Michael: Most people think the Ten Commandments are the bedrock of morality. What if I told you they’re a deeply flawed document that forgets to condemn slavery, rape, or genocide, but is very concerned with thought-crime? That’s the kind of bombshell we’re exploring today. Kevin: Whoa, okay. That’s a heavy-hitter to start with. You’re basically saying one of the most sacred texts in Western civilization is… morally bankrupt? That feels like a line designed to start a fight. Michael: It absolutely is. And that provocative idea comes straight from Christopher Hitchens's 2007 bestseller, god is not great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Kevin: Ah, Hitchens. Now it makes sense. And he wasn't just some armchair philosopher, right? He was a renowned journalist who reported from war zones like Beirut, Belfast, and Baghdad, seeing firsthand the religious violence he writes about. That experience gives his arguments a raw, visceral edge you don't find in purely academic critiques. Michael: Exactly. And the book was incredibly polarizing. It became a cornerstone of the 'New Atheism' movement, but critics found it abrasive and one-sided. It received wildly mixed reviews, celebrated by secular thinkers for its wit and courage, but condemned by many religious readers as offensive and elitist. Today, we're going to dive into why it sparked such a firestorm. Kevin: I’m ready. It sounds like we’re going to need to buckle up for this one.

Michael: Let's start right there, with those commandments. Hitchens argues that the problem with religion begins with its source code—the holy books themselves. He sees them not as divinely inspired guides to ethical living, but as poorly constructed, man-made documents that reflect the barbarism of their time. Kevin: Okay, but that’s a huge claim. The Bible, the Koran… these are texts that have guided billions of people for centuries. Where does he even begin to dismantle something that foundational? Michael: He goes straight for the jugular, to one of the most revered stories in the Abrahamic faiths: the story of Abraham and his son Isaac. He wants us to look at it not as a beautiful story of faith, but as something truly horrifying. Kevin: Right, the story where God tells Abraham to sacrifice his only son to prove his loyalty. I’ve always heard it presented as the ultimate test of faith. Michael: And Hitchens asks, faith in what? He paints the picture so vividly. Imagine Abraham, this old man, leading his beloved son up a mountain. He’s carrying the wood for the fire, the knife for the slaughter. The boy, Isaac, is confused. He asks, "Father, we have the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?" Kevin: Oh man, that’s a heartbreaking line. The innocence of the question is just brutal. Michael: It is. And Abraham’s response is chillingly evasive. He says, "God himself will provide the lamb." Then he builds the altar, ties up his own child, and lays him on the wood. He raises the knife. Hitchens forces us to sit in that moment and ask: what kind of moral system celebrates a man’s willingness to murder his own child because a voice in his head told him to? Kevin: But God stops him, right? An angel intervenes. Isn't the point that God didn't want the sacrifice, he just wanted to see if Abraham was willing? Michael: That’s the traditional interpretation, and Hitchens calls it a moral whitewash. He says the story’s conclusion is even more monstrous. Abraham isn't reprimanded for being a potential child-killer; he's praised. He's rewarded for his obedience. The moral of the story, as Hitchens reads it, is that the highest virtue is blind, unthinking submission to divine command, even if that command is to commit the most heinous act imaginable. Kevin: Wow. When you put it that way, it completely flips the narrative. It’s not about faith, it’s about the danger of absolute, unquestioning authority. Michael: Precisely. For Hitchens, this isn't just an ancient, irrelevant story. It’s the blueprint for religious fanaticism. It’s the justification for all the violence committed in God’s name, from the Crusades to the modern day. It’s the idea that if God commands it, any atrocity becomes permissible, even holy. He argues this concept of blood sacrifice and vicarious redemption—the idea that one person's suffering can pay for another's sins—is an immoral and primitive idea that poisons our entire civilization. Kevin: So he sees this in the New Testament as well? The idea of Jesus dying for our sins? Michael: Absolutely. He sees it as a continuation of the same flawed logic. He points out the endless contradictions in the Gospels—the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke don't match, the accounts of his birth and death are inconsistent. He argues these aren't divinely inspired texts but clumsy human attempts to retroactively fit a man's life into pre-existing prophecies. It’s all, in his words, "crude carpentry." Kevin: So for him, the very foundation is rotten. It's not just a few bad apples or misinterpretations over the years; the problem is baked into the source code from the very beginning. Michael: That’s the core of his argument. He believes religion is, in itself, an original sin.

