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Who Was Jesus? by Kamal Salibi, Taurus Parke Paperbacks, 2007
Against All Gods by AC Grayling, Oberon Books, 2007
God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic Books, 2007

It has long been acknowledged by Christian theologians, and by anyone else who cares to study the evidence, that the Bible does not give a coherent account of the life and sayings of Jesus. There are just too many contradictions and inconsistencies within and between the various books which make up the New Testament. Not only that, many of the historical and geographical references involving Jesus are not confirmed by modern scholarship. For instance, the earliest known archaeological record for the existence of Nazareth in Palestinian Galilee dates from no earlier than the third century AD, which undermines the case for a “Jesus of Nazareth.”  Salibi, a Christian, does a good job of pulling together many of these problems in his book Who Was Jesus?. He draws on the Koran and other sources to argue that “Jesus” is actually a compilation of two people: an Arabian named “Issa” who lived around 400 BC, was a Jewish preacher but was not executed; and about four hundred years later “Jeshu,” a preacher who was crucified in Jerusalem (though the Koran insists that only the first is the real “Jesus” and the latter account is false). Salibi's method is to reconstruct the Jesus story so as to iron out the contradictions and inconsistencies, using careful selection and a fair amount of his own speculations (“it could well have been true”). But it doesn't seem to have occurred to him that the Biblical evidence is so unreliable as to be worthless.

One of the sources Salibi believes early Christianity drew upon was the ancient fertility cult of  the “god” of “life-giving water” — that is, semen. Grayling doesn't swallow this and sticks mainly to a philosophical critique of religion, as befits a professor of philosophy at the University of London. His Against All Gods is short and bluntly put (64 pages and no index). Religions are not deserving of respect just because they are religions; they must be subject to the same scrutiny as any other belief and cannot hide behind the notion that they are personal beliefs. Are atheists themselves fundamentalists? Is atheism itself an act of faith? These claims are often found coming from religious folk who are somewhat taken aback by the plain speaking of people like Grayling. His humanism is guided by reason and respect for the evidence, the antithesis of fundamentalism and faith. And then there is the familiar objection that secular Stalinism and Nazism were worse than religion. Grayling's response is to point out that  Stalinism and Nazism were basically the same as religions in that they were monolithic ideologies of oppression and control. However, Grayling also argues that most wars in the world's history “owe themselves directly or indirectly to religion.” Granted that in the Crusades of the Middle Ages religion was an important causal factor, but are religions a cause of war in the modern world? Were the First and Second World Wars (where a largely Christian Britain and France declared war on Christian Germany in both cases) caused, even indirectly, by religion? Even if we accept Grayling's description of GW Bush's foreign policy as “conducting jihad for American/Baptist values,” this is not convincing as an explanation of the war against Iraq. Because he doesn't take into account material interests, Grayling confuses cause and consequence: propaganda instead of the underlying cause; religion invoked in the furtherance of material interests.

In contrast, Hitchens' God Is Not Great is lengthy and detailed. The title is his riposte to the Arabic-Islamic phrase Allahu Akbar: "God is Great," which is brave considering what happened to his friend Salman Rushdie. Subtitled “The Case Against Religion” (in the American edition it's “How Religion Poisons Everything”), it's a powerful and vehement denunciation of all religion and its practitioners. According to Hitchens, religionists allow themselves “permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.” All the usual arguments and some you may never have heard of are here. Like Grayling, Hitchens deals with the secular-Nazism-and-Stalinism-was-worse-than-religion argument, only in much more detail. He makes what should be an obvious point, that Hitler claimed to be a defender of Christianity against the “Christ-killer” Jews. (Incidentally, it was not until the 1960s that the Vatican officially absolved “the Jewish people” from collective guilt in Jesus’ death.) And prior to Stalin's political career he did have a strict religious upbringing and did train to be a priest, so he would have conformed to the Jesuit saying: “Give me the child until he is ten, and I will give you the man.” Hitchens claims to have been a Marxist in his youth but now says its “glories” were in the past, without specifying what those glories were or why they are in the past. And Marxism is “no longer any guide to the future,” again without giving any reason. He was a Trotskyist however and he may be really talking about his loss of faith in that dismal ideology. If he had taken a Marxist stand against capitalist imperialism, he would have avoided having to, as he saw it, support the Bush-Blair war against Iraq.

Grayling and Hitchens see themselves as defenders of the Enlightenment tradition of respect for reason and evidence against its traditional foe, religion. But they see nothing wrong in capitalism. Socialists share in the Enlightenment inheritance but recognise that the main source of irrationality in the modern world is to be found in the capitalist system of society. For socialists, therefore, the struggle against religion cannot be separated from the struggle for socialism. We fight religious superstition wherever it is an obstacle to socialism, but we are opposed to religion only insofar as it is an obstacle to socialism.

LEW

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