Try Me on This Again Hitchen

Christopher Hitchens'southward 2007 book God Is Not Cracking: How Religion Poisons Everything has made him arguably the nation's almost notorious atheist. Already renowned equally a political columnist for Vanity Fair, Slate, and other magazines and known for his frequent punditry on the political Television receiver circuit, Hitchens's spinous manifesto against religion has earned him debates across the state, frequently with the very fundamentalist believers his book attacks.

Just as a precursor to his upcoming January 5 appearance at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, Portland Monthly invited Hitchens to an run across more conforming the Rose Urban center: a conversation with a liberal believer—Marilyn Sewell, the recently retired minister of the First Unitarian Church of Portland. A former teacher and psychotherapist and the author of numerous books, Sewell, over 17 years, grew Portland's downtown Unitarian congregation into one of the largest in the United States.

Marilyn Sewell: Your book, God Is Not Great is a sweeping indictment of how faith perpetuates war, exploitation, and oppression throughout history. What inspired you to turn from critiquing politics to critiquing organized religion?

Christopher Hitchens: My political life has been informed by the view that if in that location was any truth to religion in that location wouldn't really be any demand for politics. A crucial element in the way I write, also as what I write well-nigh, has been informed by my atheism. Why this volume at this time? Past the early on part of this century I became convinced that organized religion was back in a big way with the Parties of God—as they dare call themselves—not only in Iran and among Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, just with Messianic Jewish settlers trying to steal other people's land in the name of God to try and bring on Armageddon with help from Christian forces in the United States. These forces overlap with the same Christians who endeavor to want pseudo-science taught to American children with taxpayers coin and with the Vatican saying that, "Well AIDS in Africa may be bad, merely condoms would be worse." I thought that the moment—with a capital 1000—had arrived when enough people might exist willing to to fight back. And I and others—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris—all came to the aforementioned conclusion independently. Let's not boast, only it seems nosotros weren't completely incorrect.

In the book you write that, at age ix, you lot experienced the ignorance of your scripture teacher Mrs. Watts and, then later at 12, your headmaster tried to justify religion as a comfort when facing expiry. Information technology seems you were an intuitive atheist. But did you lot ever try faith again?

I belong to what is a significant minority of human being beings: Those who are—equally Pascal puts it in his Pensées, his great apology for Christianity—"then made that they cannot believe." As many as 10 per centum of is only never can bring themselves to take faith seriously. And since people often defend organized religion as natural to humans (which I wouldn't say it wasn't, by the way), the corollary holds too: there must be respect for those who but tin't bring themselves to find significant in phrases like "the Holy Spirit."

Well, could it be that some people are "so made" for religion. and y'all are then made for the intellectual life?

I don't have whatever it takes to say things like "the grace of God." All that's white dissonance to me, not because I'm an intellectual. For many people, it'south gibberish. Too, the thought that the Koran was dictated past an primitive illiterate is a fantasy. As so far the most highly evolved of the primates, we practise seem in the bulk to have a tendency to worship, and to look for patterns that pb to supernatural conclusions. Whereas, I remember that at that place is no supernatural dimension whatever. The natural world is quite wonderful enough. The more we know well-nigh it, the much more wonderful it is than whatsoever supernatural proposition.

The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I'm a liberal Christian, and I don't take the stories from the scripture literally. I don't believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for case). Do y'all make and stardom between fundamentalist religion and liberal religion?

I would say that if yous don't believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you're really not in whatever meaningful sense a Christian.

Let me get someplace else. When I was in seminary I was particularly fatigued to the work of theologian Paul Tillich. He shocked people by describing the traditional God—as you lot might as a matter of fact—as, "an invincible tyrant." For Tillich, God is "the ground of existence." It'south his response to, say, Freud'south belief that faith is mere wish fulfillment and comes from the humans' fear of death. What do you think of Tillich'southward concept of God?"

