Faith: Part of the problem

BOOK REVIEW
Faith: Part of the problem
God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens

Reviewed by Ioannis Gatsiounis

KUALA LUMPUR - What you are about to read is a review that almost
wasn't. I mention this at the outset because the incident in question
was informed by the book's subject, religion. This was in a bookstore
in majority-Muslim Malaysia's glittering symbol of modernity, the
Petronas Towers. I had just been told by the sales clerk the store
would not be carrying the title, (which as I write this is number
three on the New York Times' nonfiction bestseller list).

Her face, framed by a powder blue headscarf, turned florid as her
eyes clung to the computer screen. I requested to speak with a
manager. The clerk ignored me. I asked again. The manager would
inform me that members of Malaysia's Internal Security Ministry had
swept through the store the day before and "requested" that the title
be removed from the shelves.

"So there is no official ban?" I queried.

"No."

"So ... self-censorship?"

The manager glanced over her shoulder, "Religion is a sensitive issue
in Malaysia."

"I understand that but should protecting religious sensitivities
happen at the expense of free and open inquiry?" Put another way,
should the rest of us be stunted intellectually because some people
of faith are thought to be susceptible to intolerance?

She murmured, "It's not that we don't have the book, it's just we're
not displaying it."

It was a subtle concession, and soon she was retrieving a copy from
the back of the store. Book and receipt in hand, I hung a little
longer than I might have on its sweeping subtitle, How religion
poisons everything.

Hitchens, whom Foreign Policy magazine ranked number five in its list
of "Top 100 Intellectuals", is the latest to speak up on behalf of
what may prove to be the most momentous movement to grow out of the
polarizing events of September 11, 2001.

Most attention has focused on the bloodthirsty call to jihad hobbling
the Muslim world and its reactionary correlative - Bush's "war on
terror". But out of the media glare is a swelling resistance to that
mutually reinforcing faith-based nefariousness.

These scrappy humanists include writers such as Sam Harris, Richard
Dawkins and Michel Onfray. It is transcontinental. It is traversing
the traditional left-right political divide. It looks deeper than the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and colonialism-cum-imperialism in
search of a cause for religious extremism, to reveal faith itself as
an integral part of the problem.

Like the Enlightenment before it, the movement's guiding principle is
reason. Reason of course is at odds with many of religions' most
basic assumptions (Jesus was born to a virgin; the Koran is the
irrefutable word of God and so on). The difference is two centuries
have passed since the end of the Enlightenment. Reason now has more
weight in its corner - more science, more philosophy, more knowledge,
more humane and sophisticated systems of ethics and justice (ditch
the cross burnings and stoning for adulterers, says reason).

"One must state it plainly," writes Hitchens. "Religion comes from
the period of human prehistory where nobody - not even the mighty
Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had
the smallest idea 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)... All attempts to reconcile
faith with science and reason are consigned to failure and ridicule
for precisely this reason."

At a time when not all Muslims are terrorists but almost all
terrorists are Muslims, to paraphrase Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, many
reason-based writers, intellectuals and activists taking up the
crusade against faith have focused unduly on Islam. Hitchens is less
divisive. Without glossing over particulars, he exposes the shared
absurdities of faith. "... religion does not, and in the long run
cannot, be content with its own marvelous claims and sublime
assurances. It must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers
[see bookstore example, above], or heretics, or adherents of other
faiths. It may speak about the bliss of the next world, but it wants
power in this one."

Here is Hitchens on sex: "... all religions claim the right to
legislate in matters of sex," even though, "Clearly, the human
species is designed to experiment with sex ... Orthodox Jews conduct
congress by means of a hole in the sheet ... Muslims subject
adulterers to public lashings with a whip. Christians used to lick
their lips while examining women for signs of witchcraft ...
Throughout all religious texts, there is a primitive fear that half
the human race is simultaneously defiled and unclean, and yet is also
a temptation to sin that is impossible to resist."

Here he is on September 11: "The nineteen suicide murderers of New
York and Washington and Pennsylvania were beyond any doubt the most
sincere believers on those planes ... Within hours, the 'reverends'
Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell had announced that the immolation of
their fellow creatures was a divine judgment on a secular society
that tolerated homosexuality and abortion."

Meanwhile, the evangelist preacher Billy Graham claimed to have
detailed knowledge of the current whereabouts of the victims, while
Osama bin Laden was making similar claims on behalf of the assassins.

Hitchens takes aim at "the tawdriness of the miraculous", commonplace
in all religions, from Mohammed's "night flight" from Mecca to
Jerusalem to Jesus' resurrection. He says that "if you only hear a
report of the miracle from a second or third party the odds [that it
happened] must be adjusted accordingly ... and if you are separated
from the 'sighting' by many generations, and have no independent
corroboration, the odds must be adjusted still more drastically."

This might seem to provide enough logic to humble believers - or at
least get them to relinquish fundamentalist convictions. But what
religion has on its side is that these miracles - not to mention the
sayings and doings of their prophets and saviors and the supposed
authenticity of their texts - are "entirely unverifiable, and
unfalsifiable".

