God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Paperback)

When Christopher Hitchens appeared on Anderson Cooper’s CNN program shortly after the release of God is Not Great, Cooper introduced him in a rather apologetic, ingratiating tone: “Here on 360, we believe in giving all sides a chance to air their views; you, the viewer, can come to your own conclusions.” Hitchens had been invited to comment on the death of Jerry Falwell, and Cooper began by asking him, scarcely in the spirit of hard journalism, whether Falwell might have gone to heaven: “No, and I think it’s a pity there isn’t a hell for him to go to,” Hitchens replied icily, before delivering a sharp denunciation of Falwell’s attitudes and the cultural climate that had elevated them to credibility: “You can get away with the most extraordinary offences to morality and truth in this country if you can just get yourself called ‘reverend.’” He indicted CNN for allowing Falwell to appear on the network after the September 11th attacks and attribute them to divine wrath: “People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign, and selling pencils from a cup!” He described Falwell as a “Chaucerian fraud” who was guilty of teaching nonsense to children, who spoke of being “raptured” into heaven while all non-Christians went to hell, and “fawn[ed] on the worst elements in Israel, with his other hand pumping anti-Semitic innuendo into American politics.”
Although the deference paid to religious figures by the American media goes widely unchallenged, Hitchens has consistently made his voice heard above the praises. He famously challenged the reputation of a far more revered person than Falwell: the Catholic Church invited him to offer testimony against the late Agnes Bojaxhiu in its canonisation proceedings-a response to evidence he presented in The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Indeed, before he published that book, “Mother Teresa” had entered the popular vernacular as a synonym for unassailable goodness (predictably, the church chose to credit that consensus).
Hitchens is a prolific and well-established figure in the American political arena. He is an author, a columnist for Slate and Vanity Fair, a books critic for Atlantic Monthly, and a highly recognisable figure in public debates and on television. Many of his public confrontations (including the one mentioned above) have taken on a second life on YouTube, in part because he so effectively stuns and wounds his opponents with his verbal agility and bite.
Hitchens brings to his book many tell-tale signs of his political life. A former Marxist, he still holds in high regard Karl Marx’s writings on religion. He objects to the assertion that Marx merely dismissed religion as the “opium of the people.” Marx’s influence on his outlook is evident in the passage he quotes from Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:

“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.”

Marx spoke poetically, if vaguely, of abolishing “illusory happiness”, and of giving up “a condition that needs illusions.” “Criticism,” he wrote,

“has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not so that man will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation but so that he will shake off the chain and cull the living flower.”

Never as tender in his criticisms as Marx, Hitchens draws also from Enlightenment-inspired giants of political philosophy such as Thomas Paine and several of the founding fathers of the United States. Looking back at the 20th century, he finds allies among such sturdy figures as Bertrand Russell and George Orwell-both of whom were critics of religion and of the secular faith of Soviet Communism. A passage Hitchens selects from Orwell’s essay, “The Prevention of Literature”, illustrates why he believes religion is “the origin of totalitarianism”:

“From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible.”

Hitchens, who is known to have had some role in popularising the term “Islamic Fascism” with regard to Islamism, typically writes of religion in highly political terms, and of rotten politics in religious ones; Christianity envisions a “celestial dictatorship”, just as North Koreans are forced to adulate “the Supreme Being and his Father” (Kim Jong-Il and Kim Il-Sung).
This outlook carries him a long way in the polemical arena. His life as a writer in rough places has armed him with first-hand knowledge of the suffering caused by the religious bullies and butchers who have so often caused and exacerbated conflicts. In a chapter entitled “Religion Kills”, he recalls with some satisfaction a discussion he had with the radio host Dennis Prager, in which his experiences helped him counter decisively one of the host’s challenges:

“I was to imagine myself in a strange city as the evening was coming on. Toward me I was to imagine that I saw a large group of men approaching. Now-would I feel safer, or less safe, if I was to learn that they were just coming from a prayer meeting? […] Just to stay within the letter ‘B,’ I have actually had that experience in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad. In each case I can say absolutely, and can give my reasons, why I would feel immediately threatened if I thought that the group of men approaching me in the dusk were coming from a religious observance.”

Hitchens manages to cover a great number of religiously motivated sectarian conflicts, tortures, and killings in the city-by-city catalogue of shame that follows, but it becomes clear that his arguments from experience will get him only so far with the faithful. The great void that persists between atheists and religious believers comes from the fact that atheists tend to see enduring similarities among all religions, while believers are more likely to regard themselves as exceptions, and people of other faiths as essentially outré, beyond the pale. For an atheist, the argument with religion is a struggle against well-practised evasions: whatever crass or vulgar idea the non-believer assails, the believer claims to profess something else; whatever crimes or cruelties the faithless critic identifies, defenders of religion will try to blame the followers and not the holy books.
Given the (as Hitchens puts it) à la carte way in which believers tend to define their faiths, he necessarily puts forward a list of foundational criticisms to which they ought to answer:

“There [are] four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking."

