How Religion Poisons Everything

[Rasputin]

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

by Christopher Hitchens

[Rasputin]

Lord, are you there? Didn't think so.

When Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of God in 1882, he immediately added that the news had not yet reached all ears, and that it would be some time before it did. But one and a quarter centuries have passed since then, and one might have thought, what with the telegraph, the Internet and all, that the news would have reached everyone by now. Instead, the opposite seems to have happened: After several decades in which skepticism and secularism did indeed appear to be in the ascendant, the current state of the world seems to attest that God has made a recovery no less miraculous than that of Aslan, the heroic lion from the Chronicles of Narnia.
The resurgent popularity both of God in general and of particular, sectarian gods (according to recent polls, Jesus has once again overtaken the Beatles) comes despite the fact that modern science and philosophy have undermined all the justifications that might once have made belief in His existence a reasonable proposition. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection pretty much mopped the floor with the last major contender for such a justification, the argument from design; scientific work since Darwin's time has only confirmed his victory. Nor has any religious theorizer ever managed, to my knowledge, to provide a convincing response to the problem of evil -- a knockdown objection to traditional theisms if ever I have heard one. Yet religious believers go on believing as if none of this had happened. No wonder the skeptics are frustrated.

One of the results of this state of affairs is the recent spate of books by nonbelievers -- Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins chief among them -- attempting to restate, in one manner or another, the case for skepticism and against theistic belief. Christopher Hitchens' "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" now takes its place in that company. The following passage, which comes in the context of an argument that organized religion manifests a deep tendency toward encouraging child abuse, serves well enough as a thesis statement:

"Since religion has proved itself uniquely delinquent on the one subject where moral and ethical authority might be counted as universal and absolute, I think we are entitled to at least three provisional conclusions. The first is that religion and the churches are manufactured, and that this salient fact is too obvious to ignore. The second is that ethics and morality are quite independent of faith, and cannot be derived from it. The third is that religion is -- because it claims a special divine exemption for its practices and beliefs -- not just amoral but immoral."

Later he adds: "Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience."

One supposes this will ruffle a few feathers -- notwithstanding Hitchens' repeated insistence that he is happy to allow consenting adults to engage in whatever religious practices they may choose, so long as they leave him and other innocent bystanders be. Nor will believers be pleased with the parade of religious scandal, hypocrisy and downright stupidity the author provides for our edification -- ranging from a former U.S. senator's scripturally-inspired refusal to support civil rights legislation (" 'I'd sure like to help the colored,' " he explained, " 'but the Bible says I can't.' "), to the former Texas governor who explained his opposition to teaching the Bible in Spanish with the trenchant observation that " 'if English was good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me,' " to the bishop of Llandaff's remarkable reply to Thomas Paine's observation that Moses behaved rather less than ethically in ordering his generals (as recounted in the Book of Numbers) to "kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him. But all the women-children that hath not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves."

Apparently unperturbed by the slaying of civilians, including children, the bishop was scandalized by Paine's suggestion that the keeping of the young female virgins had lascivious implications: "[I]t was not at all clear from the context," he pointed out, "that the young females were being preserved for immoral purposes rather than for unpaid labor."

Of course, many among the genuinely faithful developed long ago a commitment to their religion so strong that no possible fact or revelation could count against it. That's just what faith means, after all, at least according to many. Then again, as Hitchens points out, most such people cannot resist the temptation to proclaim certain events as evidence for the existence and beneficence of God. The problem, of course, is that the evidence is cherry-picked to match the conclusion:

" 'There but for the grace of God,' said John Bradford in the sixteenth century, on seeing wretches led to execution, 'go I.' What this apparently compassionate observation really means ... is, 'There by the grace of God goes someone else.' As I was writing this chapter, a heart-stopping accident took place in a coal mine in West Virginia. Thirteen miners survived the explosion but were trapped underground, compelling the nation's attention for a whole fraught news cycle until with huge relief it was announced that they had been located safe and sound. These glad tidings turned out to be premature, which was an impossible additional anguish for the families who had already begun celebrating and giving thanks before discovering that all but one of their menfolk had suffocated under the rock. It was also an embarrassment to the newspapers and news bulletins that had rushed out too soon with the false consolation. And can you guess what the headline on those newspapers and bulletins had been? Of course you can. 'Miracle!' -- with or without the exclamation point -- was the invariable choice, surviving mockingly in print and in the memory to intensify the grief of the relatives. There doesn't seem to be a word to describe the absence of divine intervention in this case."

