With all due respect to Christopher Hitchens, he misses the point. As with others of your stripe, you take details, small isolated incidents, or otherwise uncharacteristic scenarios, and blow them out of proportion, presenting them as though they are indicative of the whole.

When Mr. Hitchens spoke in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union on Wednesday night, he decried religion. He cherry-picked evils done by those claiming to do them in the name of some god. He called for a secular constitutional society to fight the forces of theocracy.

In short, Mr. Hitchens, you are sickening.

A cursory glance at Mr. Hitchens’ list of published work uncovers what is, perhaps, the root cause of all this: he appears, quite simply, to be mad at the world. His list of works is dominated by tract after tract denouncing one entity or another; one person or another.

What reasonable and charitable human being writes a book decrying Mother Theresa and referring to her as the “Ghoul of Calcutta?”

Religions are not perfect. Any work of man is, by nature, flawed. But to simply examine the bad and ignore or attempt to explain away the good is not only biased, but revisionist as well.

“Religion is bad,” “God does not exist.”

Tell that to the thousands who were helped, inspired and assisted – directly or indirectly – by Mother Theresa.

Tell that to the people of Myanmar, whose only real hope against their current oligarchy lies with masses of Buddhist monks.

Tell that to the masses of humanity who stood in St. Peter’s Square to mourn one of the great men of our time, Pope John Paul II.

Tell that to the thousands upon thousands who have found sanctuary, relief, help, guidance and purpose within the doors of a church.

Tell that to men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who opposed the Nazis and the Gestapo and ended his days in a concentration camp.

All religions – both past and present – have their upsides and their downsides. But what other type of organization so freely seeks to encourage the welfare of other people? Governments? I think not.

As to Mr. Hitchens’ assessment that churches that are given tax breaks ought to be made to extol Darwinism along with their other beliefs, he ought to refer to his U.S. Constitution, Amendment One.

It is a well-established principle of law that the right to tax an entity necessarily entails the right to destroy that entity. In this way the federal government does not pay property tax to states, since this would imply the states’ ability to destroy the federal government. Considering the First Amendment’s guarantee of “free exercise” of religion, handing the government the right to tax religious establishments is, well, pretty absurd.

As to the “equal time” half of that argument, consider this:

Most Cyclone fans know Jeff Johnson, otherwise known as “the guy who gets everybody fired up before the football games.” Imagine if, prior to the ISU-Iowa football game, Mr. Johnson dedicated just as much time to Iowa cheers as to our own. That wouldn’t make too much sense now, would it? The same is true of Mr. Hitchens’ “equal time” argument. Why should a minister be forced to espouse ideas to which he does not adhere?

On that note: being “forced to espouse ideas,” or, in Mr. Hitchens’ words “.any church that receives any tax breaks must give half of its time.” sounds very Hitler-Stalin-Mao-Gestapo-KGB-esque, doesn’t it?

To the assertion that religions do not teach morality, what does he call the Ten Commandments? Are they not, essentially, the basic foundations of Western law? More disturbingly, does Mr. Hitchens believe that it is perfectly fine to murder, steal, lie and perjure?

North Korea, Mr. Hitchens, is not a religion. North Korea is a state. An autocratic state. A state not unlike Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China, where an atheistic vision – not entirely unlike that of Mr. Hitchens, though never entirely successful, was sought as the supposed ideal. These are indeed the “horrible systems” that Mr. Hitchens makes them out to be. Very often, as in communist Poland, for instance, it is a religion itself that contributes to the toppling of these very systems.

In positioning himself against the concept of religion, Mr. Hitchens effectively asks his listener to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Yes, many horrible things have been done in the name of religion, but does this justify the denigration of such institutions as the Lutheran potluck, Methodist soup supper or ecumenical community choir?

It is hardly fair to accuse the polite, gray-haired church lady of the ills of the world simply for dishing up red Jell-O at a church dinner. Surely there are more menacing forces on this earth.

– Ryan Frederick is a senior in management from Orient.