Hitchens’ Hubris
In July 1941, a political prisoner escaped from Auschwitz. As a punishment, ten others were chosen by the Nazis to be killed in a starvation bunker. One of these men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, began lamenting what his death would mean for his wife and children. Upon hearing these cries, another prisoner, a Franciscan friar named Maksymilian Kolbe—who had run afoul of the Nazis after sheltering refugees, including hundreds of Jews, at his friary—volunteered to take Gajowniczek’s place and was sent to the starvation bunker in his stead. In the bunker, Kolbe became the leader of those awaiting death, whom he was often seen consoling and leading in prayers and hymns. Two weeks later, only four of the men were still alive, and Kolbe alone was conscious. The Nazis killed them all; Kolbe was seen calmly giving his arm to the executioner who injected him with carbolic acid. The memory of Kolbe’s courage and selflessness lived on in those who survived the Golgotha of Auschwitz, including Franciszek Gajowniczek, and Kolbe was canonized by John Paul II in 1982.
Christopher Hitchens alludes to Kolbe in his careless and dishonest polemic God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Hitchens, though unable to bring himself to mention Kolbe by name, claims he was virtually the only Catholic hero of the Holocaust and dismisses him as “a rather ambivalent priest who … had apparently behaved nobly in Auschwitz.”
It is not entirely clear why Hitchens believes that Kolbe was only “apparently” heroic at Auschwitz. Perhaps he doubts the testimony of concentration camp survivors. Maybe he objects to Kolbe because he was celibate and therefore “repulsive” to Hitchens. (So much for Michelangelo and Newton, Handel and Kant.) Hitchens may think Kolbe should have led his compatriots in discussions of Hitchens’ own “prophetic moralist,” Leon Trotsky, rather than prayer. Maybe the problem is Kolbe’s ethnicity; after all, Hitchens wrote a column in January 1983 mocking the religious beliefs of Poles at a time the rest of the world was marveling at those beliefs and the way they animated the Poles’ resistance to an atheistic dictatorship. Most likely, though, Hitchens’ unreasoning hatred of religion simply blinds him to Kolbe’s goodness, just as it caused him to ignore the fact that Kolbe’s heroism was echoed by the 130 or so other Catholic martyrs of the Holocaust so far beatified or canonized, and just as it repeatedly blinds him throughout this book to the role Christianity played in creating Western culture and continues to play in the lives of millions.
Although Hitchens’ book is lively and well written, it is fatally marred by its many rhetorical evasions and falsehoods. Throughout the book, whatever Hitchens dislikes is blamed on religion and whatever he likes is credited to something else. A clergyman Hitchens admires, Martin Luther King, is dismissed as someone who was “in no real … sense … a Christian.” By contrast, Hitchens blames the atheistic dictatorships that killed more people in the 20th century than had been deliberately killed by the state in all the preceding centuries on religion, offering up the Jesuit missions of Paraguay which protected the Indians until their dissolution as the first successful instance of totalitarianism and claiming that “A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy.” What Hitchens ignores is that Christian Europe produced very few theocracies, because the Church, basing herself on its founder, has always taught that men should “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” The political legacy of Christianity is thus one of law and liberty, not one of unitary despotism and worship of the state. In Hitchens’ strange mental universe, religion is to blame for slavery—a primordial human institution abolished in major part by religious men such as William Wilberforce—and the Rwandan genocide, where one Catholic ethnic group slaughtered a different Catholic ethnic group. Hitchens also repeats the Communist inspired lie that Pius XII was “pro-Nazi,” citing as his sole authority the book by John Cornwell that has been so thoroughly discredited by serious historians that even its author no longer makes such a claim.
Hitchens’ dishonesty extends to his own past. He now claims that he was a “guarded admirer” of John Paul II, even though he wrote two columns lambasting John Paul after his death, describing him as “an elderly and querulous celibate, who came too late and who stayed too long,” but generously offering that he would not face “eternal punishment” for his “errors and crimes” because there is no Hell. If this is how Hitchens writes about someone he admires, one wonders what he would say about someone he dislikes.
Hitchens also claims not to want to “prohibit” religion, even though he has long praised its forcible suppression, telling PBS that “One of Lenin’s great achievements … is to create a secular Russia. The power of the Russian Orthodox Church, which was an absolute warren of backwardness of evil and superstition, is probably never going to recover from what he did to it.” Of course, what Lenin did to Christianity in Russia was to unleash murder and terror. Indeed, Hitchens told Radar Magazine, in April, that if the Christian Right came to power in America, “It wouldn’t last very long and would, I hope, lead to civil war, which they will lose, but for which it would be a great pleasure to take part.” Hitchens still clings to his Marxist roots, and the urge to hurry History along—by gulags and firing squads if necessary --is always there.
The effectiveness of Hitchens’ book is also undermined by the large number of errors it contains, many so glaring that they will be picked up by even a casual reader with some knowledge of history and theology. The Gnostic gospels are not of the “same period and provenance” as the canonical Gospels, but were written several decades later; the “synoptic” Gospels are not synonymous with the “canonical” Gospels; “Q” is an assumed source for the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, but not Mark and John; the process of deciding which books to include in the New Testament was not one in which “many a life was horribly lost;” “the Vulgate” was what the Reformers were trying to get away from, not what they were attempting to translate the Bible into; Luther declared “Here I stand, I can do no other” at Worms, not Wittenberg; John Adams was not a slaveholder, nor was T. S. Eliot a Catholic; the amount of wood from relics of the True Cross would not be sufficient if gathered together to recreate the Cross, much less create a “thousand – foot cross;” Christians have never practiced animal sacrifice, nor did the Arian heresy teach that the Father and the Son were “two incarnations of the same person;” the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption were promulgated in 1854 and 1950, not 1852 and 1951; the Lateran Treaty was signed seven years after Mussolini marched on Rome, not after he “had barely seized power;” Maryland never prohibited Protestants from holding office, and condoms are not a “necessary” condition for preventing the transmission of AIDS, or else celibates would all be infected. Given all these errors (and many more), there is no reason to accept anything Hitchens writes on his own authority, and he offers no authority other than his own for most of what he writes.
Hitchens’ errors extend even to fields in which he claims to be an expert. This self-professed admirer of Evelyn Waugh describes Sebastian Flyte of Brideshead Revisited as being “heir to an old Catholic nobility.” In fact, Sebastian was the younger son, with little prospect of inheritance, and the Flytes became Catholic only when Lord Marchmain converted to marry his wife. As luck would have it, the very paragraph following the one sentence Hitchens quotes from Brideshead begins: “Sebastian always heard his mass, which was ill-attended. Brideshead was not an old established centre of Catholicism.” All the humor in Hitchens’ book is similarly unintentional, such as reading about Christianity’s supposed obsession with sex in a book with page after page discoursing on such topics as the evil of virginity, the horror of circumcision, and “the hideous consequences of the masturbation taboo.”
But what of Hitchens’ major arguments? Is there a persuasive core buried beneath the errors and falsehoods? Even Hitchens admits there is not. The book eschews philosophical argument in favor of anecdote, with the reader offered a parade of horrible religious extremists to contemplate. But such argument does not prove that religion is false or that God does not exist. As Hitchens acknowledges, “I do not say that if I catch a Buddhist priest stealing all the offerings left by the simple folk at his temple, Buddhism is thereby discredited.” Exactly. The fact that some horrible things have been done in the name of religion, and that some repulsive men have professed religious belief, does not disprove the existence of God, or show that religion is a malign force.
The main arguments that Hitchens offers against Christianity are that evolution explains the origin of life on earth, that portions of the Bible are not literally true, and that the four Gospels are not mathematical reproductions of each other. These arguments don’t get Hitchens where he wants to go. Many eminent Christians have seen no contradiction between evolution and their belief. John Paul II stated that evolution was “more than a hypothesis,” and Cardinal Newman wrote shortly after the publication of Darwin’s work that “Mr. Darwin’s theory need not be atheistical, be it true or not; it may simply be suggesting a larger idea of Divine Prescience and skill.” Newman also echoed the Thomistic belief that reason and revelation are complementary, not antagonistic, in words all Christians should take to heart: “if anything seems to be proved by astronomer or geologist, or chronologist, or antiquarian, or ethnologist, in contradiction to the dogmas of faith, that point will eventually turn out, first, not to be proved, or secondly, not contradictory, or thirdly, not contradictory to any thing really revealed, but to something which has been confused with revelation.”
And long before Newman or John Paul, such important figures as St. Augustine and St. Jerome looked to the Old Testament not primarily for historical or scientific knowledge, but to see how it pointed the way to Christ. Indeed, Augustine speculated that different species of animals were not the result of separate miraculous acts of creation, as a literal reading of Genesis would suggest, but the result of a process in which the conditions for life created by God gradually became operative.
Hitchens also fails to even mention, much less come to grips with, evidence pointing to the existence of God. Hitchens denigrates the analogy of unguided evolution to a whirlwind creating a jumbo jet out of the parts found in a junkyard as a “creationist sneer,” neglecting to tell his readers that the analogy was made famous by Fred Hoyle, an astrophysicist, who calculated that the odds of certain key life-producing enzymes arising by chance alone were 10 to the negative 40000th power. Hitchens does not discuss the fact, noted by Robin Collins, that “Almost everything about the basic structure of the universe … is balanced on a razor’s edge for life to occur.” As Collins notes, if the initial explosion of the big bang had differed in strength by as little as one part in 10 to the 60th power, the universe would have either quickly collapsed back on itself, or expanded too rapidly for stars to form. If gravity had been stronger or weaker by one part in 10 to the 40th power, stars like the sun could not exist. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy concludes, “Other things being equal, deliberate, intentional design would constitute a plausible explanation for a universe like ours existing against the odds and out of all the myriad life precluding or life-hampering universes.” So striking is the suggestion of design that physicists wishing to avoid it have postulated that the known universe is but one of a multitude of universes, which raises problems of its own. As physicist Edward Harrison writes: “Take your choice: blind chance that requires multitudes of universes, or design that requires only one.” There is no question which choice William of Ockham, frequently invoked by Hitchens, would take.
