I think this interview with Christopher Hitchens is a fairly good one--love him or hate him (and I generally lean toward the latter), he often brings up good points. Still, Hitch is one of those people who are frequently provocative but rarely persuasive. It's been ages since I've read a piece by Christopher Hitchens and came away saying, "I totally agree with that." It might be his schizophrenic political and personal philosophy that embraces the ever more nihilistic Iraq War while angrily attacking religion in all forms, then mentions how women aren't funny and goes on to plead for the release of Scooter Libby and Paris Hilton. With Hitchens, it's never about convincing others that he's right--it's about courting controversy and thus staying relevant in the zeitgeist. And he does, somehow. After all, not too many people get played by Bruce Willis, even though that movie was a notorious flop.
Still, he does use an argument against religion that nearly every athiest I've ever met has paid homage to, an argument I'll refer to as "the argument". Actually, it's not so much an argument as an observation masquerading as an argument. In the interview, Hitchens talks about an encounter when speaking when he asked a roomful of people whether they could name an act of brutality committed against a religious person by an athiest, which received no response. Then he asked the converse, if anyone could come up with an incident in which a religious person mistreated someone else because of their faith (or lack thereof), which he claims he couldn't even finish asking before people chimed in with their responses. The argument inextricable from that observation: that religion causes violence and athiesm does not.
The sheer demagogery of this argument is astonishing. On one hand, you have the availability heuristic to contend with--just because violence on behalf of spiritual ends is better-known and better-publicized does not mean that it has never happened on the orders of athiests. Nearly all of the infamously brutal 20th century regimes were athiestic. The Soviet Union persecuted followers of Judaism before segueing into persecuting Christians, using imprisonment and torture to prevent the spread of the religion. The Chinese have not only done this in the past, but they are still doing it this very day, and not just with Christian evangelists either (or just Christians, for that matter). Even minor cults like Falun Gong get major persecution from the "nontheistic" government of China, and it is all explicitly linked to their faith. I don't mean to argue that athiesm leads necessarily to such actions--it is an embarrassment, a perversion, of what many athiests believe, just as the Crusades and the Inquisition, and all the other brutalism inflicted upon innocents in the name of Christ over the years, are perversions of the essential nature of Christianity abhorred by everyone outside of a truly lunatic fringe.
It is also fairly clear to me that this argument is a textbook example of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc paradigm. In these kinds of arguments, correlation is confused with causality, which is to say that something that happens at the same time as something else is said to happen because of that something else. Sure, there have been repressive theistic regimes throughout history, and even today one finds examples. Then again, until the 20th century there were no regimes led by athiests--none. In fact, considering the carnage inflicted by regimes from Lenin to Mao to Pol Pot, one could conclude, ceteris paribus, that regimes led by athiests are far, far more violent and dangerous than their theocratic conterparts. To be fair, Marxist-Leninist thought effectively was a religion in and of itself--it had its own eschatology and dogma, its own evangelistic branch and affirmative duties. Athiesm might have been its faith, but socialism was its religion. Still, in the short time in which athiesm has been a viable, mainstream creed (there have always been nonbelievers, but it wasn't until the Enlightenment that athiesm really caught on), and in the even shorter time in which it has been widespread enough to capture control of a nation-state, there seems to be some fairly compelling evidence that athiests are just as capable of barbary as theists.
This would all be beside the point if it weren't for the implication of this argument that it is religion that is responsible for all the suffering in the world, and not just plain old human nature. If Hitchens and his contemporaries would argue that religion was responsible for a nontrivial portion of the world's problems, I would concede the point willingly. I just don't get that vibe from Hitchens, who mentions all kinds of examples of brutality by people of faith but doesn't even make a nod toward the nastiness that athiesm has also caused over the years, and his use of hyperbolic terms in contexts such as these only impedes the legitimate arguments that people might otherwise sway people. There have been, over the years, plenty of tolerant, peaceful, moral athiests. There have also been many who have been ruthless butchers who targeted people of faith for the purpose of internment, torture, and murder. The same can be said of people of faith. This indicates to me that violence and conquest are probably hardwired into the human DNA rather than something that can be flicked on and off by accepting or renouncing religion. This argument seems to belie an oversimplified and overly didactic worldview that is ironically not too far from the very people these athiests excoriate. Either Hitch and his acolytes are being deliberately intellectually dishonest when they make this claim, ignoring any evidence that doesn't conform to their cosmology (not unlike the creationists they scorn) or they are simply so uninformed that they have literally no idea about that which they speak. Then again, it's not like the two are mutually exclusive. As usual, Hitch's argument is provocative and completely unpersuasive. But a lot of evil religious people don't know what they're talking about, so don't worry about it.
P.S. Ross Douthat's review of Hitchens's book is quite good--even at his best, Hitch is less a journalist than an anecdotalist, and his book is just not that convincing. But, as you might have guessed, it's not meant to be.
