Unhitched by Richard Seymour

Author:Richard Seymour
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

•Presenting a false picture of the world to the innocent and the credulous

•The doctrine of blood sacrifice

•The doctrine of atonement

•The doctrine of eternal reward and/or punishment

•The imposition of impossible tasks and rules.15

These asseverations were argued in turn in a terse series of passages in which Hitchens attacked ‘a straw God’, an ‘absurdly literal, anthropomorphised, fundamentalist idea of God’, or indeed an ‘idolatrous notion of God’.16 Hitchens had already justified a literal reading of religious texts on the ground that ‘the apologetic “modern Christian” who argues faintly that of course the Bible isn’t meant to be taken literally is saying that it isn’t the word of God. He is, thereby, revising his faith out of existence.’ Thus the whole corpus of religious texts must be read either exclusively in the literal mode or not read at all.17 But why should ‘the word of God’ be literal? This could be answered only in reference to theological traditions of interpretation, about which Hitchens displayed remarkable ignorance.

Indeed, moments in Hitchens’s writing give the impression that what he most resented about religion was its ability to override the utilitarian calculations that keep everyday life more or less predictable. All very well when ventilating about the supererogatory nature of some religious prohibition, but when he complained of the parable of the lilies that it encouraged disregard of ‘thrift, innovation, family life and so forth’, he indeed cut the figure of an ‘indignant bank manager’.18

Many of Hitchens’s errors were mundane. He thus generously endowed a key source of his, Fawn Brodie, with a doctorate and falsely attributed the coinage totalitarianism to Victor Serge.19 Compounding simple errors of fact, though, was a litany of theological pratfalls. Terry Eagleton points out a number of these:

Hitchens’s God Is Not Great is littered with elementary theological howlers. We learn that the God of the Old Testament never speaks of solidarity and compassion; that Christ has no human nature; and that the doctrine of resurrection means that he did not die.20

Further theological errors include the claim that ‘the Jews borrow shamelessly from Christians in the pathetic hope of a celebration [Hanukkah] that coincides with “Christmas” ’, whereas the origin of Hanukkah predates Christianity, and thus Christmas, and is supposed to have been celebrated by Jesus himself. Likewise, Hitchens averred that in order to be redeemed by Christ,

I have to accept that I am responsible for the flogging and mocking and crucifixion, in which I had no say and no part, and agree that every time I decline this responsibility, or that I sin in word or deed, I am intensifying the agony of it. Furthermore, I am required to believe that the agony was necessary in order to compensate for an earlier crime in which I also had no part, the sin of Adam … Thus my own guilt in the matter is deemed ‘original’ and inescapable.21

On the contrary, as C. B. Moss noted, ‘Strictly speaking, original sin is not sin at all, but a weakness leading to sin, just as a weak chest is not consumption.

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