Review - The Rage Against God by Peter Hitchens

This book and the material that must necessarily accompany any review of it -- how it both complements and rebutts Christopher Hitchens' book "god is not Great" -- deserve a little more attention than I can muster in my current feverish state. However, Peter Hitchens' case is well made. He argues against the new militant Atheism, of which his brother is a proponent, and presents a case not for God (of whom he says very little), but for the beauty and social importance of private faith.

In the author's opinion, religion is the best delivery system for morality, and he draws heavily on examples of social degradation in Soviet Russia to illustrate his points. He asserts that while faith can go horribly wrong, much worse horrors await the community that abandons any interest in the numinous -- or that goes so far as to make religious observance illegal.

While at times I felt like I was reading a history of Soviet nastiness between 1917 and 1990, this blood-soaked period of history is instrumental to Hitchens' argument. If you can be bothered to follow him through reams of seemingly irrelevant detail, his points come together neatly in a message of compassion and deep concern for a society (once again) seeking to replace God with science.