Hitchens makes much of the fact that there are differences among the four Gospels. Hitchens overstates these differences: the four Gospels are in substantial agreement on the central facts of Jesus’ public ministry. And the differences that do exist are understandable and scarcely suggest that the portrait of Jesus that emerges from the Gospels is unreliable. If four of Hitchens’ friends each set about writing a brief biography of him decades after his death, based on their own memories or the memories of others who had known Hitchens, there would no doubt be differences between their accounts, reflecting the different perspectives and memories of the authors. These differences would not show that Hitchens did not exist, or that the biographies were fabrications or unreliable.
In fact, Hitchens inadvertently highlights the credibility of the Gospels. In his book, Hitchens recounts the story of Sabbatai Zevi, a seventeenth century false messiah who was given a choice of embracing Islam or facing death. Zevi embraced Islam, as “almost any ordinary mammal would have done.” But Christ, when faced with a very similar choice, embraced the Cross. So did almost all of those who had followed Him during His life. The logical explanation for why Jesus and his apostles did not do “what almost any ordinary mammal would have done” is that Jesus believed He was the Son of God, and His apostles came to share that belief. If the Resurrection were a hoax, someone in the know would have confessed to it to save his life. None of them did. Over time, this despised and persecuted sect became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire and then of Europe, eventually creating a civilization that gave rise to the greatest painting, sculpture, music, architecture, and literature the world has ever know. Indeed, many historians of science have concluded that it was the medieval scholastics who gave birth to science, and that the Western empirical scientific tradition could not have arisen apart from Christian belief in the reality of the physical world and the existence of natural laws and the Christian denial of pantheism.
Hitchens writes that the early conquests of Islam “certainly conveyed an idea of being backed by a divine will.” If Hitchens can entertain such thoughts about an alien civilization, why can’t he believe that about the far more remarkable story of his own? Indeed, anyone who believes that “religion poisons everything” in the face of Michelangelo and Giotto, Bach and Handel, Chartres and St. Peter’s, is, as the Psalmist says of those who do not believe in God, a fool.
Hitchens also fails to come to grips with the enduring power of religion. Indeed, he seems to have no conception of how religion has provided meaning , consolation, and inspiration to the great majority of men throughout history, portraying religion solely as the breeding ground of fanatics. Hitchens pretends that there are equally efficacious sources of meaning, consolation, and inspiration, but he is unconvincing. Hitchens claims that, “As in all cases, the findings of science are far more awe-inspiring than the rantings of the godly.” Is he serious? I doubt that even Hitchens would find re-runs of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” “far more awe-inspiring” than Michelangelo’s vision of God creating man.
And what exactly is inspiring about what Hitchens claims to derive from science? Hitchens sees evolution as “callous and cruel … and capricious”, human life as “random and contingent”, and states that “earthly things are all that we have, or are ever going to have”. Is this vision really “far more awe-inspiring” than the vision offered by Benedict XVI (whom Hitchens has dismissed as a “completely undistinguished human being”) in his inaugural homily as Pope: “we are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed. Each of us is loved. Each of us is necessary”? Benedict’s vision may not be true, but there can be little doubt that it is more capable of inspiring men than the bleak vision offered by Hitchens.
The bleakness of the vision offered by Hitchens has consequences, even if he is unwilling to face them. Although Hitchens writes of the consolation provided by art, music, and literature, almost all the artists he mentions in his book were believers of one variety or other. This is hardly an accident: men sharing Benedict’s vision of the world, who see it as an orderly place reflecting God’s glory, are likely to produce works of beauty, as indeed was done by the great artists whom even Hitchens reveres. By contrast, men who believe that life is “random and contingent,” the result of a process that was “callous and cruel … and capricious,” are likely to produce, instead, painting like Jackson Pollock, music like Arnold Schonberg, and architecture like Le Corbusier. In fact, Charles Murray, an agnostic, after his exhaustive study of human achievement, concluded that “it was the transmutation of [the classical] intellectual foundation by Christianity that gave modern Europe its impetus and that pushed European accomplishment so far ahead of all other cultures around the world.”
The vision of the world offered by Hitchens is also far more likely to lead to moral nihilism than that offered by Benedict. If human life is indeed “random and contingent,” the result of a “callous and cruel … capricious process,” and “earthly things are all that we have, or are ever going to have,” why shouldn’t human beings emulate the “callous and cruel” process that created them, hang onto their “earthly goods,” and look out for number one? Studies of charitable giving in America have in fact consistently shown that those who share Benedict’s vision are far more likely to give time and money to charity than those who share Hitchens’ vision. A recent study by the Barna Group revealed that religious Americans give seven times as much to charity on a per capita basis than do non-religious Americans. The twenty fifth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel is a more effective spur to charity than is Kant’s categorical imperative, much less a belief that human life is nothing more than a biological accident. Indeed, although Hitchens does not admit it, widespread charity was unknown in the classical world. It is a legacy of Christianity. And there is no reason to suppose that it would survive and flourish in the atheistic culture Hitchens hopes to create.
Hitchens, for all his malice, is strangely naïve: he imagines that we can gleefully tear up the taproots of our civilization and still continue to enjoy its fruits. He has found a ready audience for this belief with this book, among the overschooled but undereducated types who congregate on our coasts and are deferential to anyone with an Oxbridge accent who can readily quote books they have heard of but never read. It is true that the triumph of atheism in the West need not necessarily produce what the triumph of atheism produced in Russia—mass murder and cultural devastation on a scale previously unimaginable. But we already have before us cultural devastation of a different sort, the result of the very assault on faith—both faith in God and faith in our past—that Hitchens wants to accelerate: a culture centered around self-gratification, with comfort its highest aim; a high culture devoted to ugliness and degradation, and a mass culture marked by tawdriness and vulgarity; a loss of morals and a coarsening of manners, with notions of duty, self sacrifice, and restraint seen as anachronisms at best and tools of oppression at worst. As Waugh wrote, “It is no longer possible, as it was in the time of Gibbon, to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis on which it rests.” It is time to fortify the admittedly thin and tenuous roots still connecting us to Christendom, not to tear them up and hope for the best. No civilization worth the name has ever been defined by atheism; we are unlikely to create the first.
Comments
Great piece.
I’m agnostic, and no fan of any religion. In other words, I’m part of the choir to whom Mr Hitchens attempts to sing. Well, he failed.
Hitchens is a buffoon. He loathes Mother Theresa with a passion approaching bizarre, and yet thinks Wolfowitz is an admirable hero. He can barely find words against the blood thirsty Trotsky, yet he can find no words to admire the beauty, art, kindness and yes progressiveness - you touched on the Catholics in communist Poland, and the abolilitionists as two obvious examples - so many religions have brought us.
The problem with Hitchens, as with so many fanatics (whether political or religious) is he can only fully embrace or fully loathe something. He cannot admit the possibility of error.
If he is like his writing, he’s a pathetically shallow individual.
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Tom Piatak’s piece is simply outstanding!
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Hitchens is a palpably bitter and cynical individual. Alcohol plays a big part in his thinking as well, so I gather.
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Cut with a machete through Hitchens’ art of the wordsmith, puncture his bluster, take some sandpaper to his entertaining repartee and cute wit, and take any recording of his oh-so-proper rotund English accent (an accent that causes flat and nasal Yankee Anglophiles to swoon, and Anglophobes to be on guard) and play it on high speed to sound like The Chipmunks, and what do we have? Not much, and Mr. Piatak correctly awards this “Public” school lad his merited grade, a grade that resembles the shape of an egg.
In my years as a schoolmaster, I’ve met many such adolescents. When confronted with an examination’s essay question about which they know nothing, the lower social classes (and the heirs of Nobility with titles going back to 12th Century) have the honesty to write nothing, and thus sadly merit a grade that resembles the shape of an egg. The Upper Middle Class, the Grand Bourgeoisie, and nobility by letters-patent, when in a similar circumstance, habitually write yards and yards of prose – most of it well-written, much of it clever, and some of it witty – and all of it still nothing, and thus meriting the same grade, not only because it is nothing, but also for wasting the examiner’s time and not sparing the tree that provided the paper.
To this nothing Hitchens’ adds his Two Minutes Hate. So fierce indeed is Hitchens’ temper tantrum against Christianity that I suspect, however self-confident he may appear, that his purblind hatred is in fact the product of a deep, penetrating fear – a fear shared by his fellow village atheists, who have not been shy this year to mount crates at the publishing world’s Speakers’ Corner. That fear is a fear of Islam, a religion on the march. The mindless strategy of these panic-driven men is to open fire instead on Catholic Christianity, probably because some adherents of Islam simply would undertake to treat Hitchens as it has Rushdie. Ought we call him a coward and a poltroon? Maybe that’s below the mark.
In his (desperate) defense: Is it true that he opposes killing children (“abortion”)? Is he an Orwell fan? Well, as Anna Frank liked to say, there’s a little good in everybody.
