Informant38

I don't know about God, but neither Christopher Hitchens nor Michael Kinsley would seem to have a scrap of greatness pertaining:

...among writers about politics, the surprise technique usually means starting left and turning right. Trouble is, you do this once and what's your next party trick?
Christopher Hitchens had seemed to be solving this problem by turning his conversion into an ideological "Dance of the Seven Veils." Long ago he came out against abortion. Interesting! Then he discovered and made quite a kosher meal of the fact that his mother, deceased, was Jewish, which under Jewish law meant he himself was Jewish. Interesting!! (He was notorious at the time for his anti-Zionist sympathies.)
[...]
The book is full of logical flourishes and conundrums, many of them entertaining to the nonbeliever. How could Christ have died for our sins, when supposedly he also did not die at all? Did the Jews not know that murder and adultery were wrong before they received the Ten Commandments, and if they did know, why was this such a wonderful gift? On a more somber note, how can the "argument from design" (that only some kind of "intelligence" could have designed anything as perfect as a human being) be reconciled with the religious practice of female genital mutilation, which posits that women, at least, as nature creates them, are not so perfect after all? Whether sallies like these give pause to the believer is a question I can't answer.
[...]
Hitchens thinks a sustained argument shouldn’t even be necessary and yet wouldn't be sufficient. To him, it's blindingly obvious: the great religions all began at a time when we knew a tiny fraction of what we know today about the origins of Earth and human life. It's understandable that early humans would develop stories about gods or God to salve their ignorance. But people today have no such excuse. If they continue to believe in the unbelievable, or say they do, they are morons or lunatics or liars. "The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal," he remarks, unsympathetically.
[...]
Religious leaders from all the major faiths, who disagree on some of the most fundamental questions, managed to put aside their differences to agree that Rushdie had it coming. (Elsewhere, Hitchens notes tartly that if any one of the major faiths is true, then the others must be false in important respects — an obvious point often forgotten in the warm haze of ecumenism.)

Michael Kinsley/NYTimes 13.May.07
on Christopher Hitchens' book God Is Not Great
-
The last quoted segment is most egregious, taking seriously an idiotic argument, then making one, that because some vocal claim to religious superiority is obviously false, then all are, ipso facto. Hitchens, and Kinsley with him, could take his hand out of his pants long enough to open the window and look outside. It's a big world. Not everything that fools believe is false. Many assholes believe the sun is 93 million miles from the earth. Good honest people, many of them, do as well. They take it on faith, and have no way of checking.
Obviously any religion that says it's the only true way of believing is going to be in conflict with any other making the same claim. This being the source of Hitchens' and Kinsley's problem to begin with.
-
The first quoted segment solves an abiding mystery - how Hitchens went from eloquent defender of the oppressed and disenfranchised to grovelling toad without any overtly readable sign of change. Kinsley dressing this up in neocon clothing is, in the strictest sense, fabulous.
-
In the second segment - setting aside the Christian Resurrection, which is traditionally presented as precisely what Hitchens objects to it as, a mystery - we're given the unimaginative cartoon of the early pre-Canaan Jews wandering around with an intact set of moral codes, as every other human society must have always done by the light of Hitchens, and suddenly there's the superfluous obviousness of the Ten Commandments dropped down on everybody's head. If it was me instead of K&H, I'd have probably tried to work the golden calf in there somehow, but for men with their kinds of income that amounts to blasphemy.
On a way more somber note, the empathetic knee-jerk response toward "female genital mutilation" would be a lot stronger if it didn't leave the question of ritual male genital mutilation hanging. Men aren't perfect as born either? Or maybe it's not mutilation after all but a natural event aided by sharp knives? There is that business though, in the Old Testament-

Wherefore David arose and went, he and his men, and slew of the Philistines two hundred men; and David brought their foreskins, and they gave them in full tale to the king, that he might be the king's son-in-law. And Saul gave him Michal his daughter to wife.

Every once in a while lately scientific proof of AIDS/HIV being thwarted by men in Africa having their penises mutilated is offered up as purely scientific information with no religious bias whatsoever, though it's pretty obvious that if this was a lock the AIDS/HIV infection rates among uncircumcised gay men should be a lot lower in the US and Europe than among their cut brothers, and that wouldn't be too difficult to demonstrate.
-
Quoted segment three has this treat:

"...people today have no such excuse. If they continue to believe in the unbelievable, or say they do, they are morons or lunatics or liars."

This is true enough it could be a kind of formula. Anyone who believes in the unbelievable is a moron a lunatic or a liar. That judgment can only be passed by those who've risen from the swamp, though. Like doctors today who find the orthodox medical belief in "dyscrasia"or "miasma" as causes of disease held by their counterparts in the early 19th century, laughable, pathetic, tragic. Yet there it is. The Semmelweiss Reflex isn't something that can be displaced by the truth. Because it's about the resistance to truth by the entrenched and defensive.
-

To him, it's blindingly obvious: the great religions all began at a time when we knew a tiny fraction of what we know today about the origins of Earth and human life. It's understandable that early humans would develop stories about gods or God to salve their ignorance.

That "early humans" were "salving their ignorance". Maybe. Or maybe they were just trying to survive. Maybe things that helped them survive were held onto. Maybe there's a lot more going on here than what we can see. And maybe we need more guidance than our appetites and arrogance alone can provide.
Which is pretty much what Kinsley/Hitchens are saying was why early humans began investing in belief - salve, guidance, help, refuge. Which should have answered that question, facetious as it was before it was asked. Only maybe there's still a lot of human ignorance around, all sparkly with intricate bits of particulate knowledge set like diamonds against the black velvet of our unknowing.
Maybe the reason we evolved and adapted to "spiritual" or "religious" ideas about the world in the first place is still here, still with us.
If it was a mistake to have done that then then Hitchens and Kinsley and their snotty brothers-in-arms need to come out and say it, that it was a mistake from the beginning. But they can't because they owe their lives to that "mistake". They owe everything they have to it, and they know it.
So what they want is to throw out the parts that get in the way of their aggrandizements, and keep the justifying and the protecting, the mechanical functions of morality that make their relatively comfortable lives possible, without the burdens of responsibility and the demands for self-sacrifice that are at the heart of the religious experience of life.