This review was written in 2007, the year the book was published. It needs to be on our pages.

Christopher Hitchens has cancer and may not live much longer. He has expressed some opinions that chime well with those of The Atheist Conservative, and some that are decidedly different. As an atheist he has won our approbation; as a political commentator he has often earned our criticism. In agreement with him or not, we have always appreciated his eloquence and wit.

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God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens,Twelve, New York , 2007, 307 pages.

Religion cannot survive in our Age of Science. Until I read this book I thought that there was life in it yet, enough for it to continue as an important force in human affairs for another century or so. But I am persuaded by Hitchens that it is already dead, even though there are many millions who still believe in gods or God and even more who observe the rituals of worship, and even though some act politically and devastatingly in its name.

How then is it dead? Hitchens puts it this way, with characteristic elegance: ‘Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago … We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday.’

So – Hitchens encouragingly claims – although Islam has risen all over the globe to fight for its life with fire and tongue against scientific truth, against criticism, against freedom of body and mind, and continues successfully to rake in its converts by intimidation and even persuasion, it is doomed just as the other religions are doomed, being but the ritual perpetuation of a long-outdated belief, and will dwindle away to nothing as so many religions have done before it. Coming generations in an ever more closely communicating world will find it harder and harder to believe in the unbelievable.

We know that there are scientists who are religious. Amazingly, there are quite a few who find it possible to accept all that cosmology and physics tell us about the nature of the universe and yet still believe in a Creator God with mysterious purposes for His Creation. Of course – Hitchens says – you can do this, but ‘the theory works without that assumption’. God can be retained, but is not required. Believe in him if you will, but to questions of how the world has come to be as it is, God is irrelevant, superfluous, an added extra, an unnecessary decoration contributed by nostalgia and habit. Further knowledge of the stars will not come through prayer, and though an astronomer may pray for knowledge and go to church every seventh day to win the approval of his god, it is to his telescope he will go to find the truth.

Hitchens dismisses the argument for ‘intelligent design’ – part of religion’s last-gasp vocabulary of euphemism – with illustrations of how if nature were indeed the result of design, unintelligence would better characterize the designer who achieved such results: the ‘useless junk’ in our DNA string left over from lower creatures; our appendix; our vestigial tails; all of which are explained satisfactorily by evolution but make no sense at all as intelligent design. One could add many more. I like to cite the inability of bees to alight easily on a flat surface.

The presence among us of tormenting and life-destroying viruses does not say much for the designs of an intelligence that is also supposed to be beneficent to the human creature. Scientific discovery and skepticism have removed the need to justify horrors, to answer such questions as to ‘who inflicted the syphilis bacillus or mandated the leper or the idiot child’.

‘Intelligent design’ implies that intelligence existed before anything else. But we are aware that what we call intelligence requires human physiology – including most immediately a brain – which, of all things known, has taken longest to evolve. It has come at this – our – end of the process. An assertion that such a thing was already there at the very beginning is not rationally persuasive

I have long wondered why so many find it easier to conceive of there being an original Nothing then Something (the universe) and then again eventually Nothing, than to conceive of Something always having existed and forever to remain. We know Something exists. We know that matter is imperishable: it changes but does not dissolve into nothingness. Why, if we can accept the idea that it will have no ending, do we need to think of it as having had a beginning?

In the grip of the belief that there was ‘a beginning’ of existence, believers like to raise their favorite ‘logical’ argument that since everything must have a cause there must be a First Cause, Hitchens logically asks for the cause of the First Cause, or ‘Who designed the designer?’ No theologist or philosopher has ever satisfactorily answered that (Thomas Aquinas’s argument that God could set the cause-and-effect chain working in the universe because he is outside it does not abolish the question of how he came into existence) – or ever produced a sound argument for belief in a god of any sort.

The onus rests always on the believer to prove his case. It is not necessary for the unbeliever to prove that the object of others’ belief is not there. As Karl Popper expressed it: ‘Seeing no reason to believe is sufficient reason not to believe.’ It is an argument against belief most useful to be armed with. Another of course is David Hume’s, who asserted, in the light of the immense suffering that God coolly watches his creatures undergoing, that if he is omnipotent then he must be evil, or if good he cannot be omnipotent. (Hitchens mentions both philosophers but neither of these arguments which would have served him well.)