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Thanks, Mr. Piatak, for exposing Mr. Christopher Hitchens for the swindler of truth and enemy of God that he is. What person in his right mind would want to buy his book and read his fraudulent claims? How is one advanced in knowledge and edification by his deceitful rantings? Can’t publishers be held responsible for dumping such trash on society? Apropos the evolutionary thing: I reject the Big Bang Theory for several reasons. First, since it has never been observed in nature (observation being an integral part of the scientific method), the Big Bang boils down to nothing more than a speculative mathematical construct—purely, theory. Second, advocates of this theory for the origin of the universe never explain where the super-dense matter/energy came from. Third, according to classical physics (non-relativistic physics) a super-dense concentration of matter would not explode, but would collapse under its own gravitation into a great “black hole”. Fourth, supposing that such a concentration of matter could explode, it would simply expand as a homogeneous cloud. Sir Frederick Hoyle said, also, “Even though outward speeds are maintained in a free explosion, internal motions are not. Internal motions die away adiabatically and the expanding system becomes inert, which is exactly why the Big Bang cosmologies lead to a universe that is dead-and-done-with almost from the beginning....The notion that galaxies form, to be followed by an active astronomical history, is an illusion. Nothing forms. The thing is as dead as a doornail” (Hoyle, 1981, “New Scientist”, 92:521-27). Fifth, modern exponents of the Big Bang are primarily atheists. Along the same lines, I reject macro-evolution, because there is absolutely no scientific evidence for it. Seventh, I whole-heartedly agree with Pope Benedict XVI’s assertion that you quoted above. His words are true if God is the Creator of the universe and the Creator of mankind. And, of course, God does exist; even our reason can lead us to that intellectual acknowledgement, as St. Thomas Aquinas so cogently demonstrates in his Summa. Theologica.
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I think of the example of Maksymilian Kolbe, the
parable of the talents, and the idiotic way we humans
misperceive the symbolism and synergism created by
these two seemingly unrelated topics, and I find myself
distinctly unimpressed by agnostic and atheistic
arguments.
I may be losing my own religion, but I will never be
able to shake God. Without Him, the example of Kolbe
has no explanation in the known universe. Anyone who
explains away such a sacrifice as idiocy is truly a fool.
Poor Christopher Hitchens.
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Simian:
In the book, Hitchens allows that the fetus at some point is human, but saves his venom for those trying to ban abortion. He is not against abortion.
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Brilliantly done, Mr. Piatak.
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I take issue with the commenter who claims Hitchens is an “enemy of God.” Enemy of God is a Muslim term. We have no such term in Christianity. Christ loves all and desires to save all.
Hitchens is clearly Christ-haunted. And as another commenter stated, alcohol may play a big role in his thinking. Pray for him. Other high-profile atheists have converted over the years.
Remember, Hitchens is currently in an argument with God. I have been through such an argument. God, in His mercy, seems pleased to argue back. “Come, let us reason together, though your sins are as scarlet, they shall be white as snow.”
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“Hitchens, for all his malice, is strangely naïve: he imagines that we can gleefully tear up the taproots of our civilization and still continue to enjoy its fruits.”
Nail on the head. Hitchens is like a trust-fund brat squadering money while mocking his family.
Strange that he had no reluctance toward getting in bed with George “God told me to smite Saddam” Bush . . . .
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Mr. Piatak is too kind to the Evolutionists. It is a discredited doctrine, kept alive because it is a useful fairy story for the academic powers-that-be.
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Thank you for such an extraordinarily well-written essay. Hitchens’ role begins to make sense, at least to me, when I see him as a trickster. In Renaissance England, perhaps he would have found himself the court jester. The court jester-- as seen in Shakespeare’s plays—often would say something brilliant but so brilliantly wrong that everyone else would marvel at how he twisted logic and words to come up with the conclusion. So when I see Hitchens on television, I tend to visualize him dressed in a harlequin outfit and, once I do so, I actually begin to enjoy what he has to say. And the value of his work is that it generates stunning responses, such as the one by Mr. Piatak.
Of course, since Hitchens was one of the great instigators of our Iraqi invasion, I keep hoping that someone will ask him if he’d be willing to have a book signing in Basra or Fallujah. Maybe his brother will pose the question.
That said, I cannot help but believe that if Hitchens is lucky—truly lucky—then one rough morning he will look in the mirror and realize the title of his next book. It may go something like this: Hitchens is not Great. How Christopher Hitchens poisons everything.
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I guess the only appropriate response to this is “Thank God for Tom Piatak.”
Though most of the commenters before me would obviously disagree, Hitchens, at once droll, world-weary, over-the-top – and English, can be superficially attractive on, say, “Hardball,” or in some of his prose. But Tom Piatak saw through that long ago, see his October 2005 piece in the American Conservative. There, and in “Hitchens’ Hubris,” Tom shows how all the glib charm and facile argument can be, unless backed with substance, pernicious (a point made well, also, by the simian ex-schoolmaster commenter, above).
I think the last paragraph in Piatak’s review is especially fine, and especially powerful.
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Outstanding article reveals Hitchens’ arguments rest on a flimsy foundation. He has the same human longing we all do: we want to believe in something. Having forsaken the beautiful, rich, and mysterious truths of Christianity, he has forced himself instead to embrace Science: a cold, impersonal, and very incomplete substitute. While science is certainly useful (particularly when complemented by faith) our knowledge of the Universe remains exceptionally sketchy.
The more we delve into the subatomic or cosmological world and the interactions of matter, energy, space, and time, the more our theories diverge and fall apart. Much of the Universe is said to be composed of “dark energy” and “dark matter,” which may be real or simply constructs to make our current theories consistent. In either case our ignorance is profound. So on the scale of the very small, our theories become increasingly contrived, and on the scale of the very large, we can’t even say what is out there.
The practical question is then: Does science or faith provides more insight into the underlying truths necessary for us to live meaningful lives? It’s obvious to me that science must fail, so I choose faith.
As for Hitchens, we can only hope that on his road to Damascus, he sees the light before he reaches the end of his journey. He would be a useful ally to combat the forces of darkness.
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Superb piece. Definitely one to keep in the BookMarks folder.
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Well, Tom, after this, your second lengthy piece attacking Hitchens, I believe you are officially on Hitch’s “f” list.
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Consider St. Paul, and how tragic it would be if the zeal of Mr. Hitchens were to pass from the world before being turned into a zeal for souls. We must pray for Mr. Hitchens.
“Benedict’s vision may not be true”? I hope you mean, “Mr. Hitchens might not believe it is true, but...” In the context, I can’t make sense of it any other way.
Tom, thank you for an outstanding piece.
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I am surprised by IB Bill’s comment, when he says that “Enemy of God is a Muslim term. We have no such term in Christianity.” I repudiate his claim: Every sinner who persists in his sin is an enemy of God: “But he that shall sin against me, shall hurt his own soul. All that hate me, love death” (Prov. 8:36). “The adversaries of the Lord shall fear him: and upon them shall be thunder in the heavens” (I Kings 2:10). “Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered: and let them that hate him flee from before his face. As smoke vanisheth, so let them vanish away: a wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God” (Ps. 67:2,3.). “How long, O God, shall the enemy reproach: is the adversary to provoke thy name for ever?” (Ps. 73:3,4,7,8,10.). The enemies of the Lord have lied to him: and their time shall be for ever” (Ps. 80:16). For lo, thy enemies have made a noise: and they that hate thee have lifted up the head. They have taken a malicious counsel against thy people, and have consulted against they saints” (Ps 82;3,4). “He [Jesus] said therefore: A certain nobleman went into a far country, to receive for himself a kingdom, and to return....But his citizens hated him: and they sent an embassage after him, saying: We will not have this man to reign over us....But as for those my enemies, who would not have me reign over them, bring them hither, and kill them before me” (Luke 19:12, 14, 27). And, most starkly, “He that is not with me, is against me: and he that gathereth not with me, scattereth” (Luke 11"23). Based on Christopher Hitchens writings, he is an enemy of God. Considering IB Bill’s comment, he is ignorant of the truth.
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I think Hitchens stays up nights, googling himself to see how many hornet’s nests he’s managed to stir up. Well done Mr. Piatak. We should all pray for the soul of Christopher Hitchens.
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To me the most objectionable thing about Hitchens isn’t his atheism, but his addiction to publicity for its own sake, in which his readers are enablers. Why in God’s name does anyone take this pathetic wreck of a man seriously?
With all due respect to Mr Ferkul who said a converted Hitchens would be a “useful force to combat the forces of darkness”, I disagree - because Hitchens is a media creation whose talent is wafer-thin. Some truly intelligent “atheists” such as Albert Camus have done more to combat ignorance and darkness than many nominal Christians have done.
Camus’ “atheism” was paradoxically very Christian in spirit (because Camus placed Man at the centre of Man’s universe, which comes very close to Christ’s way of placing Man at the centre of God’s universe), in contrast to Hitchens and other such atheists whose ultimate message is cynicism and despair. Not all atheists are alike (and is there really any such thing as a total “atheist”?), and those self-ascribed atheists such as Camus who struggle to affirm some kind of transcendent Spirit of Man, are entirely different from those who regard Man as a mere thing among things.
The problem with Hitchens isn’t his theoretical “atheism”, but his anti-Humanism, his sullen denial of ANY kind of transcendent Spirit of Man. Atheists are not necessarily enemies of Christ, but all anti-Humanists are, all those who regard Man as just a thing among things.
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Jerry: Your quotes are all from the OT, except for the parable, in which the word “enemies” is put in the mouth of a king.
The “adversary” is Satan. “We struggle not against flesh and blood, but against the powers, the principalities, the forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.”
God’s plan is for salvation of mankind. Sinners are “enemies” only by a very extended definition of enemy. Yet we are told to hate the sin, love the sinner.
Cheers.
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It has often struck me how many atheists are not people who are solely interested in the material aspects of life and indifferent to religion or the spiritual, but rather are animated by what can only be called faith - in their case, the positive faith that there is no God.