I would classify that under the heading of "statements that have no pregnant—at all." Christianity, remember, is actually founded by St. Paul, not by Jesus. Paul says, very clearly, that if it is not true that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, then we the Christians are of all people the almost unhappy. If none of that'southward true, and you seem to say it isn't, I have no quarrel with you. Yous're not going to come up to my door trying convince me either. Nor are yous trying to get a tax break from the government. Nor are you trying to take it taught to my children in school. If all Christians were similar yous I wouldn't have to write the book.

Well, probably not, because I concord with almost everything that you say. But I still consider myself a Christian and a person of faith.

Do you mind if I ask yous a question? Faith in what? Religion in the resurrection?

The fashion I believe in the resurrection is I believe that one can go from a expiry in this life, in the sense of being dead to the earth and dead to other people, and can be resurrected to new life. When I preach virtually Easter and the resurrection, it'south in a metaphorical sense.

I hate to say it—we've inappreciably been introduced—merely perchance yous are simply living on the inheritance of a monstrous fraud that was preached to millions of people equally the literal truth—every bit you put it, "the basis of existence."

Times change and, yous know, people's beliefs alter. I don't believe that yous have to exist fundamentalist and literalist to be a Christian. You do: You're something of a fundamentalist, actually.

Well, I'm sorry, fundamentalist just ways those who retrieve that the Bible is a serious book and should be taken seriously.

I take information technology very seriously. I have my grandmother's Bible and I still read it, but I don't take it as literal truth. I take it as metaphorical truth. The stories, the narrative, are what's important.

But, and then, evidence me what there is, ethically, in any religion that can't be duplicated by Humanism. In other words, can yous name me a unmarried moral action performed or moral statement uttered by a person of faith that couldn't be but as well pronounced or undertaken by a civilian?

You're absolutely right. Nevertheless religion does inspire some people. Yous claim in the subtitle of your book that "faith poisons everything," just what about people like the Berrigan brothers, the Cosmic priests who were jailed over and over once again for their radical protesting of the Vietnam War? Or Bishop Romero, the nuns and priests who gave their lives supporting…

They're all covered by the challenge I just presented to yous. I know many people who…

Yes, just these people claim to exist motivated and sustained past their faith. Do you deny that?

I don't claim. I don't deny information technology. I just don't respect. If someone says I'm doing this out of religion, I say, Why don't you do it out of conviction? I don't like the Barogen brothers anyway. They're fanatical and they're pacifists who believe in the non-resistance to evil, which is itself an evil doctrine. And if Bishop Romero got as far equally existence an archbishop in El Salvador, he achieved the prestige carved out for him by an establishment that has made El Salvador into an oppressive slave order.

That's true, but he did change.

Well good for him. He needs to change a bit more. I know many, many, many people in El salvador who have no religious religion of any kind who stuck up for homo rights much longer, more consistently, and more than bravely than he did. His prestige as an archbishop was meaningless to me.

Well, I tin can't argue with that.

As it is for Martin Luther Male monarch. For case, he would've been much better off not invoking the nonsense story of Exodus, a story of massacre and the enslavement. He left us with a legacy where whatsoever clown or fraud or crook—Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, our new president's favorite priest in Chicago—who has the discussion reverend in front of his proper noun tin get an audition.

I would just say that this shows the fallen nature of people or, in secular language, the selfishness, egocentricity of all human beings. People are imperfect. Only take yous observed any redemptive aspects to religion?

No, in the sense of the challenge I made: whatever good action by a religious person could be duplicated or matched, if non surpassed, by someone who didn't believe in god. And I would add the corollary question: Is there a wicked action performed by a religious person in the cause of their faith? And of course, yous've already idea of several examples.

Yup, that's truthful.

Religion makes kind people say unkind things: "I must prove my faith, so mutilate the genitals of my children." They wouldn't exercise that if God didn't tell them to do so. And information technology makes intelligent people say stupid things: Condoms are worse than AIDS , for example. Things they wouldn't dream of maxim if the pope didn't tell them to do that.

