I find I can have a good deal of sympathy for Hitchens's observation. My thought however is that there are multiple strands of religion and he is looking at a dimension of religion which poisons. I have not read his book so do not know if he attempts to show that what he sees as poison is a necessary part of religion or a distortion created by the human problems our species has.drumdude wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 2:51 amLeave it to Christopher Hitchens to say in 1,000 words something incredibly more profound than Daniel Peterson has said in 100,000 blog posts.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.
I imagine religion can be a variety of things including a rejection and antidote to the poison in consideration. I can wonder if I am wrong. The poison has real popularity. It provides emotion thrills. It can comfort the ego.
I think Paul had this poison in mind when he spoke of bondage to the flesh or sin. He hoped his message was one of an antidote but it is clear people like to focus on sin as some other things so they can cling to the poison.