Not content simply to let the religious lives of others pass unmolested, they organize themselves into groups (congregations) like the Secular Humanist Society, hold meetings (services) at which programs (liturgies) and speeches (sermons) are presented, under the direction of officials (clergy). They publish books such as Hitchens’s (tracts) and otherwise try to draw attention to themselves and persuade others to accept their point of view (proselytism or evangelism). Their credo usually includes a standard creation-myth (evolution) and an apocalypse (variable - it used to be ‘nuclear winter,’ now it is ‘global warming,’ and in 20 or 30 years will probably be something else). In other words, atheism of the sort Hitchens, Dawkins, and others of their ilk profess has just about every aspect of organized religion.
Atheists of this sort often pose as rationalists and appeal to ‘science’ for their support, but any philosophically scrupulous consideration will show that there is no more empirical evidence to support their faith than to support any other faith. Science concerns itself exclusively with the natural world, and must accordingly take a position of neutrality about the verity of any spiritual or supernatural claim. It is agnostic, not atheist. Christians and other theists would do well to recognize that atheism’s most successful dissimulation is its claim not to be a religion.
The First Amendment provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...” Atheists, with the help of the United States Supreme Court (in cases like Lemon v. Kurtzman), have successfully twisted this into the requirement that cities (inter alia) may not permit Christmas creches or decorated trees or Easter-egg hunts in public parks, children may not write prayers or references to the Bible or draw pictures of Jesus in their schoolwork, crosses may not form part of civic seals or coats-of-arms, the Boy Scouts or other groups with a religious qualification or affiliation may not use municipal or state facilities for their meetings, and the phrase “under God” is banished from the pledge of allegiance to the flag. In other words, quite contrary to the intention of its framers (who wished to protect churches from government interference) the First Amendment has deliberately been misrepresented to mandate that atheism shall be the official religion of the United States.
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Mr. Piatak:
Don´t you think you have been a little
bit too hard on Hitchens?
This article of yours totally humiliates him.
What about the Christian charity you preach
and praise so much?
;-)
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Hello, I.B. Well, yes, you are right, I did quote mostly from the Old Testament, but I did throw in a couple of NT quotations. You know, I.B., an enemy of God is not confined to just the Old Testament or the New Testament or to any particular time. I am thinking of heretics or infidels like Arius, Eutyches, Nestorius, Hus, Mohammed, Luther and Calvin, among many. Hitchens is part of that gang, also; and he is probably nothing more than a miserable agnostsic or atheist, but still an enemy of God. Besides, if you noticed, I quoted from Luke 11:23. Now, when a person says, “you are not with me, but against me”, one has to assume that that person not with the other is an enemy (hostes), if there is no middle ground. According to those who are able to interpret Christ’s words, there is no middle ground, which makes those who are not with Christ, his enemies. Answer me this, were the Pharisees who caused Christ to be crucified his enemies? Are each one of us who sins against Him and do not do His will his friend? My best wishes to you and God’s blessings be with you. Jerry
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M.S.S., you have written an excellent analysis (expose), of the deceit atheists and agnostics attempt to foist upon us; and, I agree with your analysis. However, I disagree with the principle of separation of Church and State, because that has not been the holding of the Catholic Church. Pope Leo XIII, who, as you know, is the Vicar of Christ, made this fact quite clear in his encyclical, Immortale Dei. My best to you.
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Nice article. Hitchens is an embarassment to decent atheists like myself. I support the example and words Yeshua ben Yosef (and many others), even though I don’t believe he was a unique son of god. Hitchens is just an angry, selfish attention seeker.
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“The mindless strategy of these panic-driven men” ... “because some adherents of Islam simply would undertake to treat Hitchens as it has Rushdie.”
Interesting point. One dogmatic utopianist - who lusted for control of the leviathan of the state and failed, now paranoid about the possibility of others succeeding. Lets face it, he knows perfectly well what **he** would have done.
Much of what passes for militant Islam is framed in the same leftist paradigm that Hitchens remains stuck in, but just with a selective religious top-dressing in an attempt to force the simple masses they must accept. They want revolution, social engineering, press the magic button, and when nothing happens who shall we blame. Salafist? All rather twentieth century if you ask me. Campus hubris.
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Yes! Why does anyone take this adolescent seriously?
It is a great article Mr. Piatak and I suppose it is a good thing to expose the poor child - but I cannot understand intelligent people bothering to read anything he writes or says. I imagine his Mother and Father would be deeply embarrassed by his silly antics in publlic. At least, I would be.
His anti religion is utterly ignorant. Poor Christpher lacks imagination, compassion and reason.
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About being an “enemy of God”, Jesus said the only unforgivable sin is a sin “against the Holy Spirit.” That’s worth thinking about more. The Christian God consists of three persons, and Jesus said only the rejection of one of those persons (the Holy Spirit) is unforgivable, while on the cross he said of the insults to his own person,
“forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”
For mortal men to deny the divinity of Christ is quite understandable, as in this temporal life we “see through a glass darkly.” Similarly, an intellectual denial of God the Father - the Creator - might be forgivable, considering how rational minds might disagree on the definition and nature of the Creator. (Man’s fallen state OUGHT to provoke doubts in reasonable minds, about the nature or even the existence of the Creator, and the “Dark Night of the Soul” is arguably an essential step on the way of the cross - because how can anyone fully share in the way of Christ without experiencing some kind of personal Gethsamane of struggling against despair?) But as the Holy Spirit transcends reason and is written in men’s hearts, there is no RATIONAL excuse for hostility to the Holy Spirit.
And Christ often reminded us that the Holy Spirit is no respecter of outward forms of religion. An atheist who strives through his personal darkness toward the Holy Spirit, is closer to Christ than a professed Christian who is an enemy of the Holy Spirit in his heart.
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I suspect, like a few others here, that Hitchens is really in conflict with himself. Quite possibly someday he will find his own road to the beliefs we hold dearly. I do sense something like that with him.
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Wonderful article, full of truth and insight. But, wih respect, you ought to be careful in using examples that you don’t know enough about. To take an example, why do you say this?
“By contrast, men who believe that life is ‘random and contingent,’ the result of a process that was ‘callous and cruel … and capricious,’ are likely to produce ... music like Arnold Schonberg [sic] ...”
In the first place, what makes you attribute such a belief to Schoenberg? He was, so far as I’ve ever heardl, a believer. He identified himself, at various times in his life, as a Protestant, a Catholic, and a Jew. So he can hardly be a good example, even if we discount his art, which this Catholic agrees with almost all the musical profession as being among the great creations of European musical art.
It is so easy to discredit otherwise good arguments by going beyond your depth. We should leave that sort of thing to Hitchens.
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Dirk,
Thank you for your kind words. My argument is that artists working in an increasingly atheistic milieu are likely to produce ugly art. Charles Murray makes a similar argument in his essay quoted in my article.
And we do disagree about the type of music Schonberg wrote. I think that atonal music is ugly, as does the vast majority of the concert-going public. I assume that there have been atonal composers, abstract painters, and Bauhaus architects who were believers, but I don’t believe that such art would ever have arisen if the world in which those artists lived had not been increasingly permeated by doubt and disbelief.
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What Mr. Hitchens is implying with his views on Chritianity is that billions of people through the ages who chose Jesus are a bunch of imbiciles.Every University in Western Europe and indeed the U. S. was established by the Roman Catholic Church. So those who build western civilization are a bunch of imbeciles who have been hoodwinked. Considering the intelects of those who chose to follow Jesus Mr. Hitchens is an imbecile himself. Jack Ludwick
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Dirk,
Here is an article exploring the connection between atonal music and atheism: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Music+in+the+Modern+Age-a0120037483
Particularly revealing is the quote from American composer John Adams: “I learned in college that tonality died somewhere around the time that Nietzsche’s God died, and I believed it.”
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The memory of Kolbe’s courage and selflessness lived on in those who survived the Golgotha of Auschwitz, including Franciszek Gajowniczek, and Kolbe was canonized by John Paul II in 1982.
TP doesn’t understand his own faith. What’s selfless about pleasing God by enduring temporary earthly suffering to win eternal bliss? Kolbe required courage and endurance to the extent that he wasn’t sure that he’d win Heaven or found it hard to act on his faith, but selflessness was definitely not involved.
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No need to wonder how Hitchens would describe someone he dislikes, as he said recently, “If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enima, you could bury him in a matchbox.”
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Jim:
See John 15:13. If Kolbe cannot be described as selfless, the word has no meaning.
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A tight, beautifully sharp piece by Mr. Piatak.
As I have never heard of Schonburg and know next
to nothing of music I’ll pass on that debate.
What is interesting is the extent to which Christians
will often hop into bed with men like Hitchens.
Following the link provided over at Chronicles I read
Michael Novak’s review of the very same book and it
was rather difficult—in the words of Holden Cawfield--
to keep from barfing all over myself. I’ve also
encountered those who count Hitchens as a friend, citing
in admiration his knowledge of Latin.
If one were cynical, one would suspect that some
Catholics have more devotion to little elitist circles
and snooty-clubs than to the Church.
This article of Mr. Piatak’s has been pasted over
at Free Republic ... and while some of the
response has identified Hitchens as the charlatan he
is, what is interesting is that even with all of Mr.
Piatak’s astute observations laid out on the table,
some of the Freepers equivocate with remarks like,
“Oh, well, that’s too bad—but at least Hitchens
is solid on the War on Terror, so he’s better than most
liberals. He just doesn’t understand religion, or
economics.”
With friends like this, who needs enemas?
