Talk:God Is Not Great: Difference between revisions

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:There are two issues: the length and the structure. They are related, but separate decisions. Regarding the structure, I’d ask whether a synopsis of the book would be intelligible without the structure/sequence of the chapters. My hunch is yes, and that separating each chapter probably makes it harder to summarize the book as a whole. I’d recommend reworking the structure, then reassessing the length. &mdash; <samp>[[User:Rhododendrites|<span style=”font-size:90%;letter-spacing:1px;text-shadow:0px -1px 0px Indigo;”>Rhododendrites</span>]] <sup style=”font-size:80%;”>[[User_talk:Rhododendrites|talk]]</sup></samp> \\ 15:16, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

:There are two issues: the length and the structure. They are related, but separate decisions. Regarding the structure, I’d ask whether a synopsis of the book would be intelligible without the structure/sequence of the chapters. My hunch is yes, and that separating each chapter probably makes it harder to summarize the book as a whole. I’d recommend reworking the structure, then reassessing the length. &mdash; <samp>[[User:Rhododendrites|<span style=”font-size:90%;letter-spacing:1px;text-shadow:0px -1px 0px Indigo;”>Rhododendrites</span>]] <sup style=”font-size:80%;”>[[User_talk:Rhododendrites|talk]]</sup></samp> \\ 15:16, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

::I gave it a whirl above, if you’d like a look. [[User:MattressSmith|MattressSmith]] ([[User talk:MattressSmith|talk]]) 17:16, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

::I gave it a whirl above, if you’d like a look. [[User:MattressSmith|MattressSmith]] ([[User talk:MattressSmith|talk]]) 17:16, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

I think the “Overly long summary” is very useful. Perhaps we can have a section of Concise Summary, and another detailed section of Chapterwise Summary. [[User:Atax369|Atax369]] ([[User talk:Atax369|talk]]) 08:23, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

== New draft for synopsis and suggestions ==

== New draft for synopsis and suggestions ==

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Hello fellow Wikipedians! I intend to translate the article into Greek but I am a little worried that there are too many citations to the book itself. Would that be original research? Thanks! Τζερόνυμο (talk) 19:41, 28 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 19:50, 5 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Surely a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the book is unwarranted? I can’t see many other book pages with that kind of summary. Shouldn’t we just give the book’s general idea? MattressSmith (talk) 19:45, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don’t know. I haven’t got the time yet to review all the past discussions on the present talk-page, in relationship with each of the related versions of the article, timewise. The simplest review I found on the Internet seems indeed to hesitate starting describing the book otherwise than by its structure. One problem may be that it’s not like having to present a work as it would be one by Hegel for example, because the public is still potentially on the initiative, given our available technology and a case on a subject not ready to be settled in any manner soon. Perhaps it makes sense that this kind of breakdown is also sometimes found with works from Classical Antiquity. That’s what has become my impression watching a few lengths of this set. —Askedonty (talk) 21:50, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Does something like this work? I’ve updated this as per @Michael Bednarek‘s suggestion! (also @Askedonty)

[I’ve moved the suggested rewrite over to its own subheading.] MattressSmith (talk)

As for now, I will be staying on my undetermined Classical positions. The shortcut numbering of chapters will be falling in accordance with WP:MOS then condensing even accurately implies exposure to individual research, stylistic and otherwise motivated permutations, possibly edit waring. Let us expect still to come other points of view. (What does it mean that “atheism is not inherently totalitarian” ? Does it mean it is ? ) —Askedonty (talk) 23:02, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This has been discussed in 2009, and the consensus then was (I think) that a detailed synopsis for this detailed book is warranted. I admit that it is unusual, but Wikipedia is not paper, so I don’t see any advantage in trimming it. Aside: your shortened version above omitted chapters 18 & 19. — Michael Bednarek (talk) 01:08, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The talk archive has a (very) slow motion discussion on this question from 2009 to 2012, which while never closed appears to support a consensus for trimming this section. At any rate, I think we can reasonably revisit the question in 2025. A major problem with the “Summary” section as it presently stands is that it is mostly if not entirely sourced directly to the book itself. Even a shortened summary such as proposed above should really be sourced to third parties, i.e. reviews, commentary, etc. by others. I’m inclined to say that the currently extreme over-reliance on the book itself constitutes WP:UNDUE and it should be greatly pruned and possibly abandoned altogether if better sourcing is not found CAVincent (talk) 05:40, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with this; 2009 was a longgg time ago. So I came to this page because I wrote a draft for a new page on God: An Anatomy that I hope gets approved, but noticed that mainstream atheism books from the Anglo-American sphere have much more detail on content than I expected. I think that’s warranted for On the Origin of the Species (not an atheism book per se, but cited as such), which has a sizable amount of external sources. But here and The God Delusion come off as overly enthusiastic summary-writing, which isn’t on other nonfiction books’ pages I compared against, like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Gödel, Escher, Bach, or even The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. My attempt at summarising it all fell short (thanks @Michael Bednarek!), but is closer to what I think is appropriate. MattressSmith (talk) 11:01, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I’ve addressed your comments and rewritten the summary. What do you think now, Michael? I’ll just add references, italics, and links to pages if these seem good to you. MattressSmith (talk) 09:32, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for your work on a more concise summary. I think the reworking of this article would best be prepared for wider collaboration in your user space sandbox, or on this page in a dedicated section or, unusually, in God Is Not Great/sandbox. — Michael Bednarek (talk) 09:47, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Done! It’s below! MattressSmith (talk) 21:41, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
(To answer your question: He means that there have been atheist totalitarians, but that’s not the default—the two aren’t inextricable.) MattressSmith (talk) 11:02, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If there is anything like a default in such matter (hypothetical kind of governance?) There I’m wondering about Hitchens’ strategy himself. At Teleological_argument#Argument_from_improbability (not an article about Hitchens) we find:

an intelligent designer must itself be far more complex and difficult to explain than anything it is capable of designing.

