Hitchens er ikke så glad i julefeiring. Det utbroderer han om i dette morsomme intervjuet. Noen morsomme utdrag:
But I don't have someone permanently telling me, you know, that it's the season to be jolly. And I don't have to hear music that really isn't music at all, like "Jingle Bell Rock," blasted as if one lived in a state that allowed no alternative. Yes, actually, there are constant reminders of the Dear Leader and the Great Leader, all the fucking time. Plus, another thing I don't like: celebrations of virginity. If asked my opinion about virginity, I would say, "I'm opposed to it." I don't think it deserves to be celebrated, at any rate. Or at least, if I'm not opposed, I'm very highly skeptical and critical of it.
AVC: Shouldn't you at least practice virginity up to a certain age?
CH: I think even then, one's looking forward to losing it. At the point you know that you are a virgin, I think you decide, "Well, this is not a condition in which I want to persist very much longer." I think erring always on the side of the ambition to transcend virginity would be good.
VC: Recently, there were people in the streets calling for the death of that woman who allowed one of her students to name her teddy bear Mohammed.
CH: Yes, well the rape-and-lynch-women-for-trying-to-be-funny-about-Mohammed community is entirely religious. The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious. The child-abuse and child-sexual-mutilation-of-genitals community is pretty exclusively religious. The "You must tell children they're going to Hell for minor infractions, to terrify them when they're little" community, which I believe to be child abuse, is exclusively religious. The "Bribe people with Heaven" community—that's not moral either—is exclusively religious. One could go on and on. Scientology is a religion. Now, secularism, I'm sorry, just isn't like that. You can be a secularist and a nihilist, or a secularist and a fascist, of course. Or an atheist and a fascist—not likely, most fascists are Catholics, but certainly you could be. You could be an atheist and a sadist, and a psychopath. But I think the connection would be much more contingent. And if you're an atheist, there's another immoral thing you're not doing, which is, you're not submitting to wish-thinking. You're not saying, "Things are true, or I believe things, not because they're true, but because they make me feel better."
The thing about religion is that it's the first and the worst. The worst because it's the first. In other words, religion is our first attempt at philosophy, and cosmology, and even in a way at physics. It's what we came up with when we didn't know we lived on a cooling planet, with continental drift, and thus earthquakes and tsunamis and so forth. We didn't know that there were microorganisms, so we didn't know where diseases came from. We didn't know the planet was round, we didn't know we were in a very, very, very small suburb of a very, very, very, very, very big megalopolis, the rest of which has no idea we're even here. However, religion is our point of departure. So the first question any thinking person has to ask for themselves, as well as if anyone else wants to ask, is this: "Do I think I'm here for the same reason as the rocks and the insects and the saline solutions of the oceans and that I'm a product of this? Or do I think that I'm here by a divine design that I can influence by prayer?" In my opinion, you can tell a lot about someone from what their answer to that question is. And everyone has to have an answer to it.
Look, the whole point about religious faith, in my opinion, is that it's not possible to imagine us ever living without it, or eradicating credulity. We are a credulous species. We're programmed to look for patterns, which is a good thing, because it's enabled all our progress and all our innovation. The problem is that people will take a junk pattern over no pattern at all. Just as they'll prefer a conspiracy theory to having no opinion. And religion is a huge help in doing that. Like astrology: "Well now, come to think of it, the movements of those heavenly bodies are just out there to determine what I'm supposed to do on Friday. How simple it all now seems. How nice that is, by the way, that this vast business should be set in motion just to advise me on my career moves."
But it makes sense to individuals, because they have a high opinion of themselves. Religion also flatters our solipsism, and our selfishness, and our self-centeredness, while pretending to teach us to be modest. That's the joke of it. By pretending to say, "Be modest and humble," it promotes the most fantastic arrogance and self-centeredness and conceit. I find that quite amusing. It also trades on the fear of death. And that is a pretty good selling point. I'm not afraid of death myself, because I'm not gonna know I'm dead. I'm awed a bit by the idea, but I'm perfectly reconciled to it. Certainly I am, as everyone is, reconciled to everyone else's death but their own. They think an exception can be made in their own case. And religion encourages them to believe something as absurd as that. You can sit in the airport and watch everyone go by, and think, "Yes, if they make the right noises, they'll get eternal life." Isn't that a nice idea? No, they don't want it for them, they want it for themselves. So religion is this corrupt racket, but it can't fail because there will be infinite demand for that. Religion will die out when we stop worrying about death. I think we'll give it a fair lease.
