BERNARD KATZ
In a recent interview written up in the newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the following question was put to Hitchens: “You’re an outspoken atheist who frequently debates religious thinkers. Why is religion so important to you?”
To which Hitchens answers: “Because it’s the original subject, humanity’s first attempt to make sense of things. It precedes philosophy, science, medicine, and free inquiry. It comes from the extreme barbarous childhood of our species, but it deserves respect.
Really?
From our secular humanist point of view, I thought that religion was like Roger Dangerfield’s attitude when he used to say that “he gets no respect!” Why would we respect the morals of what Hitchens clearly recognizes as “barbaric”? In one of his latest books—and a best-seller—the very title of his book shows no respect for religion. For its very odd title is god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything! Note that “god” is denigrated by using the small “g” and that the word “poison” covers the contents of his book like a toxic cloud. A brief sampling of what he writes also supports his contempt for religion.
Here’s what he says about the supposedly benign and humane Dalai Lama. “The human species is an animal species without very much variation within it, and it is idle and futile to imagine that a voyage to Tibet, say, will discover an entirely different harmony with nature or eternity. The Dalai Lama, for example, is entirely and easily recognizable to a secularist. In exactly the same way as a medieval princeling, he makes the claim not just that Tibet should be independent of Chinese hegemony—a ‘perfectly good’ demand, if I may render it into everyday English—but that he himself is a hereditary king appointed by heaven itself. How convenient! Dissenting sects within his faith are persecuted; his one-man rule in an Indian enclave is absolute; he makes absurd pronouncements about sex and diet and, when on his trips to Hollywood fund-raisers, anoints major donors like Steven Segal and Richard Gere as holy. (Indeed, even Mr. Gere was moved to whine a bit when Mr. Segal was invested as a tulku, or person of high enlightenment. It must be annoying to be outbid at such a spiritual auction.) I will admit that the current “Dalai” or supreme lama is a man of some charm and presence, as I will admit that the present Queen of England is a person of more integrity than most of her predecessors, but this does not invalidate the critique of hereditary monarchy, and the first foreign visitors to Tibet were downright appalled at the feudal domination, and hideous punishments, that kept the population in permanent serfdom to a parasitic monastic elite.” (p.200)
And here’s what Hitchens says about the humane actions and comments by Mother Teresa:
“Every single step toward the clarification of this argument [about birth control] has been opposed root and branch by the clergy. The attempt even to educate people in the possibility of ‘family planning’ was anathematized from the first, and its early advocates and teachers were arrested (like John Stuart Mill) or put in jail or thrown out of their jobs. Only a few years ago, Mother Teresa denounced contraception as the moral equivalent of abortion, which ‘logically’ meant (since she regarded abortion as murder) that a sheath or a pill was a murder weapon also. She was a little more fanatical even than her church, but here again we can see that the strenuous and dogmatic is the moral enemy of the good. It demands that we believe the impossible, and practice the unfeasible. The whole case for extending protection to the unborn, and to expressing a bias in favor of life, has been wrecked by those who use unborn children, as well as born ones, as mere manipulable objects of their doctrine.” (pp.222-23)
The following commentaries show that Hitchens has NO respect for religion, don’t they? So we have good reason to be quite annoyed, if not angered when after writing this highly disrespectful book about the “poison” of religion, Hitchens turns about-face and then says that we should “respect” this insidious aspect of man’s barbarous past!
So I repeat: Christopher Hitchens, did we hear you right?