Because Fah--the thread poster is a secret atheist.
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wax waliba allah xagiisa ayey ka qoran yihiin. JANNA AND NAAR waxaa galeysid before you born ayey qoran yihiin.
Is that like an east-side athiest?EATHIEST
thats right man double size (e) athiestIs that like an east-side athiest?EATHIEST
omg I agree so much! +1I read his last piece in Vanity Fair at a newsstand and he apparently went through a terribly painful ordeal in his last days on earth battling cancer and pneumonia. I am glad he felt the pain that was inflicted on all those innocent Iraqis the destruction of whose country he eloquently advocated.
Good riddance to a warmongering pig.
I can barely explain how unsatisfying this book was to read. For a person to seriously criticize all religions, he would have to ask and answer a number of questions – which by no means could justly fit into one volume – and Hitchens seems unaware of any of these questions except in their most superficial form. What is a religion? Where does the term come from? Why is it used, by whom is it used, and for what reasons? How can we fairly compare two different traditions, say Catholicism and Buddhism, and consider the two to be the same type of thing – “religions” – if we have not explained what a religion is in the first place?
I will illuminate Hitchens’ ignorance of religions and religion – never mind what I could make of his unsubtle fear of Islam: The book’s subtitle rather obviously singles out one religion above all others. (What ecumenism! Is Hitchens really attacking all “religion,” or trying to shift our attention elsewhere? He hates religion, but supports a war on states of only one kind of religion.) Firstly it must be said that given an opportunity to scan the interior of this man’s mind, we might expect a gibbous Moon. Littered with craters of ancient origin, gaps in knowledge which reflect his having missed out on more recent scholarship, such as those books published over the last 50 or 60 years. Secondly, a caution about academic modesty. Insofar as Hitchens discusses Mormonism, his insight is no better than a poor summary of better studies; considering Hitchens’ baseline assumption of religious delusion or ill-will, any fair-minded author would do better to reference a more scholarly work.[1] So far as Islam goes, he confirms my Law of Wikipedia Articles: One is impressed by a Wikipedia article in inverse proportion to one’s knowledge of that topic.
Hitchens’ summary of other people’s books about Islam does little better, condensing that best of times, the rational sunshine radiating from Europe’s 8th-12th centuries. What about all the recent scholarship and debate which challenges Hitchens’ contrived lines separating religion and rationality, or the detailed investigations into the intersection of Islam, knowledge and power?[2] The reader will find no reference to reputable texts, no close reading of theology, revelation or history, and no attempt at weighing the evidence. He can’t even read the evidence![3] (Hitchens’ Arabic extends to little more than well-broadcast awareness of the definite article. Hitchens needs very badly for us to know that he knows the definite article is transliterated “al-”.) In all of two footnotes we conclude that the “Koran” is simply a mish-mash of Christian and Jewish ideas.[4] But Islamic scholarship understands the religion to be the completion of a chain of Divine Reminders, including Judaism and Christianity. For Hitchens to accuse Islam of plagiarizing Judaism and Christianity is to conclude that Islam is what it says it is supposed to be, albeit messily so.
Hitchens should more concern himself that the premises of his book undermine its conclusion. He tells us that religion is an illusion of the mind; now that we have matured as a species, we should snap out of it (the “Enlightenment” is that snapping sound.) Be scientific, reasonable, pleasant and empirical. But if we were to be scientific, reasonable, etc., should we not toss out at first chance any study which attempts to explain evil through the influence of religion, which is an illusion? ‘X’ is made up, he says, and ‘X’ is the cause of all the problems in the world; wouldn’t the Creator (or “creator”) of ‘X’ be better to blame? I wonder why it is that when a person does evil, that evil is because of that person’s religion? If a person is an adherent of two religions, will he be twice as evil? If an extremist kills in the name of religion, do we hold the extremist responsible, or the religion, or is that question too simple? But Islam doesn’t validate actions simply because one undertakes them in the name of Islam. Even if it did, why would hundreds of millions of people identify with such moral vacuity?
