By Rabbi Lawrence M. Pinsker

THERE’S no doubt that bashing religion has become sexy.

And with the success of books like God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens is fast becoming the champion of atheists whose passion for chipping away at the presence of religious ideas conceals a curiously bankrupt repertoire of ethical and moral principles.

Unfortunately, without the religions that he dismisses so glibly, Mr. Hitchens would be hard pressed to provide a rational basis for a single ideal that he apparently believes would have been arrived at through pure reason alone — ideals like loving one’s neighbour as oneself (from the “primitive” book of Leviticus, then repeated by Jesus of Nazareth), the supreme value of a single human life (from the “myth” in the Book of Genesis that we are created in the image of God and repeated centuries later by the rabbis of the Talmud and by Mohammed in the Qur’an — “One who saves a single life is as though he had saved a world,” etc.

While Hitchens can rightly point to the fact that religions, both East and West, have not always lived up to their own ideals, the track record of purely humanistic champions of non-religious ideals for humanity has an even worse track record. The prime example of a purely humanistic society is the Nazi party in the mid-20th century, which was dedicated to the dream of a God-free world where human beings could conduct themselves without the restraints imposed by the tyrannical father-figure God of Western monotheisms. Surely Hitchens would hardly want Adolph Hitler to be the poster child for his vision of a world freed of God?

CLICK HERE TO READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE….

Short URL: http://tinyurl.com/ya6r5du