As styled by central casting, Christopher Hitchens is wearing a cream linen
foreign correspondent suit and Rayban Aviators. Small and a bit pudgy, he
has his shirt unbuttoned to reveal his grizzled chest-rug, known by admirers
as The Pelt of the Hitch. He greets me with highly wrought courtesy and the
kind of long, blatant up-and-down appraisal that younger men of his class
are now too egalitarian to try at business meetings.
Perhaps no journalist is so admired by his peers, in part because he has
actually pulled off the life we imagined our profession would afford.
Dashing off 1,000 épater le bourgeois words before a two-bottle lunch,
blagging through war-zone checkpoints, starry parties, whisky-fuelled
late-night geo-politics and crackling media feuds. Yet as most of hackdom
has knuckled down to colourless, desk-bound sobriety, there is Hitchens,
still larging it, a 3-D cartoon of what we might all have been, given his
ego and intellect, his brass neck and neoprene liver.
He is Hunter S. Thompson cut with Gore Vidal, has broken America – as Vanity
Fair columnist and a pop-up TV pundit – without even chipping his minor
public school vowels. Some believe he is the one contemporary journalist who
will still be read in 50 years’ time, the worthiest claimant to the title
heir to Orwell.
And everyone has a story about Hitchens, although at 58 he is fed up with the
long-lunch legends that undermine his gravitas and obscure serious
consideration of his writing. One speaks of him clearing out a minibar in
some African hellhole – he still tries to visit “a f***ed up country at
least once a year” – and one senior, male heterosexual newspaper executive
tells me, not without affection: “Christopher tried to French-kiss me, tried
to ram his tongue between my teeth.”
Others recall his generous patronage when they were young journalists, of the
soirées at his Washington apartment, which these days are the DC parties to
attend. But there is disdain also, and a sense of betrayal. “A busted flush”
is how one former admirer describes him, referring to Hitchens’s political
gymnastics since 9/11 that have led the former Trotskyite to support the
invasion of Iraq and, in 2004, the reelection of George Bush.
Defending the war has cost him prominent old friendships and forged him
unlikely new ones, foremost with the arch neocon Paul Wolfowitz. But now
Hitchens is back in his most acclaimed role, the dashing prosecutor. And the
former tormenter of (among many) Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, Kissinger
and Clinton is levelling up to the big guy Himself.
God is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything, although sweeping in its
erudition, is a righteous harangue. When Ruth Gledhill of The Times recently
interviewed Richard Dawkins about his scientific debunking of faith, The God
Delusion, she found him less angry than his confrontational writing style
suggested. But Hitchens is never far below boiling point. He is an
evangelical secularist, an atheist warlord. Religion, he writes, is
“violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and
bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of
women and coercive toward children”.
This is the book he has been writing all his life, since his primary school
teacher remarked how kind the Almighty was to make trees and grass green, a
colour so restful to the human eye, and he knew she was wrong, that our eyes
were adjusted to nature, not the other way about.
“Marx says criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism,” Hitchens
says. “Philosophy starts where religion ends, just as chemistry starts where
alchemy breaks off or astronomy starts where astrology runs out. It is the
necessary argument. Not believing in the supernatural is the critical
thing.”
And yet, I suggest, doesn’t it fulfil one function, an innate human desire for
ritual? We are soothed by lighting candles or familiar hymns. Secularism,
for all its logic, offers no substitute. Surprisingly, Hitchens agrees. He
observes Passover (he discovered late in life that he was Jewish, his
mother’s family having changed their name from Levin), which his Jewish wife
thinks is contemptible. “She never felt she should identify with anything
except to be an American. To say you’re Jewish or anything else is
sectarian. I should praise that, but why don’t I? Because somehow it would
be banal. And I want my daughter to know what the tradition is.
“But I don’t do Christmas because I can’t stand it.” What, no presents? “Well,
you have to . . .” A tree? “Er, yup. We went to Kmart and bought a white
tinsel one. Actually it’s rather beautiful. Our annual ritual is screwing it
together.”
He was married to his first wife in a Greek Orthodox church, to his second,
Carol Blue, by a rabbi. He had his son, Alexander, now 23, baptised. He
educates his daughter, Antonia, 13, at a Quaker school, Sidwell Friends,
alma mater of Chelsea Clin ton and Al Gore’s son. He has taken her to
Washington’s Anglican cathedral to familiarise her with the liturgy. He
worries that without the scriptures – which he can quote chapter and verse –
she will never understand Milton or Shakespeare.
“The point is,” he says, “religion should be private: I am not paying my taxes
to support it. I’m not going to have children taught that metaphysical
things are true.” America, where secular education has come under protracted
attack from Creationists, is “the territory of contestation at the moment”.
“People [in the US] are fed up with the presumption of the religious and the
demands they expect to have met. There are many, many more nonbelievers and
sceptics in the States and they’ve just about had enough.”
