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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. (Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
