Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great wouldn’t have gotten my attention if not for its subtitle, How religion poisons everything. 

The subtitle’s implications worried me. If citizens believe that religion “poisons everything,” their response might be to pass laws banning religion, a position I would strongly oppose because it infringes on personal liberty.  People can think and believe whatever they like; any effort to impose on that freedom - especially in personal beliefs - is not only wrong, but futile.

Of course ”personal freedom” is really “liberty,” which, as I defined it in grade school, is “freedom with responsibility.”  That “responsibility” is, by and large, to not infringe on other’s freedoms.  (Effectively the golden rule, but with freedom.  ie: I can’t use my freedom to kill you since that is a violation of your freedom.)  Yet if “Religion poisons everything,” other’s beliefs seemingly cause negative externalities that infringe on my rights.  (That’s how I read it, anyway). Is that really true?

Hitchens doesn’t - to me - provide evidence that religious belief causes such a negative externality.  He does provide plenty of evidence that actions arising from religious beliefs quite often impose on personal freedoms, but those impositions are a failing of government to protect citizens’ rights.  In modern democracies, the government must protect liberty (further, it is a failing of the people if they do not demand such protection).  [and for those in countries without personal rights nor the freedom to leave, the only recourse is to fight.]

So, in the end, I finished god is not Great unconvinced that religious believers are necessarily imposing a negative externality (despite their prayers) and that when religious actions impose on my freedoms, the government should stop that action rather than trying to stop the personal religious belief.  I would assume that is the standard libertarian response.

I must note that the idea of ‘banning religion’ was my theorized line-of-reasoning based on the book’s subtitle. No where does Hitchens explicitly call for banning religion.  In fact, he does the opposite:

“I would not prohibit it [religion] even if I could.  Very generous of me, you may say.  But will the religious grant me the same indulgence?  … I would be quite content to go to their children’s bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to “respect” their belief … And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition - which is that they in turn leave me alone.But this, religion is ultimate incapable of doing. As I write these words, and as you read them, people of fair are in different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hardwon human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything.

The rest of the book is a description of some of the atrocities committed because of or in-hand with religion; and while religion is the core of the problem, only the actions can truly be stopped by a proper rights-protecting government. 

[There is some discussion of how religious upbringings can affect obviously naive children - but that is still a personal choice on the parent’s part, and a difficult question  (ala Jesus Camp).]

This is a good time to note that my “faith” in the right of religious freedom is a faith that the best ideas - those that help individual and society prosper - are those that will survive in the long-run.  My knowledge of evolution and my experience that the truth is eventually unavoidable makes me content to let competing ideas stand on their own merits.

Enough with philosophy based on a subtitle; what of the actual book?  Good.  Interesting.  It seemed a bit unfocused and rambled at times, but the underlying content was compelling enough to transcend any structural flaws.

I won’t do a chapter-by-chapter summary (in part because they blended together), but here are the quotes that stood out to me:

• Religious distress is at the same time the expression of a real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.

  The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.  The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusion.  The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion.  [Marx on 9]

• Two peoples of roughly equivalent size had a claim to the same land.  The solution was, obviously, to create two states side by side. Surely something so self-evident was within the wit of man to encompass?  And so it would have been, decades ago, if the messianic rabbis and mullahs and priests could have been kept out of it.  But the exclusive claims to god-given authority, made by hysterical clerics on both sides and further stoked by Armageddon-minded Christians who hope to bring on the Apocalypse (preceded by the death or conversion of all Jews), have made the situation insufferable, and put the whole of humanity in the position of hostage to a quarrel that now features the threat of nuclear war. Religion poisons everything. As well as a menace to civilization, it has become a threat to human survival. [24-25]
• “Apostasy,” according to the Koran, is punishable by death.  There is no right to change religion, and all religious states have always insisted on harsh penalties for those who try it. [29]
• The nineteen suicide murders of New York and Washington and Pennsylvania were beyond any doubt the most sincere believers on those planes. [32]
• [John Ashcroft] stated that America had “no king but Jesus” (a claim that was exactly two words too long). [32]
• Anyone citing Madison today would very likely be thought either subversive or insane, yet without him and Thomas Jefferson, coauthors of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, the United States would have gone on as it was - with Jews prohibited from holding office in some states, Catholics in others, and Protestants in Maryland. [34]
• By all means - for all I care - let a priest sworn to celibacy be a promiscuous homosexual. … By all means let anyone who believes in creationism instruct his fellows during lunch breaks.  But the conscription of the unprotected child for these purposes is something that even the most dedicated secularist can safely describe as a sin. …

