Hitchens or Has to Come Again Because He Didnt Get It Right the First Time
Information technology'south an image that could make the virtually hardened cynic smile: a miniature Christopher Hitchens, off-white-haired and apple-cheeked, trotting across a meadow in ankle-strap sandals. It's a gentle season in a gentle era. Britain has won the war, the ruins have been repaired—the Dartmoor ponies are grazing, the grass is lush and verdant. Nine-year-onetime Christopher is excelling at school and has a special fondness for Bible studies. By all appearances, God's in his heaven, all's right with the world.
On this particular outing, Christopher'due south religion instructor, a kindly old widow, is using the natural environs to demonstrate God's dearest for humankind. In His infinite kindness, she explains, He fabricated the grass light-green, a color that would please and soothe the man eye. "I just knew," Hitchens would later write, "almost equally if I had privileged access to a college say-so, that my instructor had managed to get everything wrong in merely 2 sentences." In the greenish fields of England, an atheist is born.
Fast-forward one-half a century, and the kid skeptic has grown up to be a formidable iconoclast. With his razor-sharp wit and blatant condone for all things sacred, Hitchens seems, as one Fifty.A. Weekly writer put it, "capable of pissing into your grandmother'southward fish tank." Some would deem this an understatement. In 2003, Hitchens met with a Vatican panel in an attempt to cease a certain Nobel Prize–winning nun from achieving sainthood. During a contempo appearance at the New York Public Library, his very first utterance was a annotate on Mother Teresa'due south beatification: "The old bitch got it anyway."
Mother Teresa is in good company. Hitchens'due south latest book, God Is Non Great, attacks the authority of every religious figure from the Lubavicher Rebbe to Martin Luther Rex, Jr. Gandhi comes beyond as a divisive figure whose legacy is "a dubious rather than a saintly one." The Dalai Lama is painted every bit an exiled king who anoints Hollywood stars as enlightened beings. Jesus is portrayed equally "a rather rigid Jewish sectarian" whose statements range from the innocuous to the immoral. Equally for Mohammed, Hitchens finds his teachings to be such a hodgepodge of ideas that he hesitates to even call them a religion. (This provocative viewpoint is the subject of an unabridged chapter entitled, "The Koran Is Borrowed from Both Jewish and Christian Myths.")
Such gasp-eliciting proclamations take earned the book a blizzard of media coverage and a high-ranking spot on the New York Times bestseller list. Merely underneath all the blasphemy is a quieter sort of indignation. God does not carp Hitchens and then much as the suggestion that human being beings cannot make upstanding decisions without consulting an educational activity manual. "Still little one thinks of the Jewish tradition," he writes of the X Commandments, "it is surely insulting to the people of Moses to imagine that they had come this far under the impression that murder, adultery, theft, and perjury were permissible."
Although Hitchens tin exist fiercely combative in public argue, he is cordial and respectful in private conversation. A cigarette in his oral cavity and an ever-present glass of Scotch in his hand, he listens advisedly to each question and pauses thoughtfully before venturing a reply. He is willing to change his mind: a former Marxist who once co-edited a volume with Edward Said, he has lately irked his leftist colleagues by supporting the Iraq War. His desk is piled high with atheist tomes by Daniel Dennett and H. L. Mencken, merely he relishes his friendships with religious neighbors and often socializes with them belatedly into the night. If he follows any creed, it is the Enlightenment conventionalities that all people accept an innate ability to uncover self-evident truths and distinguish right from wrong. For a human who is frequently labeled a misanthrope, Christopher Hitchens has an unexpected faith in humankind.
In addition to his regular book reviews for The Atlantic, Hitchens writes a column for Vanity Fair and contributes to a wide range of other publications. He is currently editing The Portable Atheist, a collection of "essential readings for the non-believer" due out in Nov. We spoke on June 29th at his apartment in northwest Washington, D.C., where he lives with his married woman, Ballad Blue, and his daughter, Antonia.
—Jennie Rothenberg Gritz
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| Christopher Hitchens (Photograph by Christian Witkin) |
I happened to catch you on Hardball last dark with Al Sharpton.
In that location was quite an atmosphere. I like these outdoor things with the crowd and the rut and and then on. But what a clown the guy is—a vulgar clown.
I also followed your debate with him at The New York Public Library. He fabricated the argument that your volume should accept been called Organized Organized religion Is Non Great rather than God Is Not Neat , since your effect is with the structures of religion, non with bodily religion in the Divine.
