Christopher Hitchens on Religion
// June 19th, 2007 // Leadership Development
During the canonization of Mother Teresa in 2002 British columnist Christopher Hitchens was asked by the Vatican to testify against her. Author of “Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice” he was well prepared for the original role of “Devil’s Advocate” (advocatus diaboli), in which he claimed Theresa was a political opportunist who had adopted the guise of a saint in order to raise money to spread an extreme and aggressive version of Catholicism.
In the lecture below Hitchens presents the case for his latest book, “god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”, a title well representing his abrasive, atheistic anti-fascist stance. Arguments can be made that he is inappropriately inflammatory and insensitive in a cultural landscape that is fiercely volatile, but my larger problem is that he ignores the inner development of psychological/existential/spiritual awareness from which religion derives it’s energy yet so corrupts through institution. On the other hand his argument is humanistic, libertarian, informed, articulate and entertaining.
“the Pope having just repudiated limbo after a long struggle. The place where the souls of unbaptized children always went- apparently it was never there. Tell it no, but it’s serious, tell it to the parents of those children. I have met those people, the people who thought that’s where that poor kids had gone having died before they could breathe properly and not been let into heaven. That’s where they thought they were, so it was real to them. What characteristics is this to say oh it wasn’t really real enough, so we made that bit up. They can’t do this. It was real, it was a real place for those parents and for the brothers and sisters, of those children too they wept at the thought of where the little one had gone and to say, oh never mind. By the way we – we are wrong about this, but we are now ready to be, infallible all over again. This is disgusting and in the same week as he does this the Pope repeats, that we need to teach the children more about hell. Go back again to terrify the composure of young and the innocent with these horrifying stories told them by maladjusted elderly virgins.”
I wonder what the famously anti-ecclesiastical Voltaire would have replied to Hitchens? Perhaps,
“La superstition est à la religion ce que l’astrologie est à l’astronomie, la fille très folle d’une mère très sage. Ces deux filles ont longtemps subjugué toute la terre.”“Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.”
Love the Voltaire quote, very well said (I suppose Voltaire and ‘well said’ are practically synonyms anyways).
Voltaire is indeed the man. I think he gives us licence to borrow from his writings;
“What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbor’s, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.”