Which is the stupidest religion

Christopher Hitchens. Free Inquiry 22 Philosophy of Religion. Edit this record. Mark as duplicate. Find it on Scholar. Request removal from index. Revision history. Download options PhilArchive copy. This entry has no external links. Add one. Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server Configure custom proxy use this if your affiliation does not provide a proxy.

Configure custom resolver. Hitchens Vs. Christopher Hitchens - - House of Anansi Press. Laurence Moore - - Modern Intellectual History 10 1 Self-denial in the form of asceticism and fasting is a part of both Eastern and Western religions, not only because deprivation induces altered states but also because people believe suffering somehow brings us closer to divinity.

Our ancestors lived in a world in which pain came unbidden, and people had very little power to control it. An aspirin or heating pad would have been a miracle to the writers of the Bible, Quran, or Gita.

Faced with uncontrollable suffering, the best advice religion could offer was to lean in or make meaning of it. The problem, of course is that glorifying suffering—turning it into a spiritual good—has made people more willing to inflict it on not only themselves and their enemies but also those who are helpless, including the ill or dying as in the case of Mother Teresa and the American Bishops and children as in the child beating Patriarchy movement.

Genital mutilation — Primitive people have used scarification and other body modifications to define tribal membership for as long as history records. But genital mutilation allowed our ancestors several additional perks—if you want to call them that.

Infant circumcision in Judaism serves as a sign of tribal membership, but circumcision also serves to test the commitment of adult converts. In one Bible story, a chieftain agrees to convert and submit his clan to the procedure as a show of commitment to a peace treaty. While the men lie incapacitated, the whole town is then slain by the Israelites.

In Islam, painful male circumcision serves as a rite of passage into manhood, initiation into a powerful club. By contrast, in some Muslim cultures cutting away or burning the female clitoris and labia ritually establishes the submission of women by reducing sexual arousal and agency. An estimated 2 million girls annually are subjected to the procedure, with consequences including hemorrhage, infection, painful urination and death.

Only some Hindus during the Festival of Gadhimai and some Muslims during Eid al Adha , Feast of the Sacrifice continue to ritually slaughter sacrificial animals on a mass scale.

Hindu sacred texts including the Gita forbid ritual killing, and most Hindus now eschew the practice because it violates ahimsa, or non-harm.

But it persists in some regions as a residual of folk religion. Hell — Whether we are talking about Christianity, Islam or Buddhism, an afterlife filled with demons, monsters, and eternal torture was the worst suffering the Iron Age minds could conceive and medieval minds could elaborate.

Invented, perhaps, as a means to satisfy the human desire for justice, the concept of Hell quickly devolved into a tool for coercing behavior and belief. Most Buddhists see hell as a metaphor, a journey into the evil inside the self, but the descriptions of torturing monsters and levels of hell can be quite explicit. Likewise, many Muslims and Christians hasten to assure that it is a real place, full of fire and the anguish of non-believers.

Some Christians have gone so far as to insist that the screams of the damned can be heard from the center of the Earth or that observing their anguish from afar will be one of the pleasures of paradise. Chief among these is a tremendous weight of cultural passivity in the face of harm and suffering. Secondarily, the idea of karma sanctifies the broad human practice of blaming the victim. Pierre Assouline, editor of Lire, said that he was pleased but unsurprised by the verdict and added that the trial should never have taken place.

He commented, "It was normal for Muslims institutions to react. But it would have been better if they had written to me, phoned me and that we do a debate in Lire between Houellebecq and Muslims. It is not up to judges to decide what can or can't be said about Islam.

The head of the Mosque of Lyon, Kamel Kabtane, also said that the result had been expected: "Justice has sided with the ones who want to humiliate Islam. I am not surprised given the way the trial was going. Islam now can be insulted freely.