Mick Hartley

Slate have excerpts from Christopher Hitchens’ new book “God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion“.

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.

I can’t comment on Dawkins’ book, which I haven’t read, but it looks to be a good deal more readable than Daniel Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon“, which I abandoned through sheer tedium after a mere 50 pages.

Here’s more:

Islam when examined is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require. Thus, far from being “born in the clear light of history,” as Ernest Renan so generously phrased it, Islam in its origins is just as shady and approximate as those from which it took its borrowings. It makes immense claims for itself, invokes prostrate submission or “surrender” as a maxim to its adherents, and demands deference and respect from nonbelievers into the bargain. There is nothing—absolutely nothing—in its teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance and presumption.

Hmm – is that kind of talk legal nowadays? Surely that’s offensive to some people’s deeply held religious convictions.

And while in Hitchens mode, I missed this review of Ali Allawi’s “The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace” while I was away:

Without needing or wishing to soften any critique of post-invasion planning, I would propose that this analysis has a highly unsettling implication. Hell was coming to Iraq no matter what.

This point is undergirded by another one, which is that hell was already making considerable strides in Iraq in the decade before 2003. Again, Allawi’s cool analysis and careful evidence darkens this already black picture. All the crucial indices, from illiteracy to unemployment to the emigration of talent and skill, were rapidly heading south. Perhaps most ominously, the reaction of Saddam Hussein was to ratchet up religious and theocratic rhetoric and policy, broadcasting for jihad ’round the clock, engaging in a massive mosque-building program, and launching sporadic “morals” campaigns. Again, U.S. policy could hardly be indifferent to this distress and misery and demagogy, if only because the whole context was shaped by two largely American decisions. The first was to allow Saddam to remain in power after 1991 and to watch while he massacred the Shiites and Kurds, an action that Allawi rightly describes as “unforgivable.” The second was to impose sanctions, which, unduly prolonged, did far more damage to an already distraught society than they did to the ruthless and corrupt regime.

I think I could pass an examination in the failures of our post-2003 policy and even add a few observations from experience. But I have never been able to overcome the feeling that Iraq was our ward and responsibility one way or another, and that canceling or postponing an intervention would only have meant having to act later on, in conditions even more awful and dangerous than the ones with which we have become familiar.

I think it’s true that there was no plausible scenario after Saddam which wouldn’t have involved considerable bloodshed, and that many are now only too happy to be able to lay the blame for this on the US intervention. But of course that’s not an argument that’s going to convince anyone who was opposed to the intervention.