God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

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also by Christopher Hitchens

BOOKS

Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger
Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies
Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of'the Elgin Marbles
Why Orwell Matters
No One Left to Lie To:

The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton
Letters to a Young Contrarian
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Thomas Jefferson: Author of America
Thomas Fame's "Rights of Man": A Biography

PAMPHLETS

K-ari Marx and the Paris Commune
The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favorite Fetish
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq

COLLECTED ESSAYS

Prepared for the Worst: Essays and Minority Reports
For the Sake of Argument

Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
Love, Poverty and War; Journeys and Essays

COLLABORATIONS

James Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (with Peter Kellner)
Blaming the Victims (edited with Edward Said)
When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds
(photographs by Ed Kashi)
International Territory: The United Nations
(photographs by Adam Bartos)

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Contents

One Putting It Mildly
Two Religion Kills

Three A Short Digression on the Pig;

or, Why Heaven Hates Ham

Four A Note on Health,

to Which Religion Can Be Hazardous

Five The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False
Six Arguments from Design

Seven Revelation:

The Nightmare of the "Old" Testament

Eight The "New" Testament Exceeds the Evil
of the "Old" One

Nine The Koran Is Borrowed from Both Jewish
and Christian Myths

Ten The Tawdriness of the Miraculous
and the Decline of Hell

Eleven "The Lowly Stamp of Their Origin":

Religion's Corrupt Beginnings

Twelve A Coda: How Religions End

Thirteen Does Religion Make People Behave Better?

Fourteen There Is No "Eastern" Solution

Fifteen Religion as an Original Sin

Sixteen Is Religion Child Abuse ?

Seventeen An Objection Anticipated:

The Last-Ditch "Case" Against Secularism

Eighteen A Finer Tradition:

The Resistance of the Rational

Nineteen In Conclusion:

The Need for a New Enlightenment

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Acknowledgments

References

Index











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Oh, wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law, to another bound;

Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity,

Created sick, commanded to be sound.

--FULKE GREVILLE, Mustapha

And do you think that unto such as you

A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew

God gave a secret, and denied it me?

Well, well--what matters it? Believe that, too!

--THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM
(RICHARD LE GALLIENNE TRANSLATION)

Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in your
name, and beyond the grave they will find only death. But we
will keep the secret, and for their own happiness we will entice
them with a heavenly and eternal reward.

--THE GRAND INQUISITOR TO HIS "SAVIOR" in
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV

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Chapter One

Putting It Mildly

If the intended reader of this book should want to go beyond dis-
agreement with its author and try to identify the sins and defor-
mities that animated him to write it (and I have certainly noticed that
those who publicly affirm charity and compassion and forgiveness
are often inclined to take this course), then he or she will not just be
quarreling with the unknowable and ineffable creator who--presum-
ably--opted to make me this way. They will be defiling the memory
of a good, sincere, simple woman, of stable and decent faith, named
Mrs. Jean Watts.

It was Mrs. Watts's task, when I was a boy of about nine and at-
tending a school on the edge of Dartmoor, in southwestern England,
to instruct me in lessons about nature, and also about scripture. She
would take me and my fellows on walks, in an especially lovely part of
my beautiful country of birth, and teach us to tell the different birds,
trees, and plants from one another. The amazing variety to be found
in a hedgerow; the wonder of a clutch of eggs found in an intricate
nest; the way that if the nettles stung your legs (we had to wear shorts)
there would be a soothing dock leaf planted near to hand: all this has
stayed in my mind, just like the "gamekeeper's museum," where the
local peasantry would display the corpses of rats, weasels, and other
vermin and predators, presumably supplied by some less kindly deity.
If you read John Clare's imperishable rural poems you will catch the
music of what I mean to convey.

At later lessons we would be given a printed slip of paper entitled
"Search the Scriptures," which was sent to the school by whatever na-
tional authority supervised the teaching of religion. (This, along with
daily prayer services, was compulsory and enforced by the state.) The
slip would contain a single verse from the Old or New Testament,
and the assignment was to look up the verse and then to tell the class
or the teacher, orally or in writing, what the story and the moral was.
I used to love this exercise, and even to excel at it so that (like Bertie
Wooster) I frequently passed "top" in scripture class. It was my first
introduction to practical and textual criticism. I would read all the
chapters that led up to the verse, and all the ones that followed it, to be
sure that I had got the "point" of the original clue. I can still do this,
greatly to the annoyance of some of my enemies, and still have respect
for those whose style is sometimes dismissed as "merely" Talmudic, or
Koranic, or "fundamentalist." This is good and necessary mental and
literary training.