After we meet, Hitchens e-mails me from a book tour of Dixie where, debating a
cleric at every stop, he speaks to large and friendly crowds. “Very often,”
he reports, “what you find is that almost everyone there believes themselves
to be the only other atheist.” His book went straight into the New York
Times top ten, “not because of my blue eyes but because it is part of a
freshet of volumes [Dawkins and Sam Harris’s The End of Faith] that
encourage a fightback against religious bullying and stupidity”.
It is the US constitution’s First Amendment – which enshrines separation of
church and state, and freedom of speech – that is the core of Hitchens’s
personal credo. He wrote a paean to Thomas Jefferson (with whom he shares a
birthday) and last month – after 27 years as a resident – became a US
citizen, taking his oath at the Jefferson Memorial. Even his choice of
witnesses was confrontational: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the feminist author,
persecuted for her apostasy and criticism of Islam, and a secular Marine
just back from Anbar province in Iraq.
While Hitchens’s opponents contend that he has veered right in his defence of
Iraq, he maintains that he has simply stayed true to his primary cause:
defending secularism and reason latterly against its new, fiercest
adversaries, “Islamo-fascists”. He prefers to be known as a Blairite, not a
Bushite, he says: “Not to duck the issue. We were right to intervene in
Bosnia and Kosovo, and we should have done in Rwanda. I would have supported
any president who got rid of Saddam.”
Hitchens has decided that 9/11 is the defining moment – just as the Second
World War was to his naval officer father – and fundamentalist Islam is his
glittering nemesis. “It is a war to the uttermost with the original form of
totalitarianism, which is theocracy. I’ve made a very good living out of
freedom of expression and I haven’t had to sacrifice for it yet. And I think
it is payback time. And it should come to everyone once or twice in their
life. The hour has struck. I regard these people as deadly enemies and I
want them to know that I hate them much more than they hate me.”
Would he die for secularism? He has only, as yet, received the odd sinister
phonecall. “I’m not going to say that. It’s bravado. But I think it might
come to be the case that anyone who believes in unfettered science, sexual
emancipation, open society, would have to say they were ready to risk their
lives.”
Yet he concedes that Iraq, which he has visited several times, does break his
heart: “The difference between our hopes and what has actually happened,” he
says sadly. “And I’ve lost friends there.”
As we talk Hitchens smokes his Rothmans and eyes, but does not touch, a bottle
of white wine chilling in its bucket. Perhaps his thirst has been quenched
by lunch or he’d rather not have me write about his drinking. In our more
abstemious age, his legendary alcohol consumption is used to his discredit.
Two years ago in a vicious debate on the Iraq War, George Galloway retorted:
“You’re a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay . . . Your hands are
shaking . . . You need another drink.” And I observe that Hitchens has a
curious habit of holding his right hand firmly and correctively with his
left.
His wife has remarked that he is a highly functioning alcoholic. He says: “I
have never been late for an appointment, never had to cancel a speaking
arrangement. I do radio and TV and I don’t slur. I’ve never missed a
deadline: you can check that. So it can’t be the case I’m a fall-about
drunk. If I needed to prove it to you, I could knock down a lot of booze
while we were talking and you wouldn’t notice it.” He drinks, most of all,
because it makes other people less dull: “boredom is the terror”.
Anyway, there is no flaw or tremor in Hitchens’s thinking. I’ve seldom met
anyone who speaks in such fluid, elegant, nuanced sentences, dizzying in
their breadth of reference. His friend, the novelist Ian McEwan, once said
of Hitchens: “It all seems instantly neurologically available: everything
he’s ever read, everyone he’s ever met, every story he’s ever heard.”
The stories about Hitchens mostly feature his stomach for whisky and
dialectic. But I hear enough about him making lecherous grabs at male
friends to ask him later, by e-mail, if he is bisexual. He says no. But when
younger and prettier, he received much attention from men and at public
school he “of course” had homosexual experiences – “everyone did”. He says
the rumours probably refer to the time he “smooched” the brother of a
girlfriend “who he then very much resembled and it seemed somehow
irresistible”. Although, this wasn't the source of the French kiss story.
These days, he says, he’s so decrepit that only women find him attractive. He
emits an old-school sexism, a mix of lechery, ostentatious chivalry – he is
a hand-kisser – and disregard. He says he has learnt much about women from
his middle child Sophia, 18, and envies the easy way that young people enter
sexual maturity without the fumbling and embarrassment that he recalls. But
he is least insightful when writing about sexual politics, most recently in
essays about oral sex and how women can never be funny.
His first wife has forgiven him for leaving her while pregnant for Carol Blue:
“I’m invited to stay now. And we’re friends and quite good parents. At the
time she was very cross but she says now: ‘When I met you, I realised I was
looking for trouble.’
“I have been forgiven and indulged a good deal by women, and God knows what
would have happened if I hadn’t been. I’ve been lucky. Though I wish I’d had
a sister, though I might have been too well adjusted if that happened.
Instead I had a very dramatic baby brother.”
