Okay, so the next chapter is Hitchens on health, to which health the religion of your choice is almost certainly hazardous.
We are only on the fourth chapter, and it is of average length, but the mistakes Hitchens makes are starting to accumulate, so it might take a little bit of extra time to get a front loader in here and clean this up.
The first problem is one mentioned aready. For Hitchens to point out all the problems in the world and blame them on “religion” is like writing a book attacking “medicine,” that well-meaning endeavor which has killed its untold millions. But to get this result we have to define medicine as “anything that comes, promising relief, in bottles or any other container.” That kind of categorization positively promises to blur vital distinctions, like the difference we might want to acknowledge that exists between penicillin and Cousin Bob’s Joo Joo Beans Cancer Therapy, three bucks a bottle. But Hitchens is on the offensive here. “Why make such distinctions? Why confound the issues? Whence this bigoted defense of ‘medicine?’ Are you denying that the chicken bones thrown in the air is sheer charlatanism?” Well, no . . .
The second issue, ironically, is Hitchens castigating religions for being obscurantist when it comes to simple, easy, and readily available cures for eradicable diseases like polio. He cites the example of some Muslim imams issuing a fatwa against the simple taking of some drops that would eradicate that disease completely. He emphasizes the needless suffering that “religion” has inflicted here. I take his point, although again, I am in the position of the penicillin advocate who finds himself called upon to defend the chicken bone treatment because both were administered during “doctor visits,” and Hitchens has written quite a strident book against “doctor visits.”
I am still glad he picked this argument — since religion poisons everything, let’s talk about DDT and malaria. Let’s talk about which religious group it was that succeeded in banning a substance that would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Was it the Vatican, or Muslim imams, or . . . sorry? Oh, it was secularists who in one of their periodic and recurring enviro-panics decided to consign countless thousands in the Third World to misery and death? But this wasn’t a religious bonehead move? Can we still count it, or does it have to go into another book?
Further, one of his examples of this religious obscurantism was the claim by some Roman Catholic officials who were out there saying that condoms were not really the hot stuff in preventing AIDS. Oh, tempora! Oh, mores!
“Would you care to see my video of the advice given by Cardinal Alfonso Lopez de Trujillo, the vatican’s president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, carefully warning his audience that all condoms are secretly made with many microscopic holes, through which the AIDS virus can pass? ((p. 45).
Well, let us keep this one simple, and not get into the extraneous issues. What size is the HIV virus, since we have all been exhorted to ask scientific questions? And what is the actual size (again, scientifically speaking) of the “mesh” that a condom provides? Condoms are designed to prevent the passage of the spermatazoon, and the HIV virus is 450 times smaller than the spermatazoon. And exactly how is this not like trying to keep mosquitos out of your yard with a chain link fence? But even if wrong, is this not a reasonable question? But Hitchens just waves the word science in our faces, expecting us to just shut up about it. If a cardinal raises the issue (which, it would seem, is a reasonable issue for science and reason to raise), Hitchens simply dismisses him as a “wicked” lunatic.
The third issue is sex itself. We were bound to get here sooner or later. It appears that religious folks are as uptight as it gets, and we all need to unzip a little. So we can really get the aforementioned AIDS crisis going, and give the scientists something to work on that is really worthy of their majestic powers. Actually, Hitchens doesn’t say anything like that, but he does say something every bit as silly. “The New Testament has Saint Paul expressing both fear and contempt for the female” (p. 54). It would have been nice for Hitchens to put a few references in there (3 Cor. 9:13; Hezekiah 3:16) so that we could at least know which verses he was misunderstanding. But, alas, he did not have time.
Hitchens does cite some Muslim travesties as evidence for his position, but even here, with such an inviting target, he misses it wide. Islam does have a problem with women enjoying sex, and the browbeating of women that goes on in the name of Allah does seem to me to indicate a deep-seated masculinist insecurity over sexual performance. But the way Hitchens refers to this is just risible.
“I simply laugh when I read the Koran, with its endless prohibitions on sex and its corrupt promise of infinite debauchery in the life to come” (p. 55).
