Christopher Hitchens - The Portable Atheist - Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

As Morton Smith put it “the first-century [Christian] churches had no fixed body of gospels, let alone a New Testament.” Similarly, it is now clear that the definitive text of the Koran still had not been achieved as late as the ninth century.

Central to the Islamic creed is the doctrine of the Last Day. Several terms are used in the Koran to indicate this most awesome of days: Day of Standing Up, Day of Separation, Day of Reckoning, Day of Awakening, Day of Judgment, the Encompassing Day, or simply and ominously the hour. The ultimate source of Muhammad’s notions of the Last Day was Syriac Christianity. These accounts obviously gripped his imagination, for the Koran is full of graphic descriptions of this day: this event will be marked by the sounding of the trumpet, the splitting asunder of the heavens, the reduction of the mountains to dust, the darkening of the sky, the boiling over of the seas, the opening of the graves when men and Jinn will be called to account. These beings will then have their deeds weighed in the Balance, will be judged by God, and then either assigned to everlasting bliss in Paradise, or consigned to everlasting torment and torture in Hell. The terrors of the Last Day are emphasized over and over again, especially in the later Meccan passages. Men and women will be restored to life, that is, there will be an actual resurrection of the physical body.

We know that this notion of the resurrection of the body was alien to Arabian thought, for many Meccan pagans scoffed at this manifestly absurd idea. The pagan philosophers in their polemics against the Christians also asked pertinent questions: “How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come? What was rotten cannot become fresh again, nor scattered limbs be reunited, nor what was consumed be restored…. Men swallowed by the sea, men torn and devoured by wild beasts, cannot be given back by the earth.”

All doctrines of personal survival, personal immortality, and personal resurrection confront the obvious observation that all men and women die, are buried or cremated, and even if buried their bodies eventually decompose—what is rotten cannot become fresh again.

The Muslim doctrine is committed to the physical survival of the body: “That is their reward for that they disbelieved in our signs, and said, ‘What! when we are bones and rubbish, shall we then be raised up a new creation?’ Could they not see that God who created the heavens and the earth is able to create the like of them, and to set for them an appointed time; there is no doubt therein, yet the wrong-doers refuse to accept it, save ungratefully!” (sura 17.100).

But there is one objection to such an account that Antony Flew has formulated:

Certainly Allah the omnipotent must have “power to create their like.” But in making Allah talk in these precise terms of what He might indeed choose to do, the Prophet was speaking truer than he himself appreciated. For thus to produce even the most indistinguishably similar object after the first one has been totally destroyed and disappeared is to produce not the same object again, but a replica. To punish or to reward a replica, reconstituted on Judgment Day, for the sins or virtues of the old Antony Flew dead and cremated in 1984 is as inept and as unfair as it would be to reward or to punish one identical twin for what was in fact done by the other.

The Muslim account is further dogged by contradictions. We are told all mankind will have to face their Maker (and Remaker) on the Judgment Day, and yet sura 2.159 and sura 3.169 tell us that those holy warriors who died fighting in God’s cause are alive and in His presence now. God has evidently raised them from the dead before the Last Day. Similarly, without waiting for the Last Day, God will send the enemies of Islam straight to hell. Interesting questions arise in this age of organ transplants. If a holy warrior dies fighting for the propagation of Islam, and at the very moment of his death has one of his organs, let us say his heart, transplanted into someone else lying in a hospital waiting for the surgical operation and the organ to save his life, how will the holy warrior be reconstituted? In this case, the same body will not have been refashioned; indeed, it will only be a replica with a different heart.

To answer “all is possible for God” is simply to admit the essential irrationality of the doctrine of reconstitution. In general, despite centuries of seances, table rapping, mediums, magicians, and all kinds of mumbo jumbo, no one has ever come up with a convincing proof of an afterlife. Apart from personal vanity, it is clearly fear of death that causes the persistent belief in a future life, despite all indications to the contrary.

What was the one thing that Mohammed later borrowed from Christianity? Paul’s invention, his means to priestly tyranny, to herd formation: the faith in immortality—that is, the doctrine of the “judgment.”

—NIETZSCHE, THE ANTI CHRIST

Apart from the empirical and logical objections to the doctrine of resurrection of the body, there are some powerful moral objections to the whole Islamic notion of the afterlife. Nietzsche has argued in the Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-christ that to talk of an afterlife is to do dirt on, to denigrate and besmirch this life. Far from making this life meaningful, the doctrine of an afterlife makes this life meaningless.

To invent fables about a world “other” than this one has no meaning at all, unless an instinct of slander, detraction, and suspicion against life has gained the upper hand in us: in that case, we avenge ourselves against life with a phantasmagoria of “another,” a “better” life.

The “Last judgment” is the sweet comfort of revenge…The “beyond”—why a beyond, if not as a means for besmirching this world?

Furthermore, the beyond is a way for the self-proclaimed prophets and priests to retain control, to terrorize the people with the tortures of hell, and equally to seduce them with the licentious pleasures of paradise. “The concepts ‘beyond,’ ‘last judgment,’ ‘immortality of the soul’ and ‘soul’ itself are instruments of torture, systems of cruelties by virtue of which the priest became master, remained master.

Muhammad was able to develop one of the worst legacies of the teachings of the Koran, the notion of a Holy War (discussed in Chapter 10), with the help of the idea of rewards in paradise for the holy martyrs who died fighting for Islam. As Russell put it, “at a certain stage of development, as the Mohammedans first proved, belief in Paradise has considerable military value as reinforcing natural pugnacity.”

Those prepared to die for the faith have been used frighteningly throughout Islamic history, “martyrs” were used for political assassinations long before the assassins of the eleventh and twelfth century. Modern Middle Eastern terrorists or Mujahheddin are considered martyrs and have been manipulated for political reasons, with considerable effect. Most of them have been immunized against fear, to quote Dawkins, “since many of them honestly believe that a martyr’s death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the neutron bomb.”

The contingency of this life should make man aware of its beauty and preciousness. The harsh truth that this is the only life we have should make us try and improve it for as many people as possible.

When one places life’s center of gravity not in life but in the “beyond”—in nothingness—one deprives life of its center of gravity altogether. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, everything natural in the instincts—whatever in the instincts is beneficent and life-promoting or guarantees a future now arouses mistrust. To live so, that there is no longer any sense in living, that now becomes the “sense” of life. Why communal sense, why any further gratitude for descent and ancestors, why cooperate, trust, promote, and envisage any common welfare?