Writer Hitchens indicts religions of world

god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

By Christopher Hitchens

Twelve (Warner Books). 283 pages. $24.99

god is spelled with a small g to make the author’s point in the title. The text is a searing indictment of religion and its holy texts. It follows recent books by Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins challenging religion.

Ronald Aronson, Wayne State University teacher and writer, observes: “In attacking religion, the four have been breaking the taboo against talking about it…Harris, Dennett, Dawkins and Hitchens deserve praise for their courage and tenacity in shattering the spell.”

Hitchens, a great debunker who wrote a book scalding Mother Teresa, notes the crimes of religion and its many absurdities. He declares that all religions are fraudulent, citing chapter and verse.

“Religion is man-made,” Hitchens correctly notes. “…millions of people in all societies still prefer the myths of the cave”…religion causes “hatred and conflict in the world” and depends on “ignorance and superstition” of its followers.

In Northern Ireland, “in the name of god, the old hatreds were drilled into new generations of school children and are still being drilled.” Ditto for the Muslims and Hindus in India. Ditto for the Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.

Ditto for the ghastly Taliban in Afghanistan, slaughtering the Shiite Hazara population and blowing up statues of Buddha. Ditto for Pakistan which has a law of “islamic values” allowing a woman to be gang-raped in order “to expiate the ‘shame’ of a crime committed by her brother.”

In Muslim Africa, girls are “subjected to the hell of circumcision and infibulation, which involves the slicing off of the labia and clitoris.” In Rwanda, the most Protestant nation in Africa, the Hutus slaughtered the Tutsis.

In America, the un-Christian Bush administration refuses foreign aid to charities and clinics advising family planning. It rejects any evidence contrary to its ideology. The so-called reverends Robertson and Falwell declared that 9/11 was a “divine judgment” on a society allowing abortion and homosexuality. The proponents of “intelligent design” demand that its “tripe be taught to children.”

And so it goes, as the late, lamented Kurt Vonnegut would say.

“Salman Rushdie was hit by a…death sentence …for the crime of writing a work of fiction,” Hitchens writes. The book, “The Satanic Verses,” was the target of a fatwa issued in 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran deeming the book blasphemous.

“He succeeded in igniting ugly demonstrations among Muslims…across the world where crowds burned the book and screamed for the author to be fed to the flames,” Hitchens writes with rightful anger.

He adds: “It is impossible to imagine a greater affront to every value of free expression, part horrifying and part grotesque.” Yet the Vatican, the archbishop of Canterbury and the chief sephardic rabbi of Israel sympathized with the ayatollah.

Historically, religious madness has countered the truths of science. The Catholic Church forced Galileo to recant the truth of a sun-centered universe. Joshua made the sun stand still. Aquinas half-believed in astrology.

Of the many “sins” of religion, Calvin burned Servetus at the stake. The ghettoization of Jews was “imposed on them by ignorant and bigoted” Christians. “Augustine was a self-centered fantasist and an earth-centered ignoramus.” Luther was terrified of demons and believed that the mentally afflicted are the devil’s work.

Sacred texts? All a tissue of myths, half-baked sayings, mythology and nonsense, Hitchens writes, adding: “The foundational books are transparent fables.”

The Bible? It “contains a warrant for trafficking in humans, ethnic cleansing, for slavery…and for indiscriminate massacre”…“The deranged fantasies of the book of ‘Revelation.’ ”

The Koran? “Endless prohibitions of sex and its corrupt promise of infinite debauchery in the life to come.”

God? Demolition of the concept is almost an afterthought for Hitchens.

Despite these trenchant criticisms, all college students should be required to take a course in comparative religions, their beliefs and holy texts. Religion is so much a part of people’s lives throughout the world.

The course should include the atheistic tradition and critical analysis. But it never should proselytize, never breach the wall between church and state.
Hitchens’ powerful arguments are blunted by irrelevancies, longueurs, 90-word sentences and show-off erudition. Neverthless, he makes an unassailable case that religion is a malignant force in the world.