Yeah, right. This, written about a religion which allows each Muslim male to have up to four wives, and as many slave girls as the proud owner of them can mount. This, written about a religion that awards faithful men at least three score and ten virgins in the paradise hereafter, not to mention sexual access to the cute little ganymede boys. Islam is all screwed up when it comes to sex, but the problem is not that the men aren’t getting any. Hardly. The problem is that their worship of raw power has turned their conception of everything sexual into some form of rape. And here is where Hitchens veers off into breathtaking naivete.
“The homicidal lunatics . . . of 9/11 were perhaps tempted by virgins, but it is far more revolting to contemplate that, like so many of their fellow jihadists, they were virgins” (p. 55).
Anybody who believes that these guys were virgins needs to be given a “time out” from public policy discourse for at least three weeks. We could give him some books to read during those three weeks, but we don’t really need to — there is material enough to refute Hitchens on this point from this very chapter.
And last, Hitchens has, on at least three occasions in this chapter, inveighed against a particular practice as engaged in by religious types, and then, within a page or so, he does the very same thing himself. Example numero uno.
“. . . those who preached hatred and fear and guilt and who ruined innumerable childhoods should have been thankful that the hell they preached was only one among their wicked falsifications, and that they were not sent to rot there” (p. 56).
And, then, next page, before he has had time even to catch his breath”
“Tertullian . . . was perhaps clever in going for the lowest common denominator and promising that one of the most intense pleasures of the afterlife would be endless contemplation of the tortures of the damned” (p. 57).
It appears from these two quotations taken together that Hitchens thinks that one of the only possible arguments against atheism is that he won’t be allowed to watch people like Tertullian burn.
A second example of this is when Hitchens faults Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, not so much for prose bad enough to make the back teeth ache, but rather for (presumably gleefully) looking forward to the bloodbath of Armageddon. Bad evangelicals. Julia Ward Howe gets the same treatment.
“One of the very many connections between religious belief and the sinister, spoiled, selfish childhood of our species is the repressed desire to see everything smashed up and ruined and brought to naught” (p. 57).
And so, what do we discover on the very next page? We have some billions of years to go yet, but even Hitchens cannot abstain from the glee that apparently afflicts all our species.
“At around that point, it will emulate millions of other suns and explosively mutate into a swollen ‘red giant,’ causing the earth’s oceans to boil and extinguishing all possibility of life in any form. No description by any prophet or visionary has even begun to picture the awful intensity and irrevocability of that moment” (p. 58).
The good news is that since this whole thing is a repression issue, Hitchens is probably not even aware of the jollies he got out of that paragraph.
Last example.
“Can it be a coincedence, then, that all religions claim the right to legislate in matters of sex?” (p. 53).
For those following one of my central objections to Hitchens, it would be closer to the mark to say that all human societies, religious or not, claim the right to legislate in matters of sex. This includes Hitchensville.
“But the conscription of the unprotected child for these purposes is something that even the most dedicated secularist can safely describe as sin” (p. 52).
Yeah, you can describe it as sin all right. You just can’t defend your position when asked about it. Why is it a sin?
In this section Hitchens is talking about an abuse of children that goes beyond sexual abuse, but let us limit our discussion to sexual abuse, just to keep ourselves focused on the central issue. Hitchens is not shy about telling us how he feels about this. “This revulsion is innate in any healthy person, and does not need to be taught” (p. 52). What we don’t know is why Hitchens-sentiment is the arbiter of what constitutes “any healthy person,” and why, since it does not need even to be taught, some people in San Francisco and the Boston diocese seemed never to have learned it. Imagine there’s no hell below us, it’s easy if you try, and this is true even if a man has ruined the childhoods of a thousand kids. Why is Hitchens-sentiment authoritative over the yearnings (quite powerful) of the president of the North American Man-Boy Love Association? And what does Hitchens-sentiment do when said president gives him the raspberry and heads off for another night of carnal relations? And what would Hitchens say if the man stopped giving him the raspberry, in order to ask a simple question — “Why is my desire for boys wrong? No god prohibited it, according to you, and your feelings are not my god, according to me.”
The strength of Hitchens’s feelings about this would seem to indicate that the answer to such a question would be an easy one. So what is it?