Hacker News Books

I wish Hitchens was still with us.

People should read his books - especially God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

RIP, we miss your tact, witty jabs and awesome accent.

"God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" by Christopher Hitchens.
http://www.amazon.com/God-Is-Not-Great-Everything/dp/0446697...

Christopher Hitchens - God is Not Great

Not unexpected, he's been ill for a while. I will miss his razor wit and intellect. The clarity of his thought, writing and speech was a breath of cool fresh air amidst the unfortunate smog that is modern media, especially television. Am currently reading Hitch-22, have already read "God is not Great" and would recommend it.

Ok, this is fascinating. Even beyond escaping my own echo chamber, it's really neat to escape other echo chambers.

Let's escape the woke bubble:

  1. How to Be an Antiracist 
  2. White Fagility 
  3. Between the World and Me

The books it recommends are pretty diverse - Maya Angelou to Peter Drucker to Plato.

Or how about the Trump bubble:

  1. Time to Get Tough 
  2. Righteous Indignation 
  3. Going Rogue

Lots of religion here. What if we escape atheism?

  1. Letter to a Christian Nation 
  2. God is Not Great 
  3. The God Delusion

Hmm. Not so much religion here... but we got Aldous Huxley, Bruce Li and Richard Feynmann.

I think... I've got a lot of reading to do. I LOVE this tool.

In Catholic doctrine one who commits a mortal sin without repenting is bound to hell.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_sin#Roman_Catholicism

If you look at the three conditions that a sin must meet to be considered a mortal sin, I think there is a very high probability that writing a book titled God Is Not Great is a mortal sin. There are hundreds of things that Christopher did which very likely meet those conditions, and there is also a high probability that he has not repented about them before death.

According to Catholicism people do not get into heaven by living according to what they sincerely believe, and many, many, Catholic scholars would say that Christopher is bound for hell.

God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and the God Delusion are books about religion. I mentioned a few authors that I have read whose books cover either science, religion or a mixture of the two. I will grant you that I am not making a hard study into comparative religion and certainly did not mean to imply otherwise.

> What I don't understand is why people who argue against climate change stand to gain.

One of the larger problems is that to many people climate change has become a political issue instead of a physical phenomenon. Climate change is used as a lever to achieve political goals just like racial relations, gender confusion, migration questions and many other unrelated things. This has made it a political act to either affirm and reinforce anthropogenic climate change or relativise or deny it. Just like with the other mentioned issues this politicisation makes it much harder to come to rational conclusions and act upon them. The tactic of using one thing to try to force through other things - "climate refugees" (migration), "green new deal" (welfare state), "the great reset" (globalism) - only adds fuel to the metaphorical fire, making it even harder to act rationally.

Another big problem is that climate-related eschatology has a rich history of failed predictions which makes it rather easy to claim that the currently fashionable scenario will probably end up by the wayside just like all the previous failed predictions did. Add to that the exaggerated emotionally laden calls for action because "the world will go under/be uninhabitable in X years" (where X tends to be in the near, not far future) and the stage is set for the defence of any stance on the issue, from "everyone is going to die from climate change" to "the world will thrive like never before".

Christopher Hitchens mused about "how religion poisons everything" in his book "God is not great: how religion poisons everything" [1]. Were he still alive he could write a similar book on politics: "How Politics Poisons Everything". It would be a good read and it would not change the situation one whit, alas.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43369.God_Is_Not_Great

Hitchens has a section on Buddhism in God is Not Great[1] wherein he discusses some violent atrocities in which Eastern Buddhism has taken part (Japanese Buddhism during WWII, for example), as well as the malevolent sex acts forced upon female practitioners.

Worth a read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Is_Not_Great

Here they are before I forget:

A Devil's Chaplain

Are You Living in a Computer Simulation

Arguing About Gods

Atheism - The Case Against God

Atheist Manifest - In Defense of Atheism

Atheist Universe

Biblical Cosmology

Breaking the Spell - Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief

Darwin's Dangerous Idea Evolution and the Meanings of Life

Demon Haunted World - Science as a Candle in the Dark

Dossier Of Reason

Evil God Challenge

Forged

God - The Failed Hypothesis

God Is Not Great

Godless

History of God

Jesus Interrupted

Jesus Myth - The Case Against Historical Christ

Letter To A Christian Nation

Logic and Theism

Love Thy Neighbour - Evolution of In-group Morality

Lying

Misquoting Jesus

Superstition In All Ages

The Ascension of Yahweh_ The Origins and Development of Israelite Monotheism

The Christian Delusion

The Dialogues of Plato

The Early History of Heaven

The End of Faith

The Evolution of God

The God Delusion

The God Virus How Religion Infects Our Lives And Culture

The Moral Landscape

Who Wrote the Bible

Why I am not a Christian

These are just some of the books I have read on the subject, but there are others highly rated and recommended that I still want to go through. However, these are really good.

If this list seems daunting I would recommend a shorter list:

"Breaking the spell" by Daniel Dennett
"The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkings
"God is not great" by Christopher Hitchens
"End of Faith" by Sam Harris

But books by Steven Hawking "The Grand Design", "Universe from Nothing" by Lawrence Krauss and "Your Inner Fish - A Journey into the 3.5 billion year history of the human body" by Neil Shubin, are also great although somewhat more technical. All other books are softer read.