god is not Great


I just got done reading Richard Hitchens' polemic, 'god is not Great'.

Phew.

Previously I've read 'The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins, 'The End of Faith' and 'Letter to a Christian Nation' by Sam Harris, atheists both, and to give some balance to it all- 'No God but God' by the devout Muslim Reza Aslan.

Dawkins talks about genes and irreducible complexity a lot. He also talks about religion as a form of child abuse. Sam Harris does- I don't really remember. It can't have been that specific.

Hitchens though goes after Islam. Of course, he goes after Christianity too, and all the rest. But Christianity et al seem a little wimpish compared to the extremities of fundamentalist Islam, as he presents it.

He lays out a case that Christianity effectively got defanged in the reformation. The texts got revised, the sermons demystified. I don't know a great deal about it, but when you look at Christianity today, though there are still plenty of mad idiots who'll do anything 'for God', the vast majority of Christian seem to have their heads screwed on not so completely wrong.

Though when I think of Christianity I tend to think of the meek Anglican religion I was semi-raised within. Not the head-cases in the American bible-belt. England seemed a very secular place to me growing up, and religion had no teeth to do much of anything- at least as I saw it.

Anyway. Hitchens goes after Islam. These are people who believe the text of their holy book the Koran is true word for word. Every single word is immutable, cast in stone direct from their god's mouth. Despite the fact that the language it's written in is massively open to interpretation.

It has to be the most unapologetically dogmatic faith on Earth. Even the pope changes his mind, issues apologies from time to time. But Islam cannot. Any acceptance that even one word was untrue could bring the whole thing crashing down. Or- it would just be labeled as 'Satanic verses'.

Hitchens talks about the moral cowardice of the West to face up to Islam and tell it to buck up its ideas. Instead, he says, the West gets afraid, of madmen who blow up skyscrapers and themselves for a chance at 40 virgins in 'the afterlife'.

It's powerful stuff. He's basically saying that Islam as a culture/meme as it stands now is inferior to the enlightenment values/culture of the Western world, simply because they are static and unable to advance. Islam demands complete belief in words some guy made up 1,500-odd years ago. Isn't that ridiculous?

Sensible people no longer even try to defend the Bible now. And if they do, they get shredded in reasoned debate. Al Sharpton against Christopher Hitchens wouldn't even tackle any of Hitchen's points about the Bible, because he must have known there was no way he could win. When you discredit one line as immoral, like a commandment to slay all the Malekites and take their land, who's to say they aren't all discreditable? Then what is left? The argument that the Bible teaches morals, and that without the Bible and God to back it up we'd all live in chaos without any form of morality, is itself shredded if we start saying- well, we only follow the good commandments in the Bible.

That's displaying an ability to judge moral acts from immoral acts, independant of the word of God. So clearly we are able to make our own moral discernments without God above or the book in hand.

Once that argument is made, and accepted, organized religion has little more than a shred of Deism left to stand on. "You can't disprove my amorphous, non-dogmatic God exists!"

Sure. But neither can I disprove the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Are you on a par with that?

And that according to Hitchens is the main problem with Islam. Any argument, discussion, satire, or debate about immoralities or inconsistencies in the Koran is considered blasphemy or hate-speech and stopped. Like the image of Muhammed, it is above reproach. So what can be done? How can these people of this faith get out from under the dogmatic dictates of a fictitious entity that allow for/mandate cruel discrimination against homosexuals, women, and unbelievers? How can they bring their holy book out into the light, air it out, and start thinking critically about which bits are really moral?

Hitchens says it won't be easy. He calls for a new enlightenment. He encourages people to step up, as he has done, as Salman Rushdie did before him, along with lots of others down the ages, and say to Islam, as well as to the Intelligent Design people, and to anyone else trying to paper over truth with ancient dogma- "Are you for real? Come on. Let's sit down and discuss this thing like rational adults."