Tag: Christopher Hitchens

Book Review: God is not Great – by Christopher Hitchens

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Religion, Three StarsLeave a comment

GodIsNotGreatExcerpt from page 52:

I pose a hypothetical question. As a man of some fifty-seven years of age, I am discovered sucking the penis of a baby boy. I ask you to picture your own outrage and revulsion. Ah, but I have my explanation all ready. I am a mohel: an appointed circumciser and foreskin remover. My authority comes from an ancient text, which commands me to take a baby boy’s penis in my hand, cut around the prepuce, and complete the action by taking his penis in my mouth, sucking off the foreskin, and spitting out the amputated flap along with a mouthful of blood and saliva. This practice as been abandoned by most Jews, either because of its unhygienic nature or its disturbing associations, but it still persists among the sort of Hasidic fundamentalists  who hope for the Second Temple to be rebuilt in Jerusalem. To them, the primitive rite of the peri’ah metsitsah is part of the original and unbreakable covenant with god. In New York City in the year 2005, the ritual, as performed by a fifty-seven-year-old mohel, was found to have given genital herpes to several small boys, and to have caused the deaths of at least two of them. In normal circumstances, the disclosure would have led the public health department to forbid the practice and the mayor to denounce it. But in the capital of the modern world, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, such was not the case. Instead, Mayor Bloomberg overrode the reports by distinguished Jewish physicians who had warned of the danger of the custom, and told his health care bureaucracy to postpone any verdict. The crucial thing, he said, was to be sure that the free exercise of religion was not being infringed.

In his book, God is not Great – How Religion Poisons Everything, Hitchens points out example after example of ludicrous religious practices that are anchored in murky texts sometime thousands of years old that are practiced today to the detriment of people. He argues that we are doing injustice to our young by subjecting them mutilation (male circumcision, female circumcision, female sewing up of vaginas), by loading them down with immense guilt for completely natural phenomena or needs (masturbation, sexuality of any type, procreative desires) at a minimum.

But if it was “only” guilt! In the name of religions, still today, in some societies young girls are punished if they are raped. Girls as young as eight years old are married to old men and flogged if their dowries are too small.

In page, after page, after page, Hitchens indicts the major religions of Judaism, Christianity of all flavors, Islam, up to the “modern” religions of Mormons, the Moonies and many others, with brutal exposition of simple examples.

Here from page 199:

Pascal reminds me of the hypocrites and frauds who abound in Talmudic Jewish rationalization. Don’t do any work on the Sabbath yourself, buy pay someone else to do it. You obeyed the letter of the law: who’s counting? The Dalai Lama tells us that you can visit a prostitute as long as someone else pays her. Shia Muslims offer “temporary marriage,” selling men the permission to take a wife for an hour or two with the usual vows and  then divorce her when they are done. Half of the splendid buildings in Rome would never have been raised if the sale of indulgences had not been so profitable: St. Peter’s itself was financed by a special one-time offer of that kind. The newest pope, the former Joseph Ratzinger, recently attracted Catholic youths to a festival by offering a certain “remission of sin” to those who attended.

On page 173, talking about Ghandi’s India: Cows were

cleverly denominated by the priests as “sacred” so that  the poor ignorant people would not kill and eat their only capital during times of drought and famine.

As you can see, I am letting the book describe itself.

Its pages are full of vivid, appalling, grotesque and disgusting examples showing how the organized religions are designed to give a few individuals immense power over masses of people, make the leaders extremely wealthy, and keep the average person in fear of eternal pain and damnation, fueled by ignorance, outright falsehoods, covered up by pseudo science, and all attributed to a form of supreme being, obviously invented by each religion to suit its needs of the time.

God is not Great will not be easy to read for a “believer” of any religion and it will no doubt be banned by most as heresy, the work of the devil and thus evil and anti-social.

I wish I could remember the endless references and examples, as it would arm me as a more effective debater. As it is, it’s a powerful work of reference, and it is an eye-opener about religions, much like Sam Harris’ The End of Faith.