Hitchens wants us to believe that men need no ethical instruction book; if that is the case, why does he have to write a book to tell people to stop reading (religious) books? Should it not be dazzlingly obvious? But Hitchens fundamentally fails to grasp human complexity; never mind his stunning ignorance of the Islamic ideal of innate and basic morality – the fitra; Dartmouth Professor Kevin Reinhart has done a wonderful job of explicating and clarifying early Islamic debates on the implications of this original innocence.[5] Contrarily, Hitchens’ sample individual is basically a passive and clueless idiot, not only affected by the religious idea but seized, occupied and liberated by it all at once; he offers no resistance but instead welcomes faith’s tanks and guns with flowers and parades. To be at all consistent, Hitchens should understand religion as a set of beliefs, practices and customs adopted by different people in different ways, and then debate how much agency a person, historically or morally, can be said to have. Just as a language does not spread itself, but is adopted by peoples and cultures – accounting for dialects, slang and change over time – so too faiths. We cannot trace when faith began, or separate it from modern humanity anymore than we can separate spiritual and metaphysical impulses. Moreover, the idea of religion as an academic category of study dates from Europe’s 19th-century, when the hierarchical view of the spiritual world was displaced by the secular idea of “world religions,” each of which was measured against Christianity.[6]
Such ways of living and believing are commonly if contentiously labeled “religions” as a legacy of past practice, and pragmatically because we need a language to represent an innate impulse far beyond Hitchens’ simple dialectics. People want a system to make sense of their lives. This is not a need Hitchens takes seriously, all the more embarrassing because this need is fulfilled by the atheism he so champions. Is atheism a religion? On certain interpretations, Hinayana Buddhism does not recognize a soul or a spiritual realm; it has no otherworldliness, so to speak, but it is still somehow a “religion.” Neither the rational nor the empirical perspective indicates a preference for theism or atheism, and atheism proceeds from the physical to the metaphysical. That a belief in God imposes an admission that our understanding can go no further is an interesting point, but no different than the tautology that is empiricism. We can use our minds to explain the way the world works because the way the world works created minds that are capable of understanding the way the world works. No matter how far you go, the end is always the beginning: If not God, then some other force or process takes His place. No philosopher has yet dug us out of this apparent conundrum; suffice it to say Hitchens cannot.[7]
But a debate of this intensity is too much seriousness for a man disinterested in the directions of his argument, and more so the people they doom. If religion poisons everything, the religious are either infected or contagious. If we are infected, we are infected in the mind. Our brains must be cleansed. If we are contagious, we must be put under quarantine. A glow-in-the-dark yellow jacket is not blinding enough to throw us off the obvious inversion of an Islamic expression, God is Greater.[8] Hitchens’ actual goal is to cheer on and encourage war on one religion above all others. What Hitchens requires is a sufficiently ecumenical outrage. An insulting book that apparently offends every faith and tradition, to justify or distract from his pretensions to intellectual integrity. George Bush came, confronted and conquered Hitchens far more easily than he did Iraq. (Which I suppose is Islam’s fault, too.)
Hitchens’ recent flip-flopping is miraculously convenient; it explains much of the actual harm religion can cause. Hitchens condemns religion and cheers the Bush administration’s end-times foreign policy. Like setting Iraq and Iran on fire for eight years; let the religions fight to the death! But “religion” poisons everything, which means all religions are equal(ly bad), which means he shouldn’t prefer any one religion over any other. Here is how bad things happen in religion’s name: People who don’t even believe in religion use religion to further worldly and bloody ends. Retain this the next time you hear the vacuity that “religion” is the source of all bad things and only bad things. Those with sharp tongues and minds are often the most dangerous. They can justify to themselves any kind of moral contortion or selfish necessity.
Keep in mind that the sole uniform aspect to each enormity Hitchens calls up is that it involves human beings. Hence, to blame religion – when he does not even tell us what religion is except that it is false – is not just inconsistent but obtuse. After all, we can isolate sexuality and argue that sexuality is to blame for humanity’s ills. It helps that sexual desire is as real, and yet as hard to define or pin down as the spiritual impulse. Or we could take a different tack. Were it not for evolutionary developments in the human intellect, humans would simply be too dumb to cause each other the traumatic and total harm the ability to harness nuclear fission has realized. Why not blame human intelligence for evil? If we were a stupider species, there would be no oppression, hypocrisy or class bias. As an added bonus, we’d be too thick to come up with religion. And since religion poisons everything, problem solved. Though, “How Intelligence Poisons Everything” would be an unpopular subtitle.
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