He is. And I almost deleted my post for just that reason. But I decided to leave it, because his argument still falls down, in my opinion, and as the long post that I didn’t get around to reblogging argues, he’s wrong about it being about religion. Instead it’s a gross disregard for consistency of values and of selective reading and application to serve the need to control everyone else.
I also almost took it down because a lot of the Evangelical and ultra-conservative Protestants in this country are also convinced Catholics aren’t Christian and/or worship the devil. (This one really blows my mind.) But again, left it, because I feel like having a concrete example of another country that totally ruins his argument is beneficial.
Italy is far more politically and socially dysfunctional that the US, and in many respects far more conservative, yet they have legal abortion that is not a constantly contested nor protested issue (yet IVF is illegal? idk either…) Yet, the country does NOT have the death penalty, not in spite of it’s religion, but precisely BECAUSE OF it’s religion. Though the original ban was actually the work of a non-religious Humanistic politician (Beccaria), nonetheless, the Catholic Church, as BricksandMortar pointed out, is majorly anti-execution, and would do everything in its considerable power to prevent the institution of a death penalty.
Anyways, my basic point is that he’s blaming everything on religion again, instead of looking at the deeper nuances of the issue, and I was throwing out an example of a country where his argument falls down, to facilitate an understanding of his sort of crass partiality on this argument. The death penalty in the US goes far deeper than our status as “the most religious of the modern western nations.” (This is an observation I think I am on board with, but am hesitant to fully throw my weight behind, given how many people lie about their religious beliefs in surveys because of the sever stigma against atheism or agnosticism in this country.)
That’s one of the things that aggravates me about Hitchens. His religion arguments are sound UNTIL he blames everything on religion. If you ascribe to the belief (as Hitchens himself does) that humans created God, then the flaws in our judgement and the injustices we perpetrate against each other are rooted in basic human behavior and socialization and are not the sole result of religious interference.
