Live From BEA:
Hitchens At War with Religion
By Lynn Garrett -- Publishers Weekly, 6/2/2007 12:27:00 PM
Christropher Hitchens brought the anti-religion message that he's already turned into a bestselling book to BEA today, telling the audience "I despise religion. I want there to be a war on it."
Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great (Twelve) was interviewed by Jeffery Sheler, contributing editor to U.S. News & World Report and the author of Believers: A Journey into Evangelical America (Viking, 2006) for BEA’s Upfront & Unscripted series. Hitchens reiterated the argument of his book—that religion arose out of human ignorance. "Where religion ends, philosophy begins, just as alchemy became chemistry and astrology became astronomy." Religion deserves our attention, Hitchens said, as "the most important falacious explanation for life." Asked by Sheler why he wrote the book, and why now, Hitchens said, "It was my hope to be of some heart to the movement of unbelievers in this country, who are not the tiny minority that it is assumed." He admiringly cited recent books on the topic by Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, and said, "I am honored to ride their coattails." Hitchens has been touring the country, debating clergy of all faiths and drawing what he called sizable, positive audiences "who are probably discovering for the first time that they are not the only atheist in town." He noted that some who have criticized his book in print have refused to debate him. "Stephen Prothero [Religious Literacy] refused point-blank, and when I get round to it I’ll give him a smack." He said the most consistent response to his book was that the abuses of religion he cites were carried out by extremists, but, he said, "fanaticism is always latent in religion." He also asserted that "religious people don’t really believe what they say they believe." Sheler said many of Hitchens’s critics have accused him of caricaturing religious people. Hitchens enumerated the basic tenets of Christianity and insisted that almost no Christian believes them all, but Sheler said, "There are some 60 million people in this country who do believe all of those things."Hitchens gave evangelicals credit for their work in Darfur and North Korea, and against slavery around the world. Sheler asked, "Then how can you say religion poisons everything?" Hitchens responded, "I have challenged anyone to come up with a moral action or statement that could not also have been taken by an atheist." Hitchens has been called an "atheist evangelist," Sheler noted, and while rejecting the terminology, Hitchens said he was proud to join Harris, Dennett and Dawkins, calling them "the three horsemen of the counter-apocalypse."
