Check Ye Spirits at the Door, No. 3

And so finally to Hitchens' latest best seller, the 2007 book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Where Hitchens' book on Mother Theresa is tackling a single topic, this present book seems suited to compare-and-contrast with Dawkins' The God Delusion. Both are addressing religion in a widespread, general way, but their approaches are different.

Hitchens and Dawkins are clearly on the same page here, but they bring their individual strengths to the argument. Dawkins is a scientist whose sensibilities are offended by a nonsensical and antirational mythology; Hitchens is just a guy with a keener eye than most of us, and an encyclopedic memory for history. There is a lot of overlap between the two writers' messages, but where Dawkins tells us how a level scientific and rational gaze reveals the falsehood of the supernatural, Hitchens is more focused on the demonstrated evil and suffering that humankind has endured because of our penchant for ghost stories.

And I think Hitchens' approach does a better job of revealing the reality of religions in the world. Millions and millions of people cling, as they have been told to do, to their religion as a source of certainty and moral goodness in the world, but a certain psychological disconnect is needed to keep the small goodness of individual lives separate from the mass monstrosity of the institutionalized faiths. This does seem a kind of mass delusion, and Hitchens pulls the cosmetic fluffery away and shows the ugly reality beneath.

With an impressive grasp of history, Hitchens offers up a depressingly endless string of bunglings and malfeasance from a wide variety of faiths, though he naturally concentrates more on what we know--Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He shines a light on the conflicts between the major faiths, as well as on the contradictions within the individual faiths. He talks in practical terms about how the world's major faiths came to take their present form, including all the silly permutations and bloody enforcements which the current church leadership would prefer you didn't think about.

Of course, we always recommend what moves us and what produces resonance with our own convictions. And this book absolutely fills that bill for me. But I also think it's just a compendium of all the stuff that gets spun out when we get our religious information from motivated (that is, biased) sources. It's not a surprise that the church tries to steer us thru life keeping a carefully-tailored view of the faith before us. But as educated and self-actualized people we should make our life's choices from a position of awareness and knowledge. To that end, I think it would be particularly helpful for the religious to read this book, if for no other reason than to get the other side of the story which no one within the cloisters will give them. To then go on believing with a full awareness of the implications for these beliefs would be an informed choice, at least.

I'll sign off with a bunch of quotes. I'd end up putting 200 pages' worth on here, as he makes really good points on every page, but I'll try to do at least a little culling. This first quote is from John Stuart Mill, talking about his father in his Autobiography (used by Hitchens in the introduction); the rest are Hitchens:

His aversion to religion, in the sense usually attached to the term, was of the same kind with that of Lucretius: he regarded it with feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up factitious excellencies--belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human kind--and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtue: but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful. (John Stuart Mill)
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James Madison, the author of the First Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting any law respecting an establishment of religion, was also an author of Article VI, which states unambiguously that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust." His later Detached Memoranda make it very plain that he opposed the government appointment of chaplains in the first place, either in the armed forces or at the opening ceremonies of Congress. "The establishment of the chaplainship to Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional Principles."
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Nothing optional--from homosexual to adultery--is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate. As Shakespeare put it in King Lear, the policeman who lashes the whore has a hot need to use her for the very offense for which he plies the lash.
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In talking about AIDS:

An official of Pakistan's AIDS Control Program told Foreign Policy magazine in 2005 that the problem was smaller in his country because of "better social and Islamic values." This, in a state where the law allows a woman to be sentenced to be gang-raped in order to expiate the "shame" of a crime committed by her brother. This is the old religious combination of repression and denial: a plague like AIDS is assumed to be unmentionable because the teachings of the Koran are enough in themselves to inhibit premarital intercourse, drub use, adultery, and prostitution. Even a very brief visit to, say, Iran, will demonstrate the opposite. It is the mullahs themselves who profit from hypocrisy by licensing "temporary marriages," in which wedding certificates are available for a few hours, sometimes in specially designated houses, with a divorce declaration ready to hand at the conclusion of business. You could almost call it prostitution... The last time I was offered such a bargain it was just outside the ugly shrine to the Ayatollah Khomeini in south Tehran. But veiled and burqa-clad women, infected by their husbands with the virus, are expected to die in silence. It is a certainty that millions of other harmless and decent people will die, very miserably and quite needlessly, all over the world as a result of this obscurantism.
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The attitude of religion to medicine, like the attitude of religion to science, is always necessarily problematic and very often necessarily hostile. A modern believer can say and even believe that his faith is quite compatible with science and medicine, but the awkward fact will always be that both things have a tendency to break religion's monopoly, and have often been fiercely resisted for that reason. What happens to the faith healer and the shaman when any poor citizen can see the full effect of drugs and surgeries, administered without ceremonies or mystifications? Roughly the same thing as happens to the rainmaker when the climatologist turns up, or to the diviner from the heavens when school teachers get hold of elementary telescopes. Plagues of antiquity were held to be punishment from the gods, which did much to strengthen the hold of the priesthood and much to encourage the burning of infidels and heretics who were thought--in an alternative explanation--to be spreading disease by witchcraft or else poisoning the wells.
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In the recent division in the Anglican Church over homosexuality and ordination, several bishops made the fatuous point that homosexuality is "unnatural" because it does not occur in other species. Leave aside the fundamental absurdity of this observation: are humans part of "nature" or not? Or, if they chance to be homosexual, are they created in god's image or not? Leave aside the well-attested fact that numberless kinds of birds and mammals and primates do engage in homosexual play. Who are the clerics to interpret nature? They have shown themselves quite unable to do so. A condom is, quite simply, a necessary but not a sufficient condition for avoiding the transmission of AIDS. All qualified authorities, including those who state that abstinence is even better, have agreed on this. Homosexuality is present in all societies, and its incidence would appear to be part of human "design." We must perforce confront these facts as we find them. We now know that the bubonic plague was spread not by sin or moral backsliding but by rats and fleas.
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Even in modern and hedonistic America, several states legally define "sodomy" as that which is not directed at face-to-face heterosexual procreation. This raises gigantic objections to the argument from "design," whether we choose to call that design "intelligent" or not. Clearly, the human species is designed to experiment with sex. No less clearly, this fact is well-known to the priesthoods. When Dr. Samuel Johnson had completed the first real dictionary of the English language, he was visited by a delegation of respectable old ladies who wished to congratulate him for not including any indecent words. His response--which was that he was interested to see that the ladies had been looking them up--contains almost all that needs to be said on this point...