He adds elsewhere, (though he should have included it above), that:

“the mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and most devastating one. Religion is man-made.”

He also identifies, in a chapter entitled “Religion as Original Sin”, some of the earliest and most corrupting religious precepts. He attacks the “doctrine of blood sacrifice” that invites adherents of three monotheisms to honour the willingness of Abraham to slaughter his son. He comments on the persistence of the almost ubiquitous idea of atonement through violence: the bloody rites of the Aztecs, the enforced “suicide” of Hindu widows, the Muslims who honour suicide “martyrs”, and the Christians who embrace the violent suffering of Jesus in order to lay phoney universal guilt on humanity. Worst of all in day-to-day terms, religions have made unreasonable demands of their followers, which have unsurprisingly encouraged religious leaders to make venal offers according to which the faithful may circumvent the rules:

“Don’t do any work on the Sabbath yourself, but pay someone else to do it. You’ve obeyed the letter of the law: who’s counting? The Dalai Lama tells us that you can visit a prostitute as long as someone else pays her. Shia Muslims offer “temporary marriage,” selling men the permission to take a wife for an hour or two and then divorce her when they are done. Half of the splendid buildings in Rome would not have been raised if the sale of indulgences had not been so profitable.”

Hitchens sees obfuscation and charlatanism not just in the practices, but in the very origins of every faith he examines. Christianity features, like “almost all religions,”

“a humble prophet or a prince who comes to identify with the poor [. . . ] what is this if not populism? It is hardly a surprise if religions choose to address themselves first to the majority who are poor and bewildered and uneducated.”

The Koran, he tells us, is “borrowed”, made up from

“a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion seemed to require.”

In “‘The Lowly Stamp of Their Origins’: Religion’s Corrupt Beginnings” he tells of the births of some younger religions, in particular the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, founded by the illiterate Joseph Smith, a man once convicted of being “a disorderly person and an impostor,” who later announced that he would “be to this generation a new Muhammad.” Smith founded a religion dependent on the idea that some ransacked Indian burial mounds were evidence of a “lost tribe of Israel.”
A persistent tone of moral indignation fills the pages of God is Not Great. Hitchens finds religious flocks to be not merely the oppressed and suffering creatures that Marx described, but also guilty of a great deal of oppression. He dwells with grim tenacity on subjects such as the Vatican’s warm ties with European Fascism during the Second World War, the hindrances religions have set against science and the medical profession, and the fears and abuses visited on children by believers. In a chapter entitled “Does Religion Make People Behave Better?”, he sets out the argument that moral behaviour simply does not depend on faith, but that faith can drive people to do ill in the name of some anachronistic dictate. On the debate circuit, Hitchens frequently challenges his audiences to name an ethical statement made or a moral action achieved by a believer that could not have been carried out by a non-believer. There are never any takers. Morality, he tells us, is innate. He recently gave a British radio host a secular corollary: “I can name you dozens of heroic German Stalinists who fought bravely against Hitler. It doesn’t vindicate their Communism.”
God is Not Great has the tone of a manifesto. Hitchens adopts in his introduction a “we” that suggests the solidarity of secular thinkers. He argues that the “lure of wonder and mystery and awe” can best be met by art, literature, and science, and calls for a new Enlightenment. Hitchens attributes his book’s popularity to a “change in the zeitgeist,” in which non-believers have, like him, begun to assert themselves in the public sphere. Humanistic comforts, alas, are scarcely enough to resign most people to the horror of death, or to alleviate the “condition that needs illusions,” of which Marx wrote. While Hitchens appears unsure of the future of non-belief-he sometimes describes religion as ineradicable and at others consigns it to “the infancy of the species”-he succeeds in demonstrating the great shame of religion: that its most consistent accomplishment has been to make its consolations the enemy of truth.
Roland Brown (Books in Canada)
--Ce texte provient de la Hardcover édition.

Hitchens, one of our great political pugilists, delivers the best of the recent rash of atheist manifestos. The same contrarian spirit that makes him delightful reading as a political commentator, even (or especially) when he's completely wrong, makes him an entertaining huckster prosecutor once he has God placed in the dock. And can he turn a phrase!: "monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents." Hitchens's one-liners bear the marks of considerable sparring practice with believers. Yet few believers will recognize themselves as Hitchens associates all of them for all time with the worst of history's theocratic and inquisitional moments. All the same, this is salutary reading as a means of culling believers' weaker arguments: that faith offers comfort (false comfort is none at all), or has provided a historical hedge against fascism (it mostly hasn't), or that "Eastern" religions are better (nope). The book's real strength is Hitchens's on-the-ground glimpses of religion's worst face in various war zones and isolated despotic regimes. But its weakness is its almost fanatical insistence that religion poisons "everything," which tips over into barely disguised misanthropy. (May 30)
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