Page 2 of 2 BOOK
REVIEW Faith: Part of the
problem God is
Not Great by Christopher
Hitchens
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.
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