  I think we are entitled to three provisional conclusions.  The first is that religion and the churches are manufactured, and that this salient fact is too obvious to ignore. The second is that ethics and morality are quite independent of faith, and cannot be derived from it.  The third is that religion is - because it claims a special divine exemption for its practices and beliefs - not just amoral but immoral.  The ignorant psychopath or brute who mistreats his children must be punished but can be understood.  Those who claim a heavenly warrant for the cruelty have been tainted by evil, and also constitute far more of a danger. [52]

• One must state it plainly.  Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody - not even the might Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea of what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). [64]
• … the three monotheisms claim to share a descent at least from the Pentateuch of Moses, and the Koran certifies Jews as “people of the book,” Jesus as a prophet, and a virgin as his mother. (Interestingly, the Koran does not blame the Jews for the murder of Jesus, as one book of the Christian New Testament does, but this is only because it makes the bizarre claim that someone else was crucified by the Jews in his place.) [98]
• The simple fact is that the New Testament, as we know it, is a helter-skelter accumulation of more or less discordant documents, some of them probably of respectable origin but others palpably apocryphal, and that most of them, the good along with the bad, show unmistakable signs of having been tampered with. [H. L. Mencken on 110]
• In 2004, a soap-opera film about the death of Jesus was produced by an Australian fascist and ham actor named Mel Gibson. [110]
• (It was not until two decades after the second World War that the Vatican formally withdrew the charge of “deicide” against the Jewish people as a whole.) And the truth is that the Jews used to claim credit for the Crucifixion. Maimonides described the punishment of the detestable Nazarene heretic as one of the greatest achievements of the Jewish elders, insisted that the name Jesus never be mentioned except when accompanied by a curse, and announced that his punishment was to be boiled in excrement for all eternity. What a good Catholic Maimonides would have made! [111]
• The impressive fact remains that all religions have staunchly resisted any attempt to translate their sacred texts into languages “understanded of the people,” as the Cranmer prayer book phrases it.  There would have been no Protestant Reformation if it were not for the long struggle to have the Bible rendered into “the Vulgate” and the priestly monopoly therefore broken.  Devout men like Wycliffe, Coverdale, and Tyndale were burned alive for even attempting early translations.  The Catholic Church has never recovered from its abandonment of the mystifying Latin ritual, and the Protestant mainstream has suffered hugly from rendering its own Bibles into more everyday speech.  … among most Jews, too, the supposedly unchangeable rituals of antiquity have been abandoned. The spell of the clerical class has been broken. Only in Islam has there been no reformation, and to this day any vernacular version of the Koran must still be printed with an Arabic parallel text. This ought to arouse suspicion even in the slowest mind. [125]
• Islam when examined is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require. [129]
• Each hadith [saying of Muhammad], in order to be considered authentic, must be supported in turn by an isnad, or chain, of supposedly reliable witnesses. … (”A told B, who had it from C, who learned it from D”) …. One of the most famous of the six compilers, Bukhari, died 238 years after the death of Muhammad.  Bukhari is deemed unusually reliable and honest by Muslims, and seems to have deserved his reputation in that, of the three hundred thousand attestations he accumulated in a lifetime devoted to the project, he ruled that two hundred thousand of them were entirely valueless and unsupported.  Further exclusion of dubious traditions and questionable isnads reduced his grand total to ten thousand hadith.  You are free to believe, if you so choose, that out of this formless mass of illiterate and half-remembered witnessing the pious Bukhari, more than two centuries later, managed to select only the pure and undefiled ones that would bear examination. [133]
• The idea of being “tolerated” by a Muslim is as repulsive to me as the other condescensions whereby Catholic and Protestant Christians agreed to “tolerate” one another, or extend “toleration” to Jews. The Christian world was so awful in this respect, and for so long, that many Jews preferred to live under Ottoman rule and submit to special taxes and other such distinctions. [133]
• Thus, dear reader, if you have come this far and found your own faith undermined - as I hope - I am willing to say that to some extent I know what you are going through. There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking. [153]
• But was there a moment when he [Joseph Smith] also believed that he did have a destiny, and was ready to die to prove it? In other words, was he a huckster all the time, or was there a pulse inside him somewhere?  The study of religion suggests to me that, while it cannot possibly get along without great fraud and also minor fraud, this remains a fascinating and somewhat open question. [166]
