God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

I didn't even bother to read the reviews of Christopher Hitchens's new polemic against Religion, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Another book about atheism? Yawn!! I am already hostile enough to religion and its many manifestations, innocent and not so innocent, and I don't need another book to convince me of the same. Anyway, I just picked it up on a lark and I am glad I did. It is a hugely entertaining book, at almost every page I was nodding in agreement and in indignation, laughing at the ridiculousness of it all and marveling at Hitchens's wit and his skill at phrase making. It is great reminder of what a fantastic writer and a dazzling polemicist Hitchens is or can be when he is not carping about Iraq. So in the book we learn about "the moral terrorism" and "organized hypocrisy" of the Vatican. The Japanese emperor Hirohito gets the wonderful moniker of "a ridiculously overrated mammal." He calls Calvin "a sadist, a torturer and a killer". According to him Pascal's theology is "not far short of sordid." And the Koran? "A rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms.” He is no less harsh and funny on Judaism. I am not even going to get into the adjectives he has for creationists, mormons and other assorted idiocies.

I was specially excited after seeing a chapter titled: There is no "Eastern" Solution. It is something which interests and also perplexes and annoys me -- the way crap is being sold as a packaged spiritual product by spiritual hucksters. These new age superstitions are real travesties of religion. They may look harmless, even fun at times. All those crystal balls, magnetic therapy and tarot cards but they are equally dangerous, just that their effects are more insidious. One problem with the criticism of Eastern religions is that how easy it is to shift goal posts, or actually there are no goal posts at all. The monotheistic religions at least talk in the same language, the language or arguments and logic. The eastern religions with their hostility towards the language and indeed thought itself leave you without any foundation from which you can criticise their tenets. (For example the possibility logical contradictions and ambiguities inherent in human language is used by Buddist teachings (Koan) to discredit the idea of language and intellectual thought itself.) He also recounts his experiences at the so called "Bhagwan" Rajneesh. The sign that greets him before the ashram says, "leave you shoes and minds at the door." I don't know whether I should laugh or feel indignation.

Hitchens knows a great deal about Christianity but when it comes to eastern religions he is more or less clueless. Add to that the reason I mentioned above, the chapter is a disappointment. He more than makes up for it in the next chapter where he answers the claims of the critics of atheism that Stalin and Hitler's regimes where atheistic regimes or can we link to horrors of twentieth century authoritarianism to the "death of God" concept. He takes this charge very seriously, and indeed it deserves to be taken so, and convincing refutes each and every argument. He knows a great deal of the history of 20th century dictatorships too. Surely it is not hard to see the religious impulse behind most of the dictatorships--secular or religious. The cult of personality, the sourcing of moral laws from a divine authority or his representative on earth, the messianic hope of transcendence and redemption in the form of Utopia, the sacralization of myths of race, creed and nation. These are all religious impulses in their essence. Hitchens has a lot more to say on this. And he is very good at it. As expected from a fervent admirer of George Orwell.

Now to some objections and problems. Not necessarily with this book but in general with the doctrine of "secular humanism". It is understandable why Hitchens and company would give atheism a rosy humanist image, a "positive" way of life. They are after all writing pamphlets and propaganda and are trying to win converts and the version of the atheism based on negation, doubts and self-mortification will not make a very good copy. (Though there is a good deal of misanthropy in Hitchens's book.) Though personally I am drawn to exactly this line of thinking -- the tradition of thinkers like Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Kafka and if one talks of films, Bergman, Dreyer and Bresson. Ivan Karamazov doesn't doubt the existence of God or the possibility of Salvation and redemption. He rejects them because he says the whole religious edifice is built on the tears of innocent children. In fact it was reading the speech of Ivan Karamazov which changed my own personal views towards religious faith--from an indifferent intellectual annoyance to a deep moral disgust.

Another irritating feature of these new atheism propaganda is their faith in human exceptionalism. Ironically this is something that gives it some continuity with religious dogma. This is where I agree with the critiques of thinkers like John Gray. (Though he goes too far in his neo-apocalypticism to make much sense after a while.) Gray says that not just enlightenment humanists but even philosophers like Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Heidegger who shook every foundation of the entire western philosophy, even they couldn't relinquish and let go their faith in human exceptionalism, this vile and ridiculous remnant of religious belief. Human consciousness, freedom and rationality are NOT absolutes, but rather contingent concepts, mere by-products of our evolutionary history. The refusal to acknowledge this obvious fact makes a few sections of these atheism books sound positively religious.

In conclusion let's not be too harsh on ourselves and our fellow humans. If you want to read one book about religion, let it be this one. Five out of five stars. Two Thumbs up. And all that.