He refers to the Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens, Christopher’s
political mirror image, with whom he feuded for years. Now although
hostility has ceased, they seldom meet. I ask if they rowed as children and
he says that no, his household was quiet and repressed. Besides he left for
boarding school at 8. “He and I are slightly too close in age,” he says. “It
made us competitive. The thing I like about him is he really loves railways
and loathes motorways. He is nostalgic for a lost and very English idyll.”
But what he can’t abide is Peter’s Christian faith and belief in intelligent
design. Christopher has prayed only once in his life – for an erection
(unanswered). I wonder whether he envies the faithful as he gets older and
death looms, since all that secularism offers in place of everlasting life
is “life’s a bitch and then you die”. “Well, that is not said as a gloomy
thing, is it? People say it to cheer themselves up.” But it is a dark
statement. “There is comfort in noir,” says Hitchens. “There is absolutely
no comfort in ‘Jesus wants me for a sunbeam’.”
In his own words... ‘
On terrorism Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and
demanding it at gunpoint
On drinking How do I do all this and still drink enough every day to
kill or stun the average mule? Many great writers did some of their finest
work when blotto, smashed, polluted, shitfaced, squiffy, whiffled and three
sheets to the wind.’
On free speech There is a utilitarian case for free expression. It
recognises that the freedom to speak must also be insisted on for the person
who thinks differently. For your own sake, you need to know how other people
think
*God Is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens, is published by Atlantic Books on
June 10 at £16.99. Available from BooksFirst at £15.29, free p&p.
Call 0870 1608080. timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
I'd worry if Chris wasn't attacking somebody and I bet God loves watching it all. God loves a challenge and Chris certainly gives him one.
Ian Payne, WALSALL,
I had no idea that an anti-theist had so much in common with the Gnostic movement in the US. Christopher Hitchens is my brother in arms,a kindred spirit,and a passionate soul who must speak-up.He is the greatest moral warrior to arrive in the last century,maybe longer.I find his timing to be impeccable.
sid s. davisson, Fremont, Ohio,USA
I comment very late on this one, but it does humour me, that noble Christopher, who looks somewhat depressed (may God bless him!! ; ), ends his article: 'As I write these words... people of faith are... planning your and my destruction... Religion poisons everything.' Perhaps this is why he is depressed.
In which case he should consider history a bit more closely, when you remove God from picture it doesn't exactly set everything to rights! Pol Pot atheist 2 million, Stalin 30-60 million, Mao 100 million. Perhaps he should have made an additional statement: 'However, people without faith will far exceed them.
It reminds me of David Blunkett's charming equating of 'far-right evangelical Christians' to 'extremists in the Islamic faith'. 'People of faith...', I don't recall the name of the last evangelical Christian suicide bomber, but its charming not to feel 'left out' by his statement!!! Peace and love, wishing 4 the good of our country... an evangelical Christian.
Thomas Seidler, Streatham, London, UK
If "All religion poisons everything" why in the world is Hitchens celebrating Passover? What a hypocrite! He would probably say that well it's just a tradition, doesn't mean anything, a tooth fairy kind of a celebration. Stuff and nonsense. It does mean something and it means something religious. Like I said: "what a hypocrite!"
Denise, Williamsburg, USA
Alan of Cologne. You are a bit sensitive I see. Yes, I was a bit flippant and do apologise for it. Sorry but you say you don't worship. I've never met a human non worshipper. You say we're all for self and you're right but 'atheism' can do nothing for this. If we turn to worship of God, such a possibility becomes a reality. Now deny this is an argument. It seems 'atheists' say 'argue my way or there's no argument.' I'm accused of not stuffing myself with books of Science and not listening. I tell you the ones who shout loudest ' you're not listening mean you're not obeying me. Anyhow, they' re asides, to the main point about your being a non worshipper.
Father Bryan Storey, Tintagel, UK
Bryan - you claim I am not a member of the human race?. What am I then, in your estimation - an ape, a rat or an insect? Don't worry though, in my altruistic generosity I refuse to take your comment(s) seriously - I'm sure you didn't mean to insult me. But please, can't we have some rational comment from you instead of the usual flippancies.
alan, cologne,
If you do not worship Alan of Cologne, you are a different species form the rest of us. yet your way of expressing it makes it sound so plausible. Altruistic too! That takes some swallowing.
Father Bryan Storey, Tintagel, UK
Two points: 1) The worship of "god" is not natural. jAnd the statement "we never stop worshipping" is demonstrably false. Bryan may be speaking for himself, but certainly not for me and many like me who do not "worship". In any case, who is being worshipped? An amorphous entity existing only in the mind of the worshipper, i.e. the worshipper is indirectly worshipping himself. I can well do without such "worship". - 2) Of course religous people have done and are doing untold good in the world. The question is - why? And here doubts set in. Kant pointed out that true ethical actions are those seeking no reward. But I wonder if - say - Mother Theresa did her good work without the wish in the back of her mind for a reward from her god in the shape of an afterlife in paradise. If atheists (often calling themselves humanists) do good according to their consciences it is for the sake of doing good, and, if they receive a reward, it is certainly not a reward from any god. OK?
alan, cologne,
Worship of God is natural irrespective of outside persuasions to go in for it. It is highly fruitful as Aldous Huxley convincingly shows in his 'Perennial Philosophy'. It is frequently tinged with great egoism and self righteousness and a disguised form of controlling and dominating others. The persevering pursuit of God is nonetheless greatly beneficial. Non worship of God brings on more self worship because we never stop worshipping.
