[lbo-talk] reaching out to the spiritually inclined

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Wed Apr 4 09:03:32 PDT 2007


New York Post [Page Six] - April 4, 2007

Religious Read

THEY don't call him Christopher "Hellbound" Hitchens for nothing. The heretic who attacked Mother Teresa in "Missionary Position" is at it again with "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," hitting bookstores next month.

The jeremiad, reports The Post's Kyle Smith, is a merciless attack on every faith - dryly called "ecumenical" by its editor, Jonathan Karp, who is making it the second title in his new imprint, named 12 because it publishes only one book a month.

"Religion has retarded the development of civilization," writes Hitchens, who calls Saint Augustine "a self-centered fantasist and an earth-centered ignoramus" and Mel Gibson "a fascist and ham actor [who] adheres to a crackpot and schismatic sect, and has stated that it is a pity that his own dear wife is going to hell because she does not accept the correct sacraments."

But the Hitch is just getting warmed up.

* On God: " 'God is in the details?' He isn't in ours, unless his yokel creationist fans wish to take credit for his clumsiness, failure and incompetence."

* On the Koran: "I simply laugh when I read the Koran, with its endless prohibitions on sex and its corrupt promise of infinite debauchery in the life to come."

* On Islam: "A mask for a very deep and probably justifiable insecurity . . . not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, there is nothing - absolutely nothing - in its teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance."

* On creationism and intelligent design: "The inculcation of compulsory stupidity."

* On Gandhi: "A fakir and guru" whose belief in primitive farm-based living meant that "millions of people would have starved to death if his advice had been followed."

* On Billy Graham: "His absurd [post-9/11] sermon made the claim that all the dead were now in paradise and would not return to us even if they could."

* On the Dalai Lama: "A hereditary king appointed by heaven itself. How convenient!"

* On Moses: "Commandingly authoritarian and bloody-minded" and given to "genocidal incitements."

Hitchens, who says he was once mistaken for the god "Sai Baba" in Sri Lanka, writes, "If I am hit by a bus on the day this book is published, there will certainly be people who will say it was no accident."



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list