Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens says religion poisons everything, he is not kidding - he really does mean everything. ''Yup. People ask - do you mean religion poisons aerobic dancing? Chess? Tantric sex? And I say yes - it does. Religion attacks us in our deepest integrity by saying we wouldn't be able to make a moral decision without it, and that a supernatural dictatorship is our only hope. That makes us all into serfs. And chess and Tantric sex and Chinese food are pointless if you must enjoy them as a serf.'' ''How Religion Poisons Everything'' is the highly provocative subtitle to Hitchens's fulminating bestseller God is Not Great, which sold 40,000 copies in Australia and New Zealand. It's also the title of the address he will give tomorrow to open the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Opera House. And it is the danger he believes to be inherent in religious ideas - and that posed by the religious who follow them - that he will be speaking about.

''I've already read an attack saying it's much too easy to do what Hitchens does, and what does he mean 'dangerous'?'' Hitchens said. ''It's a perfectly good point - in a way. What danger is there in my going to the Opera House? None. ''But it's not nothing to me that a murderous theocracy in Iran is about to get nuclear weapons by stealing and cheating - that is dangerous. Or that there are settlers around the greater River Jordan and Jerusalem area who think that by stealing other people's property they can bring on the Messiah and Armageddon - that is dangerous. Before the publication of God is Not Great, Hitchens was best known for abandoning the left to support the invasion of Iraq, and for writing books venomously critical of Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton. And for his reputation for hard living: he calls Johnny Walker Black ''the breakfast of champions'' and has referred to smoking in the shower.

There is one idea put to him in debate more than any other: that morality is God-given. ''Most [believers] believe that without religion their children, and even they, would not know right from wrong. I have two arguments to which no answer has yet been received. One: Name me a moral kindness or action that they can do because of their belief but that I can't. Two: Can you think of one evil action done by a religion person? You can, and you can think of another, and another.'' ''Everything we know about philosophy, we first learnt because of religion. It deserves respect for being humanity's first attempt to make sense of everything, to discover knowledge.'' ''I think human civilisation only begins when people separate religion from the state. Policing that frontier, making sure of it, is a huge thing, culturally and politically. You realise that any attempt to cross it is poisonous - in the sense of lethal.''