Rating: ***

Thieves, Moral Boundaries, Depravity and Stuffing Our Faces

On By Norbert HauptIn Commentaries, ReligionLeave a comment

For the second time in six months my daughter had her iPhone stolen. She was on a bus in San Francisco, going to work, when she noticed it was no longer in her coat pocket. I assume there are thieves who prowl public places, and particularly transportation systems, where people are crowded together and bump into each other. Most of us use our devices while waiting, so it’s really easy to spot the devices, and, more importantly, the place where the owner stashes it away when done.

Ah, an iPhone in an outside coat pocket.

They were smart enough to turn it off immediately to prevent her from tracking its location. That indicates not an opportunity theft, but a strategy, purposeful, organized crime.

Recently, there have been house burglaries in our neighborhood. About a year ago, somebody went through my car in my driveway and stole some pretty low-value stuff.

These events got me to thinking about what must be going on in a person’s mind when they decide they target somebody else’s property for their own enrichment. How does this happen? Does the person grow up without the moral code to understand that it is not right to forcibly take someone else’s stuff? Or does one become that way over time?

The German Communist Berthold Brecht wrote:

“Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.”

“First comes food, then come morals.”

There is a subtle linguistic twist in this German sentence. The word “Fressen” is about food, but in a low, demeaning way. Germans have different words for the action of eating, “fressen” and “essen.”

Essen is what humans do. Fressen is what animals do. Humans only do “fressen” when they devour food, like animals.

While this is derogatory to animals, it’s a distinction in the German language. So what Brecht is really saying is:

“Stuffing our faces comes first. Then we might think about morals.”

So might morals really be a cultural and religious luxury?

In his book, God is not Great, Christopher Hitchens tells of a debate between Professor A. J. Ayer and Bishop Butler. In this debate, Ayer asserted that he saw no evidence whatsoever for the existence of any god. Bishop Butler broke in to say, “Then I cannot see why you do not lead a life of unbridled immorality.”

I wonder if this is a normal Christian attitude. Are Christians only behaving like Christians should because of the pressure of the penalty from god? If that were not there, do they imagine that they could just let it all hang out? Come to think of it, what was going on in the Bishop’s mind? What would he like to be doing that Christianity is preventing?

I serve no god, but I have no urges to behave immorally. I have no desires that the good Bishop might call “unbridled immorality.” Being an educated, civilized, responsible and cultured adult is enough to keep me from depravity.

Maybe it’s only because I have no problem stuffing my face every day?

Islam, Sex and AIDS

On By Norbert HauptIn ReligionLeave a comment

In 1995, the Council of Ulemas in Indonesia urged that condoms only be made available to married couples, and on prescription.

In Iran, a worker found to be HIV-positive can lose his job and doctors and hospitals have the right to refuse treatment to AIDS patients. An official of Pakistan’s AIDS Control Program told Foreign Policy magazine in 2005 that the problem was smaller in his country because of “better social and Islamic values.” This in a state where the law allows a woman to be sentenced to be gang-raped in order to expiate the “shame”of a crime committed by her brother. This is the old religious combination of repression and denial: a plague like AIDS is assumed to be unmentionable because the teachings of the Koran are enough in themselves to inhibit premarital intercourse, drug use, adultery, and prostitution.

Even a very brief visit to, say, Iran, will demonstrate the opposite. It is the mullahs themselves who profit from hypocrisy by licensing “temporary marriages,” in which wedding certificates are available for a few hours, sometimes in specially designated houses, with a divorce declaration ready to hand at the conclusion of business. You could almost call it prostitution.

The last time I was offered such a bargain it was just outside the ugly shrine to the Ayatollah Khomeini in south Tehran. But veiled and burqa-clad women, infected by their husbands with the virus, are expected to die in silence. It is a certainty that millions of other harmless and decent people will die very miserably and quite needlessly, all over the world as a result of this obscurantism.

From God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens