The Sham of Islam -- Hitchens

Islam is surely ridiculous. This excerpt from Hitchy's new book, "God is Not Great". He also bothers to expose the preposterousness of Mormonism. I'm eager to learn what he has to say about Judaism and Christianity. Of these fables and superstitions, only Christianity has a central, originating character who behaved in any way that I admire, and who offered a set of lessons that I consider worthwhile. Hitchy shows some interesting similarities between the sex-crazed, illiterate, tyrannical, thieving, fabulous, murderous founders of Islam & Mormon: Mohammad & Joe Smith.

Not only did they marry all the cute hos around them, and did so by claiming that god told them to, but they also both claimed that god was revealing his word directly to them... which in both cases turned out to be inaccurate retellings of the Bible (as you might expect from the understanding of a book obtained by illiterate people), except of course all the convenient on-the-spot revelations that satisfied their desires and personal interests. Both also made "revelations" that they later had to retract and blame on intervention from the devil.

In Moh's case, he had to retract a "revelation" that indeed there were more than one god after all, and that thus his band of highwaymen could enter into an alliance with Mecca's polytheists. When his offer got refused, he suddenly realized that must have been the devil telling him that there was more than one god! In Smith's case, his first wife caught onto his phony "revelations" that he had been dictating to a literate acolyte. So she stole a ream of pages, and declared, if god is telling you this, then dictate it again verbatim. He got out of this by claiming god revealed to him that the stolen ream contained text interjected by the devil. Hitchy declines to describe massacres led by each of these horrible men.

I wonder if in his book he considers the massacres of some of the Old Testament so-called heroes. And I wonder if he regards Jesus as I do: intelligent, genuine (except for the harmless fairy-tales), and worthy of admiration.

Here's a very funny Hitchey interview about his new book.