I retrieve we can say with reasonable certainty that there is no God because all the hypotheses for information technology have been exploded or abased. We have better explanations for the things religion used to try and explain. But we can't disprove the existence of a deity. So if someone says, "Well, I just feel the presence of a strong force"—well, okay. I sort of know what they're going through. As long as they don't try to teach it to my children, or go the constabulary inverse to conform their opinion, or blow themselves up at the airport.
I've learned a lot from doing the tour, because I've had a debate with some religious person at every stop. What I haven't had from anyone, in print or in person, is whatever statement that surprised me, that I couldn't have completely predicted.
Merely were yous surprised by arguments they didn't make? Yous seemed taken ashamed past how much Sharpton agreed with you on certain problems.
I debated a guy named Marking Roberts, Hugh Hewitt's choice of pastor. Hewitt is a major Christian broadcaster and he said, "I'k going to put upwardly a champion confronting you." I said, "Bring it on!" And so I asked this guy, Roberts, "Do you believe St. Matthew when he describes the crucifixion and says all of the graves of Jerusalem opened and all the corpses walked around greeting their old friends?"
And he answered too speedily. He said, "Yep, I do, of course I exercise. I'yard a Christian—I have to believe it." But he added, "Every bit a historian, I'm not absolutely sure." I said, "Thanks for that. I must say, information technology's the most incredible respond I ever heard."
The guy spent half the time proverb that a great deal of what I wrote in the volume is right. Several of them take done that. Which is enjoyable.
Is it enjoyable, though? Or exercise you secretly find it disappointing?
Well, you sometimes experience as if you lot're punching the air. Y'all wish they'd say, "No, alibi me, John Calvin was right, and you're going to hell, buster." But they don't do that. They won't do that in front of an intelligent audience. They may privately think it, but they don't bloody say it.
And I know quite a lot about what they believe. There was one guy in Illinois who was a professor of theology and an ordained minister. He said, "You know, I was amazed. You had things in your book about our beliefs that I thought just a few people knew." He said this on the air on Christian Science Monitor Radio.
I thought, "This is condign disappointing. Why can't I get someone to stand upwards and say, 'Yes. Of course there was an impregnation of a Palestinian virgin by the Divine 2,000 years ago, and that proves the truth of Christ's doctrines. And not only that—he died for your sins. And if you don't acknowledge this, you've missed your chance of going to heaven, and you've doubled your chance of going to hell.'" No i volition do it.
What about the question of morality without God? Al Sharpton spent a lot of fourth dimension grilling yous on that. And information technology was also a major theme in your email contend with the Christian author Douglas Wilson at Christianity Today .
Weird guy.
Wilson insisted that if y'all took Jesus out of the equation, the words "right" or "incorrect" would have no pregnant. Thoughts in the brain would just be a series of chemical reactions, similar bubbles in a soft drink. Equally he put it, "If you were to have a canteen of Mountain Dew and another of Dr. Pepper, shake them vigorously, and put them on a table, it would not occur to anyone to ask which i is 'winning the debate.' They aren't debating; they are but fizzing."
What he's saying is that if he ceases to believe in Jesus, he'south going to instantly become an immoral person. It'due south a terrible admission to have made! Information technology'southward an awful insult to man self-respect to say that. And they don't seem to understand that they give themselves over in that style. It's like saying that zippo would end me from raping you at present if I weren't nether the supervision of a heavenly dictator. And I have a higher stance of myself than that.
Are y'all suggesting that y'all have more faith in human nature than religious people do?
Well, I'll put it this fashion: you can certainly say belief in God makes people bear worse. That tin can be proved beyond a uncertainty. Whether it makes them conduct amend or not, I don't think is so piece of cake to prove. Because you lot can't be certain that their belief is what made them dive in front of a truck to save a child'due south life. They might say, "I did information technology for Jesus," but they might have done information technology anyway.
I'm not so sure most that. I know Mother Teresa isn't your favorite…
Oh, well, that'due south easy! All the wicked things she did…
Just her nuns were willing to selection lepers off the street, to devote their lives to the people no ane else in society would touch. And they seemed to do information technology with 18-carat respect and dignity.
I know people who do that. I've been to Uganda and to North korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world. Everywhere you go, you lot meet volunteers who are giving up their lives for other people. Almost of them are secular. I don't think that proves annihilation virtually secularism. But the ordinary action of helping a boyfriend brute in distress doesn't require faith at all. It merely doesn't.
All the same, the evil things missionaries do are definitely done because of religion. When Mother Teresa said abortion and contraception were equivalent to murder and were the greatest threat to world peace—nobody could have said anything with such wicked consequences! She tried to demolish the only cure for poverty that we know for sure exists, which is the empowerment of women. I'thousand non particularly a feminist, but if you become women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they'll have, immediately the floor volition rise. And if you lot throw a scattering of seeds and some credit to these ladies, the hamlet will be transformed in a couple of years.
