“Faith is the most overrated of the virtues –– there is a serious danger now to civilization from religious fundamentalists of all kinds.”

Christopher Hitchens, author of the No.1 New York Times Bestseller, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” spoke these empirically proven words, and he is coming Wednesday to share his perspective on religion at Miami University.

Hitchens grew up in England where religion is compulsory in schools. His mother came from a Jewish family, and his father from a Baptist family, but neither of his parents actively practiced their religions.

Hitchens described how a childhood experience in his nature class opened his eyes to religion’s inherent nonsense.

“I had a teacher when I was about 10,” Hitchens said. “One day she said, ‘Look boys, notice the trees and the grass and the vegetation and everything are lovely shades of green, which is a wonderful thing because it’s the color that’s the most restful to our eyes. Imagine if God had made the grass orange or purple or something that was clashing, how horrible that would be. But you can see how God is so good because he made everything green.’”

Hitchens said his common sense led him in a different direction from his teacher.

“I thought to myself that’s complete nonsense; it must be the other way around,” Hitchens said. “Our eyes have gotten used to the green, rather than the trees adapting to our eyes. I just knew by sort of instinct that this was a ridiculous thing for anyone to be teaching me. It was the wrong way of teaching nature and a stupid way of imposing religion.”

Hitchens worried for a while his skepticism might be considered taboo, but he later realized others had come to conclusions similar to his own.

“I kept it to myself for a bit,” Hitchens said. “But as I got older, I met more and more people who had come to the same conclusion independently that religion is foolish, and not in a good way.”

Hitchens said although he and many others are able to recognize the absurdity of religion, plenty of people continue to blindly accept as truth everything their religious leaders say. He described implications of blind faith, the most pressing in his opinion being the actions of the pope and the Roman Catholic Church.

“The new pope is attempting to impose a more awful conservative version of Catholicism on millions of people,” Hitchens said. “The official line of the pope is that condoms are worse than AIDS … they believe people in Africa and elsewhere should not have access to prophylactics, and as a result a lot more people get AIDS.”

Hitchens said the danger of religion extends into the U.S.

“There are organized right-wing Christian forces in the United States who don’t think scientific conclusions of biologists and physicists should be accepted, and that we should all be taught that we are created instead of evolved,” Hitchens said. “We are not created, we evolved. No serious person can possibly argue about this anymore. We have pretty much wound up that argument, but there are people who just don’t want to admit it, and this is pathetic.”

Alexandra Newman, events coordinator for Secular Students of Miami (SSM), the group sponsoring Hitchens’ speech, hopes the event will open the minds of Miami students.

“This is an educational event; it’s not attacking people who are religious,” Newman said. “My hope is people will be open to listening to this … people should come with an open mind.”

Newman said one of SSM’s goals is to promote healthy skepticism in everything, including the open, rational and scientific examination of the universe and our place in it. After reading Hitchens’ book, Newman thought a speech by Hitchens would help accomplish this goal as well as some of SSM’s others, such as advocating for the separation of church and state, something explicitly stated in the U.S. Constitution.

After growing up in a nation in which religion is forced on the public, Hitchens doesn’t understand why some Americans reject the notion of separation of church and state.

“It upsets me that in a country like America, which has a secular constitution that separates the church and the state, there are people who want to overturn that and have religion imposed on people,” Hitchens said.

First-year Kendall Christerson, who attends non-denominational Christian services once or twice every couple months, thinks students at Miami can benefit from attending Hitchens’ speech.

“I think people should definitely open their minds to it and see what it is,” Christerson said. “They don’t have to agree with it, but they should listen. Maybe (afterward) they’ll step back and analyze their own beliefs.”

Hitchens’ speech will be at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 17 in the Taylor Auditorium in the Farmer School of Business. A book signing will immediately follow the speech.

“We’re going to have to call the enemy by its right name now,” Hitchens said. “Faith is the problem here –– people who will believe anything they’re told and think it gives them special rights because they’re believers. This has to be resisted.”