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Further to the question of “separation of church and state,” is should be pointed out that the phrase occurs nowhere in the Constitution. The First Amendment provides, as I noted in my previous post, that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, of prohibiting the free exercise thereof...”
The words “separation of church and state” were taken from a letter by Thomas Jefferson to a Baptist congregation in Danbury, Connecticut. They have so often been mouthed by the secularist faction to imply that the Constitition mandates governmental adoption of atheism that it is informative to look at their original context. The Baptists wrote to Jefferson, who was popularly reputed to be an atheist and Jacobin, out of concern that he would use the power of his office to interfere with worship. He replied to them that a wall of separation existed between the church and the state to protect the state from harming the church.
The First Amendment’s original intent was to prevent the Federal government from interfering with the religious establishments of the several states. Massachusetts, for example, maintained an established church of Congregational polity until 1833; Connecticut, until 1818. The First Amendment was never held to interfere with the right of Massachusetts or Connecticut to have their own established churches.
The legal ancestry of the First Amendment’s free exercise clause goes back to Magna Charta, which contained a provision that made the church independent of secular government. This was inserted in reaction to the meddlings of Henry II. in the affairs of the church, as illustrated in the Constitutions of Clarendon which he forced the bishops to sign, and which culminated in the murder of the archbishop of Canterbury, St. Thomas à Becket. This was recent and much-resented history to the barons who forced King John to renounce such interference, as well as many other abusive exercises of royal prerogative, in 1215.
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Tom—Thanks for your reply, but you haven’t addressed the point. Hitchens and Dawkins are theophobic bigots, but your argument about Kolbe is wrong.
See John 15:13. If Kolbe cannot be described as selfless, the word has no meaning.
The word means acting without thought of self. Here is the quote:
“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
The Church teaches that God rewards those who display that greater love. Kolbe died believing he was pleasing God and that pleasing God is the key to Heaven. IOW, he believed that he would exchange intense but brief suffering on earth for eternal bliss. That is not selfless. Obeying God and acting so as to gain eternal bliss or escape eternal torment is not selfless, but it is the central message of Christianity.
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Jim,
See also Matthew 16:25. This is a paradox, not a statement that Christianity is selfish.
The great saints are motivated by love for others, and St. Maksymilian Kolbe exhibited that love in many ways before he made the final sacrifice, a sacrifice that was the epitome of love, as Our Lord told us in John 15:13.
“In Aushcwitz, where hunger and hatred reigned and faith evaporated, this man opened his heart to others and spoke of God’s infinite love. He seemed never to think of himself. When food was brought in and everyone struggled to get his place in the queue so as to be sure of a share, Fr Maximilian stood aside, so that frequently there was none left for him. At other times he shared his meagre ration of soup or bread with others. He was once asked whether such self-abnegation made sense in a place where every man was engaged in a struggle for survival, and he answered: ‘Every man has an aim in life. For most men it is to return home to their wives and families, or to their mothers. For my part, I give my life for the good of all men.’” (This is taken from: http://www.catholic-pages.com/saints/st_maximilian.asp)
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No offense, Jim, but it seems to me that your critique
of Father Kolbe as selfish for wanting to see the face
of God, no matter what the cost, is rather like
observing that a child as selfish for yearning to see
his father.
IMO only a very skewed sort of philosophy would have
a problem with that, or fail to see that the child’s
desire is inherently natural and *good*.
A child that behaves well because he has come up with
some abstract system of morality, on the other hand, is
in need of serious help.
This whole idea of “disinterested” goodness is an
exercise in pride—how would a man’s wife react, for
example, if she found out her husband treated her
kindly not because he finds any joy through her but
simply out of a bloodless sense of cold, abstract duty?
You could also accuse a man of being of “selfish” for
not doing something perverse, because after all he
doesn’t want him*self* to turn into a degraded monster.
In short, if a man is concerned about preserving the
integrity of his identity, preserving his soul from
corruption, you could I suppose identify him as
“selfish”.
Ultimately men rather have to be “selfish”,
don’t they—since we are after all incarnated
as *selves*?
Part of the problem is recognizing that the “reward of
Heaven” is not of the same kind as a promotion at work,
getting a $10,000 dollar prize in a competition, or
eating a chocolate bon-bon. The difference is not just
one of degree but of kind; Heaven is not a country-club.
The “prize” is Goodness, Justice, and Truth itself—
or rather Himself.
And in any case, the “prize” is not earned by us—
rather *He* earned *us*. Things like martyrdom or even
living in a Christian fashion are not meant to be
all-expense paid tickets to Heaven, but rather bright
flaming signs that point to God and guide the rest of us
poor schmucks.
The saint’s foremost purpose is not to glorify himself
nor to get bonus points to cash in at the Pearly Gates,
but rather to call attention to the One Whom the saint
serves.
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G. S.
Well said!
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Tom, thanks again for your reply, but I think you still haven’t addressed my point. Did Kolbe act so to gain God’s approval? Yes. Did he believe God’s approval was valuable to him? Yes: infinitely valuable. His self-abnegation was of his earthly self, he forwent earthly survival and he spoke of his earthly life when he said: “I give my life for the good of all men.” According to Christian doctrine, he now has his infinitely valuable reward.
“The great saints are motivated by love for others...”
If the love is spontaneous, yes, but spontaneous or not, it is always accompanied by the desire to win God’s approval. That desire sustains saints in circumstances under which a non-believer could not express love for others. If Kolbe had placed great value on his earthly life and believed it was all he would receive, he would have been acting selflessly. He didn’t and wasn’t. I’m sure materialists who place great value on earthly life would find it very difficult or impossible to act as Kolbe did, but that’s because they don’t, by definition, believe in an eternal heavenly reward. And if religion inspires men to sacrifice themselves in a way materialism doesn’t, you’ve got to remember suicide-bombing, which is a “selfless” sacrifice from an earthly point of view.
G.S.-- Thanks for your reply too.
Ultimately men rather have to be “selfish”, don’t they—since we are after all incarnated as *selves*?
Yes, that’s my argument. Christianity is not nihilistic like Buddhism, and even in Buddhism, one pursues extinction of the self to escape suffering. So Buddhism’s “selflessness” is selfish too.
The saint’s foremost purpose is not to glorify himself nor to get bonus points to cash in at the Pearly Gates, but rather to call attention to the One Whom the saint serves.
The One Whom the saint serves is the omnipotent Master of the Universe, with the Keys of Heaven and Hell. Serving Him is the rational thing to do for someone who accepts His existence. Evelyn Waugh criticized Graham Greene’s Heart of the Matter for its portrayal (as Waugh saw it) of a man willing his own damnation out of love. If that were possible, it would be a supremely selfless sacrifice. Waugh pointed out it was theologically absurd and posited God as a monster. Greene replied that Scrooby (the character) was mad, i.e. irrational. Despite what Hitchens and Dawkins say, Christianity is a supremely rational religion when it’s followed right.
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“In the first place, what makes you attribute such a belief to Schoenberg? He was, so far as I’ve ever heardl, a believer. He identified himself, at various times in his life, as a Protestant, a Catholic, and a Jew. So he can hardly be a good example, even if we discount his art, which this Catholic agrees with almost all the musical profession as being among the great creations of European musical art.”
Yes indeed. And there have been plenty of atonal (or otherwise radical) composers who have been believers, other examples being Penderecki, Schnittke and Stravinsky.
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//"Hitchens also fails to even mention, much less come to grips with, evidence pointing to the existence of God."//
Perhaps because there isn’t any?
//"Hitchens denigrates the analogy of unguided evolution to a whirlwind creating a jumbo jet out of the parts found in a junkyard as a “creationist sneer,” neglecting to tell his readers that the analogy was made famous by Fred Hoyle, an astrophysicist, who calculated that the odds of certain key life-producing enzymes arising by chance alone were 10 to the negative 40000th power."//
I shuffle a packet of a million cards and deal them out one at a time. One it is completed, I record the sequence. Hey, the probability of that sequence occurring by chance alone were 10 to the negative (some very large number) power. It must have been God! /end sarcasm. This isn’t evidence for anything.
//"Hitchens does not discuss the fact, noted by Robin Collins, that “Almost everything about the basic structure of the universe … is balanced on a razor’s edge for life to occur.” As Collins notes, if the initial explosion of the big bang had differed in strength by as little as one part in 10 to the 60th power, the universe would have either quickly collapsed back on itself, or expanded too rapidly for stars to form. If gravity had been stronger or weaker by one part in 10 to the 40th power, stars like the sun could not exist. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy concludes, “Other things being equal, deliberate, intentional design would constitute a plausible explanation for a universe like ours existing against the odds and out of all the myriad life precluding or life-hampering universes.” So striking is the suggestion of design that physicists wishing to avoid it have postulated that the known universe is but one of a multitude of universes, which raises problems of its own. As physicist Edward Harrison writes: “Take your choice: blind chance that requires multitudes of universes, or design that requires only one.” There is no question which choice William of Ockham, frequently invoked by Hitchens, would take."//
Why would Ockham’s razor imply design of one universe over an accidental multiverse? That makes no sense at all, bearing in mind the complexity necessary for a creator capable of designing the universe in which we now exist. What a crazy, illogical argument.