Quote by Hitchens. A quote that I, as well as many others, would probably be able to produce ourselves, but not meanwhile achieving that same career. So just like a ‘myself’ had to turn itself into an ‘ourselves’ in my proposal, ‘it is’ might have been allowed to take the place of an ‘I am’ by its author while defying the world above – become below after materially turning the timekeeping device toward down. That ‘difficulty explaining’ – what is the paradoxical enormity for the book title – is still what we have not solved yet, for a more satisfying structure of the article ( I do not think that his designer assertion is in any way valid to be honest). —Askedonty (talk) 13:34, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You’re getting well away from how a Wikipedia article ought to cover a book. It’s to summarise its content and reactions to it. — Michael Bednarek (talk) 13:47, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I do not think about a receipt that would work well without knowing were to get all the ingredients. —Askedonty (talk) 13:50, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
These are all interesting questions, but I agree with Michael: It’s good for a philosophical debate, not a Wikipedia article. I think we should greatly trim this for all the aforementioned reasons. Besides, it’s tediously long, anyway. MattressSmith (talk) 15:37, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, but only if you have any idea on how to avoid listing the content following the order as it exists in the book. The sequential presentation is an appeal for the reader to draw his own conclusions from the sequence of arguments. Otherwise it would already have been presented more concisely. —Askedonty (talk) 16:30, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There are two issues: the length and the structure. They are related, but separate decisions. Regarding the structure, I’d ask whether a synopsis of the book would be intelligible without the structure/sequence of the chapters. My hunch is yes, and that separating each chapter probably makes it harder to summarize the book as a whole. I’d recommend reworking the structure, then reassessing the length. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 15:16, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I gave it a whirl above, if you’d like a look. MattressSmith (talk) 17:16, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think the “Overly long summary” is very useful. Perhaps we can have a section of Concise Summary, and another detailed section of Chapterwise Summary. Atax369 (talk) 08:23, 21 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Following the “Overly long summary” talk above, this is how I’ve tried summarising the main page as it exists. I’m happy for suggestions and feedback! I’ve updated the chapter 9 summary to be more accurate, too; since singling-out Islam as man-made seemed dubious from an atheist, I went to the book to check it.

Hitchens begins by describing his early scepticism toward religion and argues that faith persists due to human fear of mortality (ch. 1). He claims religion imposes itself on others and frequently incites violence, citing his experiences in cities like Belfast and Beirut and the reaction to Salman Rushdie‘s novel The Satanic Verses (ch. 2). He discusses religious prohibitions against pork. He critiques religious interference in public health, referring to the Catholic Church’s stance on condoms in Africa, resistance to vaccines in some Islamic groups, religious circumcision and religious female genital mutilation (ch. 4).

He argues that religious metaphysics are false and that advances in science make leaps of faith increasingly redundant (ch. 5). He challenges the argument from design, claiming religion promotes both human inferiority and self-importance while failing to explain natural flaws (ch. 6). He describes the Old Testament as violent and inconsistent, with laws that contradict its own commandments (ch. 7), and presents the New Testament as derivative and historically unreliable, marked by contradictions and retrofitted narratives (ch. 8). He argues that Islam borrows myths from Judaism and Christianity and is shaped by political motives and linguistic control. He criticises Islam’s resistance to reform, suppression of dissent, and claims of divine authority as signs of insecurity rather than truth (ch. 9).

Hitchens contends that all reported miracles are unverified and that belief in them relies on fabricated or unreliable testimony (ch. 10). He argues that many religions originated in fraud or delusion, citing Mormonism and cargo cults as examples (ch. 11), and asserts that religions do die out over time despite claims of permanence (ch. 12). He disputes the notion that religion improves morality, pointing to the abolitionist movement as an example of secular virtue (ch. 13), and critiques Eastern religions for encouraging mental submission and failing to offer consistent spiritual insight (ch. 14).

He argues that religion promotes doctrines such as eternal punishment, blood sacrifice, and sexual repression, which he views as “”positively immoral” (ch. 15), and says it harms children through fear and physical abuse (ch. 16). Responding to claims that atheists like Stalin committed worse crimes than the religious, he contends that totalitarianism is political rather than a result of atheism (ch. 17). He concludes that humanity is likely to outgrow religion, comparing its end to other abandoned practices (ch. 18), and suggests that meaning and community can be found through secular, non-coercive means (ch. 19).

MattressSmith (talk) 10:01, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Nobody’s been replying, so I’ll assume this is OK and paste it. MattressSmith (talk) 21:34, 10 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

(edited) — Michael Bednarek (talk) 01:45, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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