Christopher Hitchens keeps the crowd awake at Temple Judea. Photo by Suzy Horgan

With the United States at war with Muslim fundamentalists abroad and Christian social conservatives exercising a great deal of influence on the domestic political scene, writer, journalist and television talk show pundit Christopher Hitchens has taken on the subject of religion in his new book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Published on May 1, the book and has already reached #3 on the New York Times bestsellers list and #2 on Amazon.com’s bestsellers list.

More than a thousand people came to hear the author at Temple Judea, 5500 Granada Blvd. in Coral Gables on May 17. He was joined by a Buddhist nun and academics in the fields of religious studies and spirituality.

Standing in front of the Ark and the Torah, Hitchens boldly said, “To hell with Abraham and his vile servile faith.” Religion, he said, “comes from the frightened childhood of our race; it was a search for knowledge and understanding at a time when there was no information.” He stated the obvious, that the sacred texts were written in the pre-scientific period where natural phenomena had to be explained through supernatural myths. “Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion,” he wrote in his book.

God Is Not Great covers a broad range of topics and time periods. For example, Hitchens writes about the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, calling the occasion it commemorates “an absolutely tragic day in human history.” According to him, Israel in 165 B.C. was occupied by worldly Hellenistic Jews strongly influenced by progressive Greek thinking. The Maccabees, while re-consecrating the Temple in Jerusalem, forcibly restored Mosaic fundamentalism, which he believes set the stage for anti-intellectual Christianity and Islam.

At the lecture, Hitchens discussed the political nature of religion. The idea that “without divine instruction” man would have no morality or ethics is “absurd,” he said. One should then surmise that before the Hebrews arrived at Mt. Sinai and received the 10 Commandments, no one knew murder, lying, theft, etc. were wrong. “They must have been terribly shocked to find out,” Hitchens said sarcastically. “You should have more self-respect than that,” he told the laughing audience.

He said the aspect of religion he finds most terrifying is its indulgence of “a wish for authority, a wish to be slaves.” According to him, the monotheistic God preaches servility and submission, subjects you to 24-hour surveillance and offers no freedom to question his absolute authority — these are the fundamental precepts of modern totalitarianism. He noted that the state, regardless of how powerful it is, can’t control you after death, but with religion, “when you die, the fun really begins.”

Hitchens believes great humanist and scientific minds should serve as our intellectual guides — men who challenged the church or synagogue, such as Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, 18th-century Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire or our Thomas Jefferson, or genius physicist Albert Einstein — all of whom he would put up against priests, bishops, rabbis and imams “with confidence and pride.”

British by birth, Hitchens enjoyed using the term “my fellow Americans.” He only recently became a citizen and spoke in praise of our traditional separation of church and state. “Sometimes I think you don’t know how lucky you are,” he said.

Hitchens does not believe the rhetoric of Christian groups claiming growing popularity, or their statistics, like one stating that 80 percent of Americans attend church on Sunday. There are “not enough churches in America to hold all the people who say they go there,” he said, noting that people often lie to pollsters.

The four speakers debating the author represented the three Abrahamic religions and Buddhism. Each said Hitchens’ book did not represent their respective faith accurately. Nathan Katz, Ph.D., director of the Center for the Study of Spirituality at FIU, said that misinformation spread about Judaism could lead to dangerous anti-Semitic ideas such as the infamous “blood-libel,” which states that Jews use human blood for arcane rituals.

Lama Karma Chotso, a Buddhist nun, said she had been a practicing Buddhist for 24 years, and that God Is Not Great’s representation of her religion was the “opposite of what I had been taught and what I had been practicing.”

The speakers also made the case that the texts and dogma of their religions were not to blame for evil, only man’s misinterpretation of them or failure to live up to their high ideals. Aisha Y. Musa, Ph.D., assistant professor of Islamic Studies at FIU, called this the “human element of the equation.” Daniel Alvarez, an FIU instructor of religious studies, was the most forceful of the speakers aside from Hitchens. He said movements such as secular Nazism were inspired by scientific naturalism that espouses social Darwinism, “might makes right, survival of the fittest, the strong should rule.”

Hitchens disagreed with the assertion that the texts themselves were not flawed. He said the instructions in their books were vile things “so revolting that no humanist could contemplate doing.” He spoke at great length about the barbaric human sacrifice God commanded Abraham to perform on his son Isaac, and also similarly negative ideas conveyed by Jesus and the violent Passion scene. Standard religious practices can be forms of psychological and physical child abuse, Hitchens said, citing the teaching about the concept of hell and circumcision, which he described as ritual genital mutilation. Citing the concept of the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception of Jesus Christ, he said Biblical texts were very negative about human sexuality and the female gender.

I’m “sick of hearing that Islam is a religion of peace. I’m fed up,” he said, eliciting great applause from the audience. He said terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah sell themselves entirely as warriors for Islam, urging members to kill Jews, Christians and infidels. He noted that these groups often have charitable wings that obscure other sinister aims, such as “the Nation of Islam, a racist crackpot sect, a cult,” which practices “prislam,” the recruitment of followers in prison.

A strong supporter of the Iraq war, Hitchens noted that Iraq had civilization long before Muhammad. That prophet’s death led to a war of secession, which created today’s Sunni-Shia split. “Why is it (Iraq) is now being turned into a nightmare, into a slum, into a wasteland? Why? Because Muslims cannot be restrained from murdering each other’s children,” he said.

Hitchens rhetorically asked where the peace-loving Muslim imams were when Saddam was committing genocide against Muslim Kurds, or more recently, when terrorists were bombing holy sites in Iraq. “Where is that fatwa, you tell me?” he said to continuing applause.

Hitchens was equally critical of Eastern religions, noting that Zen Buddhism was the official ideology of the Japanese military during World War II, and is currently the official religion of the military government in Burma. “Sri Lanka is a country now almost utterly ruined and disfigured by violence and repression,” he writes, stating that a Buddhist-Hindu conflict is behind this. He noted that we don’t usually think of Eastern “contemplative” religions in this way.

The Catholic Church sought an “accommodation” with the Nazis, writes Hitchens, and the two groups shared the basic principles of anti-Semitism and anti-Communism. “2000 years of preaching Christ killing,” he said of the Church, with the age-old God-killing charge being repudiated only in 1965.

Answering the charge that Nazism was a secular movement, he said that according to his research, 25 percent of Hitler’s SS units — which ran the concentration camps, killed millions and proudly wore the famous death’s-head emblem — were practicing, confessing Catholics. None was ever threatened with ex-communication by the church, he noted. However, Joseph Goebbels, high-ranking state propaganda minister, was excommunicated, but only because he married a Protestant.

“Hitler came from a lot of causes he’s not pointing his finger at,” said Rabbi Edwin C. Goldberg of Temple Judea. He told the SunPost that he had read two other recently published books critical of religion: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris. And, not surprisingly, he disagrees with many of their conclusions. “The bottom line is people don’t have an adult view of religion,” he said, noting that he respects Hitchens’ insights, but feels he over-focuses on negative aspects. Regarding the harshness of the author’s words, he said they were just “part of his shtick.”

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