God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Chapter 2 is an overview of various ways that religion has been used as justification for wide-scale violence. Hitchens begins with an anecdote about Mother Teresa and her involvement in the 1996 referendum on Irish divorce laws. Due to Catholic leadership in the country, divorce had been illegal for years and activists hoped to change the outdated system to, at the very least, allow people in abusive marriages to escape. Mother Teresa arrived from India to bolster the opposition. Ultimately divorce was legalized, but the votes were extremely close. Hitchens highlights Mother Teresa’s later hypocrisy when, after fighting for impoverished Irish citizens to endure unwanted marriages, she encouraged Princess Diana to leave Prince Charles.

The bulk of the chapter contains a series of experiences that Hitchens had while traveling throughout the world which made him fear people with unyielding religious beliefs. He begins with Belfast, Ireland. He describes burned buildings and war-torn streets resulting from sectarian violence, and meeting people whose friends and family had been killed only because they belonged to a different branch of Christianity. When Ulster was founded as specifically Protestant, Hitchens explains that the Catholic Church pushed back by forced segregation of former neighbors and aggressive indoctrination of Catholic children.

Hitchens moves on to describe his experiences in Beirut, Lebanon. The city was always religiously diverse, and unlike Northern Ireland, it formalized the diversity into law so that specific roles in government had to be filled by people from different religions. This ultimately created a hierarchy with Christians, especially Catholics, at the top. In the 1980s, the leaders of various Christian and Jewish sects rallied together against the Muslims, especially the Shia underclass. They massacred the residents of a Palestinian refugee camp, an act which ultimately contributed to the establishment of Hezbollah and to the Shia theocracy that would come to rule Iran. Hitchens compares the situation in Beirut to that in Bombay (now known as Mumbai). Like Beirut, the city had been religiously diverse for most of its history. In the 1990s, Bel Thackeray and the Shiv Sena Hindu movement began a campaign of oppression toward the non-Hindu population.

Hitchens gives three more examples of cities starting with “B” in which he feels religious orthodoxy has done extensive damage: Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad. He uses Bethlehem as an introduction to the Israel-Palestine conflict, believing that the issues in the area could have been solved early on if politicians had agreed to form a Palestinian state. Instead, Jewish and Muslim religious leaders began to rally their supporters toward a belief that only one group had claim to the region. Hitchens gives several examples of religiously-motivated violence on both sides. He similarly believes that in Belgrade, small differences between Catholic and Orthodox Christian beliefs led to the Serb-Croat war, and that the conflict has been misrepresented as an issue of nationality when in reality it was a religious war.

Hitchens uses Baghdad as an introduction to a discussion of Middle Eastern politics throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He disagrees with those who claim Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship was secular, arguing that although a variety of religions were allowed under his rule, Hussein’s government ultimately sparked a rise in Muslim fundamentalism. This was particularly true after the September 11 World Trade Center attacks, which caused a corresponding rise in anti-Muslim Christian rhetoric in the United States. Hitchens details how these sentiments fed each other and multiplied the levels of religiously-motivated aggression worldwide.

This chapter outlines religious dietary taboos, with an emphasis on Jewish and Muslim laws against the consumption of pork. The taboo originated in ancient Jewish texts and became part of Islam when the religion was founded. Hitchens writes that devout Muslims have taken the law a step further and not only ban eating pork but are opposed to the portrayal of pigs in general. He cites Muslim school prohibitions against the book Animal Farm, which includes anthropomorphized pigs as characters, and protests in Muslim countries against figures like Piglet from Winnie the Pooh, Miss Piggy, and The Three Little Pigs.

Hitchens offers several possible origins for the pork taboo, most notably the idea popularized in secular circles that pigs carry the disease trichinosis, and early Jewish religious leaders may have been protecting their followers from contracting this disease by eating pork. Hitchens argues against this idea, stating that while archaeological sites occupied by early Jewish populations in Canaan contain few or no pig bones, those in nearby sites connected to other religions show that pigs were widely eaten among many populations. If the trichinosis threat were truly severe, he argues, there would be a corresponding higher death rate among non-Jewish populations, which does not appear to be the case.

