In a recent interview on Truthdig.com, Jon Wiener asks Christopher Hitchens some questions after the release of his latest book, God Is Not Great.
Wiener: Yes, the Old Testament is full of these horrors. But it also contains the Ten Commandments, prohibiting killing, stealing, adultery, and lying—isn’t this a good thing?
Hitchens: No. it’s not. Because these are prefaced by a series of injunctions to fear a permanent, unalterable dictatorship. The first three commandments say “just realize who’s boss.” Let’s assume the story of Moses is true, even though archaeologists have utterly discredited it. Do our Jewish ancestors have to put up with the insult from us at this late stage that, until they got to Sinai, they thought murder and theft and perjury were OK? Of course not. There would have been no such people if they thought that. There has never been a society or civilization that did warrant those things. And you don’t need divine urging to see that they’re wrong yourself.
And finally a much-needed argument against the assertion that Hitler and Stalin were atheists:
Wiener: The final killer argument of your critics is that Hitler and Stalin were not religious. The worst crimes of the 20th century did not have a religious basis. They came from political ideology.
Hitchens: That’s easy. Hitler never abandoned Christianity and recommends Catholicism quite highly in “Mein Kampf.” Fascism, as distinct from National Socialism, was in effect a Catholic movement.
Wiener: What about Stalin? He wasn’t religious.
Hitchens: Stalin—easier still. For hundreds of years, millions of Russians had been told the head of state should be a man close to God, the czar, who was head of the Russian Orthodox Church as well as absolute despot. If you’re Stalin, you shouldn’t be in the dictatorship business if you can’t exploit the pool of servility and docility that’s ready-made for you. The task of atheists is to raise people above that level of servility and credulity. No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine.
