The Blog of toussaint

I watched Charlie Rose interview Chris Hitchens about his new book God is Not GREAT.  Let me disclose my bias against Mr. Hitchens right up front.  Is it possible to hate some one you have never met?  If it is, then I hate him.  He is smug and arrogant.  He refuses to take his share of the responsibility for all the articles he wrote that helped to form public opinion on Iraq.  His excuse,  like everyone else involved in this mess, is that he was right but Bush mismanaged the war.  Side-stepping the inconvienent truth that his basis for going in was WMD, and not democracy building, he shifts his story to whatever excuse will get him through the interview. 

Now, about his new book. His hypothesis is that the belief in God is responsible for a lot of the war and death in the world today.  He blames God for Bin Laden's actions as well as Bush's.  Some might find this argument persuasive,  until you dig a little deeper.  If you listen to all the things he finds wrong with God, like having to be circumsized; or not eating pork; or eating a magical mystical wafer and other sundry rituals that can get you in to or out of heaven.  He rails against the logic of the virgin birth, or that a lot a religious people try to push God down non-believers' throats.  If you really look at these objections, you will see that all these things can be laid at the alter of "organized" religion.  It is not God but the way humans think that we should worship him (or it) that is the problem.  I don't like any of the things that he does not like but I have not confused God with religion.  You can not blame God for the perversion of his love.  If you study the religions of the world as I have been doing all my life, you will notice that the core of all religions is love, not hate.  Beyond that,  you can get yourself all discombobulated when you pick a religion to study closely.  All of them have these weird concepts that man has put in the books to further earthly aims, not Godly ones: i.e. "Slave obey your master".   

I personally favor the "watch makers" theory:  if you look at the works of a watch you say to yourself, someone made this intricate device.  It is the same with nature.  I was watching a  program about the Monarch butterfly.  Its brain is the size of the head of a pin but every March 21 at the vernal equinox,  they leave their mating ground in Mexico to head out north, exactly due north. And for the next 180 days they rotate their flight pattern exactly 1 degree every day until they are heading exactly due south to return to Mexico at the autumnal equinox in September. Amazing! Squirrels bury 10,000 nuts every year and can remember where they are over the winter.  They usually only forget where they buried less than 1/10 of one percent, or about 10 nuts.  How many of you can remember where you put your keys from day to day?  Wonders like these fuel my faith.  I don't subscribe to any organized religion but I know there is a God, and God is Great.  Unlike the know-it-all Mr. Hitchens who merely thinks he is.