June 11, 2007

SCORECARD: GOD 1---HITCHENS 0

By the time I finished Christopher Hitchens’ new book about his life-long struggle with the various Gods in his life, “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” I was sick of it. God, religion, the book, and mostly Hitchens himself. It is the book of a smart ass, an enfant terrible, a book of a man who has been everywhere and found no resting place.

It is made up of junk history, junk scholarship and finally turns out to be junk apostasy. The subtitle gives the essential clue to the book (and probably to Hitchens himself). The book is too personal and the poison is in the eye of the beholder. It is a pitiless screed that is unrelenting and eventually tiresome.

It is difficult to understand why he wrote the book since there is nothing in it that hasn’t been written before in the long history of atheism. All of his criticisms are well known and obvious—organized religion has encouraged killing of millions in wars; it has fostered ignorance and superstition which results in unhealthy practices; it has fought reason, science, and modern thought; it is full of inconsistencies, errors, impossibilities and irrational assertions all in the service of superstition. Others have written about all these issues more thoughtfully and in more depth. Hitchens’ main contribution is that he wants to destroy all religions and the idea of God altogether.

The subtitle of the book “How Religion Poisons Everything” is so full of personal bitterness that it tends to vitiate the author’s attempts at rational discourse. And, of course, such an idea is utter nonsense even in the experience of a cynical non-believer/atheist like myself. How often have I been by turns charmed, inspired, and moved by experiences within a religious context. Many millions of people have been awed by Michelangelo’s David and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but the experience is somewhat vitiated by the enormous throngs of viewers with whom one must share the experience. Michelangelo’s Moses, however, is not in Florence or the Vatican but in a little church called San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome. Relatively few people come to view it and when I did the church was closed for the lunch hour and did not open again until 2:00 PM. I waited, and when the doors were opened I was the sole visitor for at least fifteen minutes. I don’t even remember a guard being present—although I’m sure one was. It was just that the presence of the seated Moses in marble was so superhuman and awe inspiring that everything else in the church seemed to disappear.

The figure itself is an astonishing expression of tension and restraint. It is a picture of a wrathful Moses who has just received the commandments from God when he comes face to face with his stupidly idolatrous constituents worshipping a golden calf. It is this state of rage, muscles bulging, veins bursting, ready to spring up and destroy the idolators that is depicted in the statue. But of course he doesn’t; he cannot move a muscle or utter a word. He is forever frozen in that moment of Wrath/Restraint that Michelangelo has captured and incorporated in the marble for eternity. There are very few works of art that contain so powerfully such a dramatic moment in human nature. In it all of the following components are present: the weakness of ordinary human beings who are forced by their fears to commit the sin of idolatry; the wrath of the leader who does not suffer fools or folly easily and wants to destroy his flock; the self restraint that comes from compassion for the weak and foolish sinners—it is the iconic moment in which man’s capacity for self-restraint triumphs over his wish for vengeance.

Some other non-poisonous religion-related experiences I can recommend to Mr. Hitchens are listening to practically any of Handel’s oratorios, the Requiem of Mozart, anything Bach ever wrote; and standing quietly in Ste. Chapelle in Paris surrounded by those vertical windows—definitely non-poisonous. There are, of course, a thousand non-poisonous religion-related things of a simpler nature that are accessible to anyone who wants to partake of them—from the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, to “A Bum’s Christmas” by atheist H. L. Mencken.

It is doubtful that Hitchens did not ask himself why religion and the idea of God have stood the test of time and have such a powerful hold on the human imagination. Perhaps the fact that no such discussion appears in the book has to do with a certain arrogance and incapacity to tolerate human suffering.

Since the late nineteenth century and the appearance of the works of the philosopher Feuerbach, those of Freud, and the great anthropologist Sir James Frazier, it has become increasingly clear that religion—probably all religions—has its roots in the primitive thinking and feeling that exists in the minds of children and becomes overlaid with more mature forms of thought as human beings develop—only to be reverted to in times of need or stress.

Among the universal infantile fantasies that children create for themselves during their developmental years are those that depict their parents as omnipotent and omniscient and their own infantile thoughts and wishes as having the power to make things happen—known to developmental psychologists as magical thinking. The powerful parental images in the childish mind can be consoling and protective or cruel and punishing, depending on each child’s own makeup and experience. As we grow older we grow more realistic in our understanding of the way the world works until we encounter some powerful anxiety-provoking event. When that happens we tend to regress to infantile ways of thinking—like believing that there is an omnipotent rescuing entity who will hear our prayers and save us or our loved ones from harm.

These vicissitudes of mental development and the tendency to avoid painful feelings are deeply rooted in human nature because they are rooted in our biology. And they expressed themselves early in the history of mankind’s cultures the world over in the forms of rituals and stories that comforted communities of adults and children whenever danger and fear dominated human existence—whether from natural or man-made threats. Death, disease, drought, flood, earthquake, whatever was strange or mysterious required the retelling of stories and performance of rituals which tended to assuage and console people. Not very much has changed. Those experiences in far-off places and remote times became increasingly formalized into hundreds of local religions at first and then into more sophisticated religions which have more or less stood the test of time—Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, then Christianity and Islam. All of these have sub-religions and a great variety of offshoots, depending on local customs. It would not be wrong to say that, along with the vicissitudes of politics and real estate, religion is determined by local customs and events.

Mr. Hitchens, egoist that he is, cannot see humankind as any different from himself—a member of the elect—strong-minded, rational, courageous in the face of death. Let us pray that at the end he will face his final moments as bravely as he presumes. Of the rest of us, he is utterly contemptuous. What Ivan Karamazov’s Grand inquisitor refers to as the “millions and tens of thousands of millions” who make up the vile, sinful, weak and ignoble race of man, who search for consolation from God or religion in moments of stress and pain, Hitchens relegates to the discard pile.

It is not enough for Hitchens to live and let live. The tone of the book—because religion is so “poisonous”—is absolute. Religion and those who are influenced by it must go. There is no room for strong-minded atheists like himself and the faithful and the half-hearted in the same boat.

Soon Mr. Hitchens’ book will fade from memory like hundreds of other volumes in the library of apostasies since the Enlightenment began. And we will be left with the tens of thousands of millions who need a God to worship in times of pain and suffering because science and reason have discovered that human nature is made that way.