The holy book in the longest continuous use--the Talmud--commands the observant one to thank his maker every day that he was not born a woman. (This raises again the insistent question: who but a slave thanks his master for what his master has decided to do without bothering to consult him?) The Old Testament, as Christians condescendingly call it, has woman cloned from man for his use and comfort. The New Testament has Saint Paul expressing both fear and contempt for the female. Throughout all religious texts, there is a primitive fear that half the human race is simultaneously defiled and unclean, and yet is also a temptation to sin that is impossible to resist. Perhaps this explains the hysterical cult of virginity and of a Virgin, and the dread of the female form and of the female reproductive functions? And there may be someone who can explain the sexual and other cruelties of the religious without any reference to the obsession with celibacy, but that someone will not be me. I simply laugh when I read the Koran, with its endless prohibitions on sex and its corrupt promise of infinite debauchery in the life to come: it is like seeing thru the "let's pretend" of a child, but without the indulgence that comes from watching the innocent at play. The homicidal lunatics--rehearsing to be genocidal lunatics--of 9/11 were perhaps tempted by virgins, but it is far more revolting to contemplate that, like so may of their fellow jihadists, they were virgins. Like monks of old, the fanatics are taken early from their families, taught to despise their mothers and sisters, and come to adulthood without ever having had a normal conversation, let alone a normal relationship, with a woman. This is disease by definition. Christianity is too repressed to offer sex in paradise--indeed it has never been able to evolve a tempting heaven at all--but it has been lavish in its promise of sadistic and everlasting punishment for sexual backsliders, which is nearly as revealing in making the same point in a different way.
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Tertullian, one of the many church fathers who found it difficult to give a persuasive account of paradise, was perhaps clever in going for the lowest possible common denominator and promising that one of the most intense pleasures of the afterlife would be endless contemplation of the tortures of the damned.
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One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody--not event the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms--had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think--though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one--that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.

All attempts to reconcile faith with science and reason are consigned to failure and ridicule for precisely these reasons. I read, for example, of some ecumenical conference of Christians who desire to show their broad-mindedness and invite some physicists along. But I am compelled to remember what I know--which is that there would be no such churches in the first place if humanity had not been afraid of the weather, the dark, the plague, the eclipse, and all manner of other things now easily explicable. And also if humanity had not been compelled, on pain of extremely agonizing consequences, to pay the exorbitant tithes and taxes that raised the imposing edifices of religion.
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Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.
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Credo quia absurdum, as the "church father" Tertullian put it, either disarmingly or annoyingly according to your taste. "I believe it because it is absurd." It is impossible to quarrel seriously with such a view. If one must have faith in order to believe something, or believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished. The harder work of inquiry, proof, and demonstration is infinitely more rewarding, and has confronted us with findings far more "miraculous" and "transcendent" than any theology.
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"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--not that it really "means" anything--is "There by the grace of God goes someone else."
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The contradictions and illiteracies of the New Testament have filled up many books by eminent scholars, and have never been explained by any Christian authority except in the feeblest terms of "metaphor" and "a Christ of faith." [What does that latter gobbledygook King James phrase even mean?] This feebleness derives from the fact that until recently, Christians could simply burn or silence anybody who asked any inconvenient questions.
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If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world. Faithful parents are divided over this, since they naturally hope to share the wonders and delights of Christmas and other fiestas with their offspring (and can also make good use of god, as well as of lesser figures like Santa Claus, to help tame the unruly) but mark what happens if the child should stray to another faith, let alone another cult, even in early adolescence. The parents will tend to proclaim that this is taking advantage of the innocent.

All monotheisms have, or used to have, a very strong prohibition against apostasy for just this reason. In her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy remembers her shock at learning from a Jesuit preacher that her protestant grandfather--her guardian and friend--was doomed to eternal punishment because he had been baptized in the wrong way. A precociously intelligent child, she would not let the matter drop until she had made the Mother Superior consult some higher authorities and discover a loophole in the writings of Bishop Athanasius, who held that heretics were only damned if they rejected the true church with full awareness of what they were doing. [What a pompous, hairy horse's ass is this bloated, self-aggrandizing Bishop who makes ludicrous yet iron-clad proclamations about nonsensical things--things about which he could not in any case have the slightest clue!] Her grandfather, then might be sufficiently unaware of the true church to evade hell. But what an agony to which to subject an eleven-year-old girl! And only think of the number of less curious children who simply accepted this evil teaching without questioning it. Those who lie to the young in this way are wicked in the extreme.

A-freakin'-men.