Hitchens does not accept the shop-worn argument that without religion there would be no morality. He is as certain as I am that religion is not the indispensable source of ethics or law. Reason and experience teach people, and have surely always taught them, that it is better and safer to live in a world where certain kinds of behavior are by and large avoided and certain rules by and large obeyed. I was interested to find, when I got round not long ago to reading the Hammurabi Code that it deals chiefly with what punishments should be imposed on those who disobey rules of conduct rather than in laying down or even reiterating the rules themselves. Rules against murder, adultery, lying, stealing pre-date all recorded codifications, any tablet of commandments. As Hitchens says, ‘Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.’

There surely cannot be any doubt that religion has been the cause of much human misery, cruelty, torture, oppression, and probably the majority of wars. It is fair to add that some religions have inspired good deeds as well as evil ones. But then, people have always done good and evil regardless of what they do it in the name of. And surely always will. As for great works of art which it has inspired, it is not unreasonable to suppose that if religion had not supplied the inspiration something else would have done for the same artists. There must be at least as many marvelous pictures of mortals and ordinary scenes as there are of angelic gatherings and Christians suffering; at least as many admirable buildings dedicated to secular as to religious uses; and many more great poems and plays without religious themes than with them. Hitchens points out that beautiful and valuable things that have grown out of religions can be and are as much enjoyed and valued by civilized non-believers, such as himself, as by the pious. (My own list of such things is long, including: the King James translation of the bible; La Chapelle; certain painted angels and saints of the Renaissance; Bach’s compositions dedicated to God.) Hitchens cites, among things that do not require faith to treasure and preserve them, and in this case would have lasted better without it, the Buddha statues blown up by the Taliban in Afghanistan in the name of their religion – a type of vandalism that atheists are very unlikely to commit, having no reason to.

The author confesses to once having had a faith of his own, the secular faith of Marxism. He is now recognizably conservative, even traces of his former leftism becoming almost imperceptible. We welcome him among us.

Jillian Becker

Our reader and commenter George draws our attention to an article titled “Why do Americans still dislike atheists?”

It is written by an ” an independent researcher in sociology and evolution”, Gregory Paul, and  “a professor of sociology at Pitzer College”, Phil Zuckerman, who wrote a book called  “Society Without God.”

The very idea of Sociology is Leftist. It considers human beings collectively. Sociologists can be assumed to be leftists – exceptions are very rare. So it is not surprising that Paul the researcher in Sociology, and Zuckerman the professor of Sociology, have written an article for the left-biased Washington Post, which demonstrates their collectivist mind-set.

Some of their information, however, is interesting.

Here are extracts:

Long after blacks and Jews have made great strides, and even as homosexuals gain respect, acceptance and new rights, there is still a group that lots of Americans just don’t like much: atheists. Those who don’t believe in God are widely considered to be immoral, wicked and angry.

No evidence for that “widely considered” is given. But the examples of discrimination against atheists that come next are worth knowing:

They can’t join the Boy Scouts.

You have to believe in the supernatural to be a Boy Scout?

Atheist soldiers are rated potentially deficient when they do not score as sufficiently “spiritual” in military psychological evaluations.

What does the word “spiritual” mean? A claim to believe in the supernatural?

Surveys find that most Americans refuse or are reluctant to marry or vote for nontheists; nonbelievers are one minority still commonly denied in practical terms the right to assume office despite the constitutional ban on religious tests.

The first part of that sentence is not provable or even plausible. The second part is important and points to a disgraceful state of affairs. It means that governing authorities are discriminating against people who hold a particular opinion with regard to religion, in defiance of the Constitution.

Rarely denounced by the mainstream, this stunning anti-atheist discrimination is egged on by Christian conservatives who stridently — and uncivilly — declare that the lack of godly faith is detrimental to society, rendering nonbelievers intrinsically suspect and second-class citizens.

Is this knee-jerk dislike of atheists warranted? Not even close.

