Author speaks on moral decisions, free speech

Christopher Hitchens, author of “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” said, true to his book’s title, that religion poisons everything, even Chinese food, tantric sex and chess.

Of the list of examples he provided at his lecture on Tuesday night in the UC Auditorium, he chose Chinese food to illustrate the point and said that eating bread given by a master does not taste as good even if the physical delectability is still there.

In this way, religion creates a “serfdom of the mind,” he said, where all of the individual’s responsibility and judgment of right and wrong is erased. Moral decisions are left up to scriptures and beliefs.

“Religion attacks us in our very deepest integrity, in our core, by saying we, you and I and anyone here, wouldn’t know the difference between the right action and the wrong one, would have no moral compass … if you were not told what was right and wrong by means of divine revelation,” he said.

Hitchens referenced a debate at Central Hall in London he participated in last week, in which an archbishop said his region — Nigeria — knew murder, death and perjury were wrong before they received Bibles.

“I said, ‘My dear, my lord archbishop, you just made a very good point but at your own expense,’” Hitchens said.

Morality is innate within people, Hitchens said, and a society that valued crime would not survive.

To show the capabilities of morality among non-believers, he challenged the audience to think of a moral action or statement that a believer could do or say that a non-believer could not. Through his talks with theologians, he said he has yet to find someone to answer this challenge.

Going further, he asked the packed crowd to think of the opposite.

“Name me a very wicked action done or a very wicked thing said by a person of faith because of their religion,” he said. “You’ve already thought of it. Now you’re about to think of another one.”

Hitchens also addressed the topic of free speech by discussing the Muhammad cartoons controversy in 2005, in which publication of cartoons in a Danish newspaper prompted demonstrations and debate over the issue of self-censorship.

“Not one of the American newspapers reprinted the cartoon,” he said. “Not one American network would show the cartoons. This is the age of the image. Everything is picture. Everything is image-driven. Everything is pictorial. There’s a big row about some pictures that were not ever showed.”

He said this was because of fear and cowardice. When the secular magazine Free Inquiry, for which Hitchens works, published the cartoons, Barnes and Noble and Borders pulled the magazine from the shelves. He called the decision “a complete capitulation without even the gun being put to the head, without even the gun being unholstered.”

The British-born Hitchens said he did not come to America in order to curtail what he said.

“I did not cross the Atlantic to become an American in order to capitulate to a challenge to the amendment to the Constitution that makes my life possible,” he said.

He called free speech not just essential to his occupation as a writer but to his very life.

“Free expression is not just one right among many,” he said. “It’s the one right that makes the others possible.”

Daniel Curry, senior in the College Scholars Program, said he enjoyed the lecture but was anticipating more resistance to Hitchens’ message.

“I expected that there’d be more opposition to it, but there really was none at all,” Curry said. “Most people seemed to be generally on his side or just kept their mouths shut. I would have liked to have seen a little more argument from both sides of the issue.”

For Curry, Hitchens’ historical knowledge added to the presentation.

“Christopher Hitchens, of course, is an impeccable scholar,” Curry said. “He’s a famous journalist. He really knows the backstory for all these things. He went into Newton, Mother Teresa, Jefferson, really looking at the historical background of people and issues, and I thought that was fascinating.”

In the closing of his speech before the question-and-answer session followed, Hitchens underscored the difference between the worlds of faith and reason.

“(The world of faith) says we already know what we need to know,” Hitchens said. “You just haven’t recognized the good news when you see it.”

He said faith regards inquiry, debate, skepticism and the importance of evidence as ultimately unnecessary, with all the truth of the world already handed to people.

“That’s not how freedom comes, as you children of the revolution should know,” he said.