God is not Great

So I read God is Not Great this weekend, and it was a rather good read. (I also read Wild Things by Dave Eggers which was good too) I was rather surprised though when looking on reviews about it today on GoodReads how stupid people can be. Here is a quote from one of the reviews, and I will explain why it is upsetting me.

"Simply stated, Hitchens puts into words all the reasons I shy away from organized religion. The prejudices, sexism, the overall foolishness... At the same time, he seems oblivious to the fact that there are religious people out there doing great things; feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, building for the homeless. " (review by ring my bell on goodreads)

Okay now I will explain my problems with this. For one, Hitchens addresses this in his book. The reason why religion is bad is because even the nice chrisitians, muslims, jewish people ect. foster extremism. I guess the person who wrote this review just ignored that part. The problem with religion is that certain things are sacrosanct and people will not address them, and this leads to extremist views being left unchecked. Hitchens admits that he has seen religious people helping with charity work, orphanages, ect in other countries, but he thinks that secular charities are actually more helpful because they don't waste any time or money proselytizing.
Here is another quote from the review

"Mr. Hitchens, may I suggest a few new titles for your book?
Try "God Can Be Great, But Freaks Poison Religion" or "How Jerks Screw Up Religion"."

As you can see, this person who appears to believe they are an atheist or agnostic totally missed the entire point of the book and thought that Hitchens was just trying to be snooty or something. Yes your grandma may be a great christian who does a lot of good work for charity and donates a lot of money. The thing Hitchens is trying to point out is that your grandma would probably do the exact same thing if she was an atheist and wouldn't be so politically correct when is comes to not criticizing extremist behavior that should be criticized.