GOD IS NOT GREAT
El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.
Brian Unger

The publication of Christopher Hitchens’ new book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything comes at a time in American culture when most liberal intellectuals, poets, artists, and thoughtful citizens are comfortable with a kind of reverent agnostic humanism, a generalized but vague belief in social justice that rarely transforms itself into a coherent electoral agenda.

Environmentalism is the closest approximation today to a national religious consensus on the Left,a simple naturalistic faith that requires no church, no hierarchy, not even a list of strict tenets,except of course a belief in the impending disaster of global warming. (Witness Al Gore’s miraculous resurrection as a credible national figure).

Despite its considerable rhetorical excesses,Hitchens’ 283 page diatribe against organized religion is well-timed and worth considering. In a review in The New York Times, Michael Kinsley gushed over Hitchens’ talk show fame and erudition. But fame is the sustenance of Hitchens’ high profile careerism,not erudition. “The big strategic challenge for a career like this,”writes Kinsley approvingly,“ is to remain interesting... ”

Right. And God Is Not Great is that. Despite the rough patches and the downright errors in critical judgment, there is something definitively right about this book, for it says a great many things about religion that need to be said. This is a book that American buddhists should read closely. I will not take the time here to relate Hitchens’ savagely direct hits on the theological bunkers of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Suffice it to say they rival Ezra Pound’s bombardment of T.S. Eliot’s defense of institutional Christianity. Pound despised buddhism, preferring Confucianism, but he urged Westerners to abandon Christianity in favor of Eastern religion and philosophy.Hitchens,on the other hand,is absolutely clear about his distaste for religious practice:

There is no need for us to gather every day,or every seven days... to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness. we atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects... To us no spot of earth is or could be “holier” than another.

He goes on to describe a journalistic assignment he received in the 1970s, an exposé on the nauseating guru Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh,whose ruthlessly self-promoting practices fed on psychologically needy students ,leading to reprehensible results across several continents.Hitchens recalls a particularly offensive sign outside Rajneesh’s Indian ashram that read, “Shoes and minds must be left at the gate.” This sickeningly infantilizing attitude,which has never been completely eradicated from American ashrams and zendos, is precisely what Hitchens rails against. “Religion has run out of justifications,” he writes, “… it no longer offers an explanation of anything important.”

So those of us who practice buddhism, and defend it, must squarely face Hitchens’polemic, for it represents a broad segment of intelligent and articulate people in North America and the Western hemisphere.

Hitchens reminds us of the remarkable savagery of the Buddhist-Hindu warfare that has disfigured and brutalized Sri Lanka in the name of religion. Hindu Tamils pioneered the methodologies of suicide bombing that al-Quaeda and Hamas use today. An ordained buddhist priest murdered the first elected president of Sri Lanka.Buddhism, in other words,has been,at times, as implicated in humanity’s misery as much any other totalizing world religion, philosophy, or political system.

Hitchens also writes about the complicity of the Soto Zen establishment in Japan with imperial fascism in the decades leading up to and during WWII. He does his homework,noting that it was the development of infantilizing features in Zen that enabled the religious hierarchy and the fascist imperium to work together to silence opposition to Japan’s increasingly aggressive militarism. The one good rebellious Soto Zen priest, Uchiyama Gudo,a sort of Thich Nhat Hanh figure in pre-war Japan,was summarily executed by the authorities with the cooperation of the Soto hierarchy. Hitchens’ assault is not that different than Arthur Koestler’s in the 1960s. In his 1960 book The Lotus and the Robot, Koestler took D.T.Suzuki to task,asserting that practitioners of Zen were being urged to discard reason and act like young robots.“ Inarticulateness is not a monopoly of Zen,” Koestler said, “but it is the only school which made a monopoly out of it.” Suzuki responded sharply to Koestler’s attack. Koestler had not practiced Zen and did not understand the meditation practice and the interesting and useful effect it could have on discourse, morals, ethics, political practice, etc. Yet he had made his point well: it is implicitly dangerous to discard rationality in the name of religion.

The new ‘Enlightenment’ that Hitchens calls for should not depend, he says,on a few gifted individuals,for “it is within the compass of the average person.” That indeed is the teaching of Soto Zen. He considers organized religion the enemy, but one hopes that Hitchens will get to know his friends as well, part of a more disorganized religion known as Zen. We’re trying hard to follow the same Greek aphorism, “Know yourself,” and we’re working damn hard to prove Koestler wrong.

ROBYN ELLENBOGEN
COUNTING ISAIAH
Silverpoint, graphite, watercolor, bird dropping, on prepared surface,
18" x 24", 2006