Justin Lamport 9/12/2023 Understanding Religions RE 103 Prof. Overbey Some comparisons and contrasts between Hitchens and Nye intertwined with my own thoughts While Christopher Hitchens might be a Tucker Carlson type of character that exists just to incite emotional responses out of the people who will find his content infuriating, in terms of the content between the lines of his “Religion Poisons Everything” article and the first chapter of Mallory Nye’s Religions: The Basics book, the so-called difference between religion and science is surprisingly similar. While Hitchens attacks the beliefs and practices of the world’s most dominant religions, what he simultaneously does is build the case for what we call science to be religion. In this first chapter of Nye’s book, one of the most essential takeaways I got from reading and annotating it was that regardless of what ideas, traditions, behaviors, and apparatus make up the religion, that religion dictated culture, as much as culture dictated that religion. In Hitchen’s article he continuously lets it be known that theoretic based science is the “religion” he attaches himself too. With that idea in mind, looking at the history of religion more broadly with respects to what Nye says about how religion has manifested itself so deeply in culture, at one point in time religion was a science. Before we had the instruments of today that have allowed us to formulate contextually backed theories for what the world is like, before the existence of such apparatus we can only believe that the religion was what the “science” of the time was. In my opinion, science has continuously become the religion that empirical evidence as we can know it and understand it has backed. Just as there were incomprehensible events that took place hundreds and thousands of years ago that were explained through language and artistic expression that we now call religion, who’s to say that hundreds and thousands of years from now there isn’t a whole new branch of explaining existence that differs so much from our norm now and that science as we know it today isn’t made out to be ancient mythology by a Christopher Hitchens in the future. With that being said, from these two readings and especially moreso in Nye’s first chapter, it almost seemed like an idea we can all universally apply to both science and any religion is the desire as human beings to formulate events into categories. In any facet of culture and human existence at any time in the short history that we have existed, categorizing events and setting precedent I would argue has almost always been our universal religion in the sense that it dictates our lives and understanding of everything around us so much that it has become the only way for us to explain things regardless of where or when in the existence of human nature that you look. In short, in my opinion, the one thing that both science and religion and every human that has ever existed must always believe in is the idea of setting a precedent and an explanation for an idea that can unify people to get them to cooperate. Ultimately, what differentiates us from other species and even gives us the ability to formulate any kind of “universal” understanding of anything around us is the ability to cooperate and I think that is the most fundamental idea I took from these first few readings.