Then comes a typical sociological passage with sweeping generalizations:

A growing body of social science research reveals that atheists, and non-religious people in general, are far from the unsavory beings many assume them to be. On basic questions of morality and human decency — issues such as governmental use of torture, the death penalty, punitive hitting of children, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, environmental degradation or human rights — the irreligious tend to be more ethical than their religious peers, particularly compared with those who describe themselves as very religious.

Notice the assumption that to be against the death penalty, bothered about “environmental degradation”, and uncritically accepting of the doctrine of “human rights’, is to be “more ethical”.

A series of “facts” come next, no sources given, reflecting more of the writers’ personal prejudices, but likely to be pleasing to at least some atheists:

Consider that at the societal level, murder rates are far lower in secularized nations such as Japan or Sweden than they are in the much more religious United States, which also has a much greater portion of its population in prison. Even within this country, those states with the highest levels of church attendance, such as Louisiana and Mississippi, have significantly higher murder rates than far less religious states such as Vermont and Oregon.

The statistics, not given, may be correct, but the authors make no attempt  to show a direct connection between religious views and crime rates.

What follows is, we think, true. Though again no evidence is shown, and we don’t look for “scores” on “measures”, we obviously consider superstition to be unintelligent.

As individuals, atheists tend to score high on measures of intelligence, especially verbal ability and scientific literacy. They tend to raise their children to solve problems rationally, to make up their own minds when it comes to existential questions … They value freedom of thought.

Yes. But those prejudices pop out again:

They are … less likely to be nationalistic or ethnocentric.

Leftists call patriots “nationalistic” as a pejorative. They have asserted that atheists are intelligent, yet cannot conceive of intelligent people being patriots.

Then they say that being atheist could be a symptom of mental illness, and not believing in the supernatural makes for unhappiness – though this connection is “complex” and some empirical evidence casts doubt on it.

While many studies show that secular Americans don’t fare as well as the religious when it comes to certain indicators of mental health or subjective well-being, new scholarship is showing that the relationships among atheism, theism, and mental health and well-being are complex. After all, Denmark, which is among the least religious countries in the history of the world, consistently rates as the happiest of nations. And studies of apostates — people who were religious but later rejected their religion — report feeling happier, better and liberated in their post-religious lives.

We like that, and would appreciate a link to those “studies” (even if they are written in pompous Sociologese).

The rest is a stew of diverse ingredients: suicide rates among atheists higher but not certainly so. And “on numerous respected measures of societal success — rates of poverty, teenage pregnancy, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, obesity, drug use and crime, as well as economics — high levels of secularity are consistently correlated with positive outcomes in first-world nations. None of the secular advanced democracies suffers from the combined social ills seen here in Christian America.”

To translate what they’re saying: poverty, AIDS, etcetera in America are at least partly the result of religion. Some religions can cause poverty – notably Catholicism by forbidding birth control. But for the rest, causal connections need to be traced.

The next claim, if true, is good news:

Atheism is enjoying rapid growth. … Younger generations’ tolerance for the endless disputes of religion is waning fast. Surveys designed to overcome the understandable reluctance to admit atheism have found that as many as 60 million Americans — a fifth of the population — are not believers.

An ABC news film, not new (May 11, 2007), but still interesting.

John Stossel talks to atheists. Richard Dawkins says a few words.

Nicole Smalkowski, 13, a talented athlete and musician, tells how she was hounded out of school by “good Christians”, who deny doing any such thing of course.

Here are some statements by atheists, more or less well reasoned. We present them because it took courage for the speakers to go on record with their beliefs at all, as all of them, wherever they may be, come from the intolerant world of Islam where apostasy and atheism are punishable by death.

This being Sunday when Christian preachers preach, here are some antidotal words of Voltaire, one of the stars of the Enlightenment:

Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.

Christian: A good-natured, simple fellow; a true lamb of the fold, who, in the innocence of his heart, persuades himself that he firmly believes unbelievable things that his priests have told him to believe, especially those he cannot even imagine. Consequently, he is convinced that three x’s make fifteen, that God was made man, that he was hanged and rose to life again, that priests cannot lie, and that all who do not believe in priests will be damned without remission.

If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning.

Every sensible man, every honest man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.

