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I'm a slow reader and an even slower blogger. And I get easily distracted by other reading material like the big honkin' stack of Guitar Player back issues that my homie Bob gave me (not to mention my Bible). And did you really think I was going to read this over the holiday weekend? In other words, still slowly slogging through Hitchens' God Is Not Great.

Last I recall I was in the chapter in which the Author sings the virtues of pigs, and how certain religions' dietary prohibtions thereof serve as incontravertible evidence that God doesn't exist (it's so simple, how could I not see it before?).

But a word on the previous chapter, "Religion Kills." Confining himself exclusively to cities and countries around the world that begin with the letter "B," (Belfast, Belgrade, Bosnia, Baghdad...) Hitchens gives example after example of how individuals of different faiths (or denominations) have done horrible things to each other. And at the end of each example (all of which are truly abominable, by the way) he recites the mantra, "Religion poisons everything."

Leaving aside for a moment the question of atheism's track record (100 million dead at the hands of Communists in the 20th century alone, according to the Black Book of Communism, Hitler's Holocaust, etc.), the claim that religion poisons "everything" is absurd on its face. Does Hitchens consider poisonous the numerous institutions of higher learning throughout this land that were founded by people of faith--among them Harvard, Princeton, and Yale? How about all of the hospitals that were and continue to be founded by faith-based organizations? How about Alcoholics Anonymous, which contains among its twelve steps the following:

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

I also noticed something that Hitchens hints at in the first chapter, and it will be interesting to see how this plays out later: He suggests that Dietrich Bonhoffer was less a christian and more of a humanist, which (it is implied) prompted his courageous and altrustic conspirings against Hitler. Aha. So when christians do good things, they're not christians, but humanists. I wonder what atheists who do bad things are called...

Finally, I find myself having to ask why a passionate Darwinist like Hitchens should recoil in horror at the violence that dogmatists commit against each other, or against the non-faithful. In all cases, is this not natural selection at work? Is this not the strong weeding out the weak, whether by the jihadist cutting the foreign journalist's throat, or the Israeli fighter jet cutting the jihadist to shreds, or the Irish Protestants and Catholics deciding once and for all who God likes best, or the imbecillic suicide bomber blasting himself to smithereens? Should not Hitchens be cheering on the human animal's brutish refining of its gene pool?