Interdisciplinary Book and Film Reviews

Church afire 2023 Geoffrey W Sutton & Bing AI When Religion Becomes Evil:      Five Warning Signs:  Revised and Updated By  Charles Kimball Reviewed by   Geoffrey W. Sutton   In the aftermath of 9/11 and during the onslaught of religion-damning missives from the ‘‘evangelical atheists’’ Dawkins (2006), Hitchens (2007), and Harris (2004), Kimball provides a ‘‘gentle introduction to the critical study of comparative religion’’ (p. vi). In seven chapters, he outlines five  critical ways that religion can lead to tragic, even violent outcomes, and offers suggestions that may promote better relationships between people of different religious traditions. In the end, he argues for respect for diverse faiths and traditions. Kimball is uniquely qualified to write this informative  work. He is an ordained Baptist minister and a professor of comparative religion at Wake Forest University. He obtained his doctorate from Harvard University in comparative religion where he specialized in

GOD IS NOT GREAT:  HOW RELIGION POISONS      EVERYTHING By    Christopher Hitchens Reviewed by    Geoffrey W. Sutton Hitchens begins his pungent polemic against religion by explaining how he came to question religious teaching as a child (chapter 1). Following a  deconversion experience  associated with a teacher's simplistic description  of reality covered with a simple religious gloss,  Hitchens reflects upon perceived oddities in scripture and child-abusing clergy. Next,  Hitchens adumbrates his thesis as:  four irreducible objections to religious faith: 1. that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original 2. error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, 3. that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and 4. that is ultimately grounded on with-thinking. (p. 4) Hitchens covers familiar grounds in his attack of religious faith with each chapter a blow