Mother Teresa spent her entire life trying to make that impossible. I would say that millions of people are much worse off for her efforts. On an Irish gaelic radio bear witness on a recent Sunday morning, I said, "I wish there was a hell for the bowwow to become to." You couldn't have said that a few years ago. You would have gotten a terrible pasting for it. Only at present, everybody knows it'due south true. They see through this stuff.
One complaint yous've gotten a lot is that y'all lump all religious people together, throwing the moderates in with the extremists. What's your opinion on Unitarians, for example?
They say Unitarians believe in ane God maximum. And they do produce the Jefferson Bible. They go along it in impress. Skilful.
I once read that only vi percent of Unitarians consider God to be their primary religious motivation. Most of them are more than focused on social justice and community service.
I've spoken at Unitarian churches very often. Information technology seems to me, again, that they don't give me enough to disagree with. But every bit for lumping them in, I'll say this. Take you read Camus's La Peste? At the end, the plague is over, the nightmare has dissipated, the city has returned to health. Normality has resumed. Simply he ends by saying that underneath the city, in the pipes and in the sewers, the rats were still there. And they'd 1 twenty-four hour period send their vermin up again to die on the streets of a costless urban center.
That'south how I feel nearly religion. Thanks to advances of science, education, political tolerance, pluralism and so on, religion can now exist 1 option amidst many—who cares who's a Unitarian or who'southward a Congregationalist? Merely in the texts, the bodily texts, in that location is always this toxin that'due south ready to be revived. What I say is, "Do you believe this stuff or don't you?" In other words, "In what respect are you lot different from a humanist?" The authority of the texts is always on the side of the extremists, considering they do say what they say. So be aware of this danger. That's all I'm arguing.
Simply if religion is a human invention, tin't people reinvent their faith? Don't people have the power to infuse new meaning into former words?
Yes. I realized on this book bout that I would have to write a different book for every person I met, because they all take religion à la carte du jour.
I mean, certain. No two people see the world in exactly the aforementioned mode.
This is farther proof that it's manmade. The fact that anybody has now the correct to invent their own creed is a betoken for me rather than a point for them.
Reform Jews do believe that the Bible was written by humans. Should Reform Judaism still be called a faith?
Well, that'due south honestly what I wonder, whether it should be in that instance, or whether it'due south just a guild. There, I well-nigh sympathize with the people who say, "Well, it'southward not heresy, only information technology's just another proper name for hedonism or believing whatever you like." I'chiliad okay, y'all're okay—that's not a religion. Religion is saying that yous know the mind of God and you want to obey His revealed commandments, on hurting of losing your soul, at to the lowest degree. People who really live their lives in fear of that—God-fearing, as they used to say—I can respect. People who are somewhere betwixt Unitarianism and Reform Judaism—it just seems weak-minded to me. Why bother?
You mention in the book that some of your most interesting conversations are with religious friends. What do yous talk about with them?
My friend Christopher Buckley and I accept been discussing organized religion on and off for years. He'due south had all kinds of fluctuations with Catholicism. He'due south through with information technology now. But giving information technology up was no light matter. Nosotros had some very serious discussions about it.
And if I want to borrow a book—any book—that I don't take myself and demand to get hold of speedily, there'southward a very ultra-Orthodox Jewish couple in this flat building, a few floors below me, who would be very probable to have information technology. They're highly intellectual, very well read. They'd also be very interested in having a word about the volume before I gave it back. I'd just have to be careful non to call them on a Friday nighttime considering they wouldn't reply the fucking phone.
Most of my Jewish friends are, like most Jews, non-believers—in fact, very discerningly secular. But these two are very observant. I wouldn't say very devout, but information technology ways something to them. It's the continuity of the tradition. I'one thousand not indifferent to that. Not at all.
It's funny you should mention that, considering when I read about your religious crunch at the age of 9, I constitute myself wondering if you would have been happier in a yeshiva, where y'all could have questioned everything and analyzed texts to your heart's content.
My ain way of joining a yeshiva was to become a Troskyite, I suppose. I was a member of an extremely Talmudic sect. The leading thinker of our group was a guy called Yigael Gluckstein; he wrote under the name Tony Cliff. There was a very heavy Jewish presence in this group, likewise. You realized that for many people this was a kind of substitute for the yeshiva. They loved the micro-arguments within Marxism about the nature of the Soviet country: the different theories of bureaucratic collectivism, state capitalism, workers' status—absurd as these discussions would seem to outsiders, cool as some of them actually were! Yeshivas were very good training, no dubiousness about it.