Father Bryan Storey , Tintagel, UK
According to Wilfredo Pareto, there is no such thing as altruism. As F.S. Summers wrote above, we do these things for the pleasure it brings us or some times, I would add, out of guilt.
Saloon Singer, Windsor, Canada
Atheism is not another form of religion. There is no doctrine for every atheist to follow, no one to mandate over your way of life and no absolute rule of do and don'ts. It just means you don't believe in God.
For those that claim that Hitchens is attacking all religious read again. His main argument is that religion has no place in government and should not be pushed on to those who simply don't believe. The U.S is primarily a christian country, imagine if everyone were forced to learn islamic beliefs.
Also theres is no question that some religious people have done great things for the sake of doing good, but no religion of any kind is necessary for any person to do good onto another.
Stephen, L.A, USA
We need to worship the reality of a real world. Not some man invented theology as a tool of control.
The intellectual, of free sound mind, knowing what they know, must reject religion and everything it stands for.
F.S.SUMMERS, London/NY,
Those people that lead in doing kind and generous acts do so because of their own personal make-up: For some performing kind acts leads to a warm cuddly feeling inside. For others, murdering people provides the same feelings. The fact that either can (and are) attributed to a higher power demanding it is evidence of the folly of religion. If religion were removed from the world tomorrow, there would still be good people doing good things and bad people doing bad things. Each of us does only what is in our own interests. To believe otherwise is infantile. That doesn´t mean we don´t help the fallen comrade, but we do so because it makes US feel better. This may sound awful and pessimistic, but it really isn´t, as nature has provided us with feelings of empathy and an ability to share other´s pain: this is what leads us to help others, not some altruistic desire to be "good". Can you think of an exception to this rule in your life?
Nicholas Ord, Guildford, Surrey
Nicely put Mr. Farrington!
It is tiresome listening to what is essentially a 'rant' from people such as Hitchens who haven't really got to grips with what religion really is and means to some people.
Essentially they accuse ALL people of faith of extremist beliefs, when their rants (almost laughably) advertise their own zealous disrespect for other people.
Hitchens, Dawkins and the like have founded their own brand of atheism - the non-tolerant, extremist, rude kind. It's just sad that so many people feel discontent with merely not believing in a god, but feel anger towards those who do.
John, Pontefract, UK
I suppose all those missionaries throughout the centuries administering to lepers, the poor, the forgotten, the homeless, orphans, the people that society otherwise would have given up on, are evil, vicious blah blah blah.
We've heard this kind of hate-filled ranting before, and we'll hear it again.
If, for the sake of argument, Hitchens is wrong about God (for he cannot prove that he is right) he is going to look pretty damn silly in the next life!
A. Newman, London, UK
(In response to Ali, out of London)
Let us remember than humans invented religion.
Ben, Toronto, Canada
There'll be even more scoffing as we all suffer from giving up the worship of God as this is inevitably replaced by an increase in self worship.
Father Bryan Storey , Tintagel, UK
Let us not forget that humans invented cars.
Ben, Toronto, Canada
Hitchens' book is right on. I am a student of history, theology (born again and unborn again believer) and religion.
If the world would be freed from religions that claim to be the only one holding the truth and are prepared to kill for it, it would indeed be a better place. Sadly this will not happen until the sun explodes or Jesus 'returns'.......
Rand, Toronto, Canada
Please pass on to the Bishop who reccomends doing nothingthat:
"There is no fun in doing nothing if you have nothing to do!"
Brian McCartan, Banbridge,,
It is quite logical to question religion and the existence of a God.But to say religion is bad stems from being ignorant.Cars take us around quicker but are also responsible to thousands of deaths.My point being is it the cars or the drivers that are responsible.Same way a religion like christainity teaches peace but people use it for their self interests.
adi, london,
If you continuously ask a religious person "and why do you think that?" again and again to each of their responses to a question of why they are 'christian/jewish/muslim/ etc' you will eventually get down to the core nugget of their belief. And when you find that core nugget of belief, you will think "that is a nice idea, but it is really very very silly". A bit like Santa Claud really.
Adam G, Sydney, NSW
Our first step forward should probably be to make a step far back to our origins: the religion of MOTHER GAIA! On "Cometa-Last Queen of Sheba", a novel of the New Era (Authorhouse.co.uk, ISBN:9781425960445) ther's a good point on that, inspired on Prince Charles outrageous ideas.
Antonio DaSilva, London, England
God was vindictive,spiteful, and prone to dreadful nepotism.
Sadly his son seems to be going down the same path.
