But Hitchens is …

I’ve been spending part of my mornings with Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I love the guy, and wonder why he spends so much of his excellent mind thrashing at the windmill of religion. But I’ll read whatever he writes about anything of his choosing, as it’s a delight just to sit in his sidecar as he navigates. (He says he’ll leave them alone when they leave him alone. Surely he knows both are impossible.)

Just a couple of his observations – if God rested on the seventh day, what did he do on the eighth? (Never thought to ask.) Religion, he says, is “both the result of and the cause of dangerous sexual repression.” Too true, says this Catholic boy who sheepishly had to confess through a screen to a possible child abuser that he had touched himself to a happy result.

Nothing optional – from homosexuality to adultery – is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate.

He wonders how the Jewish people ever made it as far as they did before Moses while thinking that “murder, adultery, theft and perjury were permissible.” It must have been quite a mess before the old guy stumbled off the mountain. I did not know (the 8nuns did not tell me!) that the Immaculate Conception was not official church doctrine until 1852, and the problem of there being something about Mary was not solved until 1950, when they discovered her miraculous Assumption into heaven, hymen intact.

The moments I spend with Hitchens in the A.M. are better spent and far more enlightening than those of monks and nuns creeping into chapel. Is it possible that he might be some kind of deity. We’ll see after he succumbs to esophageal cancer … if he returns in a more durable body.