Religion is a Mental Illness

Q: As a Sufi Muslim, I'm very ruffled by the title of your book. Did you have to settle for the literal negation of Allahu Akbar (i.e. God is NOT Great)?

Christopher Hitchens: Yes.

All religions are wrong in the same way, in that they privilege faith over reason, but they’re not all equally bad in the same way all the time. I mean, if I had been writing in the 1930s, I might certainly have said that the Catholic religion was the most dangerous religion in the world, because of its open alliance with fascism and anti-Semitism, the damage from that our culture has never recovered and never will. But at the moment, it's very clear to me, the most toxic form that religion takes is the Islamic form.

The horrible idea of wanting to end up with Sharia, with a religion-governed state (a state of religious law), and that the best means of getting there is jihad, holy war, and that Muslims have a special right to feel aggrieved enough to demand this I think is absolute obscene wickedness, and I think their religion is nonsense in its entirety.

God speaks to some illiterate merchant warlord in Arabia? And he’s able to write this down perfectly, and it contains the answers to all human-- don't waste my time! It's bullshit!

Also, that God speaks-- the Archangel Gabriel speaks only Arabic.

All religions claim to be revealed truth, but Islam rather dangerously says, ours is the last and final one. There can't be anymore after this. This is God's last word.

Now, that's straight away a temptation to violence and intolerance, and if you note, it's a temptation they seem quite willing to fall for.

Every Allahu Akbar reminds people that we are in a very serious struggle with a very depraved religion.

"With a necessary part of its collective mind, religion looks forward to the destruction of the world. By this I do not mean it "looks forward" in the purely eschatological sense of anticipating the end. I mean, rather, that it openly or covertly wishes that end to occur. Perhaps half aware that its unsupported arguments are not entirely persuasive, and perhaps uneasy about its own greedy accumulation of temporal power and wealth, religion has never ceased to proclaim the Apocalypse and the day of judgment."

-- Christopher Hitchens, “God is Not Great”

"The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species."

-- Christopher Hitchens, "God Is Not Great" (2007)

“There would be no churches if humanity had not been afraid of the weather, the dark, the plague, the eclipse and all manner of other things now easily explicable.”

-- Christopher Hitchens

On this much-discussed occasion, Muhammad was seeking to conciliate some leading Meccan poly-theists and in due course experienced a “revelation” that allowed them after all to continue worshipping some of the older local deities.

It struck him later that this could not be right and that he must have inadvertently been “channeled” by the devil, who for some reason had briefly chosen to relax his habit of combating monotheists on their own ground. (Muhammad believed devoutly not just in the devil himself but in minor desert devils, or djinns, as well.)

It was noticed even by some of his wives that the Prophet was capable of having a “revelation” that happened to suit his short-term needs, and he was sometimes teased about it.

We are further told—on no authority that need be believed—that when he experienced revelation in public he would sometimes be gripped by pain and experience loud ringing in his ears. Beads of sweat would burst out on him, even on the chilliest of days.

Some heartless Christian critics have suggested that he was an epileptic (though they fail to notice the same symptoms in the seizure experienced by Paul on the road to Damascus), but there is no need for us to speculate in this way.

It is enough to rephrase David Hume’s unavoidable question. Which is more likely—that a man should be used as a transmitter by god to deliver some already existing revelations, or that he should utter some already existing revelations and believe himself to be, or claim to be, ordered by god to do so?

As for the pains and the noises in the head, or the sweat, one can only regret the seeming fact that direct communication with god is not an experience of calm, beauty, and lucidity.

If you see something apparently involving suspension of the laws of nature, shall we say: the Sun is standing still so Joshua can win his battle? Or the raising of Jarius' daughter, or even my favorite miracle, the turning of the water into wine at Cana, attribute to the Hellonistic influence that still persisted in Palestine at that time. You still have to ask yourself a question: Which is more probable? That the laws of Physics or nature have been suspended, by the way in my favor, or that I'm under misapprehension?

Everyone has to ask themselves that question. That's if they saw it themselves. If they take it as a report, issued and filtered through dozens of other non-eye witnesses and corrupt text down the years, then I would think anyone who says they think of the resurrection as a historic fact is advertising a willingness to believe in absolutely anything.

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What does Christianity say? Ah, those laws can be suspended, and in your favor too, if you make the right prayers and propitiations and sacrifices. It can be that a virgin can conceive, a dead body can walk again, your leprosy can be cured, the blind can see. NONSENSE!

It's not moral lo lie to children! It's not moral to lie to ignorant uneducated people and tell them that if they will only believe nonsense they can be saved. It's immoral!

The totalitarian concept of the afterlife. The hideous idea doesn't even occur in the New Testament, excuse me, doesn't occur even in the violent, rape and genocide filled books of the Jewish bible. There's no punishment of the dead. When god has destroyed your tribe and had your virgins and your children murdered in front of you, and had your flocks and herds scattered and so on, and you also fall down to a bronze sword, he's done with you. The earth can close over you. That's it. You tangled with the wrong tribe, the one he favored.

Not until gentle Jesus, meek and mild, are you told: -- If you don't make the right propitiations you can depart into everlasting fire -- One of the most wicked ideas ever preached, and one that's ruined the lives and peace of mind of many, many children preached to them by vicious, child hating old men and women, in the name of this ghastly cult, which we're met here to discuss tonight. I don't need 2 minutes to finish with this religion. But thanks.

I have a moral challenge on this point: Answer me if you think the morality comes from the supernatural, and will require celestial dictatorship permission for it. Name me a moral action committed by a believer, or a moral statement or an ethical statement uttered by one that could not been made or uttered by a non-believer.

I've asked this in a number of venues and forums now, I'm gonna keep on asking it. I've not yet had an answer.

If I were to ask anyone in this room, however: Could they name a wicked action performed or a vile statement made by someone, attributable only to their religious faith, there isn't a single person here who would have to hesitate for a second in discovering what that was, and saying it.

Why is it incompatible with knowledge and science is for this reason: We calculate that the human species, Homo sapiens, has been around now, Carl Sagan thought perhaps 200.000 years, I would say for simplicity 100.000, not more nor less. In order to believe the Christian message you have to believe this: For those hundred thousand years people were born, died, usually, many of them in child birth, either the mother or the child, at life expectancy perhaps 20 years, 25, died of microorganisms they didn't know existed. Genesis doesn't mention them because the people who write Genesis don't know there are microorganisms.

Earthquakes would have been terrifying. Tsunamis, volcanoes, mysterious events. War, famine superimposed on this. You can all fill out this picture for yourselves, I'm sure. That was our life.

For tens of thousands of years, on and on it went. Maybe a gradual upward curve of a sort. We seem to have made some progress very painfully, and with infinite suffering and labor, and with our solidarity still intact.

Now, here's what you have to believe: You have to believe that Heaven watched that for 98,000 years, and after 98,000 years decided 2,000 yrs ago, it may be time to intervene. And the best way of doing that would be to have a filthy human sacrifice in a very remote part of Palestine. And the news of this has still not penetrated to the rest of the world and I don't think will be believed when it does.

And isn't believed by me, and can't be believed by a thinking person.

Thank you.