Peter Bolt, Redditch, UK
I read extracts from his book published recently. Its just angry really. The way he reacted to his teachers comments, highlighted above, was typical. She was just observing the beauty of the world, and he was just being an angry young man.
Religion is simply used as an excuse for violence. Human beings are violent animals that have evolved through a viscious process of natural selection. Weve recently (in the last few thousand years) evolved philosophy and religion. But we are still those same violent animals that survived famine, flood and the dinosaurs. We just use religion as a conveninent excuse. We must kill to survive! Lets do it in the name of God!
Read 'miracle in the andes' by Nando Parrado. Through 80 days of starvation and death in the andes he lost his belief in god and catholicism, and developed an understanding of something far more real and true. For a far more rewarding, enlightening and interesting book, dont bother with Hitchens - try that.
Luke, nottingham, uk
Peter, you seem to have no understanding of world history.
From the moment some bloke called Jesus claimed he was the son of God it has been going off left, right and centre. The Islamic world is a perpetual ongoing world, catholicism did for europe in the middle ages what big brother does for intelligent television. Just exactly what earth are you inhabiting Peter?
ben, London, UK
Timothy Leary was a twit, Mike.
"Saddam held Iraq together and gave its citizens law and order and some semblance of a decent life." - Paul Travers
And I thought Galloway was a mouthpiece for Baathism
Saddam stopped being 'secular' after the first Gulf War when his power was eroding. Throughout the sanctions years, he used radical Islam and jihadist propaganda to consolidate his rule over Iraq. He supported Islamic Jihad in M.East and harboured Jihadists throughout the 90's - it's all in Tenet's book. Al-Qaeda and Zarqarwi were there unmolested long before US troops set foot in Iraq.
Jews, Christians and Shiite muslims were persecuted and cleansed - and you call that 'private worship without persecution'.
And your claim that Iraq was 'sovereign' is laughable. It lost all sovereignty with the no-fly zones, sanctions and its aggression and genocide policy.
The only 'apologist' here seems to be you with your Saddam nostalgia and US 'aggression' nonsense.
N Murdoch, Coatbridge, Scotland
Hitchens is certainly correct in saying that the hysterical ascendency of the religious right in the U.S. has finally goaded secularists into fighting back. When I moved to Atlanta from Los Angeles in1988, I was an unbeliever but neutral in matters of religion. But the constant wail that if you don't do it our way (teach creationism, post the 10 Commandments in the town hall, say "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays") you are oppressing us has become too much for me to stomach. I find now that I am as intolerant of them as they are of me. So I thoroughly enjoy Hitchens' book, though I certainly don't think it will change many minds, religion not being a matter to which people are inclined to turn their intelligence in the first place.
Mike Kerley, Atlanta, GA
Timothy Leary said: "A terrorist is a patriot without an air force.
Mike Zwerin, Paris, France
Many horrendous, savage and brutal things have been done specifically and solely in the name of God. Equally horrendous acts have been done for other reasons not related to God but this does not mean they were done in the name of atheism.
The trouble with the religious is that they have a very self-centred view of life (man created in God’s image, the sun orbiting the earth, etc) and fail miserably in seeing things from another point of view.
David Rothwell, Brighton,
On terrorism Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint
---
Gee, sounds kinda like the George W. Bush administration!
FGFM, Chicago, IL
I appreciate Chris Hitchen's good way with words but often when it turns to ranting, I hear his brother Peter in a different guise. Both are ideologues and intolerent but amusing if not listened to for a long stretch.
Brian Delaney, Sacramento, California
"And yet, I suggest, doesn’t it fulfil one function, an innate human desire for ritual? We are soothed by lighting candles or familiar hymns. Secularism, for all its logic, offers no substitute. "
Modern Satanism is a secular anti-religious philosophy that rejects the concept of an external god or some ethereal part of us that lives on after our bodies expire. Instead it stresses indulgence in the earthly pleasures during our one and only life here and now. However it also provides myth and ritual for those who need it, acknowledging that for some people a philosophy (no matter how sound) can never be enough. It's not the myth and ritual that is the problem with the major spiritual religions, it's the ego-debasing, life-denying so-called morality that these myths and rituals support.
Manny Cooke, London, England
Two years ago in a vicious debate on the Iraq War, George Galloway retorted: “You’re a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay . . . Your hands are shaking . . . You need another drink.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just for the record, Galloway made those comments about Hitchens in the halls of the US Congress, not in their debate.
FGFM, Chicago, IL
"Philosophy starts where religion ends." If CH would read my article on "maths philosophy" (new area, not the same as philosophy of maths), he might learn differently. FOUNDATIONS OF SCIENCE 10(2), 153-245, June 2005. Abstract is here:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10699-004-3068-9
In brief, philosophy is a mental exercise. To understand mind we need maths, the main point of my paper... But Maths comes from deep inside Nature (philosophers from Plato to Thomas Hobbes, Leibniz, Husserl; physicists from Thomas Bradwardine, 1290 – 1349, to Galileo, to 1990 Nobel Laureates Jerome Friedman, Henry Kendall, & Richard Taylor for obtaining experimental resonance spectra showing three quarks in a proton, & on..). But mind is _NOT_ adequate for Nature (Heideggger, yours truly), -- I had thought CH was somehow new, reformed, but I guess not. That quote and the excellent article by JT shows that he's just another shallow, hold-out Marxist.
