Christopher Hitchens was in his usual ebullient form this week at the Times/Intelligence2 debate "are we better off without religion?" Speaking for the motion were the heavy artillery of Richard Dawkins, A.C. Grayling and Hitchens. Speaking against and dodging the heavy shelling was Rabbi Julia Neuberger, Roger Scruton and Nigel Spivey. The debate is engaging stuff and mp3 or podcast files of the speeches can be found here.
Christopher Hitchens began by recalling a recent exchange in Colorado Springs with an evangelical broadcaster who insisted he answer the following question, and insisted he answered with a yes or a no:
You are to imagine yourself in a strange city, at night, without friends, would feel yourself to be safer or less safe if you saw a dozen men coming towards you in the dark, if you were to know they had recently come from a prayer meeting?
Hitchens replied that through his work he had been in that situation several times...in…Belfast…Bombay…Beirut…Belgrade…Baghdad and other places.
You can see where this is going already can’t you!
Hitchens said in Belfast, everything socially and economically has been retarded for at least half a century by sectarian warfare, people killing their neighbours on the basis of what type of Christian they were. That one of the few things the different churches agreed on is that children must be separated into different schools and not be educated alongside children of other beliefs. In Baghdad – the parties of god have the Iraqi people "in their jaws" killing off any process of transition to a democracy. Promoting a religious duty to blow up the mosques of other types of believer. In Beirut – the constitution defines citizens by faith...the president must always be a Christian, the speaker of the parliament a Shia, the vice president must always be a Sunni etc etc and just look at the consequences. In Belgrade there was the corrosive influence of faith in what happened in Bosnia. He talked of Bombay now Mumbai– a city nearly ruined by the sectarian partition of India
Hitchens was careful to say religion is not the sole cause of all these problems, but he posed a challenge: Who is not to say that the preaching of religion has not in all these cases gravely, deepened, poisoned and prolonged all these threats to civilisation?
Don't think that was the answer the evangelical broadcaster was expecting!
Comments