Holiday Blasphemy

Released in conjunction with the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of the Species, The Greatest Show on Earth is Dawkins' most recent lesson in anti-creationism. Taking as his starting point the notion that scientists around the world have accepted evolution as indisputable fact, Dawkins goes on to lay out the evidence, including how all animals have evolved from one another, how... animals collaborate in the evolutionary selective breeding process, how radioactive decay clocks and carbon dating can trace the lifespan of earth and how humans need only look to their own developmental process or some quickly evolving species such as Croatian lizards and Trinidadian guppies to see evolution in action. The stakes for proving evolution weigh heavily on Dawkins, who sees creationism as an absurdly misguided fantasy and a potential threat to an enlightened, scientifically informed society — not to mention an insultingly narrow vision because it fails to account for the amazing and complicated process of change at work around us every day. Thankfully for the reader, Dawkins counterbalances his dense scientific evidence with humorous asides, all the while delivering a holy smackdown to intelligent design.

Sharp-tongued, pithy and devilishly eloquent, Harris' missive — a response to hate mail he received from believers after his 2004 book The End of Faith — addresses his Christian critics directly, namely the 53 percent of Americans who consider themselves to be creationists. Letter was written out of Harris' fear for the future of a civilization that bases its decisions on the words of a single, outdated book of dubious origin. In... this slim volume, Harris systematically examines how morality has been severed from religion, and the ways that religion has justified certifiably immoral behaviors. One of his central tenets is that atheism need not identify itself as a distinct worldview, as one does not refer to "non-astrologists," but that, in its reverence for belief, the world has grown dangerously apologetic for those that simply see no reason to trust in an omnipotent being.

In some sense Harris saves most of his wrath for the liberal and moderate Christians whose vague, wishy-washy notions of faith give them a vague, wishy-washy understanding of God — finding the almighty, for instance, in the good works of humans who helped one another during the tsunami of 2004, but dismissing the natural disaster that killed hundreds of thousands of people as just another divine mystery. Why not credit ourselves for the goodness, Harris argues, and leave God out of it? It's a pretty sound argument, and one that, like Harris' book, is not easily dismissed.

If there's one line from this searing and witty polemic that sums up Hitchen's true feelings about religion, it is this: "God did not create man in his own image. Evidently it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization." In... his view, all religions are based on wishful thinking, provide a false narrative of creation and encourage sexual repression, solipsism and servility. Hitchens breaks down, by chapter, why all religions — including Hinduism and Buddhism — are equally dangerous, working from the fallacies of their sacred texts on out to the global conflicts that have been waged in the name of divine superiority. A onetime newspaper correspondent, Hitchens has seen these conflicts on the ground; as a child he was schooled in scripture and knew from an early age that his most pressing questions about God would go unanswered. These personal examples lend his writing greater heft, though all of this must be swallowed with a strong dose of Hitchens' vitriol and hyperbole.

In this debut novel, a central event has set off a chain reaction that echoes outward into a series of linked stories. God comes to earth, disguised as a young Dinka woman, in order to apologize to the Sudanese for his own impotence to help them. This young Dinka woman is promptly gunned down and her body is eaten by dogs who start speaking Aramaic and are worshipped by the Africans. When... the news of God's murder breaks out around the world, chaos ensues. Priests kill themselves and rootless teenagers with no future throw a suicide party. A young man joins with the military to fight in the apocalyptic war between the Evolutionary Psychologist Forces and the Postmodern Anthropologist Marines. Currie dips between the macro images of a post apocalyptic world and the micro moments of individual characters, trying to survive and find some redemption. But there's not much to be found. What is most disturbing about Currie's godless world is not so much its occasional flashes of humor but its familiarity to our own. And though God is killed off in the first few pages, this book actually makes a good case for why we've kept him alive for so very long.

Burroughs, who's milked his childhood with neglectful parents and his subsequent alcoholic young adulthood for a series of gleefully mean-spirited memoirs, returns to similar territory for this Christmas-themed collection of stories. Exhibit A: See Burroughs' parents boozing it up in the kitchen while he ingests the plastic appendages off of a toy Santa and winds up in the emergency room getting his stomach pumped. Though he has no illusions about God (as... a child he regularly confuses Jesus and Santa), Burroughs continues to believe in the fantasy of Christmas, each year looking for the joy and peace that seem to elude him. Burroughs' holiday nightmares seem to reach a perverse peak at age 26, when he wakes up after a bender in a strange hotel room beside a naked, hirsute older man, only to find a plush Santa suit rumpled on the floor. He does, as literary creators are wont to do, find some redemption in sober adulthood, discovering the true meaning of the holiday with a supportive and caring partner by his side. It's a Christmas tale for the ages. Whether or not Burroughs' personal spin on it will pique any sympathy from readers is another matter.

An agnostic Esquire writer with a penchant for extreme immersion journalism, Jacobs elected to follow the Bible's good words for a full year as a follow-up to his stunt book The Know-It-All (in which he read the Encyclopedia Britannica from beginning to end). What follows is a roundup of some of the Bible's best and worst injunctions. So while Jacobs learns to treat people with greater respect and cuts back on his... lying, he also avoids his wife during her period, starts honking on a shofar and eats insects. In the meantime, his wife attempts to help him "be fruitful and multiply" while, presumably, trying to explain to others why Jacobs is wandering around New York in a cloak with a ZZ Top beard. Jacobs comes away from the experience far more knowledgeable about Judeo-Christian values and he even cops to taking some of them to heart in his post-biblical life. The most valuable parts of his account, however, are actually the facts he uncovers about modern-day fundamentalists, from visits to Jerry Falwell's megachurch and a snake-handler prayer meeting to his research on the modern-day quest among American and Israeli cattle ranchers to breed a red heifer in order to become "spiritually clean." Ultimately these investigative segments tell the reader much more about the Bible's literalists than Jacob's own year of play-acting.