About the Book and Author
Christopher
Hitchens is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair
and a visiting professor of liberal studies at the
New School. He regularly writes for the Atlantic
Monthly and Slate, and is the author
of numerous books, including Letters to a Young
Contrarian and Why Orwell Matters. He
was named one of the “Top 100 Public Intellectuals”
by Foreign Policy and Britain’s Prospect.
Mr. Hitchens was born in
Portsmouth, England and educated at the Leys School,
Cambridge, and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read
Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. From 1971-1981,
he worked in Britain as book reviewer for the Times;
social science editor of the Times Higher Education
Supplement; assistant editor and staff writer
for the New Statesman; researcher/reporter
for London Weekend Television; and chief foreign correspondent
for the Daily Express. In 1981, he emigrated
to the United States.
From 1982-2002, he
wrote a column called the "Minority Report"
for The Nation. Since 1992, he has been columnist
and contributing editor at Vanity Fair and,
at different times, Washington editor and columnist
for Harper’s magazine, American columnist
and correspondent for the Spectator, the
New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement,
Sunday Today, and the Sunday Correspondent.
As foreign correspondent and travel writer, he has
written from more than sixty countries on all five
continents.
Chapter One
Putting It Mildly
If the intended reader
of this book should want to go beyond disagreement
with its author and try to identify the sins and deformities
that animated him to write it (and I have certainly
noticed that those who publicly affirm charity and
compassion and forgiveness are often inclined to take
this course), then he or she will not just be quarreling
with the unknowable and ineffable creator who—presumably—opted
to make me this way. They will be defiling the memory
of a good, sincere, simple woman, of stable and decent
faith, named Mrs. Jean Watts.
It was Mrs. Watts’s
task, when I was a boy of about nine and attending
a school on the edge of Dartmoor, in southwestern
England, to instruct me in lessons about nature, and
also about scripture. She would take me and my fellows
on walks, in an especially lovely part of my beautiful
country of birth, and teach us to tell the different
birds, trees, and plants from one another. The amazing
variety to be found in a hedgerow; the wonder of a
clutch of eggs found in an intricate nest; the way
that if the nettles stung your legs (we had to wear
shorts) there would be a soothing dock leaf planted
near to hand: all this has stayed in my mind, just
like the “gamekeeper’s museum,”
where the local peasantry would display the corpses
of rats, weasels, and other vermin and predators,
presumably supplied by some less kindly deity. If
you read John Clare’s imperishable rural poems
you will catch the music of what I mean to convey.
At later lessons we would
be given a printed slip of paper entitled “Search
the Scriptures,” which was sent to the school
by whatever national authority supervised the teaching
of religion. (This, along with daily prayer services,
was compulsory and enforced by the state.) The slip
would contain a single verse from the Old or New Testament,
and the assignment was to look up the verse and then
to tell the class or the teacher, orally or in writing,
what the story and the moral was. I used to love this
exercise, and even to excel at it so that (like Bertie
Wooster) I frequently passed “top” in
scripture class. It was my first introduction to practical
and textual criticism. I would read all the chapters
that led up to the verse, and all the ones that followed
it, to be sure that I had got the “point”
of the original clue. I can still do this, greatly
to the annoyance of some of my enemies, and still
have respect for those whose style is sometimes dismissed
as “merely” Talmudic, or Koranic, or “fundamentalist.”
This is good and necessary mental and literary training.
However, there came a day
when poor, dear Mrs. Watts overreached herself. Seeking
ambitiously to fuse her two roles as nature instructor
and Bible teacher, she said, “So you see, children,
how powerful and generous God is. He has made all
the trees and grass to be green, which is exactly
the color that is most restful to our eyes. Imagine
if instead, the vegetation was all purple, or orange,
how awful that would be.”
And now behold what this
pious old trout hath wrought. I liked Mrs. Watts:
she was an affectionate and childless widow who had
a friendly old sheepdog who really was named Rover,
and she would invite us for sweets and treats after
hours to her slightly ramshackle old house near the
railway line. If Satan chose her to tempt me into
error he was much more inventive than the subtle serpent
in the Garden of Eden. She never raised her voice
or offered violence—which couldn’t be
said for all my teachers—and in general was
one of those people, of the sort whose memorial is
in Middlemarch, of whom it may be said that if “things
are not so ill with you and me as they might have
been,” this is “half-owing to the number
who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited
tombs.”
However, I was frankly appalled
by what she said. My little ankle-strap sandals curled
with embarrassment for her. At the age of nine I had
not even a conception of the argument from design,
or of Darwinian evolution as its rival, or of the
relationship between photosynthesis and chlorophyll.
The secrets of the genome were as hidden from me as
they were, at that time, to everyone else. I had not
then visited scenes of nature where almost everything
was hideously indifferent or hostile to human life,
if not life itself. I simply knew, almost as if I
had privileged access to a higher authority, that
my teacher had managed to get everything wrong in
just two sentences. The eyes were adjusted to nature,
and not the other way about.
From the book
GOD IS NOT GREAT: How Religion Poisons Everything
by Christopher Hitchens. Copyright (c) 2007 by
Christopher Hitchens. Reprinted by permission of Grand
Central Publishing, New York, NY. All rights reserved.
