Religion poisons everything, warned atheist Christopher Hitchens convincingly, but whose analytical failing was in conflating theology with ontology. That is to say, to the best of my knowledge Hitch never disentangled his denunciation of man-made religious doctrines from his devout denial of some other-dimensional, higher existence; to him, revealing doctrinal absurdities was the same as disproving a supreme beingness. Thus as a construct of argumentation, Hitch's approach to preaching atheism contained a philosophical black hole.
Nonetheless, his axiom of "religion poisons everything" has received a noteworthy boost of late. I've seen videos of evangelical pastors informing their congregant petrie dishes of natural selection that God will protect them from covid-19 — incontestable proof that religion, as an agent of the pandemic, can poison even one's soft tissue. And then there's this, from WaPo:
"More than 550 parishioners packed Sunday service at the Life Tabernacle Church in the Louisiana town of Central. Megachurches in Ohio and Florida also reported their halls teeming with congregants. In Virginia, Liberty University last week welcomed back from spring break some 1,900 of students to its Lynchburg campus."
These defiantly oblivious Trumpian schmucks are, without a doubt, American society's greatest threats of today. Covid-19 is "not a concern" to us, says the Tabernacle Church's "pastor" as he sends forth his flock of more than 500 potentially contagious fatalities. "The virus, we believe, is politically motivated," he added dumbfoundingly, in that this virus, if politically motivated, can't kill? Then again, who the hell could know what this moron is thinking, except this: "We hold our religious rights dear, and we are going to assemble no matter what someone says" — omitting that those someones are epidemiologists and infectious disease experts, who are motivated less by their perfectly logical disdain of Trump than by their professional interest in saving lives.
And let us not depart without hearing from this nation's most invidious of all theocratic charlatans, Liberty University's president, Jerry Falwell Jr., who also propagates covid-19 as a plot to destroy that most invidious of all political charlatans. "I think we have a responsibility to our students — who paid to be here, who want to be here, who love it here — to give them the ability to be with their friends …" etc., etc., madness atop imbecility. Who could have known that Falwell's responsibility to his students would by yesterday result in a dozen of them being "sick with symptoms that suggested covid-19"?
Which brings us back to Hitchens. On at least a secular level, perhaps his entanglement of theology and ontology — religious doctrines and human existence — was not, after all, far off the mark.