If the intended reader of this book should want to go beyond disagreement with
its author and try to identify the sins and deformities that animated him to
write it (and I have certainly noticed that those who publicly affirm
charity and compassion and forgiveness are often inclined to take this
course), then he or she will not just be quarrelling with the unknowable and
ineffable creator who – presumably – opted to make me this way. They will be
defiling the memory of a good, sincere, simple woman, of stable and decent
faith, named Mrs Jean Watts.
It was Mrs Watts’s task, when I was a boy of about 9 and attending a school on
the edge of Dartmoor, in southwestern England, to instruct me in lessons
about nature, and also about scripture. She would take me and my fellows on
walks, in an especially lovely part of my beautiful country of birth, and
teach us to tell the different birds, trees, and plants from one another.
The amazing variety to be found in a hedgerow; the wonder of a clutch of eggs
found in an intricate nest; the way that if the nettles stung your legs (we
had to wear shorts) there would be a soothing dock leaf planted near to
hand: all this has stayed in my mind, just like the “gamekeeper’s museum,”
where the local peasantry would display the corpses of rats, weasels, and
other vermin and predators, presumably supplied by some less kindly deity.
At later lessons we would be given a printed slip of paper entitled “Search
the Scriptures,” which was sent to the school by whatever national authority
supervised the teaching of religion. (This, along with daily prayer
services, was compulsory and enforced by the state.) The slip would contain
a single verse from the Old or New Testament, and the assignment was to look
up the verse and then to tell the class or the teacher, orally or in
writing, what the story and the moral was.
I used to love this exercise, and even to excel at it so that (like Bertie
Wooster) I frequently passed “top” in scripture class. It was my first
introduction to practical and textual criticism.
However, there came a day when poor, dear Mrs Watts overreached herself.
Seeking ambitiously to fuse her two roles as nature instructor and Bible
teacher, she said: “So you see, children, how powerful and generous God is.
He has made all the trees and grass to be green, which is exactly the colour
that is most restful to our eyes. Imagine if instead, the vegetation was all
purple, or orange, how awful that would be.”
And now behold what this pious old trout hath wrought. I liked Mrs Watts: she
was an affectionate and childless widow who had a friendly old sheepdog that
really was named Rover, and she would invite us for sweets and treats after
hours to her slightly ramshackle old house near the railway line. If Satan
chose her to tempt me into error he was much more inventive than the subtle
serpent in the Garden of Eden.
However, I was frankly appalled by what she said. My little anklestrap sandals
curled with embarrassment for her. At the age of 9 I had not even a
conception of the argument from design, or of Darwinian evolution as its
rival, or of the relationship between photosynthesis and chlorophyll.
I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority,
that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong in just two sentences.
The eyes were adjusted to nature, and not the other way about.
I must not pretend to remember everything perfectly, or in order, after this
epiphany, but in a fairly short time I had also begun to notice other
oddities. Why, if God was the creator of all things, were we supposed to
“praise” him so incessantly for doing what came to him naturally?
This seemed servile, apart from anything else. If Jesus could heal a blind
person he happened to meet, then why not heal blindness?
What was so wonderful about his casting out devils, so that the devils would
enter a herd of pigs instead? That seemed sinister: more like black magic.
With all this continual prayer, why no result? Why did I have to keep
saying, in public, that I was a miserable sinner?
Why was the subject of sex considered so toxic? These faltering and childish
objections are, I have since discovered, extremely commonplace, partly
because no religion can meet them with any satisfactory answer. But another,
larger one also presented itself. (I say “presented itself” rather than
“occurred to me” because these objections are, as well as insuperable,
inescapable.) The headmaster, who led the daily services and prayers and
held the Book, and was a bit of a sadist and a closeted homosexual (and whom
I have long since forgiven because he ignited my interest in history and
lent me my first copy of P. G. Wodehouse), was giving a nononsense talk to
some of us one evening.
“You may not see the point of all this faith now,” he said. “But you will one
day, when you start to lose loved ones.” Again, I experienced a stab of
sheer indignation as well as disbelief.
Why, that would be as much as saying that religion might not be true, but
never mind that, since it can be relied upon for comfort. How contemptible.
There still remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that
it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of
this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the
maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous
sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.
I do not think it is arrogant of me to claim that I had already discovered
these four objections (as well as noticed the more vulgar and obvious fact
that religion is used by those in temporal charge to invest themselves with
authority) before my boyish voice had broken. I am morally certain that
millions of other people came to very similar conclusions in very much the
same way, and I have since met such people in hundreds of places, and in
dozens of different countries.
Many of them never believed, and many of them abandoned faith after a
difficult struggle. Some of them had blinding moments of unconviction that
were every bit as instantaneous, though perhaps less epileptic and
apocalyptic (and later more rationally and more morally justified) than Saul
of Tarsus on the Damascene road. And 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, openmindedness, and the pursuit
of ideas for their own sake.
