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GOD IS NOT GREAT BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Though it’s a perfectly serious discussion of why the monotheistic religions have all vilified the pig, this last is indicative of Hitchens’s dark humor (elsewhere he suggests a new Latinate motto for the incorruptible Catholic church: “No child’s behind left”). He then elaborates on the human characteristics of the pig, via Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies, in support of his theory that the monotheists don’t eat pigs because they find it tantamount to cannibalism. Unsurprisingly, he offers the same defense of pork that Bill Hicks used of weed: Why would the good lord have put it there if he didn’t want us to consume it? Why that one prohibition, if all else is there for the taking?
As Hitchens remarks in his “Putting It Mildly” introduction, the fact that religion is man-made is simultaneously the simplest and the most effective argument against it, the innocent quality of the most obvious questions ("out of the mouths of babes…") what the dogmatic fear most. Thus the high priests and keepers of secrets have wrought around the debate the idea that if you’ve come up with a clear and logical objection — Mummy, how did an illiterate merchant write down the will of God in Arabic? Mightn’t he have made some mistakes? — you just don’t understand the finer details. So we have Psalm 14 (oh, and 53, oddly enough): “The fool has said in his heart, there is no God.” Ah, well, that’s me told.
For atheists, of course, this presents a problem. Frustrating though it can be discussing religion with the religious, we cannot thrust copies (of this book, or of any other) into their hands, for then we become like them. Hitchens argues that he doesn’t go around trying to convert the believers, and he wouldn’t outlaw faith because while we are troubled by “fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other” it simply wouldn’t die anyway. He does, inevitably, wonder why the respect he gives to other people in this regard is not reciprocated. But we’ve all been there.
He would, on the other hand, ban religion from the public sphere. “Ancient stupidity is upon us again.” It is fine, he concedes, to practice your faith indoors; but faiths, by their very nature, have to interfere with non-believers. It is the paradox of their insecurity, so murderously certain of being right, but not quite certain enough to lay off telling the rest of us about it.
Where science has the edge (morally and intellectually over religion) is in its acceptance that the important issue is the search for truth, not the belief we are already in possession of it. Rational thinkers admit what they don’t know, or, as Hitchens puts it, realize that even as they learn (ironically, because we learn) we know less and less about more and more. Innumerable ancient sages hit upon this reality, that part of growing up is realizing how increasingly far you have to go. This begs an interesting question about the intellectual development of those who have not yet twigged to their cosmic insignificance.
And so to arrogance, and pride, and the appalling vanity of thinking that God cares about you, is watching over you or, worst of all, acts through you. Every copy of God Is Not Great should come with a free bumper sticker: “You are not God’s instrument on Earth.”
The worst excesses of religion are products of the disgraceful arrogance of believing that you speak for the deity, applicable from the meekest parish vicar to the leading radicals of Hezbollah (modestly enough, the “Party of God”). By way of an example, Hitchens cites the two-state Israeli-Palestinian solution, which has been staring everyone in the face for years, but which is undermined by the presence in the debate of mullahs, priests and rabbis, and by their incompatible claims of god-given rights. It doesn’t stop there: Not only does religion continue to cost lives — in 2007! — but it threatens humanity as a whole, thanks to the murderous hybrid it has formed with politics, and the development of nuclear stand-offs in crisis points like the Middle East and Kashmir.
“The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infamy of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be protracted.”
Let us hope, then, that Hitchens is right. For, as the man has made abundantly clear in this excellent book, “religion poisons everything.” [Repeat until no longer necessary.]