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However, there came a day when poor, dear Mrs. Watts over-
reached herself. Seeking ambitiously to fuse her two roles as nature
instructor and Bible teacher, she said, "So you see, children, how pow-
erful and generous God is. He has made all the trees and grass to
be green, which is exactly the color that is most restful to our eyes.
Imagine if instead, the vegetation was all purple, or orange, how aw-
ful that would be."

And now behold what this pious old trout hath wrought. I liked
Mrs. Watts: she was an affectionate and childless widow who had a
friendly old sheepdog who really was named Rover, and she would in-
vite us for sweets and treats after hours to her slightly ramshackle old
house near the railway line. If Satan chose her to tempt me into error
he was much more inventive than the subtle serpent in the Garden of
Eden. She never raised her voice or offered violence--which couldn't

be said for all my teachers--and in general was one of those people,
of the sort whose memorial is inMiddlemarch, of whom it may be said
that if "things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been,"
this is "half-owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life,
and rest in unvisited tombs."

However, I was frankly appalled by what she said. My little ankle-
strap sandals curled with embarrassment for her. At the age of nine
I had not even a conception of the argument from design, or of Dar-
winian evolution as its rival, or of the relationship between photosyn-
thesis and chlorophyll. The secrets of the genome were as hidden from
me as they were, at that time, to everyone else. I had not then visited
scenes of nature where almost everything was hideously indifferent or
hostile to human life, if not life itself. I simply f^new, almost as if I had
privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed
to get everything wrong in just two sentences. The eyes were adjusted
to nature, and not the other way about.

I must not pretend to remember everything perfectly, or in order,
after this epiphany, but in a fairly short time I had also begun to notice
other oddities. Why, if god was the creator of all things, were we sup-
posed to "praise" him so incessantly for doing what came to him natu-
rally? This seemed servile, apart from anything else. If Jesus could
heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blind-
ness ? What was so wonderful about his casting out devils, so that the
devils would enter a herd of pigs instead? That seemed sinister: more
like black magic. With all this continual prayer, why no result? Why
did I have to keep saying, in public, that I was a miserable sinner?
Why was the subject of sex considered so toxic? These faltering and
childish objections are, I have since discovered, extremely common-
place, partly because no religion can meet them with any satisfactory
answer. But another, larger one also presented itself. (I say "presented
itself" rather than "occurred to me" because these objections are, as
well as insuperable, inescapable.) The headmaster, who led the daily
services and prayers and held the Book, and was a bit of a sadist and
a closeted homosexual (and whom I have long since forgiven because
he ignited my interest in history and lent me my first copy of P. G.

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Wodehouse), was giving a no-nonsense talk to some of us one eve-
ning. "You may not see the point of all this faith now," he said. "But
you will one day, when you start to lose loved ones."

Again, I experienced a stab of sheer indignation as well as dis-
belief. Why, that would be as much as saying that religion might not
be true, but never mind that, since it can be relied upon for com-
fort. How contemptible. I was then nearing thirteen, and becoming
quite the insufferable little intellectual. I had never heard ofSigmund
Freud--though he would have been very useful to me in understand-
ing the headmaster--but I had just been given a glimpse of his essay
The Future of an Illusion.

I am inflicting all this upon you because I am not one of those
whose chance at a wholesome belief was destroyed by child abuse or
brutish indoctrination. I know that millions of human beings have
had to endure these things, and I do not think that religions can or
should be absolved from imposing such miseries. (In the very recent
past, we have seen the Church of Rome befouled by its complicity
with the unpardonable sin of child rape, or, as it might be phrased in
Latin form, "no child's behind left.") But other nonreligious organiza-
tions have committed similar crimes, or even worse ones.

There still remain four irreducible ob]ections to religious faith:

that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that
because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum
of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result
and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately
grounded on wish-thinking.

I do not think it is arrogant of me to claim that I had already
discovered these four objections (as well as noticed the more vulgar
and obvious fact that religion is used by those in temporal charge to
invest themselves with authority) before my boyish voice had broken. I
am morally certain that millions of other people came to very similar

conclusions in very much the same way, and I have since met such
people in hundreds of places, and in dozens of different countries.
Many of them never believed, and many of them abandoned faith
after a difficult struggle. Some of them had blinding moments ofun-
conviction that were every bit as instantaneous, though perhaps less
epileptic and apocalyptic (and later more rationally and more morally
justified) than Saul of Tarsus on the Damascene road. And here is
the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a be-
lief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon sci-
ence and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient
factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages
reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free
inquiry, openmmdedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.
We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement be-
tween Professor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins,
concerning "punctuated evolution" and the unfilled gaps in post-
Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shall
resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommuni-
cation. (My own annoyance at Professor Dawkins and Daniel Den-