I use the word "fundamentalist" as a dismissive term, but actually, those who really struggle with the text, and effort and make it come out correct, accept my respect in a way. Grudgingly. I think it's sinister, but people who are willing to give a bit of their life to this, to their Torah portion or their Sura—it's meliorate than breezing along like some nihilist or hedonist.
At the very least, that approach to religion requires a lot of thinking. As ane Orthodox rabbi once said to me, "No Jew is infallible. Just the Pope is infallible."
My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they oasis't elected a new one. In that location's no ane in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don't miss information technology.
There's one affair I have to ask you almost. Y'all mention in the book that Orthodox Jews have sexual activity through a hole in a canvass. As far as I know, that'south an urban legend.
You should see the electronic mail I got from my downstairs neighbor about it! I asked him, "Look, someone's told me this is an urban legend. There'southward a film nearly information technology, there'southward a book about it. How come only at present, when I mention it in passing, does it all of a sudden become such an upshot?" His e-mail was wonderful—nigh three pages worth—including the possibility that some mad rabbi in some shtetl maybe did say something like that.
Simply I've changed it. It'south non in the book now, not in the new editions. And I wish I hadn't put information technology in. It was absolutely in passing, and I didn't need information technology. When I recollect of the mikvah, and other Orthodox teachings nigh women, some of them very obscene, I could have fabricated it much harsher.
Ironically, you've learned a lot about religion in the process of writing this book. And religious people seem more than happy to engage with y'all near it.
That is actually what impressed me with all these debates on my book tour. I accept had almost no refusals. Initially in Atlanta, my publisher said, "We've given upward. We won't get anyone. Nosotros might not even get a hall in Georgia to practice this." And I said, "No, I bet you nosotros will. They won't want information technology said that they refused the claiming." And really, they were pretty generous in the end.
Co-ordinate to the Wall Street Journal, yous've been selling a lot of books in the Bible Belt.
And I promise you, there was no finish where we didn't have to turn hundreds of people away.
Who were these hundreds of people? Were they atheists? Were they religious people who were angry at yous?
No, definitely not. They are people who take had enough. Specially in the South, they're people who don't like being laughed at by people from the N who think they're all rednecks and Falwell fanciers. They're very clear on that. They regard that association as a fucking insult, which information technology is. Falwell died the week of my swing through the South, making me wonder if someone upwards there really does like me. So I had to mention information technology, and I said what I thought about him, and information technology brought roars of applause. Even the things I said about him that were really, by whatsoever standards, quite rude, while the guy's carcass is hardly common cold.
Only look at what's happened to so-called intelligent blueprint—the Creationist movement. It'south been defeated in every courtroom where information technology's been tried—in Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, the most conservative district in Pennsylvania effectually Dover. They've been smashed. People don't want to come from a country they'll become laughed at for saying they're from.
From what I've read, the judge in the Dover case was actually quite religious himself, which raises another question. At that place are millions of religious people who would say, "Look, we completely believe in scientific discipline. Only yet, we also have this carve up function of our lives that is well-nigh ritual and family unit and personal meaning." Are you fine with that?
Sure. Those people run across my qualifications. They make it a individual belief. The place for religion is in the mind, within the individual. If they insist, information technology'south within the family, equally long equally they don't corruption the children. At that place are lines they shouldn't cantankerous: no genital mutilation of people who aren't qualified to sign an elective surgery form. No, not once, non e'er. Preferably, no teaching about hell, I call back. Simply you probably tin can't finish people from doing that. No denial of medical intendance on superstitious grounds. Directly to jail for that. No marrying off your daughters to distant relatives, or not and then distant, like the Mormons practise.
Last calendar week, I was at Salman Rushdie's 60th birthday party in London—he was celebrating his knighthood. It was quite a squeamish evening. Anyway, I met an interesting Pakastani novelist named Nadeem Aslam. He'due south from the Yorkshire towns where a lot of Pakistani Muslims have settled, which is now the hotbed of terrorism in Britian. And he says that something really terrible has happened in this community. Because of their tradition of going dorsum to Pakistan to the same old village, in the near astern part of Pakistan, to get a wife from the tribe and bring her, veiled, back to England, this percentage of the population is responsible for the bulk of the deformed births in the country. They're inbreeding. They're ruining themselves and creating a huge burden for the health and social welfare departments besides. Information technology'south obscene cultism. That bothers me, also. That'southward influencing the society I'm living in.
How'due south Rushdie doing? There'south been quite a stir surrounding his knighthood.
