Yet the dark side of the medical profession is also well-known to folklore. Messrs. Burke and Hare, not always willing to wait for corpses to sell to an anatomy professor, killed to provide the cadavers. A columnist in the Financial Times recently mentioned the names of Josef Mengele and Che Guevara, two physicians who were capable of extreme cruelty. I didn't think the comparison was fair: Mengele was a sadist in his capacity as a doctor, while Guevara, willing enough to slay what he thought of as the class enemy, did not prostitute his gifts as a doctor in order to do so.

You may recall the case of Dr. Baruch Goldstein. On Feb. 25, 1994, this Israeli army physician stalked into the so-called "Cave of the Patriarchs" in Hebron, unslung his automatic weapon, and fired into the crowd of Muslim worshippers, killing 29 people of all ages and both sexes before being killed himself.

But, Hitch, just as Guevara didn't "prostitute his gifts as a doctor" in order to kill, neither did Goldstein, whatever his motivation. Yes, yes, I get it, you're saying that religion was the reason Goldstein killed. But why so willing to excuse Guevara, motivated by political ideology, and not Goldstein? As you yourself are aware, the godless totalitarian regimes of the 20th century - Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, the Khmer Rouge - were responsible for more suffering and death than the history of deaths attributable to religion throughout the rest of human history combined.

Talk about prostituting one's gifts.

The reason that slaughter in the twentieth century was so much worse had nothing to do with religious or totalitarian motivation. You must blame technology. If Jerico had been a city of millions and Joshua had had a nuclear bomb, The civilian casualties would certainly been comparable to those of Hitler and Stalin.

Except in certain Muslim circles, religion simply is no longer important enough to kill over. And even among Muslims most of their rage stems from being exploited, colonized, occupied, and disrespected by the west for 200 years.

kenrockthefirst:

As you yourself are aware, the godless totalitarian regimes of the 20th century - Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, the Khmer Rouge - were responsible for more suffering and death than the history of deaths attributable to religion throughout the rest of human history combined.

This statement is a bit misleading. Yes, those totalitarian regimes were responsible for more suffering and death than can be attributed to religion. But were these regimes really Godless?

I would argue that while they were godless in the traditional sense (no worship of a Judeo-Christian god), these regimes simply the worship of a god with the worship of the State.

Those that lived (and, in some cases such as North Korea and Cuba) continue to live in totalitarian regimes worship the state, instead of, as I have mentioned, a Judeo-Christian god.

For those regimes, past and present, the State is God.

Nazi Germany was a Roman Catholic regime. I can't speak for the Khmer Rouge, but I suspect that they incorporated local religious beliefs into their regime. Stalin did claim to be an atheist.

That's a fallacy. Any truly Christian person who got in the way of the Nazis was sent to the death camps along with the Jews, Gypsies, etc.

To quote something Hitchens said in his latest book (and you would know this had you done your homework)

"To begin with a slighly inexpensive observation, it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists."

page 230.

Since "truly christian" is a self-described term that even christains can't agree on, it's pretty much a worthless argument.

kenrockthefirst:

That's a fallacy. Any truly Christian person who got in the way of the Nazis was sent to the death camps along with the Jews, Gypsies, etc.

I see. You contend that (Christian) British and American POWs were sent to concentration camps.

You are wrong here. Hitler claims he did fight in the name of Christianity (a perversion of Christianity.) I am a Christian, and truly abhor the genocide committed by him and his followers, but a quick internet search reveals that he did use Christianity as his reasoning (however illogical it is) just as the Taliban and Al Qaeda do in the name of Islam. So, yes, he and others did not truly understand Christianity, but that fact does not erase that he used religion as his call to arms. To say that religious fanaticism was not responsible for millions of concentration camp deaths is highly inaccurate. Although I do not agree with Hitchens about whether God exists, I agree with him in that so many zealots are ready to kill others to prove the supremacy of their brand of faith.

The following is from his speech in Munich on 12 April 1922:

My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice....

It may seem at first that Mr. Hitchens' is comparing Guevera and Goldstein, which would indeed be a weak, if not specious, analogy of hippocratic betrayal. But the mere proximity of these references within the same article is irrelevant and attacking such a proximity is an oversimplification. Bare in mind that Mr. Hitchens cites the Guevera/Mengele analogy as a sub-argument - that of addressing the Financial Times columnist. The Goldstein case, however, exemplifies the principal argument: a doctor rejecting his moral and professional codes based on dogmatic license.

In addition, the nazim/stalinism case for equating totalitarion secular oppression with religious violence is a tired one. Usual arguments aside (Hitler's catholism and Vatican approval, Stalinism as a virtual theocracy), it boils down to this: secular tyranny requires no instruction (apart from perhaps sociopathy and demagoguery) whereas relgious fundamentalist violence is derived not from morality of the individual, but from dogmatic license.