Hitchens believes a better explanation lies in the similarity between pigs and humans. He notes that this similarity holds even in the context of modern science; pig organs have been used successfully as transplants within humans. In ancient cultures, the human-like sounds made by slaughtered pigs, their obvious intelligence, and the similarity between pig flesh and human flesh may have resulted in pigs being treated differently than other farm animals. Hitchens links this to human sacrifice, a practice which he believes was rampant in ancient societies. When human sacrifice became less popular as a form of worship, Hitchens believes that pig consumption became taboo alongside it.

He ends with an example of how pork has been used as a tool to oppress Muslim and Jewish populations. He writes that the Spanish tradition of serving huge arrays of pork products at gatherings originated during the Inquisition. During formal events, Christian officials would identify heretics by observing who ate from the pork platters and who did not.

To Hitchens, religious belief is a health hazard. He begins Chapter 4 with stories about polio and AIDS. After the polio vaccine was invented, the disease quickly declined worldwide and by the early 2000s it was on the verge of eradication, even in the most disadvantaged areas of the world—such as India and parts of Africa and the Middle East—where mass vaccination was difficult. Hitchens outlines the huge effort undertaken to reach these populations, put forth by UNICEF and similar organizations. However, soon after the effort was underway, some Muslim groups began to spread misinformation about the vaccine, suggesting that it caused infertility and was a campaign by the United States to destroy Islam. This led many people to skip the second dose of the vaccine or forgo it altogether, with polio ultimately returning to areas like Nigeria where it had formerly been eradicated.

The campaign against AIDS prevention by the Catholic Church was even more direct. Catholic leaders claimed that condoms were useless against AIDS as they were perforated with tiny holes that HIV could pass through. Islamic authorities similarly condemned condom use and believed that AIDS could be prevented in Muslim countries simply because the population’s values prevented them from engaging in sex outside marriage. The Muslim, Catholic, and Evangelical Christian rhetoric surrounding AIDS was amplified even more because of the virus’s prevalence among gay men; the disease was often characterized as punishment for what they saw as the men’s choice to live a sinful lifestyle.

Aside from helping dangerous diseases to spread, Hitchens outlines a number of religious practices that damage individuals’ lives and bodies under the guise of religious belief, such as religious orders that ban certain types of medical care like blood transfusions. He is particularly concerned with religion’s views on sexual health. He describes the practices of both male and female circumcision, the former being a feature of Judaism and the latter a practice among several small religions in Africa and the Middle East. Both, he writes, are a sign of religion’s dangerous tendency to police human sexuality. In the case of women especially, the practice is highly dangerous, leading to pain, permanent disfiguration, and infection. Often circumcision is performed on babies or young children who do not have the ability to consent to their body being permanently altered.

The sexual repression inherent in nearly every religion leads Hitchens to conclude that religious belief leads to immoral sexual behavior. He highlights the rampant sexual abuse of minors that has been uncovered within the Catholic Church, suggesting that it stems from enforced celibacy among Catholic leadership and priests being taught through their lives that sex is inherently evil. He likens this to the practice of arranged marriages between adult men and young girls that can be found in certain parts of Islam, Hinduism, and Mormonism. In general, Hitchens declares that sexual repression directly leads to sexual deviancy, whether it be child abuse or the high levels of rape that can be found in many fundamentalist communities.

Hitchens’s last major example of religion’s threat to human health is the mental health problems caused by belief in an imminent doomsday. He focuses on examples from Christianity and Islam. In both religions, leaders often paint a picture of the end of the world and give detailed descriptions of the torture and prolonged deaths that await non-believers. In contrast, the devout are promised a future in paradise. Hitchens believes that this inspires religious believers to commit themselves wholeheartedly to religiously-motivated violence on many scales. He cites the tendency for devout Christians and Muslims to be extremely pro-war, even going so far as to support nuclear programs if they feel they are following God’s plan.