As Dawkins once said, in his eulogy for Douglas Adams: “. . . imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”
//"Is there a persuasive core buried beneath the errors and falsehoods? Even Hitchens admits there is not. The book eschews philosophical argument in favor of anecdote, with the reader offered a parade of horrible religious extremists to contemplate. But such argument does not prove that religion is false or that God does not exist....The fact that some horrible things have been done in the name of religion, and that some repulsive men have professed religious belief, does not disprove the existence of God, or show that religion is a malign force."//
Says you. That’s a pretty poor argument. Tell you what, come up with what good religion has done in the world that outweighs all the deaths and suffering it is causing or has caused in the following places today: Palestine, the Balkans, Kashmir, Sudan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Northern Ireland, Ivory Coast, Sri Lanks, Phillippines, Iran and Iraq, the past situation in Afghanistan, oh, and the years of anti semitic ‘deicide’ propaganda spread by the church over the centuries that without which the holocaust never would have taken place, not to mention the bigotry and close-minded deludedness regarding homosexuality, abortion and stem cell research in the United States, and THEN you can say that religion isn’t a destructive force.
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Brilliant piece!
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Jim: “Evelyn Waugh criticized Graham Greene’s
Heart of the Matter for its portrayal
(as Waugh saw it) of a man willing his own
damnation out of love. If that were possible,
it would be a supremely selfless sacrifice.”
By a curious coincidence I’ve read that essay; & am
especially fond of both Waugh & Greene.
I think Waugh’s point was that each of us
is, in the course of our lives, given primarily
responsibility for one thing and one thing only—
our own individual soul.
Committing an evil in order to somehow “save”
somebody else’s soul is an act of hubris—we
assume we know how things would turn out had we
not committed that evil.
A good example—let’s suppose that in Dostoevsky’s
Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha murdered his father to
pre-empt his brother Dmitry from committing the murder…
thus sparing Dmitry from taking the burden of guilt onto
himself.
But think about this in real world terms—should I
*really* kill the mailman as a means of rescuing my
next-door-neighbor from committing the crime? That’s
what self-damnation for the sake of another really
amounts to.
Note that in Dostoevsky’s novel, Dmitry does not, in
the end, commit the murder—even though most
everybody is convinced he will since he hates Pop
Karamazov so much.
Another analogy would be if Mr. Piatak were to
deliberately write badly for fear of discouraging
budding writers such as myself—that would be
selfless of him, in a sense, but in that sense it
is a sort of selflessness that is wrong. It is
always wrong to destroy one’s own gifts, and it is
always right to use those gifts to the utmost --
the impact it may have on others is a matter of
Providence. Our responsibility is to
do what is right, not do what is wrong for the right
reasons.
I’m not necessarily sure how far we disagree—
obviously the language gets kind of slippery, when
we speak of “evil” we can mean it in the sense that
a toothache is an evil, or in the sharply different
sense in which the degradation of a man’s integrity
& character is an evil.
The same thing goes for the approval of a perfectly
wise and benevolent God as a good, vice the sense
in which getting to spend an eternity lounging with
7,000 Muslim virgins would be a good.
I would certainly agree with you if you regard the sort
of selflessness traditionally advocated by Buddhism
as nihilistic.
Perhaps love is the missing element in this discussion;
love as in something that binds men both to one another
and to God.
Brunhilde in Ring of the Niebelung second-guesses and
disobeys Voton, claiming to serve his true desires and
interests—but this is not really love, since in her
disobedience she fails to respect him and his
rightful authority.
To come back to the example of Scobie—realistically
speaking, it is just as likely (moreso, IMO) that his
suicide would bring more despair and darkness into the
world rather than more hope and light.
Douglas:
First off, the Douglas Adams parable is very interesting,
very colorful, appeals to the feelings quite well,
and is very clever—it is everything except a piece
of reasoning, which is what I thought Dawkins’
prided himself on.
You’ll excuse me, I hope, if I do not regard the
anecdote of a British writer of pop comedy sci-fi as a
bitter defeat for the ideas of Thomas Aquinas,
Etienne Gilson, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, etc…
Naturally the Holocaust had everything to do with
St. Augustine, and nothing to do with ... oh, say,
Nietschze?
Consider the godless Marxism admired by Hitchens and so
in vogue among leftist intelligentsia… in its various
forms it has murdered over 70 million human beings.
Belief in God is, in more general terms, a belief that
something transcends material existence.
If you accept that something transcends our appetites,
that something transcends material world, then you had
might as well lighten up about religion.
Religion is simply what-one-believes-in.
If you don’t believe in anything, and don’t think
that anything transcends the material world, then you
might as well drop the moral pose, given that things
like love and justice and reason are just memes full
of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
If you are no more than a meat-machine I fail to see
why you expect your indignation to register with
anyone.
If we are all meaningless blips in an absurd
reasonless puddle doomed toward an oblivion of eternal
darkness, I fail to see why you are offended that one
blip has written something critical of another blip.
Still, you & John Lennon are right—if nobody believed
in or loved anything at all—whether Christianity or
their family or Marxism or the writings of Richard
Dawkins—then nobody would fight about anything
anymore.
If you believe a loveless and beliefless world is a
price worth paying for peace, then I am truly sorry for
you.
If you think that the love of God is the only sort of
love that causes fighting, then you’re an idiot.
“Perhaps because there isn’t any?”
There is no proof for a multiverse, but you and your
fellow-travellers are certainly willing to take that
one on faith.
Faith as in—belief in things unseen.
Inference, perhaps?
Theists infer God; atheists infer Nothing.
As near as I can tell, the sole appeal of the multiverse
theory is that people like Hitchens and Dawkins
dogmatically rule out any sort of creative will behind
creation.
I.e., they find an infinite number of Universes
an idea easier to entertain than a Creator.
Fine; but to pretend that the one possibility is self-
evidently more “likely” (if such a word applies) than
the other is pure sophistry.
I also find it odd how such men claim that their
disbelief in God is purely “scientific” and “objective”.
I mean—would they or would they not admit that they
hate the very *suggestion* of some omnipotent Other?
Actually I think Hitchens *has* admitted this—so
much for reasoned objectivity.
Anyhow—have you ever thought about what the word
“infinity” means?
Do you really think it so obvious that an empty,
meaningless infinity is a more plausible origin for
Man than Spirit? And in any case, the multiverse
picture still doesn’t resolve anything in terms of
why there is Being at all.
Of course Dawkins might answer that there is no
reason—again, fine; but to pretend like that’s a
scientific proof for a philosophical question is rubbish.
The Christian faith that you regard with such contempt
is the creative font of the great works of culture,
art, and literature of Western Civilization. If you
truly regard religion as poison, then for the sake
of consistency and integrity you should stop partaking
of that poisoned heritage.
If you hate Christendom so much then the right thing to
do is reject it rather than derive parasitic pleasure
from it.
Which means no Michaelangelo, no Bach ... for that
matter, it also means no Jack Kerouack, no Tolkien,
and no Johnny Cash. No Camus, even—“The Outsider”
is derivative of the story of Christ, Camus declared
this himself.
And it also means no science—there is a reason it is
called Western science, and there is a reason it
originated in Europe.
I’ll give you a hint: Logos.
And the assumption that without Christianity everybody
would have spent the last 2,000 years being nice to one
another is a problematic proposition, to put it mildly.
Do you *really* think that greed, hatred, and
power-lust are mere side-effects of belief in God?
Admitted, there are Christians who behave like
total bastards.
But have you considered that such people might have
behaved like bastards regardless?
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Many thanks for a brilliant and beautiful article.
Leonor Muller.
http://www.diekunstlerin.com
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G. S.:
Bravo! Your response to both Jim and Douglas is excellent..
I would also direct everyone to the article from Christianity Today linked to above, which deals with the philosophical confusion of Dawkins et al.
As you point out, the multiverse is a theory taken on blind faith, a theory that has arisen because the big bang is uncomfortably close to the creation ex nihilo that atheists have always denied.
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Hitchens, like other intellectual atheists who preceeded him, notably Bertrand Russell, whose polemics on religion, in my view, were much more persuasively argued, have a blind spot when it comes to the topic of God- a blind spot only seen from the perspective of the believer.
Hitchens, like Russell before him, fell into the trap of conflating the actions of purported Christians, Buddhists or Muslims with the tenets of the respective faiths. That is, according to Hitchens, if you say you believe in whatever, your actions are evidence of faith in the respective tenets.
Moreover, Hitchens, who needs to rely on empirical evidence to make his claims, as he has dispensed with the super (that is above or beyond) natural, has no counter factuals to support his claims about the corrosive effects or religion.
For his claim to be “proved” Hitchens would need to point to an advanced and growing culture without religion, of which there are none. He might just as well have argued that breathing air poisons everything.
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After reading Piatak’s brilliant essay, I’d pity poor Hitchens if it weren’t for his smug malice. Why do old Reds get away with excusing their horrible crimes as “idealism”? The Nazis had ideals too.
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//Belief in God is, in more general terms, a belief that something transcends material existence.
If you accept that something transcends our appetites, that something transcends material world, then you had might as well lighten up about religion.
Religion is simply what-one-believes-in.//
This is a gross confusion of religion and spirituality. I don’t know about Douglas, but many atheists are deeply spiritual in a non-religious way. Spirituality means to consider the possibility of something bigger than oneself and sometimes bigger than everything. Religion means to subscribe more or less doubtlessly to that kind of belief and channel it into an organized system with clearly identifiable deities, rites, and traditions. There is a striking difference. Spirituality is a driving force of humanity, and those who lack it are empty, useless, or bad human beings. Religion is an unwarranted and unjustified assumption on the basis of that spiritual drive.
//If we are all meaningless blips in an absurd reasonless puddle doomed toward an oblivion of eternal darkness, I fail to see why you are offended that one blip has written something critical of another blip.//
Theists typically make this gross over-simplification: materialism must equal some form of nihilism. Even if we were all meaningless blips, it would still not follow that we must not care about anything. We are not even sure whether we *are* at all blips, or just what kind of blips. But even if it were true, you see that as a hopeless darkness, whereas many non-theists see it as a chance to rule ourselves as a human species, give ourselves hard-earned values and make ourselves follow them.
