Reaction to Delusions

The rather petulant subtitle that Christopher Hitchens has given his (rather petulantly titled) God is Not Great is How Religion Poisons Everything. Naturally one would not expect him to have squandered any greater labor of thought on the dust jacket than on the disturbingly bewildered text that careens so drunkenly across its pages - reeling up against a missed logical connection here, steadying itself against a historical error there, stumbling everywhere over all those damned conceptual confusions littering the carpet - but one does still have to wonder how he expects any reflective reader to interpret such a phrase. Does he really mean precisely everything? Would that apply, then - confining ourselves just to things Christian - to ancient and medieval hospitals, leper asylums, orphanages, almshouses, and hostels? To the golden rule, "Love thine enemies," "Judge not lest ye be judged," prophetic admonitions against oppressing the poor, and commands to feed the clothe and comfort those in need? To the music of Palestrina and Bach, Michelangelo's Pieta, "ah! bright wings," San Marco's mosaics, the Bible of Amiens, and all that gorgeous blue stained glass at Chartres? To the abolitionist movement, the civil rights movement, and contemporary efforts to liberate Sudanese slaves? And so on and so on? Surely it cannot be the case that, if only purged of the toxin of faith, these things would be even better than they are; were it not for faith, it seems fairly obvious, most of them would have no existence at all. And since none of these things would seem to fall outside the general category of "everything," it must be that Hitchens means (assuming he means anything at all) that they fall outside the more specific category of "religion." This would, at any rate, be in keeping with one of the rhetorical strategies especially favored in New Atheist circles: one labels anything one dislikes - even if it is found in a purely secular setting - "religion" (thus, for example, all the twentieth-century totalitarianisms are "political religions" for which secularists need take no responsibility), while simultaneously claiming that everything good, in the arts, morality, or any other sphere - even if it emerges within an entirely religious setting - has only an accidental association with religious belief and is really, in fact, common human property (so, for example, the impulse toward charity will doubtless spring up wherever an "enlightened: society takes root). By the same token, every injustice that seems to follow from a secularist principle is obviously an abuse of that principle, while any evil that comes wrapped in a cassock is unquestionably an undiluted expression of religion's very essence.

- David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions