HITCHENS'
ERRONEOUS
PROCEDURE
Anonymous
(Investigator
129,
2009 November)
Christopher Hitchens
has
defined countless people as stupid, guilty, and evil although many are
highly
educated and have committed no crime.
In his book God is
Not Great (2007) Hitchens argues
that religion "poisons everything", and to make this case he catalogues
crimes
and stupidities of people professing to follow a religion.
The world has
thousands of Christian ministries that heal, educate, fight poverty,
and
improve living standards. I have mentioned a few such ministries (#118
pp
43-44, #126 p. 64, and #128 p. 6) but Hitchens mentions none of them.
Hitchens' cataloguing
game
can be played using any category of people one chooses – such as
students, TV
viewers, scientists, females, politicians, doctors, car drivers,
psychologists,
etc – and then catalogue all
the bad
and ignore all the good of that
group.
Take students. We can
catalogue shootings in schools, violence in schools, and youth crime
outside of
schools. We can catalogue silly beliefs of students, silly actions, and
conflicts with parents from ancient times to now. We can catalogue
adult crimes
of former students.
We then conclude:
"Students,
studies and schools
poison everything."
Subject to context
this method of judging and assessing is variously called "prejudice",
"racism", "tarnish with the same brush", "bigotry", "false
generalization",
etc.
Some of Hitchens'
aspersions and attacks focus directly on the Bible. For example he
calls
circumcision "sexual mutilation" and "hideous procedure" and mentions
"boy
babies who died".
Someone has argued
that
simply eating food can kill by choking or poisoning, but if we try to
save
lives by stopping everyone from eating we’d all die.
What is needed, therefore, when evaluating a [medical] procedure, is
not horror stories based on rare occurrences but statistics for and
against.
The
Bible repeatedly states that its ethics are meant to promote life and
health –
and recent research in Africa
suggests that circumcision
is saving and could save millions of people from HIV and other sexually
transmitted diseases. Circumcision reduces the risk of catching HIV
50%, herpes 25% and human papilloma virus 35%.
(The New England Journal of Medicine
Volume
360, p. 1298;
Siegfried,
N et al,
www.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab003362.html)
Hitchens' book is
crammed with titillating facts but his overall thesis is nonsense
because his [cataloguing] procedure
can be used to demonize any category of people whatsoever.
Hundreds of articles about the Bible:
http://ed5015.tripod.com/