He's fine. There was an attempt to jack it up, but information technology has failed. He was afraid at one bespeak that information technology would happen again, every bit information technology happened before in '89, that in one of these shops in Islamic republic of pakistan, the police would go nuts and impale a few people. Then the whole thing would take off and there'd exist more claret spilled. It didn't happen, though.
He stayed right here in this apartment when he was still under the fatwa , didn't he?
He did, yeah. That was when he was on the run. The whole of this front area was a command post with machine guns and dogs and searchlights. There were four hotels that look into this apartment, and they had rooms in each of them.
By "they," you mean the Secret Service?
It was the Diplomatic Protection Corps. He'd come up to visit the White House, so he had to exist protected on their dime. They said it was the toughest job they e'er had to do because when the Chancellor of Germany is in town, everyone knows she'south in boondocks, and then your protection of her doesn't draw attention to her presence. Only they wanted maximum protection—
—and they didn't want people to enquire, "Why are those guys with machine guns continuing in that courtyard?"
Yes. Although it got out. Maureen Dowd leaked where he was staying. Thanks a lot. *
*From the editor: Maureen Dowd denies this, and The Atlantic erred in non seeking her response before posting this interview... Click here for more
You mentioned that faith should be a private affair. Where do you stand on the headscarf debate in French republic?
From the athenaeum:
"The Crescent and the Tricolor" (November 2000)
France today has more than Muslims than practicing Catholics, and couscous has arguably become the country's national food. By Christopher Caldwell
There is in fact no mandate in the Koran for covering the head or the face. In many countries that have a Muslim majority, in that location's no question of girls wearing veils in school. Turkey wouldn't have it, Tunisia wouldn't take it, I don't recall Kingdom of morocco would have it. We're applying a Saudi standard to children in Western Europe because we call up nosotros must respect their religion.
And it'southward a Jewish heresy, covering the hair, which y'all'd think would put them off. But no, they ever borrow the worst stuff. They infringe the dumbest stuff in Judaism: the terrible Abraham story and the pork phobia and the head covering. They also borrow the stupidest stuff from Christianity, like the virgin nascency and all that nonsense. It'south atrocious, witless plagiarism. Why we should respect it, I don't know.
Yous seem to relish talking nearly the virgin birth. It comes up quite a lot in your book and your debates.
I was on the radio with some talk show host in Seattle who turned out to exist Catholic. I found it out this way: I said, "Find me anyone who believes in the virgin nascency. I only don't believe anyone believes in information technology." And he said, "I do."
I said, "No you don't. No you don't, y'all're just saying it!" And he said, "Yes, I practice. I believe in the immaculate conception of Jesus Christ." And I said, "I hate to tell y'all this, simply the immaculate conception of Jesus Christ is not the same equally the virgin nascency. The immaculate conception is the conception of the Virgin Mary. She was immaculately conceived, considering she had to be conceived originally without sin. It's a quite dissimilar thing from the virgin nativity."
At that place was a slight pause. I said, "Well, and so is there anything else you lot truly believe while we're at it? You've been believing that when it'southward not the teaching of the Church. You probably would have believed in limbo when they told you to. Now they tell you you don't have to. What if the teachings change again? It's nonsense! Information technology's come to something when I have to tell you what the Catholic educational activity is on births and conceptions."
I read in the New York Times that you lot exercise like to bring your children up with some modicum of religious didactics. I'd exist interested to know what the Christopher Hitchens Sunday School looks similar.
It would be the King James Bible. Of class, the Church of England doesn't bother with information technology anymore. They accept some happy, crappy new book. Only if you lot don't know what's in King James and how it sounds, y'all won't understand a lot of what's in Shakespeare or Milton or John Donne or George Herbert, to name only a few examples. Enormous numbers of phrases in mutual utilise would be opaque to y'all. You wouldn't know where they came from. They would exist empty.
Look, religion was our first attempt at philosophy. It was the first and the worst, but information technology's withal part of our history and tradition. As it is, children don't know where anything comes from—they don't know the literary catechism or the historical record. So I call up to be religiously literate is very of import.
I too think if you start showing them the stuff as they arroyo the age of literacy and reason, there isn't the slightest chance they're going to believe in it. If Antonia speaks up and asks, "Daddy, what'south this nearly killing all the infant boys in Egypt?" I just say, "Well, information technology seemed like a adept thought at the fourth dimension."
You found out a few years ago that you lot're technically Jewish.
Every bit is Ballad. Nosotros do a rather vestigial Passover seder and then our daughter knows what the tradition is.
What value practise you find in that?
The value in celebrating the murder of Egyptian children? I don't retrieve very much. But it is a tradition.
Y'all drop the wine on the plate? You dip parsley in salt water?