Which is more dangerous: fanaticism or atheism? Fanaticism is certainly a thousand times more deadly; for atheism inspires no bloody passion whereas fanaticism does; atheism is opposed to crime and fanaticism causes crimes to be committed.

(For source references go here.)

We  believe that the Framers of the United States Constitution intended to found a secular nation, not “a Christian nation” as so many conservative pundits assert. We have looked for informed opinion about it, and found this one, given to us by Tom Hinkson, who is “a  life-long atheist”. He was, he says, “not brought up with any religion”, though both his parents “believe in a Christian deity”. He served his country in the Navy as a Nuclear Reactor Operator for seven years. In the last election cycle he joined the campaign for Marco Rubio. He is a  life member of both the National Rifle Association (NRA) and Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW).

Here is his opinion. It is his and not ours, but the information he provides confirms our own.

2011 is supposed to be the year of the Constitutional Conservative, but is it really? The Tea Party has helped  the Republican Party gain a majority in the House of Representatives, and near parity in the Senate, so things in the US have to get better – right? Not so fast! It seems that we as a nation have traded one evil for a possibly lesser evil, but another evil nonetheless. Have you noticed who is at the helm of the Tea Party? Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich … the list goes on. You might ask, “Well aren’t they better than Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Joe Biden?” The answer is yes, of course they are. But too many of the Tea Party figureheads represent that “silent majority” of biblical literalist Christians who, instead of wanting to turn the United States into a socialist utopia as Obama and the Democrats do, want to turn it into a kind of theocracy.

Since the rise of the Tea Party, there has been a movement to re-learn our American history, mainly fueled by Glenn Beck. This would be a very good thing, if he told the whole story. History is usually told with huge gaps to reinforce the tellers’ point of view. The so-called Christian conservatives bend history one way, and the Progressives would rather ignore history altogether.

If you have watched Glenn Beck for any appreciable length of time, you have seen him bring several people on to argue that we are a Christian nation, that nearly everything in the Constitution has a biblical foundation, and the proof for these claims lies in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence. He and they make a compelling argument – at least to those who don’t know history.

It is true that the preamble of the Declaration of Independence refers to a divine power:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The  Constitution, however, created a very explicitly secular government, and those that would argue otherwise try to re-write history to hide the transition from a government that derives its power from a higher power to one that derives its power from the consent of the governed.

Glenn Beck and the “Christian Conservatives” would have everyone believe that the Declaration of Independence founded our nation, and that the Constitution was written with the Declaration as sort of a foundation. The question is, are they right? Let’s look at some history that they won’t tell us.

The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4th, 1776, formally declaring the independence of the 13 colonies from Great Britain, but did it create the United States of America? The answer is no, the United States of America was created by the Articles of Confederation, which created a binding agreement of government between the 13 original colonies. The Articles of Confederation were not ratified until March, 1781. Until the Articles of Confederation were ratified, the United States of America was just an idea. But wait a minute, why doesn’t anyone mention the Articles of Confederation? Probably because the Articles of Confederation created a government that failed in short order. The Constitution that we have today was originally ratified on September 17th, 1787, creating our current form of government.

The “Christian Conservatives” would have everyone believe that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written virtually side-by-side; in fact they are frequently published this way. The question is why would they want to ignore the 11-year gap? The answer is that the Constitution is a secular document. But, if we can be convinced that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written side-by-side, then an argument can be made to declare the United States of America a “Christian nation”, which opens the door for a biblical lens to view the Constitution through; even though the separation of church and state is an undeniable concept that is spelled out in the Constitution, and further explained by Thomas Jefferson in his letters to two separate Baptist organizations (see here and here).

Christians will argue that the intent of the founders was to create a Christian nation because Christianity was (and still is) the major religion present in the United States. But, if that was their intent, why not spell it out? Why would the founders specifically state that there will be “no religious test for office” (Article 6, paragraph 3 of the Constitution), or that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” (1st Amendment)? The answer is obvious: the founders wanted to create a secular government. Not only did they not state that there was a federal religion, they specifically banned it! In fact they went even further than that, and banned congress from making any law that RESPECTED the establishment of a religion, meaning that not only would the government not create a religion, or declare a national religion, but that the government would not even formally recognize religions.

