hic, hic est

Auld Lang Syne.
Here's to the rock star with the crooked teeth,
the cellist, banker, mezzo bearing gifts,
the teacher with the flask in her jeans -
those girls who made us sweat and lick our lips.

To the jeune fille who broke my heart in France,
the tramp who warmed your lap and licked your ear,
the one who bought me shots at 2 a.m.
that night I tied your pink tie at the bar.

Who smoked.  Who locked you out.  Who kissed my eyes
then pulled my hair and left me for a boy.
The girl who bit my upper, inner thigh.
My raspy laugh when I first heard your voice

toasting through broken kisses sloppy drunk:
To women!  To abundance!  To enough!

- Emily Moore

from the New Yorker

I read a review in the New Yorker this week of a new book by Christopher Hitchens, entitled God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.  I was curious because Hitchens can be an excellent writer, but of course, I completely disagree with the title.  Not really surprisingly, the tone of the book sounds absolutely horrible to me too.  Take this paragraph from the review:

"Hitchens is nothing if not provocative.  Creationists are 'yokels,' Pascal's theology is 'not far short of sordid,' the reasoning of the Christian writer C.S. Lewis is 'so pathetic as to defy description,' Calvin was a 'sadist and torturer and killer,' Buddhist sayings are 'almost too easy to parody,' most Easter spiritual discourse is 'not even wrong,' Islam is 'a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms,' Hanukkah is a 'vapid and annoying holiday,' and the psalmist King David was an 'unscrupulous bandit.'

I will say one thing about the foregoing paragraph that is in Hitchens' favor:  It is very refreshing to read a Western writer attacking religion who actually attacks all religion, and not just Christianity, Islam and Judaism (in that order).  Sam Harris, for instance, who wrote The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, actually encourages readers to practice Eastern spiritual practices, in what is - I'm sorry - a really terribly obvious hypocrisy.  If religious practice is bad, it's bad.  Buddhism and any other Eastern religions contain all the seeds for potential bad that Islam or Christianity do, and Islam and Christianity have all the seeds for potential good that Buddhism does.  So I was actually a little glad to see that Hitchens avoided that almost ubiquitous problem with almost all Westerners who idolize Eastern religion and attack Western religion, even if he avoids this in a way that I disagree with.

The main problem with atheists' attacks on religion is that the basic point - religion is a force for bad in the world - is untenable.  As the reviewer writes of Hitchens' book:

"When Hitchens weighs the pros and cons of religion in the recent past, the evidence he provides is sometimes lopsided.  He discusses the role of the Dutch Reformed Church in maintaining apartheid in South Africa, but does not mention the role of the Anglican Church in ending it.  He attacks some in the Catholic Church, especially Pope Pius XII, for their appeasement of Nazism, but says little about the opposition to Nazism that came from religious communities and institutions."

The point here is fairly clear to me.  People can be good, and people can be bad, and the same people can use or manipulate religion in furtherance of their cause.  Being a Christian, and being therefore admittedly biased, I would hasten to point out that in both of the above cases mentioned (the Dutch Reformed Church vs. Anglican Church in South Africa, Catholic supporters of Nazism vs. other religious opponents of Nazism), it is pretty clear that those doing bad were doing so in direct opposition to basic Christian moral principles, whereas those doing good were doing so in accordance with them.  The conclusion for me is pretty obvious: people do bad things, and will use whatever institutions available to them to do bad things, regardless of what that institution is.  As the reviewer states,

"The idea that people would have been nicer to one another if they had never got religion, as Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris seem to think, is a strange position for an atheist to take.  For if man is wicked enough to have invented religion for himself he is surely wicked enough to have found alternative ways of making mischief."

That's basically the point.  Religion as a social force is ultimately such a variegated issue that it makes little sense to me to have any one opinion on it whatsoever.  To think that ridding the world of religion would solve all our problems is just tremendously naïve.  Be religious, be atheist, but being either one of those won't guarantee that you'll be good or bad, and it's silly to think that it could.

I still like reading Hitchens' book reviews, and I even like reading some of his political writing (even though I disagree strongly with roughly half of it), but this kind of vitriol is pretty useless, and I find it disappointing that anyone would think that this work could pass for intellectual output.


In other news, I read a book review in The Believer (a magazine that, despite its title and its being mentioned at the end of this livejournal post, has nothing to do with religious belief) of a book entitled My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up by Stephen Elliot, which I ordered after reading the review - a better title, and hopefully a better book.