I agree and am appalled in the same way you are. Allow me inquire you lot this: The Greek myths, their fables, their folk tales that endured are not literally true, merely there's great value in the universal truths that are taught just by the story itself. I see so much of scripture in a similar way including, for case, the creation story. Can y'all agree with me that some of those stories are valuable just as metaphor?

The creation story is ridiculous garbage. And has given us a completely false picture of our origin as a species and the origins of the cosmos. If you want a skilful mythical story it would be the life of Socrates. We have no proof, as with Jesus, that he ever existed. We only know from witnesses to his life that he did. Like Jesus, he never wrote anything down. Information technology doesn't matter to me whether he did or not be considering we have his teachings, his method of thinking, and his extreme intellectual and moral courage. Anyone who can await me in the center and say they adopt the story of Moses or Jesus or Mohammed to the life of Socrates is— I have to say it to yous—intellectually lacking. The neat edition starts with Locutius and Epicurius who piece of work out that the world is fabricated of atoms and is not created past any pattern. It goes through Socrates and through, well, Galileo, Spinoza—people whose work is burned and despised by Jews and Christians and Muslims alike—to through Voltaire to Darwin to, I'm abridging the story somewhat, but information technology's the last chapter of my book. It'due south a better tradition for people who retrieve for themselves and who don't pray in aid of any supernatural potency. That's what you should be spending your life is in spreading and deepening that tradition.

Yous say that nonbelievers, "Distrust annihilation that contradicts science or outrageous reason" that you lot respect free inquiry. I am a person of religion and absolutely agree with these two statements. Simply I do not believe that in gild to be religious you have to disconnect your brain. Do you believe that and, if so, why?

The smallest privilege of faith over reason is a expose. My daughter goes to a Quaker schoolhouse, for example. Do I think that the Quakers are the same as Hezbollah? No, of course I don't, though I call up there'due south a lot to be said confronting Quakerism morally and what Quakers and Hezbollah do take in mutual is the thought that "organized religion" is an automatically good word. I retrieve it's non. When people say, "I am a person of faith," they expect applause for information technology as we see in every ballot cycle. If I could make one change in the civilization it would exist to withhold that applause, to say, "Look a infinitesimal, yous simply told me you're prepared to accept an enormous amount on no testify whatsoever. Why are you thinking that that would impress me?" I have no use for it, when I could be spending time looking through a telescope or into a microscope and finding out the most boggling, wonderful things. People say faith tin motility mountains. Organized religion in what, by the manner? Yous haven't said.

If y'all would like for me to talk a little bit most what I believe . . .

Well I would actually.

I don't know whether or not God exists in the commencement place, permit me merely say that. I certainly don't retrieve that God is an former man in the heaven, I don't believe that God intervenes to requite me goodies if I ask for them.

You don't believe he's an interventionist of any kind?

I'm kind of an doubter on that one. God is a mystery to me. I choose to believe because—and this is a very practical thing for me—I seem to alive with more integrity when I discover myself answerable to something larger than myself. That thing larger than myself, I telephone call God, but it'southward a metaphor. That God is an emptiness out of which everything comes. Perhaps I would say " reality" or "what is" because we're trying to describe the space with language of the finite. My religion is that I put all that I am and all that I have on the line for that which I do not know.

Fine. Simply I remember that's a slight waste of what could honestly be in your example a very valuable time. I don't desire you to go abroad with the impression that I'1000 but a vulgar materialist. I practise know that humans are also and so fabricated even though we are an evolved species whose closest cousins are chimpanzees. I know it's not enough for us to to eat and so along. We know how to retrieve. We know how to laugh. We know we're going to dice, which gives united states a lot to call up most, and we have a need for, what I would telephone call, "the transcendent" or "the numinous" or even "the ecstatic" that comes out in dearest and music, poetry, and landscape. I wouldn't trust anyone who didn't answer to things of that sort. Just I retrieve the cultural job is to dissever those impulses and those needs and desires from the supernatural and, above all, from the superstitious.

Could you lot talk most these two words that you merely used, "transcendent" and "numinous"? Those are two words are favorites of mine.

