Christopher Hitchens: God? Feh!

Last night, one of my favorite intellectual pugilists, Christopher Hitchens, came to town to perform his enfant terrible show.  This time the subject was Hitchens' new book,  God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.  Speaking at Temple Judea(!), Hitchens drew a packed house (maybe a 1000 people).  So much so, Rabbi Goldberg, who was moderating Hitchens' talk,  had to restrain himself: it's hard to see the place so crowded, the rabbi lamented, and not get to launch into a High Holy Day sermon, even in May. (Rabbi Goldberg has a blog post about this himself. Worth checking out.)

Hitchens was not the only draw, however. Also invited to the event were Lama Karma Chotso, a Buddhist nun who is now president of the Interfaith Council of Greater Hollywood (FL) and several scholars from FIU's Center for the Study of Spirituality, including: Prof. Daniel J. Alvarez (torn between evangelical and faithlessness), Prof. Nathan Katz (Orthodox Jew who's a buddy of the Dalai Lama), and Prof. Aisha Musa (Muslim). What follows after the jump is my recollection of the gist of the exchanges but is not to be relied upon as an accurate transcription. If there are corrections that need to be made, I will speedily oblige.

Hitchens began provocatively. 

Speaking briefly but passionately, Hitchens thrust forward with the claim that religious faith is corrupt and absurd: he drew on two examples to spark debate: the Akedah (near-sacrificial binding) of Isaac, and the practice of circumcision. What kind of world do we want to live in where parents are ready to both kill their children to mollify a divine request and mutilate their children (whether boy or girl) to show their faithfulness?

Unfortunately, the respondents did not parry Hitchens' initial provocations during the talk, instead raising the problems they saw with the facts in the book. (To be fair, they weren't told what Hitchens was going to say that evening, so they read the book and gave their reactions.)  Thus, for example, Katz, in his response, pointed out that Hitchens had fallen for the claim that Orthodox Jews make love through a sheet with a hole in it.  The claim is an arrant myth.  And Katz rightly tweaked Hitchens for not having done his homework.  But in the course of making his rebuke, Katz said that telling such a story was effectively only a few degrees less bad than raising the canard of the blood-libel.  Katz also contested CH's claim that religion mucks everything up by invoking some of the empirical data suggesting that religious people recover from surgery because of prayer, are more likely to give to charity, and that circumcision is a good preventive tool against HIV transmission. 

When it was Hitchens' turn to speak, true to form, he went apeshit upon Katz's comparison of what he wrote to the blood-libel, saying, essentially, that if Katz hadn't been his invited guest at this house of worship, he would go outside and beat him senseless.  So much for that burgeoning friendship...  On the merits, Hitchens said, look, if I'm wrong about the sheets with holes, then so be it; I'll happily remove it. It doesn't hurt my overall claim that religious practice denigrates women and is afraid of the female birth canal.  As to the empirical claims that religion has a healing effect, Hitchens said, why do we need medicine at all then? And if religious people are to be praised for their charity, doesn't it undermine the goodness of such a charitable impulse if it's done for fear of powers invisible, as Hobbes would put it?  The larger claim that we need God to be good is patently false, says Hitchens. 

Professor Musa took Hitchens to task about which translation of the Koran he was purporting to use in the book, and the one he actually used, and then made a larger point: the Koran is a wonderful book demonstrating that Islam is a religion of peace, and Islam is being corrupted in some places by the human element.  Showing he was not afraid, as he put it, to attack the ideas of a Muslim woman in a wheelchair, Hitchens called bollocks: why is it that not a single Muslim authority issued a Fatwa against Saddam's genocide against the Kurdish Mulsim population? Why does the Koran call for death to infidels in this and that sura? And on. 

Prof. Alvarez, meanwhile, chastized Hitchens for having evinced no empathy for the religious worldview in his book, and more sharply, contended that Hitchens' preferred secular humanism and scientism led to the Nazi and fascist worldviews.  Hitchens responded with a learned disquisition on the Catholic Church's ties to fascism throughout Europe, and how the Church during WWII asked its priests to say prayers for the Nazi regime.  Alvarez responded: Albert Speer once wrote that the Germans weren't better killers because of their Christian conscience.  Hitchens: 25% of the German killing machine were practicing Catholics. Not one got excommunicated.  Know who got excommunicated? Goebbels.  Know why? He married a Protestant.  Game over.

Even the gracious Buddhist nun got her drubbing from Hitchens.  Sure, everyone thinks Buddhists are such lovely people.  And you're no different. But Zen Buddhism was the religious motivation for the Japanese suicide bombers during WWII and much of the ongoing violence in Sri Lanka is inspired by Buddhists  too. So, how do we know, Hitchens asks, which Buddhism is right? The cheery one or the deathly one? Isn't there a danger to the surrender of reason to religion?

As he wrapped up, just before questions from the audience, Hitchens quoted from memory much of the following often distorted passage of Marx from his Contribution to "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right."

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.  The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Though the rhetoric of the passage is quite lovely, the allusion to Marx made me wonder how Hitchens proposed reason would better adjudicate the claims among varying secular worldviews.

If Hitchens criticizes the books in light of the practices done in their name, then citing Marx is problematic, right? Hitchens knows full well of the many millions of people slaughtered under Communism. Indeed today, various people believe the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (which Hitchens robustly supported) involve crimes against good sense if not humanity.  In light of the crimes of communism (and, to some, the crimes of quasi-liberal imperialism), can Hitchens simply say, ain't no flies on us? What method or assurances can Hitchens promise? 

It may be that Hitchens is saying: look, there are two horses running, and I'm ready to ride this one and not the other, to take my chances, in other words, with the horse of anti-theism.  But that's a mightily more modest tone than the one struck last night and in his writings.

Update: A comment below indicates that I likely erred in recalling Hitchens' point about Buddhism's role in religious violence today in Sri Lanka, so I've amended the post somewhat. Thanks Patrick.