The second chapter of Hitchens’ book is entitled “Religion Kills.” Well, in this world of hardscrabble Darwinism, nature red in tooth and claw, what doesn’t? Religion kills, but so does cancer, old age, hunting accidents, radiation from the sun, other predatory species, too much mayonnaise, and the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Actually, we need to take the wide-angle lens and admit that it is Evolution that kills.
There are two things that can be said in response to this second chapter of Hitchens’ book. The first is what was said in the last chapter — killing is bad? who says that? is there a reason we must listen to him? is it bad to not listen to him? But let us not become tiresome. We will return to flog this dead horse only when it tries to get up again, which is probably just a few pages away.
But the second response is to point out the logical problem with how Hitchens has arranged his thought experiment. Suppose his thesis was not that religion poisons everything, but rather that trousers poison everything. Since trousers are common enough, just like religion, it would not be much work at all for a person of Hitchens’ abilities to assemble one horrendous story after another of one atrocity after another, and all committed by men in trousers. See, trousers poison everything.
The problem here is immediatley seen in the availability of counterexamples. We betake ourselves to look at this society, and then that one, and all the men in those societies wear togas. And, sure enough, we find that all the same atrocities are being committed in these differently-appareled cultures. Maybe trousers don’t poison everything. Maybe men are a disgrace to trousers. For if trousers poisoned everything, one would think (naturally enough) that to get into a trouser-free zone would pretty much take care of the problem. But toga-men do all the same awful stuff. And then, so do loin-cloth men. Maybe togas don’t poison everything either. Maybe men are a disgrace to togas.
The subtitle of this book is “How Religion Poisons Everything.” And in this chapter, “Religion Kills,” Hitchens points to example after example of religious people behaving badly. And I, for one, don’t think he is making this stuff up. But for someone who bases an awful lot on reason, I think he needs to pay closer attention to what he is doing in the name thereof. His conclusion does not follow from the evidence being presented, not unless wet streets cause rain.
Perhaps Hitchens should take a step farther back and argue a much more plausible point, which is that “People Poison Everything.” Go back to our trouser example. If trousers were the problem, then getting rid of them should get rid of the basic problem (making all due allowance for societal inertia). In the same way, if religion is the toxic waste in the system, then purging it should deal with the problem. So, then, what did almost a century of religion-free societies (Soviet Union, Red China, and so on) teach us about all this? We had quite a few trips around the sun enjoying life to its fullest, now that religion (that which poisons everything) was banished and gone. But son of a gun, the atrocities sort of picked up speed. The “poison” was purged from the system but the patient was still flat on his back on the hospital bed with his tongue hanging out.
When you look at abominable theistic societies and abominable atheistic societies, the variables are probably not the thing you want to appeal to in order to account for the constant, horrific result. We need to look for the constant. What might that be? People. People poison everything.
There are two reasons why someone like Hitchens cannot make this obvious connection. The first is that he is a humanist. He appeals to the “elementary duty of a self-respecting human” (p. 28). To admit that people are corrupt in themselves, rather than corrupted from the outside by a very convenient bogey like “religion,” would be to admit a fundamental corruption in what is Hitchens’ functional deity. Man is basically good. Bad things come from other places, and other sources. This approach enables Hitchens to be as cynical as he wants about what is going on out there, while at the same time not blaspheming man’s essential goodness at the core.
And secondly, to admit that man is a sinner, clumps of sin all over his clod-hopping, mud-encrusted boots, is to admit that he is the one bringing the problems into everything else. But this is sounding too much like orthodox Christianity, and this is nothing other than an affirmation of a basic Christian truth. Man is a sinner, and he brings it into everything — into politics, into religion, into philanthrophy, into car sales, into professional sports, into wind surfing, into war, into painting, into Little League baseball. This is the trouble. People poison everything. Whereever we go, there we are.