ABSTRACT
Religion, then, it appears, is not going away. I take it as obvious that science is not going away either (if only because most people love their electronic toys too much). That means we have to find some way to deal with the relationship between these two great cultural forces. What are the possible outcomes? I consider five; perhaps you will be able to formulate others. (1) It could be that religion is just evil, so that, no matter how long it stays around, it should be opposed. On this view, religion is
like racism or sexism or abusing children: no matter how inevitable it is, we should oppose it whenever and wherever it arises. Something like this seems to be the position of Christopher Hitchens, who titles his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Hitchens likes the subtitle so much that he repeats it a few pages into the book:
Religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow. . . . People of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything.2
