Hitchens is not smart

I've listend to Hitchens on the radio promoting - or mumbling to promote - his new book "God is not Great", a fairly uninspiring attack against all things religious with the most vicious venom spewn in the direction of Islam. After Richard Dawkin's attempt to ditch religion in "The God Delusion", which was also given plenty of airtime, the secularists seem to be really on the advance - or are they?

There is a noticeable unease amongst those defenders of secularism compelling them to write about the subject. The very fact that they see the need to go on the offensive indicates that they are beginning to lose ground, and their attacks are, consequently, becoming more and more fanatical. If religion was a relic of the past, they would not need to convince us that it does not matter.

Hitchen, also an ardent supporter of the war in Iraq, is not so much worried about religious traditions and ritual, after all he admits to wanting a passover ceremony for his little daughter in spite of his Jewish wife not being too fuzzed about it. What worries him is that people should take religion seriously, believe in Divine revelation and be guided by it in their daily lives and politics. Islam is his greatest fear because Muslims have refused to have their religion emasculated by a foul compromise with secular overloards.

Just as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are turning out to be as disastrous and untenable as many an imperialist war before, the secular fundamentalists are beginning to lose the intellectual argument. A fish out of water will flap violently, but it will soon be snuffed out. The American empire is past its decadent stage and disintegrating fast even without having been attacked by any formidable enemy from the outside. Instead they had to create one in al-Qaedah. Meanwhile Russia and China sit on the sidelines watching the erstwhile giant fall and bleed to death, overstretched in too many military adventures far afield.

The need to find fault with religion is an admission of failure by the secular protagonists. Every now and then they are trying to poke a little to get a reaction in order to demonstrate the irrationality and violent nature of their enemy, be it the publication of offensive cartoons in Denmark or knighting Salman Rushdie for having written Satanic Verses, a book described by the late author Roald Dahl as unreadable, which had been prefinanced in order to begin the last crusade against Islam and religion which later culiminated in the war on terror. The mechanism of this kind of subversion is described very well in the response written by the leader of the Islamic Party of Britain at the time in his book "Satanic Voices Ancient and Modern", a book as poignant today as it was then. At the time, Muslims over-reacted and fell into the trap. Now, they seem to have matured sufficiently to sit back and watch the secularists burn themselves out.

Hitchens' and Dawkin's ramblings are the last attempt of the advocates of a failed social experiment to survive whilst more and more people are turning away from the wishy-washy uncertainties of dogmatic liberalism to find fulfilment in religious belief and devotion. Hitchens is not smart, and God is indeed great!