Of course, the secular argument has a few problems: for instance, it is traditional for congress to open with a prayer, which would seem to contradict the Constitution itself, and honestly, it does. So, how can this be explained? Hypocrisy, plain and simple. If there is one constant in the history of this nation, then hypocrisy is it. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were both outspoken critics of slavery, yet both owned dozens of slaves. No one today will argue in favor of slavery, even though several of the founders owned them. Yet, there are many who would argue for legislation based upon the bible or other religious texts rather than the Constitution simply because most of our founders identified themselves as Christians.

In the Declaration of Independence, there are three mentions of a higher power, they are: “Nature’s God”, “Creator”, and “Divine Providence”. None of these three terms are innately Christian, and the use of the terms is as an authority to separate from Great Britain. The United States of America is mentioned at the end of the document, but as I stated earlier, this was an idea; the United States of America was not formally established until the Articles of Confederation were ratified. Independence from Great Britain, and thus international recognition as a nation was not achieved until the end of the Revolutionary War by the signing of the Treaty of Paris on September 3rd, 1783.

In the Articles of Confederation, there are three references to a deity. Two of those references are “in the Year of Our Lord”, which was the common language for stating a date, not a reference to any divine inspiration for the government being created. The third reference is found in Article 13, the first sentence of the second paragraph states: “And Whereas it hath pleased the Great Governor of the World to incline the hearts of the legislatures we respectively represent in congress, to approve of, and to authorize us to ratify the said articles of confederation and perpetual union.” “Great Governor of the World” is an obvious allusion to a higher power, but not specifically to a Christian deity.

Nonetheless, the “Great Governor of the World” is the authority that is used to create the government under the Articles of Confederation. So if  the United States of America were still governed by the Articles of Confederation, the Christians would have some proof that we were founded as a “Christian Nation”. But as The Articles of Confederation created a very weak and very flawed government which soon failed, it can be stated that the government formed as a direct result of the Declaration of Independence was a failure. The founders of our current government knew that several changes needed to be made.

Within the Constitution, there is only one reference to any higher power, and that reference is in the date, which as stated above, was the common way of declaring a date “in the Year of Our Lord”. That reference is at the end of the Constitution, just before the signatures. There are several very important differences between the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Articles of Confederation.

The first, and largest difference, is that the Constitution does not claim any authority from a higher power, whereas both the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation did. Instead, the Constitution boldly proclaims “We the People” as the authority to create the government and all that comes with it. This runs in direct contradiction to the “Christian Conservative” claim that our rights are not given to us by the government, but by the Christian God (which was not specifically mentioned in any founding document). This puts a large hole in the “Christian Conservative” argument, but the Constitution does not stop there.

Within the Constitution, there are three specific bans on the co-mingling of religion and government. These bans are found in Article 6, paragraph 3, and in the 1st Amendment. The Constitution clearly states that there shall be “no religious test for office”, at either the federal or state levels, and that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This suggests very strongly that one of the many lessons that the founders learned from the Articles of Confederation was that the mixing of religion and government does not work.

So while in principle I agree with “restoring America” as the Tea Partiers and Glenn Beck advocate, I say let’s restore it to a government run by the laws set forth by the Constitution. While we’re at it, let’s restore the Pledge of Allegiance to how it was before 1954, when the words “under God” were added. We can also take the words “In God We Trust” off of our currency. Those words were added first to coinage in 1864, on the two-cent coin, long after the founders died. Paper money wasn’t tainted with those words until 1957. Our national motto “In God We Trust” wasn’t adopted until 1956. All of the laws ordering these changes are unconstitutional because they all respect the establishment of religion. Let us abide by the Constitution, and restore the secular nation that the Founders intended.

Christopher Hitchens, atheist, and Tony Blair, convert to Catholicism, debated religion in Toronto on November 27, 2010.

The motion was: “Religion is a force for good in the world”.

The good news is that Hitchens, opposing, won the debate. The audience voted two-to-one in his favor.

From the report in the Telegraph (where there is also a video clip):

Mr Blair … said: “It is undoubtedly true that people commit horrific acts of evil in the name of religion.

“It is also undoubtedly true that people do acts of extraordinary common good inspired by religion.”