A flake of lamb, a bit of sauce. My female parent-in-law is quite expert at doing it. And we have Polish-Jewish cousins who have a squeamish manner of doing information technology likewise. It'southward upward to Antonia whether she wants to go more interested at a certain point.
I take to inquire you about Chapter 17 of your book. It's all almost Hitler and Stalin, an attempt to disprove that their evil was purely secular. Can you summarize that argument for me?
From the archives:
"The Holocaust and the Catholic Church" (October 1999)
Some in the Vatican want to make Pius XII a saint. If they succeed, "the Church will have sealed its second millennium with a lie." By James Carroll
Whenever anyone argues that the world would be better off without religion, religious people usually point to Stalinism, and Nazism. Well, fascism is some other name for what the Cosmic right wing did in the '20s and '30s in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Croatia, Hungary, Austria. Yous could drib the discussion "fascism" and say "the Catholic right fly." Information technology was a reaction to Bolshevism—Judeo-Bolshevism, actually—and a reteaching of church ideas. That was Hitler's model.
Now, Hitler clearly did have the wish to replace all religion with the worship of Aryan-Norse blood myths and bizarre mysticism culminating in the Führer principle. But he never abandoned the church. He certainly never abased his restless search for its support.
But he didn't promote Christian ideas.
No, you couldn't say that. Existent Nazi members, when they got married, would have some wild Aryan anniversary with daggers and banners and invocations of God-knows-what myth. Not secular. Pagan, you could say—Nordic-pagan. Just certainly not secular.
And at that place was much praise for the church building's attitude to the Jews. Fifty-fifty beyond the stop, the Vatican protected members of the Third Reich in political slums it was helping to run in South America. So that's non secular at all.
Equally for Japan, the third fellow member of the triptych of the Nazi axis, the caput of state was not the head of the church, but he was a god—worshiped non unlike the godhead of North korea, which is only one short of the Trinity, with Male parent and Son. It'due south an order of worship that is enacted every mean solar day. You lot have to praise the leader all the fourth dimension, in every department of culture and education, from dawn till dusk.
Information technology's funny—they say the births of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong Il were attended by miraculous events like the singing of birds, which I can tell you birds don't do in North korea. It was on some magic mountain and so on. So they have all of that. Miraculous births are absolutely necessary for any religion. They don't say they'll follow you later on your death. They don't get that far. Only neither does Judaism.
And how do you explicate Stalin?
In 1917 in Russia, millions and millions of people had been told for hundreds and hundreds of years that the head of land was divine. The czar was as well the caput of the Russian Orthodox Church, the "Little Male parent." If you lot were Joseph Stalin, you shouldn't exist in the dictatorship business if y'all can't see in that location's a huge opportunity. A huge reservoir of credulity and servility has been gifted to yous past the previous regime. And so what happens? Inquisition, heresy hunts, worship of the supreme leader, and miracles—behemothic tomatoes. Whatever it is, information technology isn't secular.
How are you lot defining "secular," then? Every bit a synonym for "free-thinking"?
But that if you wanted to talk almost secular government, you'd accept to point to a regime that built all its institutions on the teachings of Spinoza and Darwin and Einstein and Jefferson.
America basically tried to do that.
Yeah, America is the closest example. Just considering faith entered into information technology—bringing slavery and genocide and and so on—I don't think y'all can point to it.
All of these explanations sound a bit complicated to me. If I tin can infringe Ockham's razor from you lot for a moment…
No, yous shouldn't be borrowing it. You lot should have it always by your person!
All right, here it is: the fact that all these totalitarian regimes proceed popping up, with or without faith, but shows that people have a tendency toward hero worship, and leaders accept a tendency to decadent that ability. Religion might be a tool that leaders can use. Merely information technology'southward awfully tricky to discover religious motives behind every anti-religious dictatorship.
You're quite right. Disbelief is a necessary condition for emancipation of the mind, but it's non a sufficient ane. You lot can free yourself from superstition and even so finish upward a nihilist or a hedonist or a Stalinist. What'due south innate in our species isn't the fault of religion. But the bad things that are innate in our species are strengthened by organized religion and sanctified by it. The fact is, we are a mammalian species ane one-half-chromosome away from chimpanzees, and it shows. Curing ourselves of organized religion is only a pocket-sized step along the route. Fortunately, our brains seem to exist evolving.
Nosotros as well have a trend toward being tribalistic. Your book blames the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia on religious fanaticism, but isn't religion, in those cases, part of a larger tribal instinct?
