More thoughts on Hitchens from Father Ted

The question "what is religion?" draws many answers. The only solid one to me is that it is about those beliefs which bind us back - the Latin root means this and it is a useful thought. This means in turn that it is not necessarily about God.

The books we've been reviewing in the thread write mainly about those binding beliefs which involve God somehow. Better I think to write about belief.

As a pastor it was very clear to me that everyone had their own set of binding beliefs - expressed in the comment that there are five Gospels: The Gospels of SS Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and "the Gospel according to me".

Trouble begins when this fifth Gospel begins to over-shadow or replace the others, and especially when it is imposed in a thorough-going manner or is drawn into a political system.

What I've seen of Dawkins and Hitchens two books suggests that they base themselves on rather cheap jibes about the excesses of religion, which must surely vitiate to some degree their arguments by basing them on bad evidence.

Nonetheless, the books seem to have made us all sit up and think!

Pity about the titles and the book covers!

Sam reviews Christopher Hitchens, "God is not Great"

Christopher Hitchens’ new book, subtitled “How religion poisons everything” is his personal repudiation of religion and religious belief. In it he lists his objections to faith-based religion including “the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos.” The book follows closely on the publication of “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins which has similar themes.

The first chapter is somewhat autobiographical and details some of the author’s doubts as a child about the reality of faith. Whilst as an adult Hitchens believes in respecting different faiths and professes to have friends of many different religious orientations, interestingly he seems annoyed when some of them after listening to his objections proclaim him to be a “seeker”.

Personally I’m sympathetic to many of his objections to organized religion and its excesses as I’m sure many religious people are too (perhaps including Jesus and the many prophets who criticized the hypocrisy and venality of the religious authorities of their times-I would like to think that religious belief and humanism are not mutually exclusive-well clearly they're not-the leading example, which Hitchens cites, being Martin Luther King).

A digression: Richard Dawkins was recently featured in the ABC program Compass. During that documentary I found myself sympathizing with the theologically liberal Anglican bishop that Dawkins interviewed. The topic of evolution was mentioned. The bishop felt that religion also evolves and is enlightened by science. Dawkins responded saying that the bishop was someone that he had a lot in common with.

To Hitchens credit, he gives quite a balanced view of the issues albeit from an atheistic point of view. He doesn’t disguise the fact that many so-called humanists have been equally guilty of hypocrisy and support for totalitarian regimes-one of his major criticisms of religion. I learnt a lot by reading this book and especially many fuller accounts of recent human tragedies and the unfortunate role that certain misguided religious people played in them (eg. the Rwandan genocide). Reading this book was not a problem for me. Though it was challenging and thought-provoking I wasn’t threatened by it in a spiritual sense. Then again the author would probably recognize a tendency towards deism in the reviewer if we were to discuss theology (deism-just learnt the meaning of this very interesting word after reading his book-had to google it!)

Hitchens draws a link between religion, racism and totalitarianism. It is hard to deny that this link has existed (and unfortunately still exists). Is religion nothing more than a destructive and irrational tribalism sustained by far-fetched myths? Christopher Hitchens seems to think so. Personally I’m a bit more optimistic. I see the problems of religion reflecting the problems of the human condition-one of which being that the power of love is frequently overcome by the love of power. But thank God for evolution! I would like to think that the glass is not as dark as it once was.

(God is Not Great-How religion poisons everything by Christopher Hithens, published in paperback by arrangement with Warner Books Inc., New York, New York, USA 2007).