Hermann Burchard, Stillwater, OK , U.S.A.
A witty, brillian man, one who makes sense on many issues.
On the matter of cost/benefit of religion, I think we can point to anti-religious and a-religious figures (especially since 1789) who have created utter hell for people by their utopian schemes. Pol Pot, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, are only a few who come to mind. Sadly, some truly religious figures, for reasons both religous and secular, have also created hell on earth for many people.
One thing that can be said about religion, however, is that it often does provide individual leaders with an understanding that they are ultimately accountable to God for their actions. This fear sometimes provides salutary checks on individuals who would otherwise have no effective checks.
In any case, hugely important social institutions and movements that have sprung from religions have abolished slavery, build schools and hospitals, provided relief and recovery and reform, and have performed countless ohter acts of love and care
James, Jacksonville, Illinois U. S.
Is this not the essence of socialism and particularly that brand of saviour that it throws up, such as Tony Blair for instance? Socialism shows antipathy to religion, vilifies, mocks and yet when one hears the leader of the Party speaking on matters of human consolation and moderation, of hurt, he adopts a tone that is not dissimilar to a theatrical vicar voice full of pauses and heavy silences faux solemnity; is he not the deity incarnate? Is he not suggesting his doctrine is the saviour of mankind? The addresses turn into sermons and instead of God being the redeemer, the inspiration and source of redemption; it is the manufactured sentiment of a dogma that is earthly, manufactured and malleable. But in seeding its message Labour finds that it has to be manipulative and worse, selective. Currently, the middle classes are seen as in no need of succour, support. A mechanical system of differentiation is promoted. Would God do such a thing? Make such judgements, discriminate so?
Malcolm Turner, Alsager, England
Christopher sounds a very confused man, no better than most of us, and with little understanding of religion - not that the Brush Your Teeth With God Brigade seem to have much clue either. So much certainty and so little humility. They are counterparts.
Frank Upton, Solihull,
I commend Mr Hitchens in his latest efforts, Religion is dreadful! As for all the tit bits in this article it just makes him more endearing!
John Wilkman, Sydnay, Australia
Got the book. Love it. What a brilliant guy! I wish there were more like him out there.
Hellen, NY,
I have read a long extract from Hitchens' book, and although I am an atheist and symapthise ardently with his cause, I was extremely disappointed.
Hitchens' style is flat and uncreative except for some easy invective. There is nothing in that long extract which an intelligent newspaper reader would not know. Hardly a single new fact.
Hitchens has just trawled the media and the internet and read a few books, and made up his own book with that thin material. Every now and then he reminds us he has been in Kurdistan and Bosnia and Nothern Uganda and other trouble spots on little easy holiday trips from his plush home in the US. That's all the legwork he has to show.
Amazing that such a mediocre scribe could be seen as an important writer. It is the embarassing case of a lightweight mind grappling with a heavyweigt subject.
K Raman, London , UK
Mr. Hitchins reminds us that religion is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children”. What is surprising is that he appears to be surprised by this. Since the same can be said (to a greater or lesser degree) of every human society throughout history (including those which aspired to be totally without religion), it is hardly significant that it is also true of human religion.
David Easlea, Philadelphia, USA
Mother Theresa was religious, wasn't she? Pope John Paul ll was likewise...and a host of others who did nothing but good wherever they were. Where was their hate, intollerance, bigotry, violence etc They had one thing in common. They forgot themselves and followed...Jesus
Michael Camilleri, Victoria, Gozo, Malta
Obviously a very angry man - Christ came to save, deliver and love thse who, like Hitchens, are so against Him. Instead of reading such a message of hate, buy a Bible, get to a living church and learn of Jesus message of love.
Phil , Brentwood,
How then does he justify his support for the born again Bush, with his faith based policies?
Leslie Bary, Lafayette, LA - USA
Yes, I agree with Mr. Hitchens in many respects. On Cometa-Last Queen of Sheba (AuthorHouse Sept.2006-ISBN:9781425960445 ) I many times suggest that atheism is the expression of more spiritual men (more men than women, actually) than many priests and religion gurus. Even so, one of my main characters (Pablo, the doctor teologicus)gives god Destiny and goddess Gaia a go to have people's relationships cut to measure. There are and always there will be more that we don't know than what we think we know, and, about GOD, SOUL...better if we follow Pablo and his friend Quijote's example, leaving things a bit nebulous as they are, while they uncork a bottle of red by sunset.
Antonio DaSilva, London, England
Hitchens ought to be a university lecturer specialising in History of Ideas. A journalist is supposed to say something new. Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer were hot stuff last century - but Hitchens is dishing up cold table warmed up in a frying pan.