He pointed to the good done by faith based organisations, including the millions of lives saved in Africa and care for the mentally ill, disabled and destitute.

He added: “The proposition that religion is unadulterated poison is unsustainable.

“It can be destructive, it can also create a deep well of compassion, and frequently does.”

We would contend that good people will do good things and bad people bad things whether or not they have religious belief.

Mr Blair said the common thread running through all faiths was to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” .

Most religions have it, but not all. Islam does not have it. The understanding that you will probably be treated by others in much the same way you treat them is also common sense. Which Islam manifestly lacks.

Mr Hitchens … said: “Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick, and commanded to be well.

“And over us, to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea.”

Even Tony Blair had to smile at that.

In a recent article, the Townhall columnist Jeff Jacoby discusses the proposition, put forward by the American Humanist Association in a series of TV and press ads, that people “can be good without God”.

Jacoby concedes that “people can be decent and moral without believing in a God who commands us to be good”. However, he argues, that is not because they reason their way to ethical behavior but because they “reflect the moral expectations of the society in which they were raised”.

He writes:

In our culture, even the most passionate atheist cannot help having been influenced by the Judeo-Christian worldview that shaped Western civilization. …

In a world without God, there is no obvious difference between good and evil. There is no way to prove that murder is wrong if there is no Creator who decrees “Thou shalt not murder.’’ It certainly cannot be proved wrong by reason alone.

Now then, now then (as British policemen used to say when approaching an area of rising excitement). Every moral law ever taught, whether or not as a divine injunction, came out of the heads of human beings. They may have claimed that a god inspired them, or instructed them, addressed them in dreams, or snatched them up for a brief sojourn in heaven and “revealed”  the message to them, but what they were actually doing was thinking.

Jewish sages bade people to obey the moral laws because, they warned, it was God’s will that they should. Disobey and you offend a terrible power! The Christian churches promised everlasting reward in paradise to those who obeyed and eternal punishment in the flames of hell to those who didn’t. The hope and the dread probably kept a lot of people behaving decorously a lot of the time.

The more sensible moral laws of Judaism and Christianity  – do not kill, do not steal, do not lie (“bear false witness”)  – are sound principles and are to be found in other cultures which do not claim that they were issued by a deity. They are precepts of Buddhism, for instance. It’s more than probable that many a forgotten tribe, whose gods were not of a kind to be drafted into law enforcement, penalized murder and theft and deception.

As for “doing unto others as you would be done by”, or refraining from doing to them what you wouldn’t like done to you – “the Golden Rule” that many religions preach -, was divine inspiration necessary for its conception? Common sense prompts it, experience teaches it, and reason approves it. It’s an excellent example of a moral idea arising out of intelligent self-interest.

Yet Jacoby opines:

Reason is not enough. Only if there is a God who forbids murder is murder definitively evil. Otherwise its wrongfulness is a matter of opinion. …

Atheists may believe — and spend a small fortune advertising — that we can all be “good without God.’’ History tells a very different story.

The story that history tells is that religion has been the greatest source of human suffering next to bacteria, viruses, and natural disasters. And until quite recently, Christianity in all its major branches inflicted more agony on human bodies and minds than any other religion since Baal required babies to be thrown into the iron furnace of Moloch’s belly.

Jacoby is right that “in our culture, even the most passionate atheist cannot help having been influenced by the Judeo-Christian worldview that shaped Western civilization”. For good or ill, that must be the case. But there have been far better influences.

To men of reason since the dawn of the Enlightenment, to their skepticism, their enquiry, their science, their commerce, their exploration and invention we owe what is best in our civilization.

Jillian Becker  November 17, 2010

Facebook is alleged to have helped the Palestinian Authority track down a free-thinking blogger living in the West Bank town of Qalqiliya.

If this is true, Facebook has committed an indefensible and despicable betrayal of trust.

Walid Husayin is a 26-year old barber. Knowing the intolerance of Islam, he kept up the appearance of a conforming Muslim, and posted his real views anonymously on the Internet, thinking himself safe from detection.

AP reports the story, which is a good thing, but does so unsympathetically, calling his blogs “anti-religious rants”.

