“Religion Kills”
His point in this chapter is concentrated on multiplying religious acts of violence. The media has covered muslim aggression very well, and many condemn Islam because of it, but Hitchens expands that idea of violent zealots to include the most venerable Christianity. The Holocaust was predicted by Christianity’s ambiguous and often outright violent outburst against judaism. Worse, Hitchens recounts an episode of a similar treatment of fellow Christians. To say that one is a Croatian is to say that one is a Roman Catholic while saying that one is a Serb means to say that one is a Christian Orthodox. Here I quote Hitchens’:
“In the 1940’s, this a Nazi puppet state, set up in Croatia and enjoying the patronage of the Vatican, which naturally sought to exterminate all jews in the region but also undertook a campaign of forcible conversion directed at the other christian community. Tens of thousands of Orthodox Christians were either slaughtered or deported in consequence, and a vast concentration camp was set up near the town of Jasenovacs. So disgusting was the regime of General Ante Pavelic and his Ustashe party that even many German officers protested at having to be associated with it.”
And Hitchens goes on to discuss how a few decades later the shoe was found on the other foot. What is called “ethnic cleasing”, Hitchens observes, is in fact “religious cleaning”.
Now, he goes on to answer the imaginary counter, which basically associates religion with charity and in fact opposition to such genocides. But of course, he argues, you find the Christian slave-owner as well as Christian abolitionists. But he plays the averages. We all are human. Hitchens chalks such instances of moral behaviour to a common humanity. As he puts it:
“In all cases I have mentioned, there were those who protested in the name of religion and who tried to stand athwart the rising tide of fanaticism and the cult of death. I can think of a handful of priests and bishops and rabbis and imans who have put humanity ahead of their own sect or creed (…) But this is a compliment to humanism, not to religion.”
You can find admirable behaviour both from atheists and theist, but violent behaviours and crusades and inquisitions, in these, the strict sceptic, the strict atheist will not be found. This point was also made by Russell who was appalled by the Ku Klux Klan and Nazism.
On page 18 he tells us how Denis Prager “who is one of America’s better-known religious broadcasters. He challenge me in public to answer what he called a ‘straight yes/no question’, and I happily agreed. Very well, he said. I was to imagine myself in a strange city as the evening was comming on.Toward me I was to imagine that I saw a large group of men approching. Now-- would I feel safer, or less safe, if I was to learn that they were just comming over from a prayer meeting?”
Obviously Hitchens would feel much safer if they had not. But what do you think?