Stupid, and proud of it

In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind old men as guides.  — Heinrich Heine

god is not Great
How Religion Poisons Everything
by Christopher Hitchens

REVIEW
Through centuries of living, learning, experimenting, experiencing, innovating and gaining vast knowledge, man has evolved to the next level. Today we are guided by our conscience and act with humanity; we no longer are bound by “one book”, rather we have many books to choose from for any aspect of our lives.

Hitchens writes: “Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind … and the soul. … Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago, … the devotions of today are the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness.”

“We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. … religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.”

This book is about rational thought and free inquiry verses faith, fear and institutionalized totalitarianism of religion; it is about conventional religion based on belief in the supernatural versus humanism rooted in rationality and the laws of nature; and it is about freethinkers versus the closed mindedness of the faithful. It is about personal responsibility and choice versus the inevitability of destiny. It also asks whether god created man or man created god.

Hitchens writes: “… here is the point about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.”

He writes: “God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods, and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization. … Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemer or gurus actually said or did. … the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know everything. … the sheer arrogance to tell us that we already have all the essential information we need. Such stupidity, combined with such pride, should be enough on its own to exclude “belief” from the debate. The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.”

“There is no need for us to gather every day, or seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, … we do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form of one of man’s most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no spot on earth is or could be “holier” than another: to the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock.

I leave it to the faithful to burn each other’s churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can always be relied upon to do. … I now know enough about all religions to know that I would always be an infidel at all times in all places.”

Through out the history, religion has tried to block or discredit science and knowledge, and at times, it has caused pain, suffering and death of the faithful while retarding the forward march of the science in their midst.

Hitchens writes: “In 2005, in Nigeria … a group of Islamic religious figures issued a fatwa that declared the polio vaccine to be a conspiracy by the United States against the Muslim faith. The drops were designed, said the mullahs, to sterilize the true believers. Their intention and effect was genocidal. Within months, polio was back; …

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 microscopic holes, through which the AIDS virus can pass? … Consider the damage such a dogma has caused. …

Bishop of Rio de Janeiro, Rafael Llano Cifuentes, told his congregation in a sermon that “the church is against condom use. Sexual relations between a man and a woman have to be natural. I have never seen a little dog using condom during sexual intercourse.” Senior clerical figures in several countries-Cardinal Obando y Bravo of Nicaragua, the archbishop of Nairobi in Kenya, Cardinal Emmanuel Wamala of Uganda-have all told their flocks that condoms transmit AIDS.”

“The attitude of religion to medicine, like the attitude of religion to science, is always necessarily problematic and very often necessarily hostile. … science and medicine, .. have a tendency to break religion’s monopoly, and have been fiercely resisted for that reason. … Plagues of antiquity were held to be punishment from the gods, which did much to strengthen the hold of the priesthood and much to encourage the burning of the infidels and heretics who were thought to be spreading disease by witchcraft or else poisoning the wells. … The human papillomavirus (HPV) has long been known as a sexually transmitted infection that, at its worst, can cause cervical cancer in woman. A vaccine is now available … not to cure this malady but to immunize women against it. But there are forces in the Bush administration who oppose the adoption of this measure on the grounds that it fails to discourage premarital sex. To accept the spread of cervical cancer in the name of god is no different, morally or intellectually, from sacrificing these women on a stone alter and thanking the deity for giving us the sexual impulse and then condemning it.”

In chapter seven of his book, titled Revelation: The Nightmare of the “Old” Testament, Hitchens deals with how god contacted unlettered individuals, randomly, in the Middle East to give them his divine instructions as unalterable laws!

On the Ten Commandments (the Decalogue), the tale told in the book of Exodus, Hitchens writes: “The first three are all variations of the same one, in which god insists on his own primacy and exclusivity, … including dire warning that the sins of fathers will be visited on their children “even unto the third and fourth generation.” Then the observance of a holy Sabbath day, “Honor thy father and thy mother”, Only then come the four famous “shall nots”, which flatly prohibit killing, adultery, theft, and false witness. Finally, there is a ban on covetousness, forbidding the desire for “thy neighbor’s house, manservant, maidservant, ox, ass, wife and other chattel.”

“It would be harder to find an easier proof that religion is man made. There is first, monarchial growling about respect and fear, accompanied by a stern reminder of omnipotence and limitless revenge, … then a sharp reminder to keep working and only to relax when absolutist says so. One can tell that this is man-made product … because it throws in “wife” along with other property, animal, human, and material, of the neighbor.”

I strongly recommend this book.

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Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School. He is the author of numerous books; he was named number five on a list of the “Top 100 Public Intellectuals” by Foreign Policy

and Britain’s Prospect.

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