Edmund Burke, Kingston upon Thames, England
He seems to have done far more than many 'Christian' parents to educate his children in their Christian heritage!
Mary, Plymouth, England
Despite disagreements with Hitchens (prmarily over the Iraq war), I have to say he's bang on here, religion has been humoured for way too long and it's time society grew up and took responsibility for it's own actions.
To quote Watchmen, 'it's not God that kills the children, it's us. Only us'
Owen, London, UK
Christopher Hitchens states, "I would have supported any president who got rid of Saddam”.
This sits in opposition to his militant secularism as Saddam was a secularist leader himself who despised the likes of Osama Bin Laden. Under Saddam minority religious groups could worship privately without fear of persecution from a religious state and women were free to engage in business and university life. Now Iraq is a playground for 'Islamo-fascists' with sectarian killings and persecution of women the norm, an outcome even someone with a basic knowledge of global politics and history could have predicted would happen. Therefore, how intelligent is Hitchens?
This man is nothing more than an apologist for a catastrophic war of aggression on a sovereign state based on lies and deception. It doesn't sit easily with us but lets now admit Saddam held Iraq together and gave its citizens law and order and some semblance of a decent life.
I think I need a drink now Christopher!!!
Paul Travers, Glasgow, U.K.
"Jesus wants me for a sunbeam", is that all Hitchens understands of faith? No wonder he presents such a bleak prospect of a man who has his own religion, even though it is a religion in which there is no God.
The idea that secularists and atheists have no religion is a scam. All they are trying to do is impose their own faith that there is no God on the rest of us.
More people have died at the hands of men with a faith in no God than in all the countless centuries of barbaric acts at the hands of men who claimed to serve a God.
I wish people like Hitchens would be honest and admit that they have a faith as important to them as that held by those of us who believe that there is more to life. As it is he deceives himself and all those he preaches his own 'gospel' to by pretending that he is not as much a believer, a man of faith, as the most committed Christian.
It is not much of a gospel to live or die by though.
Peter Farrington, Maidstone,
Whilst I believe it's true that some of the most evil people in the world are driven by religious extremism, at the same time it's true that some of the most caring, pleasant, trustworthy, honest, upright people I know are also strongly religious, but in a private way, not an outright one.
I agree, religion has caused more harm to the world, killed more people, caused more suffering, than any other philosophy. There's no way any caring superior being as portrayed by religions can be behind this. So let's view religion as I believe it is - a human need to understand things we don't really understand, and a philosophy of life.
We need to control the way it is used to encourage the good aspects to come out of it, and stop the bad ones (as defined by humanist and caring philosophies). Alas, I've no idea how you do that. However I see no way it will occur naturally, and I think the end of the world is more likely to be brought by religion than by any other root cause.
Stuart, Chester,
It's time to stop attacking "religion" as if it is a single entity. The Koran is the exact opposite of the New Testament in its promulgation of violent subjection of non adherents, where as the New Testament is defined by its only law "Love your neighbour as yourself". Lets attack belief systems that are violent and intolerant and appalud those that arent.
Dhimmi, London, UK
"And I observe that Hitchens has a curious habit of holding his right hand firmly and correctively with his left."
Sounds like Dr Strangelove. Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bombers.
G, London,
All the comfort comes from Jesus by radically following His teaching that we find ourselves through self forgetfulness ie by becoming much less selfish and egotistical.
Father Bryan Storey , Tintagel, UK
So Mr Hitchens, at a ripe old age, has now decided that religion is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children”. But it has always been all these things and more. How come it has taken him so long to realize the obvious?
Al Faux, Weybridge,
What a brilliant article, not least because of it's subject. I find myself agreeing with Christopher at every turn and it becomes the warmest entertainment just as the best joke truly depicts real life and the best poetry expresses your own emotions better than you can yourself. And of course the relief is that you felt you were the only one.
I have to say that when I met Christopher his hands were not shaking, I know, I couldn't help but look, and he was utterly professional and devastatingly charming. The evening wasn't without a warning shot of rebellion of course - I doubt he's ever boring.
Philipa, Middle, England
Too many words to finish about a nobody. Brit go home.
Bob Hall, NYC/NY, USA
Bizarre. people can - and do -think what they want (something I'm sure Hitchen's agrees with - so why the rant?). All these evangelical atheists turn me off.
Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris, crawl back under your stone, take Osama Bin laden, the congregation of the westboro baptist church and a few others with you and leave the rest of us alone.
Beyond caring enough to right this response, I (we?) really don't care!
john, london, UK
this guy is a real piece of work
robert furlong, prescott, arizona
Janice, that was a very interesting article on the man himself - but you've not really explained the book, other than a few lines reducing his argument to a straight forward demand for a secular state.
Instead you've devoted most of this review to alleging that he is an alcoholic, bi-sexual, bad parent who is mates with Paul Wolfowitz. This only encourages your readers to make ad hominem judgements rather than to engage with his arguments - which, as with many of the current 'anti-religion' books, are hard to fault.