Yes. Organized religion isn't the cause of information technology, but it's a powerful reinforcement. There'due south a huge separate between the people of Due north Carolina and Southward Carolina over what constitutes a proper barbeque. And indeed, football rivalries in Texas. Withal, if everyone in those towns was a member of a unlike faith, you'd find it wasn't so funny. It would get very nasty.
In that location would be football rivalries in Glasgow no matter what, but they've been made much, much worse by the fact that information technology's Rangers against Celtic, Protestant against Catholic. And that'due south within the dialogue of only only one stupid monotheism. They're willing to kill about that. They don't care almost Islam or Judaism. They only intendance nearly beingness the right kind of Christian.
So faith is a very powerful re-enforcer of our backward, clannish, tribal chemical element. But you can't say it's the cause of information technology. To the contrary, it's the production of it. It'due south the deification of it.
Hamas has a potent religious element, but the clashes in Gaza about seemed like an ultra-violent turf war.
Dreadful. Merely dreadful.
You've had some potent opinions on the Palestinian situation in the past. Practise you call back Israel and the West are doing the correct thing in supporting Abbas?
I don't think so. I think they should take long been trying to build up the Barghouti forces. Non Marwan Barghouti, only Mustafa Barghouti and the Palestinian left. I retrieve it's too tardily now. The Palestinian left has been destroyed betwixt the automobile of Fatah and the Islamic Jihad. Information technology used to exist quite strong. The Saudis have besides poured a lot of coin into infiltrating the Palestinian movement, and it worked. And and so the Israelis made the stupid mistake of trying to play one group against some other. I bet they regret that now.
That'due south an old British tactic, isn't it? Divide and conquer?
From the archives:
"The Perils of Partition" (March 2003)
Our author examines the political—and literary—legacy of United kingdom's policy of "split and quit." By Christopher Hitchens
Pakistan is the result of it. Of the two states that were created by partition in 1948, Islamic republic of pakistan is by far the about menacing. And it sickens me to find that everyone wants to modify the subject area to Israel. I know what the criticisms are, and I hold with a lot of them. But still, if a British group were boycotting Pakistan the fashion they did State of israel, I'd be impressed. And I know that's not going to happen. It makes me suspicious.
I'm non similar Abe Foxman. I don't get looking for things to complain most. But you don't have to! It's plain as can be. Permit'due south change the subject to the Jews. No give thanks you! Information technology angers me, actually!
Do you recollect Abbas will exist able to work with secular Arabs in the West Bank?
Well, that's what the test should be. The only test that's existence practical is willingness to cooperate with the Israelis, which is but one of the necessary tests. For a long time, because of the Common cold War, the United States unfortunately paid no attention at all to the secular left in the Arab or Persian globe. The primary matter was to destroy the left, so every bit a result, nosotros made far too many compromises with religious forces. This is part of the price of that.
There don't seem to be many prominent secular voices in the Arab world.
There are more than you retrieve. There are quite a lot in Islamic republic of iran. They've had the longest experience with theocracy, and they're really through with it. And People's democratic republic of algeria and Tunisia—these are people who take an idea of what information technology might be like to live nether these characters, and they're not willing to exercise it. And in that location are more and more than of those voices amongst the European Muslim population. They're our hope. Our only promise, actually.
When y'all mentioned the platonic atheist government a moment back, you brought up Spinoza, Darwin, Einstein, and Jefferson.
Past the fashion, Martha Nussbaum would maintain that neither Einstein nor Spinoza were exactly atheists. They were pantheists, possibly. They didn't believe in a personal God, and then they were not religious. But they may have had a belief in a deity. I'd similar to first with making a distinction between the two things, because it could be that many people were, like Jefferson and Paine, deists, because it seemed so improbable that all of this was an accident. You lot tin can believe that if you like. Only you lot have all your work still ahead of you in showing that God is aware of your being.
In whatsoever example, these were brilliant, highly educated men. How would mass-atheism play out in societies where people live in modest villages and center their lives around their families and the cycles of the seasons?
At that place'southward a pic—I've never seen information technology—well-nigh a hamlet atheist in America. At ane point, at that place'south some incredible thunderstorm or some other apocalyptic effect that makes it seem as though the Second Coming really is about to happen. Everyone'south incredibly impressed. And even he thinks it seems to be true. But he keeps muttering as these events unfold, "But where did Cain get his wife?"
All the old questions take to occur to yous when you read the Bible. Maybe y'all can't read, but you hear the story—wait a infinitesimal, in that location are only two guys in the world, and their parents, and so ane of them finds a wife. Where did she come from? Once yous've thought it, yous can't unthink it.
