Christopher Hitchens, on Mitt Romney's ridiculous "freedom requires religion" speech:
Yes, well the rape-and-lynch-women-for-trying-to-be-funny-about-Mohammed community is entirely religious. The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious. The child-abuse and child-sexual-mutilation-of-genitals community is pretty exclusively religious. The "You must tell children they're going to Hell for minor infractions, to terrify them when they're little" community, which I believe to be child abuse, is exclusively religious. The "Bribe people with Heaven" community—that's not moral either—is exclusively religious. One could go on and on. Scientology is a religion. Now, secularism, I'm sorry, just isn't like that.I don't agree with Hitch on either the all-religion-is-bad argument, or the Hannukah-is-evil argument. But I'm with him in denying the idea that all faith must be good. Posted by Stephen Silver at December 24, 2007 03:36 PM