Religious World Thhrough an Athesitic Prism

I’ve just finished reading Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. His thesis is two-fold—religion is the work of man, not of divine origin (and it’s used to exploit the fearful) and, as the subtitle suggests, it has no redeeming value; in fact it’s poison. Nu? So what do I think? The first part of the thesis is obviously true on the face of things. Of course religion is the work of man (which should not be read as a denial of the existence of God). People have known this since time immemorial or at least since the Greeks began to think about things. Xenophanes of Colophon (570-480 BCE) noticed that the gods of the “Ethiopians are black and snub-nosed, those of the Thracians have blue eyes and red hair.” The second part of the thesis is more problematic. “Everything” includes a lot of things. Can religion really poison them all? Well, Pope Alexander VI is a well known example of someone who did, in fact, use poison, but Hitchens doesn’t even bother to mention him, though he does include in his rogues’ gallery of examples such icons as Mother Teresa and Mohandas Gandhi.

What are we, the religious people of the world, to make of this? The simple answer is to point out all the errors of fact that mar Hitchens’ work. At some point I started to take account. My dozen examples may be his only gaffs, or the tip of the iceberg; in any event his credibility is undermined. (Examples: William Jennings Bryan was three times—not twice the Democratic candidate for president; scholars believe Jesus was born in 4 BCE, not 4 CE.) We could point to the ethics religions (whether man-made or divine in origin) provide to help guide lives honestly and productively. But he has an answer to that, two in fact. One is the obvious rejoinder that you don’t need religion to have ethics. Atheists and agnostics are potentially as ethical as religious people (and have never burned the religious at the stake). They believe in a natural law perhaps, not a revealed one. And secondly, he asks, are religious people all that ethical? Some are, but remember Alexander VI, and the recent Catholic priests’ sexual abuse scandal, and the Orthodox rabbi who cheated old people in his nursing home. Need I go on?

David Klinghoffer in his valedictory column in the Forward defends religion, Judaism specifically. (I really hate to see him go; Noam Neusner, like his famous father, a former Providentian, is the new conservative voice on the op-ed page, but I’d gotten used to Klinghoffer. Who else could be so wrong so often? Young Mr. Neusner has big shoes to fill.) In this final column Klinghoffer manages to equate liberalism with Hitlerism, a form of journalistic legerdemain unmatched since Goebbles defended Germany’s invasion of Yugoslavia with his famous three lie sentence: “Peace loving Germany was viciously attacked by war mongering Yugoslavia.” To Klinghoffer, while Hitler didn’t believe humans could overcome their nature, real Jews do, but Libels don’t, so liberals are like Hitler. I’m really sorry to see him go. Doesn’t he know that liberals are really Commie Pinkos who are secretly trying to undermine the country? Every Rush Limbaugh Conservative knows that. Klinghoffer argues that liberals believe in gay marriage and handing out condoms in schools since gays and students are simply acting according to their nature and their hormones. Ah, but the Jewish sages have for a thousand years taught that to overcome our nature is why God put us on earth. To this Hitchens would ask: The Great Intelligent Designer gave us hormones and instincts only so that we could suppress them? I add—And give untold business to Freud and his?

In a recent New York Times op-ed piece Edward Luttwak discusses apostasy as viewed by Islam. Those who think that as the son of an African Muslim Obama will be in a better position to negotiate with Muslims are sadly mistaken. Because his father was a Muslim, Islam considers him to be a Muslim despite his father’s having renounced the religion, and despite his own conscious decision to become a Christian. The punishment for this backsliding is beheading by a cleric. It’s worse than murder as the victim’s family can forgive the murderer, but God and Islam can never forgive the apostate. Hitchens would ask where, exactly, in this scenario is the benefit of religion to society? I wonder myself.