The men who organized religion do seem to have understood that man's
instinctive thirst for logic meant their outlandish claims would
eventually be called into question, hence why "all religions take
care to silence or to execute those who question them". This,
Hitchens rightly points out, is a sign of their weakness, not their
strength. Man is also drawn to wonder and mystery and no doubt this
is what makes religion's fairy tales of parted seas and winged horses
so alluring. But the mysteries of consciousness and the universe and
the magic of music and art and literature meet that need - without
insulting our intelligence with tidy explanations.

Hitchens says believers tend to use the argument that religion
improves people once they have exhausted the rest of their case. This
reminds me of a taxi ride I took last week. The driver said that
Malaysia was a "free country". "When I gently pointed out the number
of ways in which it is very far from that, he said, "But our
government is good and not corrupt, because it has Islam."

Malaysia, of course, is famously corrupt and the Islamic component
party he was referring to, UMNO (United Malays National
Organization), is no exception; the leader of UMNO, Abdullah Badawi,
suggested as much when he won the nation's premiership in 2003 on an
anti-corruption platform. By most accounts, corruption has gotten
worse under the pious Abdullah.

I was tempted to mention this to my driver and to add that the
nation's most devout state, Kelantan, where alcohol is hard to find
and there are separate check-out lanes for men and women, is also
among the country's most impoverished, with the highest or near-
highest drug addiction and HIV and divorce rates. But I intuited that
these were things he knew already - just as many Muslims know that
the September 11 attacks were not a Jewish conspiracy but committed
by fellow Muslims - but that he, like they, were too ashamed to admit
it to an unbeliever.

It is undeniable that faith does work in some people's lives. I have
met people of all the major faiths whose belief does seem to be
playing a positive role - they are considerate, affable,
compassionate, clear-eyed and moral in judgment. Hitchens offers this
example. His wife had left a large sum of cash on the back seat of a
taxi. The Sudanese driver returned the full amount to the couple's
home. Hitchens then offered the driver 10% of the money, to which the
driver said he expected no compensation for doing what was his duty
to Allah.

On the other hand, history up to the present is laden with examples
in which faith produces some real nasty results. In Malaysia, for
instance, which is struggling in vain to project itself as a model of
Islamic tolerance, several states have made apostasy from Islam a
punishable offense. Recently, it was reported that a film is under
fire from religious authorities because the local actress shaved her
head for the role, which the clerics say violates Islamic doctrine by
making a woman look like a man.
To be sure, the most devout among us are often the most
uncompromising, hostile, irrational, out-of-touch people with modern
realities one will meet. What generally allows a religious person to
become a constructive member of society is that he chooses to adhere
to some tenets of his faith and discard others - so that he might
decide to love thy neighbor regardless of whether he is a homosexual;
or provide for the poor while rejecting the contempt some scriptures
hold for unbelievers.

But even then one does not need to adhere to the primordial "truths"
of religion to be a good person. The "serious ethical dilemmas are
better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and
Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of
the holy books," explains Hitchens.

A major liability of religions is that they seek to canonize truth.
They are "fossilized philosophies", as Simon Blackburn in his study
of Plato's Republic - "or philosophy with the questions left out",
says Hitchens.

By contrast philosophy, science and to a large extent literature are
inherently more humble. In abiding by the laws of reason they do not
fix permanently to truths but must remain open to new evidence, and
adjust their convictions accordingly, or risk being jettisoned en
masse, as has been the case with Marx and Trotsky (of course these
mere mortals did not promise hellfire for anyone disagreeing with
their theories and hence crumbled under the scrutiny of reason).

Hitchens tackles the faith-based argument that atheist and secularist
rulers have committed crimes more heinous than the the Crusades and
Islamic imperial conquests and the witch trials etc, etc. He calls
this claim the "last-ditch 'case' against secularism" and shows how
these leaders - notably of fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism - often
worked in complicity with religious bodies. Even in instances where
there is no such collusion, as in North Korea, people adulate their
leaders like gods; the rule and abuse is religious in nature.

The author makes a persuasive case that religion often hinders
development, the Islamic Republic of Iran being but one tragic
example. He says societies that do not learn "to tame and sequester
the religious impulse will consistently be outdone by those that
do ... Where once [religion] 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."

Hitchens treatise does at times come across as indiscriminately
contemptuous, for instance, saying that religion can only impede, or
in branding organized religion "violent, irrational, intolerant,
allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry". And the faithful will
likely use this to discredit the book outright while clinging to
their deep aversion to contemplating the decisive role faith itself
is playing in our divided world. And yet implicit in Hitchens'
recognition that religion is man-made is that it is schismatic; and
his encyclopedic grasp of history, on full display here, compels one
not to reject his claims out of hand.

Also suggestive in Hitchens' unyielding irreverence is that the
faithful are a lost cause anyway; that he is not looking to win over
minds whose basic convictions sidestep reason but rather to inspire
the rest of us to take a tougher stand against injustices committed
in the name of God and to puncture religion's elaborately irrational
fortresses ensconcing the gullible impulse.

God is Not Great: How religion poisons everything by Christopher
Hitchens. Twelve Books, Hachette Book Group USA, May 1, 2007. ISBN:
13:978-0-446-57980-3. Price US$24.99, 307 pages.

Ioannis Gatsiounis, a New York native, is a Kuala Lumpur-based writer.

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