We do not hold our convictions dogmatically. We are not immune to the lure of
wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find
that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and
Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical
morality tales of the holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains the
mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.
We do not believe in heaven or hell, yet no statistic will ever find that
without these blandishments and threats we commit more crimes of greed or
violence than the faithful. (In fact, if a proper statistical inquiry could
ever be made, I am sure the evidence would be the other way.) We are
reconciled to living only once, except through our children, for whom we are
perfectly happy to notice that we must make way, and room. We speculate that
it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short
and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not
worse.
We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion.
And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true – that 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.
Most important of all, perhaps, we infidels do not need any machinery of
reinforcement. There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven
days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to
grovel and wallow in our unworthiness. We atheists 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, we can
counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or the
gallery to another, or to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of
truth or beauty.
Some of these excursions to the bookshelf or the lunch or the gallery will
obviously, if they are serious, bring us into contact with belief and
believers, from the great devotional painters and composers to the works of
Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides and Newman. These mighty scholars may have
written many evil things or many foolish things, and been laughably ignorant
of the germ theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the
solar system, let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there
are no more of them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow.
Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time
ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism, as
did, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor hanged by the Nazis
for his refusal to collude with them. We shall have no more prophets or
sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only
the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming
point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness.
While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way (one might cite
Pascal) and some of it is dreary and absurd – here one cannot avoid naming
C. S. Lewis – both styles have something in common, namely the appalling
load of strain that they have to bear.
How much effort it takes to affirm the incredible! The Aztecs had to tear open
a human chest cavity every day just to make sure that the sun would rise.
Monotheists are supposed to pester their deity more times than that,
perhaps, lest he be deaf. How much vanity must be concealed – not too
effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of
a divine plan? How much self-respect must be sacrificed in order that one
may squirm continually in an awareness of one’s own sin? How many needless
assumptions must be made, and how much contortion is required, to receive
every new insight of science and manipulate it so as to “fit” with the
revealed words of ancient man-made deities?
How many saints and miracles and councils and conclaves are required in order
first to be able to establish a dogma and then – after infinite pain and
loss and absurdity and cruelty – to be forced to rescind one of those
dogmas? 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 civilisation.
The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most
devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree
on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did. Still
less can they hope to tell us the “meaning” of later discoveries and
developments that were, when they began, either obstructed by their
religions or denounced by them. And yet – the believers still claim to know!
Not just to know, but to know everything. Not just to know that god exists,
and that he created and supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know
what “he” demands of us – from our diet to our observances to our sexual
morality. In other words, in a vast and complicated discussion where we know
more and more about less and less, yet can still hope for some enlightenment
as we proceed, one faction – itself composed of mutually warring factions –
has 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. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and,
like all farewells, should not be protracted.
The argument with faith is the foundation and origin of all arguments, because
it is the beginning – but not the end – of all arguments about philosophy,
science, history, and human nature. It is also the beginning – but by no
means the end – of all disputes about the good life and the just city.
Religious faith is, precisely because we are still--evolving creatures,
ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our
fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other.
For this reason, I would not prohibit it even if I thought I could. Very
generous of me, you may say. But will the religious grant me the same
indulgence? I ask because there is a real and serious difference between me
and my religious friends, and the real and serious friends are sufficiently
honest to admit it. I would be quite content to go to their children’s bar
mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to “respect” their belief
that the Koran was dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate
merchant, or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations.
And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the
polite reciprocal condition – which is that they in turn leave me alone. But
this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing. As I write these words, and
as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your
and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human
attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything.
© Christopher Hitchens 2007 Extracted from God is not Great, by
Christopher Hitchens, published by Atlantic Books on June 10 at £16.99.
Available from BooksFirst at £15.29, free p&p. Call 0870 1608080 or
visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
When I became an atheist
My parents did not try to impose any religion: I was probably fortunate in
having a father who had not especially loved his strict Baptist/Calvinist
upbringing, and a mother who preferred assimilation – partly for my sake –
to the Judaism of her forebears. I now know enough about all religions to
know that I would always be an infidel at all times and in all places, but
my particular atheism is a Protestant atheism. It is with the splendid
liturgy of the King James Bible and the Cranmer prayer book – liturgy that
the fatuous Church of England has cheaply discarded – that I first disagreed.
When my father died and was buried in a chapel overlooking Portsmouth – the
same chapel in which General Eisenhower had prayed for success the night
before D-Day in 1944 – I gave the address from the pulpit and selected as my
text a verse from the epistle of Saul of Tarsus, later to be claimed as
“Saint Paul”, to the Philippians (chapter 4, verse 8): “Finally, brethren,
whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things
are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely,
whatsoever things are of good report: if there be any virtue, and if there
be any praise, think on these things.”
I chose this because of its haunting and elusive character, which will be with
me at the last hour, and for its essentially secular injunction, and because
it shone out from the wasteland of rant and complaint and nonsense and
bullying which surrounds it.