Is such a mind-set, which insists on seeing God's hand in the failure of the fourth Sept. 11 plane to reach its target while turning uncomfortably away from the question of why He did not intervene with respect to the other three, open at all to rational argument? Hitchens, for the most part, seems to think the answer is "no," and one doesn't get the sense that the primary purpose of "God Is Not Great" is to change the minds of the faithful. The book is for the most part too personal, too anecdotal, to function as argument; one comes away with a good sense of Hitchens' beliefs on the subject, and some of the reasons for them, but is unlikely to have one's own views changed. Indeed, one senses that this is due to the author's deep pessimism regarding the possibility of bridging the gulf between skeptics and believers -- a pessimism that renders the reading of the book a somewhat discouraging experience.

The book is an impassioned cri de coeur. It seems as if it was written out of passion, and quickly, with little revision or self-critical scrutiny. One admires the genuine moral outrage that motivated and animates it, but cannot help but wish the author had been less blinded by that outrage to some of its faults and limitations. Individual sentences are frequently vague and sometimes downright inscrutable; and while Hitchens makes many good points, he rarely manages to make them in a way that is pithy or memorable (the banal title is only the first example of this).

[Rasputin]

Moreover, the book tries to do too much, attempting to take on the three major monotheisms and non-theistic alternatives, while also attempting to address a variety of general issues (religious violence, religion's metaphysical claims, the influence of religion on behavior, etc.) in about 300 pages. One comes away from almost every chapter thinking one has been granted only a selective view of the topic; and as the selection was made by someone who is obviously partisan, the real issue raised is one of fairness.

Indeed, if believers tend to be closed-minded with respect to challenges to their views, the same can be said of Hitchens, who tends to bolster his dismissal of religion by assuming or defining away anything positive one might say about it. Each apparent acknowledgment of admirable behavior on the part of the religious is immediately followed with a disclaimer denying that the admirable aspect had anything at all to do with religion:

"I can think of a handful of priests and bishops and rabbis and imams who have put humanity ahead of their own sect or creed. History gives us many other such examples ... But this is a compliment to humanism, not to religion."

But surely it is implausible to think that religious belief has never motivated ethical behavior, and even in some cases extreme sacrifice. It may be true that, on the whole, religious belief has inspired more immoral than moral behavior; it may also be true that there are philosophical and psychological reasons to expect this to be the case. But these claims would require a much more rigorous and comprehensive argument than Hitchens manages, or even attempts, to provide.

I am not in any way unsympathetic to Hitchens' overall claim. Nor do I fail to share his sense of alarm at the current worldwide ascendancy of religious belief and the ways in which such beliefs encourage sectarianism, oppression and violence of various sorts (much of it, indeed, directed toward children), or at the apparently increasing acceptance of religious fundamentalism and the erosion of the church-state distinction in our own society. But I wish he had deployed his passion and his considerable intellectual gifts in a more disciplined manner. Ultimately, "God Is Not Great" is somewhat of a disappointment -- not so much for those who disagree, who will simply be irritated, but for those of us who think that it has an important case to make and were hoping that this might be the book to carry that message to the people.