Kevin: Okay, so the texts are problematic. I can see the argument there, even if it's uncomfortable. But that's ancient history and textual analysis. Hitchens's subtitle is 'How Religion Poisons Everything.' That's a present-tense claim. Where does he see that poison in the modern world, affecting people's lives right now? Michael: This is where his critique moves from the philosophical to the brutally practical. He argues that religion is actively hazardous to our health and a direct obstacle to scientific progress. And he has receipts. Kevin: I’m listening. Give me a concrete example. Michael: One of the most powerful and tragic stories in the book is about the global effort to eradicate polio. By the early 2000s, the world was on the verge of wiping out this terrible disease. It was a triumph of modern medicine and global cooperation. But then, the campaign hit a wall in northern Nigeria. Kevin: What happened? Michael: Islamic clerics in the region began spreading a rumor. They issued a fatwa, a religious decree, declaring that the polio vaccine was a secret Western plot. They claimed it was contaminated with anti-fertility agents, designed by the US to sterilize Muslim children. Kevin: You cannot be serious. That’s beyond absurd. Michael: It is, but it was devastatingly effective. People trusted their religious leaders more than they trusted doctors and scientists. Vaccination rates plummeted. And the result was predictable and horrific. Polio, which had been nearly stamped out, came roaring back. Not just in Nigeria, but it spread from there to ten other African countries and even as far as Indonesia. Children were paralyzed and killed because of a lie told in the name of faith. Kevin: That's horrifying. That’s not an abstract debate about scripture; that’s a direct line from religious belief to dead children. Michael: That's the "poison" Hitchens is talking about. He sees this pattern everywhere. He tells another story about a prominent Vatican Cardinal, Alfonso Lopez de Trujillo, who publicly claimed during the height of the AIDS crisis that the HIV virus could pass through microscopic holes in condoms. Kevin: Come on. That's just scientifically false. Michael: Completely false. But this misinformation was repeated by bishops in countries ravaged by AIDS, like Uganda and Kenya. The message was clear: condoms don't work, trust in abstinence and faith instead. It’s impossible to know how many people died because they listened to that advice, but Hitchens argues that by spreading such lethal disinformation, the Church was acting in a way that was not just amoral, but deeply immoral. Kevin: Is this just an issue with what we might call religious fundamentalism, or does he see this as a problem with mainstream religion too? Michael: He sees it as a fundamental conflict. When an unchangeable, divinely-revealed truth clashes with new, evidence-based scientific understanding, religion often demands that the evidence be rejected. He points to the debate in the United States over the HPV vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer. Some religious groups opposed its widespread adoption, arguing that protecting young women from a sexually transmitted disease would encourage promiscuity. Kevin: So they would rather risk women getting cancer than risk them having sex without consequences? Michael: That was the argument. For Hitchens, this is the ultimate indictment. Religion, he says, prioritizes dogma over human well-being, control over compassion, and faith over facts, often with deadly results.

Kevin: This is all incredibly bleak, Michael. A catalogue of violence, immorality, and dangerous ignorance. If religion is the problem, what does Hitchens offer as the solution? He can't just be tearing everything down without proposing an alternative. Michael: You're right, he doesn't. The final third of the book is a powerful shift in tone. After detailing the problem, he builds up an alternative he calls "a finer tradition." It’s his celebration of the long, often persecuted, history of rational, secular thought. Kevin: So, who are the heroes of this tradition? Michael: They are the dissenters, the skeptics, the heretics. The people who, throughout history, chose reason over revelation, often at great personal risk. He traces this lineage from the ancient world to the modern day. He starts with figures like Socrates, who was executed by Athens for "impiety" and "corrupting the youth"—which really meant he asked too many uncomfortable questions. Kevin: He was a threat to the established order because he encouraged people to think for themselves. Michael: Exactly. And Hitchens sees that same courage in figures of the Enlightenment. But the story that I think best captures the spirit of this "finer tradition" is the story of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza in 17th-century Amsterdam. Kevin: I know the name, but not the story. Michael: Amsterdam at the time was a haven for Jews fleeing persecution in Spain and Portugal. It was relatively tolerant. But even there, religious dogma had its limits. Spinoza was a brilliant young thinker within the Jewish community, but he began to question core tenets of the faith. He questioned the immortality of the soul, the divine authorship of the Bible, and argued for a separation of church and state. Kevin: That would have been radical stuff for the 1600s. Michael: It was explosive. The elders of his synagogue were terrified. They saw him as a threat to their entire community. So, on July 27, 1656, they gathered and pronounced upon him a cherem, a curse of excommunication. It’s one of the most chilling documents you can read. They damned him by day and by night, in his sleeping and in his waking. They commanded that no one should speak to him, read his writings, or come within four feet of him. He was utterly cast out. Kevin: Wow. For daring to think differently. What did he do? Michael: He accepted his exile with quiet dignity. He spent the rest of his life grinding lenses to make a living, and writing in private the philosophical works that would change the world. He never renounced his ideas. And that, for Hitchens, is the point. Spinoza faced total condemnation, but he held fast to his reason. His ideas, suppressed in his own time, went on to influence the Enlightenment and thinkers like Albert Einstein, who deeply admired Spinoza's rational, impersonal view of the universe. Kevin: So for Hitchens, the real saints aren't the ones who perform miracles, but the ones who stand up to the mob, armed only with their intellect. Michael: Precisely. The real heroes are the people like Spinoza, like Galileo, like Thomas Paine—the resistance fighters of reason. He argues that this is the tradition that actually gave us our most cherished values: science, democracy, freedom of conscience, and human rights. Not revelation from on high, but hard-won human inquiry from below.

Kevin: So, after all this—the critique of scripture, the examples of harm, the celebration of reason—what's the single biggest takeaway from god is not great? Is the book just an attack, or is there a deeper message? Michael: The deepest message is a call for a new Enlightenment. Hitchens argues that humanity has, in a sense, outgrown religion. We no longer need it to explain the cosmos—science does that far more elegantly. And he argues its moral framework is not just outdated but actively dangerous. The alternative he offers isn't nihilism or despair. It's humanism. Kevin: What does he mean by humanism, exactly? Michael: It’s the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man, and woman. It’s the belief that we can create our own meaning, our own morality, and our own purpose using the tools we were born with: our reason, our empathy, our curiosity, and our courage. We don't need a divine dictator or the threat of hell to be good. We can be good for goodness' sake. Kevin: It’s a powerful, if unsettling, argument. It really leaves you with a big question: Can we build a moral and meaningful world without God? Hitchens's answer is a resounding 'yes.' It makes you wonder what you truly believe. Michael: And that's a question worth discussing. His work forces you to examine your own assumptions, whether you're a believer or not. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Find us on our socials and let us know what you think. Does religion poison everything, or is Hitchens missing the bigger picture? Kevin: A conversation that’s definitely worth having. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.