//Do you really think it so obvious that an empty, meaningless infinity is a more plausible origin for Man than Spirit?//
It is not a matter of plausibility. It is a matter of evidence. There is much more evidence for natural causes than for the thousands of versions of “Spirit” that people have ever come up with. Besides, I have a problem with the word “Man” the way you seem to intend it--as if there was anything special about us humans. The only beautiful thing that we really have is our intellect. To waste it in pursuit of mindless submission to a flock-leader, warmonger God is criminal.
//And in any case, the multiverse picture still doesn’t resolve anything in terms of why there is Being at all.//
You’re right, it doesn’t. Currently, there is no explanation for that sort of question. Does that trouble you so much that you must go looking for answers anywhere? Would it not be more rational, not to mention more mature, to accept one’s limits and be confident --hope, or perhaps pray?-- that one day a fellow human will glimpse an answer?
//The Christian faith that you regard with such contempt is the creative font of the great works of culture, art, and literature of Western Civilization. If you truly regard religion as poison, then for the sake of consistency and integrity you should stop partaking of that poisoned heritage.//
Yesterday an electrician came to my home to install a new wiring system. He did a really fine job of it. But while he was at it, he raped my wife and killed my dogs. Naturally, I had him arrested. Should the cops have grinned and said, “Ahhh but look at those wires! Such a good job!”
Clearly, that never happened. But I think you see my point. You committed a false dichotomy. Bad things may overshadow the good ones, or vice-versa. One does not accept or reject *anything* because of a few features. In the case of Christianity (as well as Islam and any other religion), we non-theists would like to keep the art and gradually educate people to learn to do away with the rest.
//And the assumption that without Christianity everybody would have spent the last 2,000 years being nice to one another is a problematic proposition, to put it mildly.//
“What ifs” are often pointless, but it is easy to see how the obscurantist forces of the Church have slowed down what might have been a faster process. Perhaps only slightly faster, or we might have had the Internet by the year 1600. But certainly it would have been faster had all emerging scientists all the way up to the 1800s not have to deal with religious authorities.
//Do you *really* think that greed, hatred, and power-lust are mere side-effects of belief in God?//
Those are natural effects that all human beings are capable of. Radical belief in God merely makes them more probable.
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G.S.—Yes, thanks for an interesting response. I see I misspelt Scobie, but excuse myself on the ground that I far prefer the conservative Waugh to the (relatively) liberal Greene. Conservatism and theism certainly do seem to foster art in a way liberalism and atheism don’t, but I don’t regard that as evidence for the truth of theism. Beliefs can be useful without being true and if human beings have evolved to be religious, it’s presumably healthy for us to be so, in some sense. Dawkins and Hitchens in fact seem evidence for that: they’ve filled their God-shaped holes with an ideology allowing them some of the nastier religious comforts:
the odium atheologicum, one might say.
If you don’t believe in anything, and don’t think that anything transcends the material world, then you might as well drop the moral pose, given that things like love and justice and reason are just memes full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Not so. Love, justice and reason are independent of God and the supernatural. Right and wrong do not exist by divine command but by necessity: God cannot tell us that murder is good and make it so. And in a Godless universe, 13 is still a prime number.
I.e., they find an infinite number of Universes an idea easier to entertain than a Creator.
By saying that you actually betray your failure to grasp the nature of God. An infinite number of Universes (X) is indeed an easier idea to entertain than a Creator (Y), unless Y is simpler than X, which standard theology denies. An omnipotent God could create one universe or an infinite number. Therefore, ceteris paribus, by Occam’s razor the multiverse is a simpler explanation than God.
The Christian faith that you regard with such contempt is the creative font of the great works of culture, art, and literature of Western Civilization.
1) Even if that were true, it’s post hoc, ergo propter hoc. 2) It’s not true: the Parthenon, Aeneid and very much beside are pre-Christian. 3) Men like Mozart, Milton and Newton would not have been recognized as Christian by the early Church, and were’t recognized as such by many of their contemporaries.
And it also means no science—there is a reason it is called Western science, and there is a reason it originated in Europe.
I’ll give you a hint: Logos.
A term from pre-Christian Greek paganism. Plus, science took an awful long time to appear and appeared in a very limited area if we assume that Christianity was responsible for it. Seems to me Protestantism has a much better claim than Christianity and Protestantism was a heresy that would have been stamped out if its Christian opponents had had their way.
I don’t agree with Douglas and his mentors, but I don’t agree that religion is the source of all good either.
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G.S.—Yes, thanks for an interesting response. I see I misspelt Scobie, but excuse myself on the ground that I far prefer the conservative Waugh to the (relatively) liberal Greene. Conservatism and theism certainly do seem to foster art in a way liberalism and atheism don’t, but I don’t regard that as evidence for the truth of theism. Beliefs can be useful without being true and if human beings have evolved to be religious, it’s presumably healthy for us to be so, in some sense. Dawkins and Hitchens in fact seem evidence for that: they’ve filled their God-shaped holes with an ideology allowing them some of the nastier religious comforts:
the odium atheologicum, one might say.
If you don’t believe in anything, and don’t think that anything transcends the material world, then you might as well drop the moral pose, given that things like love and justice and reason are just memes full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Not so. Love, justice and reason are independent of God and the supernatural. Right and wrong do not exist by divine command but by necessity: God cannot tell us that murder is good and make it so. And in a Godless universe, 13 is still a prime number.
I.e., they find an infinite number of Universes an idea easier to entertain than a Creator.
By saying that you actually betray your failure to grasp the nature of God. An infinite number of Universes (X) is indeed an easier idea to entertain than a Creator (Y), unless Y is simpler than X, which standard theology denies. An omnipotent God could create one universe or an infinite number. Therefore, ceteris paribus, by Occam’s razor the multiverse is a simpler explanation than God.
The Christian faith that you regard with such contempt is the creative font of the great works of culture, art, and literature of Western Civilization.
1) Even if that were true, it’s post hoc, ergo propter hoc. 2) It’s not true: the Parthenon, Aeneid and very much beside are pre-Christian. 3) Men like Mozart, Milton and Newton would not have been recognized as Christian by the early Church, and were’t recognized as such by many of their contemporaries.
And it also means no science—there is a reason it is called Western science, and there is a reason it originated in Europe.
I’ll give you a hint: Logos.
A term from pre-Christian Greek paganism. Plus, science took an awful long time to appear and appeared in a very limited area if we assume that Christianity was responsible for it. Seems to me Protestantism has a much better claim than Christianity and Protestantism was a heresy that would have been stamped out if its Christian opponents had had their way.
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would also direct everyone to the article from Christianity Today linked to above, which deals with the philosophical confusion of Dawkins et al.
Plantinga’s arguments are, I’m afraid, risible. He argues: ‘Dawkins says God is complex [using the word in a scientific sense], but classic theology says He’s not complex [using the word in a non-scientific sense]. One in the eye for Dawkins!’ Plantinga commits the gross error of failing to distinguish between two different senses of the word ‘complex’. Then: ‘Dawkins says complex entities have parts, but God is immaterial, therefore has no parts, therefore is not complex.’ Risible again: it’s proof by definition. If by ‘part’ one means ‘a distinguishable portion of a material entity’, then of course God has no parts. But why must it be an material entity? To take a simple example: the digits of pi are ‘parts’ of pi and if nothing existed but God, he would still know all the digits of pi. Therefore parts exist within God and he is indeed ‘complex’. Infinitely so, in fact.
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Kolbe didn’t act as he did in order to earn approval from God. He acted in obedience to God.
In Moby Dick, Father Mapple states, “And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.”
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Re Maximilian Kolbe being selfish or selfless.
From an orthodox Christian perspective, Kolbe was neither. He was, through God’s grace, a saint. I.e., he was and is holy as God is holy. The word satin comes from Sanctus, Latin for holy.
As Jesus said, “with God, all things are possible.”
Being holy, he acted as God wills without seeking salvation.
As the old Baltimore Gothicism said (paraphrasing), I am sorry for my sins not because I fear hell but because they offend God.
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I would also direct everyone to the article from Christianity Today linked to above, which deals with the philosophical confusion of Dawkins et al.
Plantinga’s arguments are also confused, I’m afraid. He argues: ‘Dawkins says God is complex [using the word in a scientific sense], but classic theology says He’s not complex [using the word in a non-scientific sense]. One in the eye for Dawkins!’ Plantinga commits the gross error of failing to distinguish between the two different senses. Then: ‘Dawkins says complex entities have parts, but God is immaterial, therefore has no parts, therefore is not complex. One in the eye for Dawkins again!’ No, faultily reasoned again: it’s proof by definition. If by ‘part’ one means ‘a distinct portion of a material entity’, then of course God has no parts. But why must it be an material entity? To take a simple example: the digits of pi are ‘parts’ of pi and if nothing existed but God, he would still know all the digits of pi. Therefore parts exist within God and he is indeed ‘complex’. Infinitely so, in fact. That’s quite beside the question of the ‘mind’ whereby God knows pi, which again must be infinitely complex.
As you point out, the multiverse is a theory taken on blind faith, a theory that has arisen because the big bang is uncomfortably close to the creation ex nihilo that atheists have always denied.
If Dawkins & Co say the multiverse DOES exist, they have blind faith. They don’t: they offer the multiverse as a possibility, as the steady state universe was previously offered as a possibility. Theories aren’t dogmas.
