Inquisitor puts religion in hot seat

Religions should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

That is an echo of George Orwell's pointed statement about saints. And it gets to the crux of Christopher Hitchens' lushly literate drubbing of religion, which he deems man-made and fraudulently based, at best, on wishful thinking, and guilty of pernicious tendencies that include exploiting our fear of the unknown, demanding servility and sexual repression.

In essence, he contends, religion is an enemy of free inquiry that clings to a set of oppressive rules in an attempt to justify an insupportable notion about the origins of mankind and the universe: an imposition that is born of and belongs to the "infancy of our species."

In light of these indictments, god is not Great dwells primarily on backing up its subtitle, "How Religion Poisons Everything." In rousing fashion, Hitchens puts pen as scalpel to work as he cuts into historical offenses large and small and reveals their shoddy, faith-based foundation.

There are many culprits. The killing fields brought to the reader's attention include the Balkans (the setting of "ethnic cleansing" in the 1990s), the Twin Towers, the swaths left across China and Korea by Japan's "Zen-obedient zombies," and the graveyards across Europe where multitudes of free-thinkers and heretics were discarded after being snuffed out by medieval instruments of torture invented and used with "divine-guided" cruelty.

The writing is mordant and unyielding, self-assured and ironic, and delivers an idea-driven pummeling as likely to elate as to inflict vicarious stigmata, depending on the reader's humor and convictions.

An amusing recollection about Hitchens' own formative experience involving a Bible teacher - an epiphany to which he traces his unbelief - gives way to analyses of religion's legacy of abuse and mind-control. Exposed are religion's contempt for advances in treating and preventing illness, its advocacy of harmful practices such as genital mutilation and incest, and its obsession with detrimental and bigoted prohibitions (against masturbation, birth-control, female sensuality and homosexuality, among many others). He concludes that because religion insists on a "special divine exemption for [such] practices and beliefs," it is "not just amoral but immoral."

In probing the murky evolution of the major monotheisms, Hitchens points out certain conspicuous similarities, such as the lack of first-person accounts of core events, the endless disagreements among so-called apostles and prophets, and the random culling and discarding of biblical passages, which, borrowed or recycled, are prone to being invoked by mutually-hostile exponents.

It is telling, he quips, that while all religions are man-made, in most cases they were also made exclusively by men. The link between this fact and the patriarchal chauvinism and sexist attitudes of countless religious mandates is self-evident.

In a chapter entitled "Religion's Corrupt Beginnings," Hitchens recounts the story of Marjoe Gortner who was pitilessly indoctrinated from infancy by his evangelical parents and, "trained like a seal," gained notoriety (while still a child) for his ability to regurgitate scripture. Gortner subsequently rebelled and became the star of a documentary in which he revealed all the theatrics and trickery employed to induce the faithful into obedience and exaggerated ecstasy. The implication is that such behavior, there for all to witness, is related to all past religious deceptions, including the indulgences racket.

In the same vein, Hitchens examines the historical circumstances that gave birth to Joseph Smith and Mormonism, noting Smith's good luck in getting started in a "hectically pious district" which was known to embrace "one religious craze after another," on a continent that had useful "signs of an ancient history." He points to the trend of opportunistic "revelations" (including the much belated one, circa the Civil Rights Act, that "black people were human after all") as clear evidence that religion is created by humans. And, by extension, that such recent examples should give us a good idea about the true reasons for the many face-saving adjustments that all religions have made in deference to the spirit of the times in order to survive throughout the ages.

Hitchens also devotes a chapter to the history of secular atrocities and the cults of personality in whose names they were committed. He asserts that the religious have often been connected to secular tyranny (exploring, for one, the links between fascism and the Catholic Church), and points out that secular dictators and sectarian leaders are alike in their demand for totalitarian authority over their subjects. He is unequivocal. To him, the results are equally deplorable. The desirable alternative, for Hitchens, is "the defense of secular pluralism."

Is nonbelief itself a religion? Perhaps. It is undeniable that, at some level, any painstakingly researched and elaborated argument seeks converts. Hitchens concedes that "precisely because we are still-evolving creatures," haunted by deep-seated fears about life and death, religious faith is here to stay. But, in his view, it should be left on the sidelines, dwarfed by the revelations made possible by the microscope and the telescope, and replaced by a new Enlightenment, where attention to literature, the sciences and the pursuit of free inquiry furthers the notion that "the proper study of mankind is man, and woman."

Here, eloquence and stimulating contention unite. Regardless of one's persuasions, god is not Great provides an abundance of well-honed ideas worth considering.

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