I got to talk with Christopher Hitchens

This isn't that exciting, but I think it's neat. Some time ago, Christopher Hitchens was on a local NPR show called Radio Times. Marty Moss-Coane was interviewing him about his new book and towards the end they take callers.

For those of you who don't know, Christopher Hitchens is, among other things, a strong advocate of Atheism. His most recent book, which he was discussing on this occasion, is entitled God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. His argument is that because religion requires abandoning reasoned thought for dogma, all religions are inherently bad and he cites all these examples of negative behaviors that can be attributed to belonging to a religion. He's pretty equal opportunity about it, too. He hits everyone pretty equally, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, even His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Anyway, so he was going on about how every religion under the sun is bad and we would be so much better off without them all. And of course everyone was calling in to say their religion was different and he would tell tem why he thought that their way of worshiping an invisible man in the sky was just as bad as everyone else's.

Well, I guess I wasn't any different. I called in and told him I was a Quaker, which is one of the Peace Churches along with the Mennonites and the Amish and the Church of the Bretheren, and that to my knowledge the Quakers hadn't hurt anyone in the last 200 years, and I asked him if maybe since tolerance of others and promotion of equal rights and social justice were core components o Quakerism that there was some way we might distinguish ourselves from all the religions that were causing problems.

This is where things get cool. He said that because Quakers don't push their beliefs as the only way to heaven, as if we had some divine knowledge that we were right and everyone else was wrong, he didn't consider Quakerism to be a religion. He even mentioned that he has his daughter enrolled in a Quaker-run school. I said that I felt it just made us an honest religion. And its true, virtually every Quaker I've ever met has been slightly agnostic in that we are perfectly willing to accept that whatever our personal beliefs are, we could be wrong and/or someone else could be right. Maybe we're all right. Heck, maybe we're all wrong. Who knows?

Well, he commented that it seemed as if some massive wave of Agnosticism had swept over the country because everyone that called into the show that day had the same point that they don't judge other religions because they might be wrong themselves. He then commented that he could tell that I was not a particularly religious individual.

I was going to argue with him about whether or not Quakerism is a religion and how religious I am, but I decided instead that if Christopher Hitchens doesn't think you're religious, you should just take that as a compliment and move on.