“Religion poisons everything!” (13)

A few days ago, my wife and I were atop Mount Carmel in Israel, at the traditional site of the famous contest between the prophet Elijah and the priests of Baal that’s recounted in 1 Kings 18.

Working, again, from the late Christopher Hitchens’s confident and universal assertion that “religion poisons everything,” we must inescapably conclude that Felix Mendelsohn’s oratorio Elijah (because it’s a member of the set called “everything”) was poisoned by religion, and that it would have been better — assuming that it would have come into existence in the first place! — without the religious element that it contains.

Here’s a two-part recording of Mendelssohn’s toxic composition Elijah, another of religion’s crimes against humanity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlY8WQ5vLeY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf8IOw9NXGw

Should such performances perhaps be banned?  Regulated, at least?  (Poisons and poisonous things are commonly regulated.)