My 2nd Life

Our beliefs and our world
Lately, I read two books which I had picked-up in Manhattan in June: Christopher Hitchens ("God Is Not Great") and Mike Davis ("Planet of Slums"). The Christopher Hitchens book was on display in the same section that deals with faith and spiritualism. That is remarkable.

Hitchen argues against the teachings of the "holy books" (Quran, Bible, Talmud etc.) as scientifically false. He also refutes the argument, whether or not religion is metaphysically "true," that at least it stands for morality. For him religion stands for a heavenly dictatorship and its immoral teachings, which have at different times included the slaughter of others, the enslavement of the survivors, the mutilation of the genitalia of children and women, the burning of witches, the condemnation of sexual "deviants" and the eating of certain foods, the opposition to innovations in science and medicine, the doctrine of predestination, the horror of suicide-bombing and jihad, and the ethically dubious notion of vicarious redemption by human sacrifice (a list which is his and by no means exhaustive).

Religion - or a supernaturally guided celestial dictatorship on earth as Hitchens put it - is totalitarian in nature, as it tries to prescribe not just the personal lives of believers and non-believers, the ways communities are organized, but also the desires and thinking of individuals. The idea that a non- religious person would not know the difference between right and wrong is to Hitchens nothing more than an insanuation. But he concludes, that not to be among the believers, has its advantages too: No one to read and condemn one's thoughts and deeds which will spare the eternal worshipful bliss ("a somewhat hellish idea") or to go to an actual hell.

For billions of people hell is real and hell is now. It is the place where they live. Mike Davis is the accountant of the "Planet of Slums". In 2004, he published an article in the New Left Review that read as follows: "Sometime in the next year, a woman will give birth in the Lagos slum of Ajegunle, a young man will flee his village in west Java for the bright lights of Jakarta, or a farmer will move his impoverished family into one of Lima’s innumerable pueblos jovenes. The exact event is unimportant and it will pass entirely unnoticed. Nonetheless it will constitute a watershed in human history. For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural. Indeed, given the imprecisions of Third World censuses, this epochal transition may already have occurred."

The author has enlarged the article into a factsheet of misery. A few bullet points:

• Lagos grew from 300,000 people in 1950 to 13.5 million today

• Todays urban population stands at 3.2 billion. This exceeds the total global population of 1960

• In China alone, 200 million people moved from the rural areas to the cities since the late 1970s

• In 1973 in Sao Paulo 1.2 per cent of the population lived in slums. In 1993 the figure had risen to 20 per cent

• In Ethiopia 99.4 per cent of the urban population are slum dwellers

• With 10 to 12 million slum dwellers Mumbai has the largest slum population in absolute terms, 100,000 people live in the streets of Los Angeles, 1 million on the pavements of Mumbai

• "Slumlordism" is a major source of income: 53 percent of land in 16 Southeast Asian cities is owned by the top 5 per cent of landlords

• In Nairobi population density per square kiloeter can vary from 360 (Karen neighbourhood) to 80,000 (Kibera slum)

• In 2005 the Government of Zimbabwe destroyed the shelters of 750,000 slum dwellers with no compensation or without providing new housing; 10 years earlier the Government of Myanmar did the same: it destroyed the homes of 1.6 million city dwellers

• Kinshasa (10 million inhabitants) has no waterborn sewage system while in Manila less than 10 per cent of houses are connected to such a system

• In Laini Saba (Nairobi) there are 10 working pit latrines for 40,000 people and in Bangalore 19 for 102,000, meanwhile in New Delhi 480,000 families have access to 160 toilet seats and 110 mobile toilet vans

• In Luanda 84 per cent of the urban population is jobless

• In Dhaka only 7 per cent of the children attend school while half ot the 10 to 14 years old are engaged in income generation

• In the Villevakam slum (Chennai) more than 500 people, or one person per family, are estimated to have sold one of their kidneys.

I think, I stop here. There are many more figures in Mike Davies' book.

Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great - The Case Against Religion, ISBN: 1843545861

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, ISBN: 1844671607