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Christopher Hitchens wrote:HULSEY: Yes, the question is if there is no God, why spend your life and career trying to refute that? Why don’t you just leave it alone and stay home? Fair enough?

HITCHENS: Well it’s not my—it isn’t my whole career, for one thing. It’s become a major preoccupation of my life though in the last eight or nine years, especially since September 11, 2001 to try and help generate an opposition to theocracy and its depredations.

That is now probably my main political preoccupation, to help people in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Israel resist those who sincerely want to encompass the destruction of civilization and sincerely believe they have God on their side in wanting to do so.

A thing—maybe I will take a few minutes just to say something that I find repulsive about, especially monotheistic, Messianic religion. With a large part of itself, it quite clearly wants us all to die. It wants this world to come to an end. You can tell the yearning for things to be over. Whenever you read any of its real texts or listen to any of its real, authentic spokesmen, not the sort of pathetic apologists who sometimes masquerade for it, those who talk—

There was a famous spokesmen for this in Virginia until recently, about the rapture say that those of us who have chosen rightly will be gathered to the arms of Jesus, leaving all of the rest of you behind. If we’re in a car, it’s your lookout, that car won’t have a driver anymore. If you’re a pilot, that’s your lookout, that plane will crash. We will be with Jesus and the rest of you can go straight to hell. The eschatological element that is inseparable from Christianity—if you don’t believe that there is to be an apocalypse, there is going to be an end, a separation of the sheep and the goats, a condemnation, a final one, then you’re not really a believer, and their contempt for things of this world shows through all of them. It’s well put in an old rhyme from an English exclusive bretheren sect. It says that, “We are the pure and chosen few and all the rest are damned. There’s room enough in hell for you, we don’t want heaven crammed.”

You can tell it when you see the extreme Muslims talk. They cannot wait, they cannot wait for death and destruction to overtake and overwhelm the world. They can’t wait for, what I would call without ambiguity, a final solution. When you look at the Israeli settlers, paid for often by American tax dollars, deciding that if they can steal enough land from other people and get all the Jews into the promised land and all the non-Jews out of it then finally the Jewish people will be worthy of the return of the Messiah and there are Christians in this country who consider it their job to help this happen so that Armageddon can occur so that the painful business of living as humans and studying civilization and trying to acquire learning and knowledge and health and medicine and to push back—can all be scrapped and the cult of death can take over.

That, to me, is a hideous thing in eschatological terms and end time terms on its own, hateful idea, hateful practice and a hateful theory but very much to be opposed in our daily lives where there are people who sincerely mean it, who want to ruin the good relations that could exist between different peoples, nations, races, countries, tribes, ethnicities, who say—who openly say they love death more than we love life and who are betting that with God on their side, they’re right about that.

So when I say, as the subtitle of my book, that I think religion poisons everything, I’m not just doing what publishers like and coming up with a provocative subtitle, I mean to say it infects us in our most basic integrity. It says we can’t be moral without Big Brother, without a totalitarian permission. It means we can’t be good to one another, it means we can't think without this. We must be afraid, we must also be forced to love someone who we fear, the essence of sado-masochism and the essence of abjection, the essence of the master-slave relationship and that knows that death is coming and can’t wait to bring it on. I say this is evil. And though I do, some nights, stay at home, I enjoy more the nights when I go out and fight against this ultimate wickedness and ultimate stupidity. Thank you.

Kishkumen wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 03, 2024 1:59 am

Hitchens was a great wordsmith and well capable of slamming his opponents, but he has a very shallow, even adolescent rage against religion. It would be really convenient if we could isolate one cause of the evil in the world and simply target that until its destruction improved everything almost immeasurably. Unfortunately, things don’t work that way. Religion is a category we made up to describe a range of human activities. Behind these activities lie human nature and our capacities for good and evil. The latter is the root problem, and getting rid of it is probably beyond human ability. That is why higher powers are invoked—because it seems to be an intractable problem.

Kishkumen wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 03, 2024 1:59 am

Hitchens was a great wordsmith and well capable of slamming his opponents, but he has a very shallow, even adolescent rage against religion. It would be really convenient if we could isolate one cause of the evil in the world and simply target that until its destruction improved everything almost immeasurably. Unfortunately, things don’t work that way. Religion is a category we made up to describe a range of human activities. Behind these activities lie human nature and our capacities for good and evil. The latter is the root problem, and getting rid of it is probably beyond human ability. That is why higher powers are invoked—because it seems to be an intractable problem.

drumdude wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 03, 2024 3:38 am

I think that's a fairly uncharitable view of what he says in that quote. He specifically calls out monotheistic, Messianic religion. And a subset of that - those monotheistic leaders who yearn for the end of the world. I don't recall him making much fuss about Hinduism, or Jainism.

He admits in his book that he has a soft spot for his "sweet mediocre" Anglican church, which is about as far removed from extremism as a religion can get. I doubt Hitchens would be so naïve as to believe that the world would be perfect if we just eliminated all religions.

...Religion is a category we made up to describe a range of human activities...

Kishkumen wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 03, 2024 11:32 am

drumdude wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 03, 2024 3:38 am

I think that's a fairly uncharitable view of what he says in that quote. He specifically calls out monotheistic, Messianic religion. And a subset of that - those monotheistic leaders who yearn for the end of the world. I don't recall him making much fuss about Hinduism, or Jainism.

Then more fool he, as other religions are just as capable, thanks to human nature, of becoming tools of oppression.

He admits in his book that he has a soft spot for his "sweet mediocre" Anglican church, which is about as far removed from extremism as a religion can get. I doubt Hitchens would be so naïve as to believe that the world would be perfect if we just eliminated all religions.

So, extremism is the problem, not monotheism or a belief in the end of the world. That probably sells fewer books and speaking engagements, but it is a helluva lot more accurate.

Philo Sofee wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 03, 2024 3:36 am

Unfortunately, according to MG, those higher powers also see no need to interfere with their given free will gift to mankind, and so are accomplice to the evil. After all, even God told Isaiah he created the good and the evil. Chapter 41 if memory serves me right. It's back to the old God who is powerful enough to do something about it but won't, or a God who can't stop it. Either way, it's bad for the deity's clout. It's not human evil that is the root of the problem though is it? Isn't it that free will was given by the gods when they really didn't have to do that? I'm just askin', I know philosophically you can trounce me, but do so, I can take it - GRIN!