Now a disagreement I've had with Dawkins—whose work is incredibly of import to us all—and with Daniel Dennett, too, is about whether atheists should rename themselves every bit "brights." I disagree with this completely because it exactly materializes what believers think of us, that nosotros're some sort of snobbish elite. And it has the further implication that you have to be smart to see through organized religion. I know for certain that that's non true. Many, many people are made—as I am—unable to believe. They just can't bring themselves to exercise it.
I think people are naturally revolted by obscurantism and obfuscation. For whatever reasons, at any rate, there have been many times in history where mass movements of people have burned the churches downwardly. People who were quite unlettered would think, "All of this is quite untrue."
Then what was your overall goal in writing this book? 1 reviewer, writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education, wonders if your "thousand strategy is to taunt organized religion so mercilessly that it packs its bags and storms, red faced, out of the cosmos."
That's nonsense. I don't advise annihilation of the sort. Faith is ineradicable. In that location shouldn't be any attempt to eradicate it. I wouldn't have asked people to come and fence with me if that's how I felt.
But if religion is really as horrifying equally you say it is, how could there not be a need to eradicate information technology?
There could exist some occasions where nosotros'd say, "Okay, that's enough." Afterward all, Christians are warned in advance, "Look people to laugh at you, because what you lot believe is really extraordinary." I always bring that up to the Cosmic Defense force League. They're e'er writing letters of complaint. I enquire, "Why are you doing this? Your religion warned yous that you lot would be ridiculed. You should accept information technology gratefully and non exist filing hate spoken communication complaints, you lot idiot."
The kickoff hope I had for the book was that it would put some promise into the growing atheist secular move.
"Atheist secular" every bit opposed to what kind of secular?
Co-ordinate to Pew, the fastest-growing grouping in America are those who claim no religious amalgamation. There are more than of usa than there are Jews or Muslims, and it's growing quite fast. But the number of people who say they're atheists is still quite pocket-size. The atheist core are my constituency. Just yesterday, a bunch of them turned up at that show with Al Sharpton. They all had this sense of emancipation. Ii years ago, you wouldn't accept gotten that. And information technology'southward because of Dawkins and Sam Harris and others like them who are speaking up.
Did y'all happen to see that Due south Park episode about Dawkins? One of the kids ends up in a future civilization where Dawkins has successfully eradicated all religion—only as a result, at that place's at present a group of atheist bounding main otters fighting two other atheist groups over who has the most logical answer to the "Great Question."
Until nearly ten years ago, the main figure in American atheism was Madalyn Murray O'Hair. She was a madwoman who, they say, kept all her coin in gold confined—portable, minor ones. The whole thing became quite hysterical, and she ended up existence killed for her money. It became another cult. I used to go their bulletin, and I stopped reading it later a while. Among other things, I idea they had a tinge of anti-Cosmic paranoia. They would sell books about the surreptitious Vatican world authorities, that sort of thing. Information technology had a beatnik fringe.
It won't happen this time. It'due south more serious. It just is. I got an invitation from a group called the Atheist Alliance—they're holding a conference in Washington in the fall, where Harris and Dawkins and Dennett and myself are all going to be. And Matthew Chapman, Darwin's nifty-not bad grandson, who has done a brilliant book about the Pennsylvania case, and maybe Victor Stenger. Whatsoever y'all remember of us, we're not a completely negligible crew. It's not what yous call up, it'southward how you lot recollect that's important.
In your book, yous write that human beings would practise better to leave the church and gaze through the Hubble telescope or study a strand of Dna. You use the word "awe" to describe your reaction to these scientific phenomena. What would you say you're in awe of ?
It'southward a version of the thing I say elsewhere, which is that my definition of an educated person is that y'all have some thought how ignorant y'all are.
Explicate how that's a pleasant experience.
It's when you're standing there on the verge of something that'due south nearly incomprehensible—when you lot're standing on the edge of the K Canyon peering down, thinking, "What the hell is that?"
Would you lot telephone call information technology the sublime?
Call it transcendent if you like. If yous sentinel the dusk while listening to the "Missa Solemnis," and so you can certainly call it transcendent. As long equally information technology's non supernatural. There'southward no need for the supernatural. The natural is wonderful enough. As Einstein said, "The wonderful thing is at that place are no miracles." The laws of nature work all the fourth dimension. We can't sympathise them all, merely we know they are intelligible. In that location's something extraordinary at work that holds it all in place.
The best way yous could put it is that in that location couldn't be any break of those laws to do good someone who prayed, for the lord's day to stand up still while he finished his boxing. No. That would be piddling compared to the extraordinary consistency and harmony that does seem to apply to the laws of physics. That'due south beautiful. And faith is an obstacle to our seeing that.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/07/transcending-god/306076/