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nett, for their cringe-making proposal that atheists should conceitedly
nominate themselves to be called "brights," is a part of a continuous
argument.) We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery
and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the seri-
ous 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. Literature, not scripture, sustains the
mind and--since there is no other metaphor--also the soul. We do
not believe in heaven or hell, yet no statistic will ever find that without
these blandishments and threats we commit more crimes of greed
or violence than the faithful. (In fact, if a proper statistical inquiry
could ever be made, I am sure the evidence would be the other way.)
We are reconciled to living only once, except through our children,
for whom we are perfectly happy to notice that we must make way,
and room. We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people ac-
cepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave
better toward each other and not worse. We believe with certainty
that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a
fact that the corollary holds true--that religion has caused innumer-
able people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but
to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a
brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.

Most important of all, perhaps, we infidels do not need any ma-
chinery of reinforcement. We are those who Blaise Pascal took into
account when he wrote to the one who says, "I am so made that I
cannot believe." In the village of Montaillou, during one of the great
medieval persecutions, a woman was asked by the Inquisitors to tell
them from whom she had acquired her heretical doubts about hell
and resurrection. She must have known that she stood in terrible dan-
ger of a lingering death administered by the pious, but she responded
that she took them from nobody and had evolved them all by herself.
(Often, you hear the believers praise the simplicity of their flock, but
not in the case of this unforced and conscientious sanity and lucidity,
which has been stamped out and burned out in the cases of more hu-
mans than we shall ever be able to name.)

There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or
on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel
and wallow in our unworthiness. We atheists do not require any
priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices
and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any
images or objects (even including objects in the form of one of man's
most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no spot on earth is
or could be "holier" than another: to the ostentatious absurdity of the
pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some
sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock, we can counterpose a leisurely or
urgent walk from one side of the library or the gallery to another, or
to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty. Some

of these excursions to the bookshelf or the lunch or the gallery will
obviously, if they are serious, bring us into contact with belief and be-
lievers, from the great devotional painters and composers to the works
of Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Newman. These mighty
scholars may have written many evil things or many foolish things,
and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or the place

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of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone the universe, and
this is the plain reason why there are no more of them today, and
why there will be no more of them tomorrow. Religion spoke its last
intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago: either that
or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism, as did, say,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor hanged by the Nazis for
his refusal to collude with them. We shall have no more prophets or
sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today
are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up
to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness.

While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way--
one might cite Pascal--and some of it is dreary and absurd--here
one cannot avoid naming C. S. Lewis--both styles have something in
common, namely the appalling load of strain that they have to bear.
How much effort it takes to affirm the incredible! The Aztecs had to
tear open a human chest cavity every day just to make sure that the
sun would rise. Monotheists are supposed to pester their deity more
times than that, perhaps, lest he be deaf. How much vanity must be
concealed--not too effectively at that--in order to pretend that one is
the personal object of a divine plan? How much self-respect must be
sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness
of one's own sin? How many needless assumptions must be made,
and how much contortion is required, to receive every new insight
of science and manipulate it so as to "fit" with the revealed words of
ancient man-made deities? How many saints and miracles and coun-
cils and conclaves are required in order first to be able to establish
a dogma and then--after infinite pain and loss and absurdity and
cruelty--to be forced to rescind one of those dogmas? God did not
create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about,
which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and reli-
gions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see
all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.

Past and present religious atrocities have occurred not because we
are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, bio-
logically, only partly rational. Evolution has meant that our prefrontal
lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproduc-
tive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone
or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and
disorder. But still, what a difference when one lays aside the strenu-
ous believers and takes up the no less arduous work of a Darwin, say,
or a Hawking or a Crick. These men are more enlightening when
they are wrong, or when they display their inevitable biases, than any
falsely modest person of faith who is vainly trying to square the circle
and to explain how he, a mere creature of the Creator, can possibly
know what that Creator intends. Not all can be agreed on matters
of aesthetics, but we secular humanists and atheists and agnostics do
not wish to deprive humanity of its wonders or consolations. Not in
the least. If you will devote a little time to studying the staggering
photographs taken by the Hubble telescope, you will be scrutinizing
things that are far more awesome and mysterious and beautiful--and
more chaotic and overwhelming and forbidding--than any creation
or "end of days" story. If you read Hawking on the "event horizon,"
that theoretical lip of the "black hole" over which one could in theory
plunge and see the past and the future (except that one would, regret-