Well, this would probably be very embarrassing, if you knew me. I can't compose or play music; I'yard not that fortunate. But I tin can write and I can talk and sometimes when I'm doing either of these things I realize that I've written a sentence or uttered a idea that I didn't absolutely know I had in me… until I saw information technology on the page or heard myself say it. Information technology was a sense that information technology wasn't all done by hand.

A souvenir?

But, to me, that's the nearest I'm going to get to being an artist, which is the occupation I'd most similar to have and the one, at last, I'm the most denied. But I, think everybody has had the experience at some bespeak when they feel that there's more to life than just matter. Simply I think information technology's very important to proceed that nether control and not to hand information technology over to be exploited past priests and shamans and rabbis and other riffraff.

You lot know, I think that that might be a religious impulse that you're talking about there.

Well, it'due south absolutely non. Information technology'southward a man i. It'due south office of the melancholy that we accept in which we know that happiness is fleeting, and we know that life is brief, but we know that, still, life tin exist savored and that happiness, even of the ecstatic kind, is available to u.s.. Only we know that our life is essentially tragic as well. I'm absolutely non for handing over that very important section of our psyche to those who say, "Well, ah. Why didn't you say so before? God has a programme for you in heed." I have no time to waste on this planet being told what to exercise by those who think that God has given them instructions.

Those terms don't have to be fastened to God. But I remember a religious impulse is when you're but all of a sudden filled with the sense of thankfulness for something beautiful or for someone or maybe—I use the discussion "numinous"—or when y'all're struck with some sense that there's something beyond y'all. It is a human phenomenon.

I wrote a brusk book about the Parthenon and the sculpture of the Parthenon, the history of the building and then forth. Without that building, I would feel rather lost. If it were destroyed, for instance, I would feel that something really terrible had happened to the homo species. Simply, I'thou able to appreciate the diverse symmetries and, um, magnificences of the Greek style without at all caring about the cults of Pallas Athena, the goddess in whose honor the building was erected or the Obsidian mysteries that were historic in that location or Athenian imperialism, in general—all those dead behavior as Christianity will one twenty-four hours exist. It'due south a big cultural job for me to separate the cultural achievement that organized religion laid merits to from the claims of faith itself. No one's going to deny the role of religion in, for example, architecture or devotional painting (which, actually I like that the to the lowest degree). In music, even though Verdi, information technology turns out, was not a laic, under that stimulus he could produce a pretty practiced requiem. The poetry of John Dunn or George Herbert strikes me every bit having been produced by people who probably really believed what they were proverb. I take to be impressed.

You write, "Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and the soul." You lot use the give-and-take "soul" there as metaphor. What is a soul for you?

It's what you might call "the ten-gene"—I don't accept a satisfactory term for it—it's what I hateful past the element of us that isn't entirely materialistic: the numinous, the transcendent, the innocence of children (even though nosotros know from Freud that childhood isn't every bit innocent as all that), the existence of honey (which is, likewise, unquantifiable just that anyone would be a fool who said it wasn't a powerful force), and so forth. I don't think the soul is immortal, or at to the lowest degree not immortal in individuals, but information technology may be immortal as an aspect of the human personality because when I talk almost what literature nourishes, it would be giddy of me or reductionist to say that it nourishes the brain.

I wouldn't contend with you lot nigh the immortality of the soul. Were I dorsum in a church over again, I would love to have you in my church because you're so eloquent and I believe that some of your impulses—and, excuse me for proverb and so—are religious in the way I am religious. Yous may call it something else, but we concur in a lot of our thinking.

I'm touched that you say, equally some people accept also said to me, that I've missed my vocation. But I really don't call up that I accept. I would not be able to be this fashion if I was wearing robes or challenge authority that was other than human. that's a distinction that matters to me very much.

You have your role and information technology'south a valuable one, and then thank you for what y'all give to us.
Well, thank you for asking. It's very good of yous to exist my hostess.

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Source: https://www.pdxmonthly.com/news-and-city-life/2009/12/christopher-hitchens

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