Our book group finished reading Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. When I began reading it, I wanted to respond to all his arguments–something along the lines of “I agree with this,” “I disagree with that, and here’s why.”

This quickly became impossible, partly because his arguments were so consistently overstated and inflammatory. There is something about him that I still like. His sharp wit, I think. He can turn a clever phrase, for sure! It makes me like him.

He makes some great points with which I agree. We should all act morally, for example. Being “religious” (clearly and obviously) does not guarantee that one is moral, as we have seen by the extreme downfall of many religious leaders and people who claim a moral superiority. Similarly, being a-religious, or atheist, does not mean that a person is amoral. Absolutely, I agree.

It did not take long before I simply accepted the fact that his arguments are a response to fundamentalist, literalistic and extremist forms of religion. When he feels he needs to argue that atheists can have morals, he is arguing with people who think they don’t. That’s not me. I don’t believe that morals come from religion. I believe that morals come from culture and we project them into our religions.

What frustrated me, though, were his overstatements and his refusal to acknowledge exceptions to his arguments. For example, since all religion poisons, according to him, then any religious person doing a good thing is doing that good thing not because of their religion. Their religion has nothing to do with their goodness, he says.

And on the flip side, if any religious person does a bad thing, then they are doing it because of their religion, and not just because they are a bad or immoral person and not because they have badly twisted the true meaning of religion.

So Martin Luther King was good, Hitchens admits, but that had nothing to do with his Christianity. I must disagree! And I think MLK would disagree with that too.

Many of the things that Hitchens thinks are bad things I also think are bad things–like violence, torture, oppression, domination. And I agree that religion has been brought into the service of these sins and evils. I would like to address that.

But if we did away with all religion today, I believe that tomorrow we would still have all these evils. His explanation of causality is not believable to me. I would be much more convinced of Hitchens’ arguments if his book was about “How Fear Poisons Everything, even Religion.” Or maybe, “How Shame Poisons Everything.”

So I have moved on to reading a new book: A Question of Faith: An Atheist and a Rabbi Debate the Existence of God, by William E. Kaufman and Morton Shor. It seems to be a much better reasoned and more respectful dialogue. It’s written in the format of letters to each other and seems very accessible and readable. I will blog about it when I get a little further along.