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tably and by definition, not have enough "time"), I shall be surprised
if you can still go on gaping at Moses and his unimpressive "burning
bush." If you examine the beauty and symmetry of the double helix,
and then go on to have your own genome sequence fully analyzed,
you will be at once impressed that such a near-perfect phenomenon
is at the core of your being, and reassured (I hope) that you have so

much in common with other tribes of the human species--"race"
having gone, along with "creation" into the ashcan--and further fas-
cinated to learn how much you are a part of the animal kingdom
as well. Now at last you can be properly humble in the face of your
maker, which turns out not to be a "who," but a process of mutation
with rather more random elements than our vanity might wish. This
is more than enough mystery and marvel for any mammal to be get-
ting along with: the most educated person in the world now has to
admit--I shall not say confess--that he or she knows less and less but
at least knows less and less about more and more.

As for consolation, since religious people so often insist that faith
answers this supposed need, I shall simply say that those who offer
false consolation are false friends. In any case, the critics of religion
do not simply deny that it has a painkilling effect. Instead, they warn
against the placebo and the bottle of colored water. Probably the most
popular misquotation of modern times--certainly the most popular
in this argument--is the assertion that Marx dismissed religion as
"the opium of the people." On the contrary, this son of a rabbinical
line took belief very seriously and wrote, in his Contribution to the
Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, as follows:

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real dis-
tress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of
the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as
it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the
people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the peo-
ple is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up
the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a con-
dition that needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore
in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is
religion. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the
chain, not so that man will wear the chain without any fantasy
or consolation but so that he will shake oti the chain and cull the
living flower.

So the famous misquotation is not so much a "misquotation" but
rather a very crude attempt to misrepresent the philosophical case
against religion. Those who have believed what the priests and rab-
bis and imams tell them about what the unbelievers think and about
how they think, will find further such surprises as we go along. They
will perhaps come to distrust what they are told--or not to take it "on
faith," which is the problem to begin with.

Marx and Freud, it has to be conceded, were not doctors or exact
scientists. It is better to think of them as great and fallible imaginative
essayists. When the intellectual universe alters, in other words, I don't

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feel arrogant enough to exempt myself from self-criticism. And I am
content to think that some contradictions will remain contradictory,
some problems will never be resolved by the mammalian equipment
of the human cerebral cortex, and some things are indefinitely un-
knowable. If the universe was found to be finite or infinite, either
discovery would be equally stupefying and impenetrable to me. And
though I have met many people much wiser and more clever than
myself, I know of nobody who could be wise or intelligent enough to
say differently.

Thus the mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and
the most devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who
made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus
actually said or did. Still less can they hope to tell us the "meaning"
of later discoveries and developments which were, when they be-
gan, either obstructed by their religions or denounced by them. And
yet--the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know
everything. Not just to know that god exists, and that he created and
supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know what "he" demands
of us--from our diet to our observances to our sexual morality. In
other words, in a vast and complicated discussion where we know

more and more about less and less, yet can still hope tor some en-
lightenment as we proceed, one faction--itself composed of mutually
warring factions--has the sheer arrogance to tell us that we already
have all the essential information we need. Such stupidity, combined
with such pride, should be enough on its own to exclude "belief" from
the debate. The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant
for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. It may be
a long farewell, but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be
protracted.

I trust that if you met me, you would not necessarily know that this
was my view. I have probably sat up later, and longer, with religious
friends than with any other kind. These friends often irritate me by
saying that I am a "seeker," which I am not, or not in the way they
think. If I went back to Devon, where Mrs. Watts has her unvisited
tomb, I would surely find myself sitting quietly at the back of some
old Celtic or Saxon church. (Philip Larkin's lovely poem "Church-
going" is the perfect capture of my own attitude.) I once wrote a book
about George Orwell, who might have been my hero if I had heroes,
and was upset by his callousness about the burning of churches in
Catalonia in 1936. Sophocles showed, well before the rise of mono-
theism, that Antigone spoke for humanity in her revulsion against
desecration. I leave it to the faithful to burn each other's churches and
mosques and synagogues, which they can always be relied upon to
do. When I go to the mosque, I take off my shoes. When I go to
the synagogue, I cover my head. I once even observed the etiquette
of an ashram in India, though this was a trial to me. My parents did
not try to impose any religion: I was probably fortunate in having
a father who had not especially loved his strict Baptist/Calvinist up-
bringing, and a mother who preferred assimilation--partly for my
sake--to the Judaism of her forebears. I now know enough about all
religions to know that I would always be an infidel at all times and
in all places, but my particular atheism is a Protestant atheism. It is
with the splendid liturgy of the King James Bible and the Cranmer

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