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Christopher Hitchens |
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God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens
Atlantic, £17.99
John Crace
Tuesday June 12 2007
The Guardian
If the intended reader of this book should want to go beyond disagreement
with its author and try to identify the sins that animated him to write it,
he or she will not just be quarrelling with the ineffable creator who made
me this way, they will also be defiling the memory of a simple, pious woman
called Mrs Jean Watts.
It was Mrs Watts's task, when I was a boy of about nine, to instruct me in
lessons of nature and scripture, and there came a day when she said, "So you
see children, how powerful and generous God is. He has made the grass to be
green, which is exactly the colour that is most restful to our eyes."
I was appalled by this. Even though it was to be several months before I was
to fully comprehend the subtleties of Darwinian evolution and to unlock the
secrets of the genome, I simply knew my teacher had managed to get
everything wrong in two sentences. The eyes were adjusted to nature, not the
other way round.
I do not believe it is arrogant of me to say that I had uncovered the four
irreducible objections to religious faith - its misrepresentations of the
origins of man and the cosmos, its combination of servility and solipsism,
its dangerous sexual repression and its wishful-thinking - before my boyish
voice had broken. Everyone knows I have always been right about everything,
even when I have later changed my mind, and there is at least one other
person conceited enough to make similar claims. My brother.
Religious friends - I use both words guardedly - often call me a seeker
because I have studied the world's sacred texts in greater depth than any
scholar. Like almost everything else, this irritates me immensely. I read
these books because I am, by nature, tolerant and wish to engage with the
idiocies many hold dear. The difference between me and them is that while I
would not try to convert others to atheism, they feel obliged to save my
soul. This is an important distinction. The purpose of this book is not to
prove God does not exist; it is to prove I am cleverer than Richard Dawkins.
Sheltered as my life normally is within the rarefied sanctuary of the
Washington intellectual elite, I have always made it my business to give
comfort to the world's conflict zones by blessing them with a visit - often
accompanied by my dear friend, Salman Rushdie. And I ask you this: if the
express purpose of religion is to make you happy, then why is every zealot a
psychopathic paedophile?
Yes, more people have died in the name of religion than ... Oh, you've
already heard this somewhere before, have you? Well let me tell you
something you don't know. The reason that Jews and Muslims don't eat pork
has nothing to do with the meat's cleanliness. It comes from their Freudian
repression of their lust for pigs.
Religion serves only the self-satisfied and the conceited; it dates back to
a period of prehistory when nobody - not even the mighty Democritus - had
the faintest clue what was going on and God was needed not just as an
explanation but as an instrument of social repression ...
But I can see that I am again in danger of losing you in the radicalism and
unfamiliarity of my discourse, so let me devote the next 150 pages to a
brutal deconstruction of the evils of the Bible and the Qur'an - though they
hardly merit the attention of my intellect. I could talk about the weakness
of evidence by revelation, but suffice it to say that the Bible is a
catalogue of lies compiled by ruthless, amoral, sexually perverted liars and
that the Qur'an is a catalogue of lies borrowed from the Bible.
I must also talk about the tawdriness of the miraculous, the priapism of
blood sacrifice, the molestation of children and the empty concept of heaven
which are endemic in every believer, but I should also like to counter the
case against the secularists. Were not Hitler and Stalin the biggest
mass-murderers in modern history, say the vicious religious apologists such
as Mother Teresa? I say only this. All the Nazis were Catholics and Stalin
was a theocrat.
The time for the new Enlightenment has come. Cast aside your false gods and
know one thing and one thing only. There is no God but me.
The digested read, digested: Our Christopher, who art in Washington,
hallowed be my name.
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