The Ideas Guy
Richard Handler
Move over Moses, Christopher Hitchens's new commandments
Last Updated: Tuesday, June 9, 2009 | 2:56 PM ET
By Richard Handler CBC News
The Royal Ontario Museum is an appropriate spot for a speech by an atheist. A treasure trove of natural history, the museum houses a vast collection of fossils.
The skulls of dinosaurs, suspended in time, bite into the air, to the delight of generations of schoolchildren.
So when one of the high priests of the New Atheism shows up to give a talk you can say he's in the right place: evolution's cathedral (in the core of Toronto's high-end shopping district).
Christopher Hitchens (Christian Witkin/McClelland & Stewart) Indeed, he looked right at home in a beige suit, before a microphone: Christopher Hitchens, the British-born, master scold, who has made a career of daring insults.
But unlike some master insulters, such as the right-wing Anne Coulter, for example, Hitchens is both clever and serious, while ranging over an immense ideological territory.
He's scolded Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger and old friends on the left who he angered with his support for the Iraq war. (Hitchens now wears a Kurdish flag pin in his label.)
He also disdains Islamist suicide bombers and fervid Israeli settlers, sometimes in the same sentence. Moral equivalence is one of his highly-evolved debating tricks.
Move over, Moses
So there he was, the author of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, speaking before a packed house on the occasion of the ROM's upcoming show on The Dead Sea Scrolls.
Hitchens's subject was the Ten Commandments and he was taking the occasion to rewrite and edit them, with no apologies to Moses or, for that matter, the Lord, a human fiction, as Hitchens sees Him.
Hitchens can be a polite man. But like those nearby dinosaurs, he never hesitates to bite.
Right off the top, he chastised William Thorsell, head of the ROM, for going on too long with his opening remarks and poaching on Hitchens's topic.
I have seen Hitchens on the web call people, or their remarks, stupid. His politeness goes only so far. He is hair-trigger ferocious.
Celebrity atheist
It is an irony, perhaps, that a man who hates religion — yes, hate is a strong word, but accurate — has devoted followers himself. Along with fellow non-believers Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, he is part of the triumvirate of today's atheist gurus.
A publicist from the ROM told me that a man came all the way from Halifax to see Hitchens at this sold-out event. Museum staff were so touched, they found him a seat.
It is not the first time that this kind of pilgrimage has been made. A woman from Toronto went to New York a while back to hear Hitchens speak at the New York Public Library.
There are plenty of videos of Hitchens's speeches available on the internet. But people seem to want to see him in person, the living, breathing body of an atheist celebrity.
I suspect Hitchens is amused by all this adoration, which so offends him among the religious. But he is clever, as I said, with a sinewy, critical intelligence and sharp humour.
As he told the assembled crowd, people can show their respect for him by displaying their purchased book receipts.
Kill your enemies
In a world where politicians and celebrities want to be loved, Hitchens has no time for that silly emotion. He doesn't want to love his enemies, as he told us at the ROM. He wants them to be killed. Dead.
I think he was referring to nasty religious terrorists when he said that, not people who merely disagreed with his opinions. But in a country that still resonates with the seeming semblance of Christian charity — do unto others with our social safety net — Hitchens's bravado can be chilling.
A former Marxist who moved spectacularly rightward, or should I say devoutly more contrarian, a few years ago, Hitchens has the instinct and temper of the ideological street fighter. Forget love. He wants to be right.
His own opinions on religion, for a starter, are ironclad. He has never, in his many speeches and appearances, found anybody who can stand up to them, according to him.
Nor can 2,000 years of religious writing by some of the best minds of their day make a dent in his own argument, he cheerily informed the audience.
In short, here is the Hitchens position. It's rather simple. Religion is a human construct. God did not create humans. Humans created God. Not out of a sense of love or mercy, but out of their insecurity and fear, especially of death.
The mumbled list
With these views, Hitchens has the certainty of a believer. Many have tried to debate him, as some of questioners did, politely, that evening at the ROM. But to no avail.
(Where did humans get their sense of right or wrong, they asked? Hitchens: it's innate, something that helps us survive as a species. No supernatural mystery, please.)
At the heart of all religion is the Golden Rule. Do unto others, etc. Every child knows and feels this, Hitchens argues, even if many parents might disagree.
For him, it is not necessary to have a dictator God or an enforcing priesthood to make you submit to religion's elaborate codes of conformity.
You don't need to believe in God to be good or charitable, argues Hitchens, echoing Nietzsche and Dostoevsky
And in a way, the ROM itself proved a version of that argument, just the night before.
At the Munk Debate, in the same hall and before an equally packed audience, four people took on the proposition that foreign aid, particularly to Africa, does more harm than good.
Aid used to be the province of religious charity, of course. And still is, to some extent. But during that evening's debate, the subject of religion and its ethical commitment to charity was never mentioned.
Dependency, corruption, Western guilt, all this was debated. But there was no talk about any religious or spiritual injunction to help the poor.
You see, Hitchens might say. You don't need religion to do good deeds.
Actually, Hitchens doesn't much care if you believe in God in your heart. He is content if religious belief is a private, self-consoling sentiment or fantasy. He just doesn't want religion to be forced on him or society. Nor does he want to pay for its upkeep.
Oh, yes, how would he rewrite the Ten Commandments?
Well, Hitchens was a tad slap dash on that front and he mumbled a bit as well.
But why, he asked, prohibit things that are unenforceable anyway, such as honouring your parents or keeping the Sabbath?
He would write new commandments to prohibit genocide, slavery, rape and mutilation, which, he argues, the Old Testament encourages.
And he would keep the commandment about idolatry, with the glaring amendment: have no gods before you. Period.
It was quite a performance, even with the mumbling. Afterwards, many polite Canadians lined up to buy his book and have the smiling archbishop of reason inscribe it for posterity.