[Rasputin]

In what is perhaps one of the stranger reviews from The New York Times Book Review, Michael Kinsley writes adoringly of Christopher Hitchens, the man and the phenomenon, but little about the book in question. In the review, Kinsley tells us about Hitchens' sparkling conversation, that he is a "principled dissolute, with the courage of his dissolution: he enjoys smoking and drinking, and not just the reputation for smoking and drinking -- although he enjoys that too," and that "he is productive to an extent that seems like cheating: 23 books, pamphlets, collections and collaborations so far; a long and often heavily researched column every month in Vanity Fair; frequent fusillades in Slate and elsewhere; and speeches, debates and other public spectacles whenever offered." From this introduction, the review then turns on the following line: "The big strategic challenge for a career like this is to remain interesting, and the easiest tactic for doing that is surprise." For Kinsley, Hitchens' latest book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, is interesting precisely because it bucks Hitchens' recent trend towards the right.

Though it was meant as an endorsement, it was hardly a compliment considering Hitchens' fall from grace for many of us on the left.

Nevertheless, like Kinsley, I too have a certain affection for Hitchens, not for the man so much as the role he plays as our public gadfly. Even with his stubborn defense of the war in Iraq, he makes us think by exposing our platitudes for what they are. But unlike Kinsely, I simply do not find anything of interest in this latest work. Both the book and the publicity tour have failed Kinsely's all important strategic challenge. Hitchens' arguments are entirely predictable, following a common pattern, whether in the recent crop of popular attacks on religion from those such as Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins, or the more ancient lineage represented proudly by those such as Voltaire, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, et al.

After all, is anyone really surprised to learn that the historic faiths are guilty of self-contradictions, that religious fanatics are prone to violence, and that all religions have a human origin? There was a time when these observations were truly radical and provocative. But between then and now a gulf of religious scholarship and critique have transpired, heightening our awareness and forcing any religious devotee not only to learn the truths of his or her tradition, but also to rethink the nature of religious truth. Most (with the exception of fundamentalists) would now concede that religions are true not in the same way that science or mathematics are true, but more in line with the way a Picasso portrait conveys a subjective truth that belies the merely representational. For instance, except for the most literally minded, the Bible is not proven untrue or unreliable because it has two contradictory stories of creation in the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis, or because it has four different portraits of Christ included within the New Testament. On the contrary, an appreciation of these variances -- even contradictions -- are essential to understanding the particular nature of truth that belongs to the religious. It is precisely this insight that gives rise to contemporary hermeneutical philosophy, in which the contemporary theorists echo the claim made by Nietzsche over a century ago -- namely, "there are no facts, only interpretations."

Borrowing from that great philosophical gadfly Nietzsche even further, he is famous for his proclamation that "God is dead." But as many contemporary theologians and philosophers of religion now tell us, the death of God immediately implies the death of the death of God as a movement, or as a dogmatic expression of atheism. In other words, to speak of the death of God need not be an anti-religious rant; rather, it might very well be a religious expression of faith. Gianni Vattimo, a contemporary hermeneutical philosopher from Italy and former member of the European Parliament says this best when he writes that the death of the moral-metaphysical God "liquidates the philosophical basis for atheism." This is not to say that all beliefs are equal, that there is a moral equivalence between religion and science, or that it makes no difference whether one sticks one's head in the sand living in some pretend reality verses being on a painstaking search for the truth. But it is to say that we are all potential idolaters, and that idolatry comes in many different forms with the religious being the most recognizable and thus easiest to target.

In short, this book by Hitchens is disappointingly lazy. If I had my druthers, I would much prefer the nuance from someone like Freud, who almost a century ago chronicled how religious ideology was a human projection, how it functioned as an infantile neurosis, and how it stifled our psychological and moral development. Even with all that, Freud reminds us in The Future of an Illusion that religion is not all bad: "Religion has clearly performed great services for human civilization. It has contributed much towards the taming of the asocial instincts. But not enough." It is precisely this honest critical assessment in contrast to Hitchens' bombast that we need today.

For examples of this honest critical assessment of the meaning, as well as both the strengths and limitations, of religion in today's world, I would recommend my book with Gianni Vattimo and John Caputo entitled After the Death of God, except that one can find a similar sentiment marked in almost any other current work in philosophy of religion. The point is, this critically aware, thoughtful, and politically engaged faith is out there for anyone who has grown weary with the old clichés -- in other words, for exactly the sort of someone we once thought Christopher Hitchens was.

[Rasputin]