Those who defend religion against the likes of Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris typically rely on either personal attacks or intellectually vacuous pleadings for an 'unmoved mover.' Those who lazily describe HItchens as a bigot should think about the social consequences of leaving American evangelicals (who through sheer numbers could establish a de facto theocracy) unchallanged. Anglicanism is only benign because of the past efforts of people like Hitchens.
Pete, Oxford, UK
There are some people who deserve to be atheists and Hitchens is one of them. No God. No Pope. No Hope. What strikes me about all these publicity-hungry atheists is that their religious education in school must have been sadly deficient: the fourth 'R' seems to have passed them by. I don't mind arguing with atheists and agnostics who know what religious belief is but to deconstruct the arguments of straw men is just a waste of time. I give Mr Hitchens the same advice as I gave Mr Dawkins: read Rudolf Otto's "The Idea of the Holy" to see that religion in its many facets is non-rational, not irrational. The irrational is what's left when the religiously under-educated get on their high horse and start charging at straw men.
Dr David Green, Athens, Greece
God? A piece of fiction in whose name much evil has been sanctioned. Sad homo sapiens.
Tommy Roe, Seatle, WA, USA
Oh dear Mr Hitchens, why are you going to such enormous lengths to try to prove the existance of something (or someone) that you say doesn't exist - God?
Certainly religion has it faults, but why not point out is merits too? Given your intellectual gifts why the polemic of fear, for it seems to me that fear is at the basis of your 'arguement'.
And no, most great artists do not do their best work drunk - think Heaney, (recent Nobel for Literature), Hockney, Freud two great British painters, Menuhin (voilinist) and a host of others, all of whom were hard working sober artists.
So you don't think God is great, but, fundamentally, God thinks you are, the real you that is, without the props of drink, polemic and fear-driven intellectual prose.
Francis O'Hara, Nice, France
I enjoyed the article and the comments it has drawn. I think people mostly hedge what they say to belong to the group (herd) they think is going to "win" or be the dominant force and so to the comment about aetheists.
Maybe the view could be taken that like smoking cigarettes or drinking to excess or performing risky actions over and over, God will save you, or that believing a God will aid you is good for the aethiests who are working towards the same target without the "help" from a God.
In life today, it helps to have an edge, but thats not a
God.
Greggo, Perth Australia,
"How do I do all this and still drink enough every day to kill or stun the average mule?"
The answer, Christpher, is that you don't actually write anything that insightful.
Far from having "sweeping erudition", your book reads like a the ranting of a reactionary schoolboy.
Yes the evangelical creationists of America are a bit nuts...tell us something we don't know.
How about choosing a slightly more worthy opponent for your atheist arguments.
John McD, San Francisco, CA
Surely it is all part of the Lord's plan for there to be ugly bigoted Godophobics in the world. Or was He just not very good at his job? Maybe this was an early attempt at a universe, maybe He has learnt the lessons and He can now knock off a perfect parrallel version without such mistakes. In future he will successfully avoid the need for His universe to have fossils of extinct creatures, chronic suffering and off course a hopeless inability to stop rival tribes of His magnificence fighting each other (in the name of love of course). EveryOne makes mistakes you know and Christopher Hitchens is the very worst kind.
burns, brum, uk
It is amazing that someone has to write a book to defend basic common sense.
Michael , Bournemouth,
The Religious, who for millennia have been stoning, racking, and burning those who disagree with them, have suddenly prate about the virtues of tolerance, when their own beliefs are called into question.
Isn't it hypocritical for murderers to complain about mere impoliteness?.
Harvey, Santa Monica, CA, USA
Ones faith is inside ones head,it does not need to be publicised by wearing particular clothes,growing beards or building houses of worship.
Likewise ones absense of a faith should also be private.
neither should be reviled and both should be accerted by the other.
Till that happens we will have wars and conflicts and I suspect it will see the end of civilization before it happens
Michael Wilkinson, Telford, Shrpshire,England
That Hitchens is still trying to be a media darling, I don't doubt, but the unadulterated Left considers him a joke here in the States - there's no coming back from his Iraq position. That religion has to go is not much of a revelation these days, and if Hitchens thinks he's going to ride that insight to his former prominence in the US, he's sadly mistaken - that movement would clearly be hurt by his self-serving arguments. No, I think you'll find that only those hoping to befuddle the American public into a state of mindless compliance have use for him these days.
Tony Somera, Champaign, Illinois
Given a choice between the immanence of Mr Hitchens and the transcendent glory of God, I will choose the latter any day.
Christopher Gillibrand, Brussels, "democratic" Belgium/ Europe
Bigotry is ugly.
Even when pursued on behalf of currently politically correct causes and couched in fancy phrases.
In the end it says more about the person who goes to great effort to pursue it than it does regarding the topic on which he rails.
An appropriate label for Mr. Hitchens, in contemporary parlance, would be "Godophobic".
Miriam , Manchester, UK