• Every week, at special ceremonies in Mormon temples, the congregations meet and are given a certain quota of names of the departed to “pray in” to their church.  This retrospective baptism of the dead seems harmless enough to me, but the American Jewish Committee became incensed when it was discovered that the Mormons had acquired the records of the Nazi “final solution,” and were industriously baptizing what for once could truly be called a “lost tribe”: the murdered Jews of Europe.  For all its touching inefficacy, this exercise seemed in poor taste. [168]
• … a watched at the gates, whose job it was to alert the others if the Messiah arrived unexpectedly. (”It’s steady work, as one of these watchmen is supposed, rather defensively, to have said.) [172]
• This is exactly what gave Dr. King his moral leverage, because he could outpreach the rednecks.  But the heavy burden would never have been laid upon him if religiousity had not been so deeply entrenched to begin with.  [179]
• I was a guarded admirer of the late Pope John Paul II, who by any human standards was a brave and serious person capable of displaying both moral and physical courage. He helped the anti-Nazi resistance in his native country as a young man, and in later life did much to assist its emancipation from Soviet rule. His papacy was in some ways shockingly conservative and authoritarian, but showed itself open to science and inquiry … Pope John Paul was praised among other things for the number of apologies he had made.  These did not include, as they should have done, an atonement for the million or so put to the sword in Rwanda.  However, they did include an apology to the Jews for the centuries of anti-Semitism, an apology to the Muslim world for the Crusades, an apology to Eastern Orthodox Christians for the many persecutions that Rome had inflicted upon them, too, and some general contrition about the Inquisition as well.  This seemed to say that the church had mainly been wrong and often criminal in the past, but was now purged of its sin by confession and quite ready to be infallible all over again. [193]
• In order to establish eternal peace in East Asia, arousing the great benevolence and compassion of Buddhism, we are sometimes accepting and sometimes forceful.  We now have no choice but to exercise the benevolent forcefulness of “killing one in order that many may live.” This is something which Mahayana Buddhism approves of only with the greatest of seriousness. [- Japanese Buddhist leadership on joining Nazi/Fascist Axis 203]
• The Dalai Lama tells us that you can visit a prostitute as long as someone else pays her.  Shia Muslims offer “temporary marriage,” selling men the permission to take a wife for an hour or two with the usual vows and then divorce her when they are done. Half of the splendid buildings in Rome would never have been raised if the sale of indulgences had not been so profitable: St. Peter’s itself was financed by a special one-time offer of that kind.  The newest pope, the former Joseph Ratzinger, recently attracted Catholic youths to a festival by offering a certain “remission of sin” to those who attended. … This pathetic moral spectacle would not be necessary if the original rules were ones that would be possible to obey.  … The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey. [212]
• At the very extreme edge can be found the primevil puritanism of the Taliban, which devoted itself to discovering new things to forbid (everything from music to recycled paper, which might contain a tiny fleck of pulp from a discard Koran) and new methods of punishment (the burial alive of homosexuals).  The alternative to these grotesque phenomena is not the chimera of secular dictatorship, but the defense of secular pluralism and of the right not to believe or be compelled to believe.  This defense has now become an urgent and inescapable responsibility: a matter of survival. [252]
• All he really “knew,” he said, was the extent of his own ignorance. (This to me is still the definition of an educated person.) [256]
• This derided heretic [Baruch Spinoza] is now credited with the most original philosophical work ever done on the mind/body distinction, and his meditations on the human condition have provided more real consolation to thoughtful people than has any religion. [262]
• I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no super-human authority behind it. [Einstein, 271]
• The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth.  It is not possession of the Truth, but rather the pursuit of Truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever-growing perfectibility is to be found.  Possession makes one passive, indolent, and proud. If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would will all humility take the left hand. [Gotthold Lessing, 277]
• [Religions] are philosophy with the questions left out. [Simon Blackburn, 278]
• Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it [religion] no longer offers an explanation of anything important.  Where once it used to be able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard - or try to turn back - the measurable advances that we have made. [282]

Hitchens concludes the book saying, “it has become necessary to know the enemy, and to prepare to fight it.”  While the rhetoric is powerful, I would’ve preferred he made clearer that the coming “fight” is one of preferably ideas and not of actual violence.  God knows we’ve got plenty of that already.

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