Reading a review of “Mortality” by Christopher Hitchens (G section, Sept. 10), I was distressed, but not surprised, to read that Hitchens’s so-called religious enemies wrote to tell him, an atheist, that his diagnosis of cancer was, as he put it, “a slow-acting suicide-murderer — on a consecrated mission from heaven.”
When I read this, and was reminded of the hate that religion seems to engender around the world, I was reminded as well that Jonathan Swift, about 1720, wrote, “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”
I imagine that this sentiment was expressed in ancient Babylon, and before that. Regrettably, it is as true today as ever.