reaching out to the spiritually inclined
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.”