A mysterious blogger who set off an uproar in the Arab world by claiming he was God and hurling insults at the Prophet Muhammad is now behind bars — caught in a sting that used Facebook to track him down.

The case of the unlikely apostate, a shy barber from this backwater West Bank town, is … illustrating a new trend by authorities in the Arab world to mine social media for evidence. …

Walid Husayin — the 26-year-old son of a Muslim scholar — was … secretly posting anti-religion rants on the Internet during his free time.

He faces a potential life prison sentence on heresy charges for “insulting the divine essence.” Many in this conservative Muslim town say he should be killed for renouncing Islam, and even family members say he should remain behind bars for life.

“He should be burned to death,” said Abdul-Latif Dahoud, a 35-year-old Qalqiliya resident. The execution should take place in public “to be an example to others,” he added.

Over several years, Husayin is suspected of posting arguments in favor of atheism on English and Arabic blogs, where he described the God of Islam as having the attributes of a “primitive Bedouin.” He called Islam a “blind faith that grows and takes over people’s minds where there is irrationality and ignorance.”

If that wasn’t enough, he is also suspected of creating three Facebook groups in which he sarcastically declared himself God and ordered his followers, among other things, to smoke marijuana in verses that spoof the Muslim holy book, the Quran.

Then comes a very interesting piece of information:

At its peak, Husayin’s Arabic-language blog had more than 70,000 visitors, overwhelmingly from Arab countries.

Wow! We wish we could find so many like-minded readers in the free West. But what a revelation – that there are some 70,000 Arabs who appreciate atheism and anti-Islam satire. A thirst for reason in the heart and home of Islam!

But hold on – not all his visitors liked what he said. Some hundreds among them objected – ranted, one might say.

His Facebook groups elicited hundreds of angry comments, detailed death threats and the formation of more than a dozen Facebook groups against him, including once called “Fight the blasphemer who said ‘I am God.'”

The outburst of anger reflects the feeling in the Muslim world that their faith is under mounting attack by the West.

Come, come AP – hundreds among 70,000 reflect “a feeling in the Muslim world”? Oh, we know that feeling exists, but there are larger manifestations of it than that. These figures suggest something quite different: that there is an undercurrent of rebellion against Islamic dogmatism. A tide that could become a flood? We wish.

AP does its best to defend the Palestinian Authoritarians:

Husayin is the first to be arrested in the West Bank for his religious views …

The Western-backed Palestinian Authority is among the more religiously liberal Arab governments in the region. It is dominated by secular elites and has frequently cracked down on hardline Muslims and activists connected to its conservative [read fundamentalist – JB] Islamic rival, Hamas.

Husayin’s high public profile and prickly style, however, left authorities no choice but to take action.

No choice, AP?

Husayin used a fake name on his English and Arabic-language blogs and Facebook pages. After his mother discovered articles on atheism on his computer, she canceled his Internet connection in hopes that he would change his mind.

But he persisted intrepidly:

Instead, he began going to an Internet cafe — a move that turned out to be a costly mistake. The owner …  said the blogger aroused suspicion by spending up to seven hours a day in a corner booth. After several months, a cafe worker supplied captured snapshots of his Facebook pages to Palestinian intelligence officials.

He has his brave defenders:

A small minority has questioned whether the government went too far.

Zainab Rashid, a liberal [female] Palestinian commentator, wrote in an online opinion piece that Husayin has made an important point: “that criticizing religious texts for their (intellectual) weakness can only be combatted by … oppression, prison and execution.”

Is Facebook unable to resist being misused by despots?

Such “stalking” on Facebook and other social media sites has become increasingly common in the Arab world. In Lebanon, four people were arrested over the summer and accused of slandering President Michel Suleiman on Facebook. …

In neighboring Syria, Facebook is blocked altogether. And in Egypt, a blogger was charged with atheism in 2007 after intelligence officials monitored his posts.

The effect over time of the products of freedom on the closed world of Islam must be for the good. Meanwhile, those – such as Facebook – who provide the means for the free dissemination of ideas, must resist all attempts to interfere with their purpose. If they collaborate with the forces of oppression they don’t merely tarnish their own reputation but subvert the invaluable service they exist to provide.

Here is the admirable atheist conservative Pat Condell talking about “God or nothing”.