G.S.—Yes, thanks for an interesting response. I see I misspelt Scobie, but excuse myself on the ground that I far prefer the conservative Waugh to the (relatively) liberal Greene. Conservatism and theism certainly do seem to foster art in a way liberalism and atheism don’t, but I don’t regard that as evidence for the truth of theism. Beliefs can be useful without being true and if human beings have evolved to be religious, it’s presumably healthy for us to be so, in some sense. Dawkins and Hitchens in fact seem evidence for that: they’ve filled their God-shaped holes with an ideology allowing them some of the nastier religious comforts:
the odium atheologicum, one might say.
I don’t think Douglas was very convincing, but your response had serious flaws too. To address some of them:
Consider the godless Marxism admired by Hitchens and so in vogue among leftist intelligentsia… in its various forms it has murdered over 70 million human beings.
Consider the godful Islam so opposed by Hitchens. Many of its adherents, in the name of God, would happily slaughter twice as many. Of course, their idea of God is wrong, but perhaps it’s not God or His absence that makes an ideology murderous. In any case, Marxism retains God in the guise of “historical inevitability” etc.
If you don’t believe in anything, and don’t think that anything transcends the material world, then you might as well drop the moral pose, given that things like love and justice and reason are just memes full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Not so. Love, justice and reason are independent of God and supernatural, because He cannot make them other than are: by necessity, love is good, murder is wrong and 13 is a prime number. God cannot contrive that love is bad, murder is right and 13 is evenly divisible by 7.
If you are no more than a meat-machine I fail to see why you expect your indignation to register with anyone.
Morals do not depend on God: what is good and what bad are independent of Him, because He cannot make them other than they are.
As near as I can tell, the sole appeal of the multiverse theory is that people like Hitchens and Dawkins dogmatically rule out any sort of creative will behind creation.
I.e., they find an infinite number of Universes an idea easier to entertain than a Creator.
It is easier to entertain and by suggesting otherwise you betray your failure to grasp God’s greatness. An infinite number of universes are as a speck of dust beside the One Who could create—and perhaps has created—them ex nihilo.
The Christian faith that you regard with such contempt is the creative font of the great works of culture, art, and literature of Western Civilization.
1) If that were true, it’s post hoc, ergo propter hoc. 2) It’s not true: Stonehenge, the Parthenon, the Aeneid and very much beside are pre-Christian.
If you truly regard religion as poison, then for the sake of consistency and integrity you should stop partaking of that poisoned heritage.
If you hate Christendom so much then the right thing to do is reject it rather than derive parasitic pleasure from it.
Which means no Michaelangelo,
A homosexual whose homosexuality intimately informed his art. Now, if you truly regard homosexuality as poison, then for the sake of consistency and integrity you should stop partaking of that poisoned heritage. If you hate homosexuality so much, then the right thing to do is reject it rather than derive parasitic pleasure from it. So no Michaelangelo for believers in Christian tradition, I’m afraid.
And it also means no science—there is a reason it is called Western science, and there is a reason it originated in Europe.
I’ll give you a hint: Logos.
A term from pagan Greek philosophy. Science took an awful long time to appear and appeared in a very limited area if we assume Christianity has the credit—or takes the blame—for it. Seems to me it arose from the same forces as Protestantism, and Protestantism was a heresy that would have been stamped out if its Christian opponents had had their way.
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I would also direct everyone to the article from Christianity Today linked to above, which deals with the philosophical confusion of Dawkins et al.
Plantinga’s arguments are also confused, I’m afraid. He argues: ‘Dawkins says God is complex [using the word in a scientific sense], but classic theology says He’s not complex [using the word in a non-scientific sense]. One in the eye for Dawkins!’ Plantinga commits the gross error of failing to distinguish between the two different senses. Then: ‘Dawkins says complex entities have parts, but God is immaterial, therefore has no parts, therefore is not complex. One in the eye for Dawkins again!’ No, faultily reasoned again: it’s proof by definition. If by ‘part’ one means ‘a distinct portion of a material entity’, then of course God has no parts. But why must it be an material entity? To take a simple example: the digits of pi are ‘parts’ of pi and if nothing existed but God, he would still know all the digits of pi. Therefore parts exist within God and he is indeed ‘complex’. Infinitely so, in fact. That’s quite beside the question of the ‘mind’ whereby God knows pi, which again must be infinitely complex.
As you point out, the multiverse is a theory taken on blind faith, a theory that has arisen because the big bang is uncomfortably close to the creation ex nihilo that atheists have always denied.
If Dawkins & Co say the multiverse DOES exist, they have blind faith. They don’t: they offer the multiverse as a possibility, as the steady state universe was previously offered as a possibility. Theories aren’t dogmas.
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Dear G.S.
Thank you for demonstrating how brilliantly ‘faith’-driven Christians dodge the important questions, and do not read the literature they claim to rebuke!
//Naturally the Holocaust had everything to do with
St. Augustine, and nothing to do with ... oh, say,
Nietschze?//
Hitler was, if he is to be believed, a practicing Roman Catholic. Nietzsche, a philosopher who died several decades before the holocaust, was not. Hey, which one caused the holocaust?
The holocaust was a result of several centuries of Christian church propaganda and misinformation (’deicide’, or the charge that the Jews killed god, and that the blood was ‘on the hands of the descendendts’, was a charge invented upon the Jews, and used to stir up anti-semitic hatred), without which such an act would have been far more difficult to carry out.
//Consider the godless Marxism admired by Hitchens and so
in vogue among leftist intelligentsia… in its various
forms it has murdered over 70 million human beings. //
Except that Stalin didn’t kill people “in the name of atheism”. Stalin killed because he was a bad person. Communist Russia was a result of Communism combined with russian culture. It was also a ‘personality cult’, a la North Korea, where the leader is held to be almost divine, unquestioningly. In that way, it is closer to dogmatic religion than to atheism. It had naff all to do with atheism. People don’t do bad things in the name of atheism, but they DO do bad things in the name of ‘God’. As I pointed out in the above comment I left.
Without dogmatic religion and belief in the supernatural without evidence, good people would do good things, and bad people would do bad things. It takes religion for good people to do bad things (or personality cults).
//If you don’t believe in anything, and don’t think
that anything transcends the material world, then you
might as well drop the moral pose, given that things
like love and justice and reason are just memes full
of sound and fury, signifying nothing. //
“Belief in god is a contemptible reason to be moral”.
Religious people are so terrified of the prospect that we are in control of our own destiny, and what is important is what we choose to be important.
//Still, you & John Lennon are right—if nobody believed
in or loved anything at all—whether Christianity or
their family or Marxism or the writings of Richard
Dawkins—then nobody would fight about anything
anymore.
If you believe a loveless and beliefless world is a
price worth paying for peace, then I am truly sorry for
you. //
If you really think that removing an omnipotent, interventionalist creator removes all meaning from the world, then I am truly sorry for you. If you think atheists cannot love, then there is an entire world of empirical evidence to argue differently. Just because the concept of love can be broken down to chemical and evolutionary levels does not make it in any way fake.
Religious people and organizations do good things. Nobody expects them to be efficiently, purposefully evil, but the good they do is not dependent on religious ideas. The good they do is based on basic morality which most people share. A secular humanist mindset is just as likely to breed acts of kindness, and with less chance of imposing conditions.
//If you think that the love of God is the only sort of
love that causes fighting, then you’re an idiot.//
When did I say that? Stop putting up a straw man and address the questions.
//There is no proof for a multiverse, but you and your fellow-travellers are certainly willing to take that
one on faith.//
When did I say I believed in a multiverse? I asked why a belief in a multiverse was necessary to not believe in a god. Don’t put words in my mouth.
//Do you really think it so obvious that an empty,
meaningless infinity is a more plausible origin for
Man than Spirit? And in any case, the multiverse
picture still doesn’t resolve anything in terms of
why there is Being at all.//
I’ll try and explain it as monosyllabically as possible: It is more plausible that the universe was either all-being, or created by some quantum accident, because a being who created the universe in all its order deliberately would have to be several magnitudes more complicated than the universe itself. Therefore by going “well the universe is so complicated it must have been created by an ordered being” is false logic, since you are making a bigger assumption assuming the universe was created by a deliberate creator than that it was either infinite or created un-deliberately.
//Which means no Michaelangelo, no Bach ... for that matter, it also means no Jack Kerouack, no Tolkien, and no Johnny Cash. No Camus, even—“The Outsider” is derivative of the story of Christ, Camus declared
this himself.//
It is a fallacy to credit Christianity as the ‘font’ of western culture, in days when everybody was Christian by default, where questioning was often suppressed under torture, and when science hadn’t developed sufficiently to determine the origin of man. Even then, your founding fathers were secular deists at best, and not the Christians you mistakenly claim them to be (if you are so mistaken).
//And it also means no science—there is a reason it is
called Western science, and there is a reason it
originated in Europe.
I’ll give you a hint: Logos.//
It’s funny, the period that the Church had its greatest control on Europe, was the period of least scientific progress. In fact, it was called the Dark Ages. Was that your logos, sir?
//And the assumption that without Christianity everybody
would have spent the last 2,000 years being nice to one
another is a problematic proposition, to put it mildly.
Do you *really* think that greed, hatred, and
power-lust are mere side-effects of belief in God?//
Certainly not, but I strongly believe that religion has caused unmeasurable unnecessary suffering, and continues to cause it today, in the Middle East, in conflicts in Africa, and in eastern europe (a rebuttal to which I am yet to see), and in the bigotry, hatred and scientific handicapping in the U.S., and that we would be better off were more societies more beautifully secular as large parts of Europe are nowadays.
Of course, you wouldn’t be raising these arguments if you were actually an inquisitive mind and had read Dawkins. You would at least be addressing the arguments he has made to everything you said. Or Harris, or even Hitchens (a man whose personal politics I disagree with, but still find entertaining with strong points to make).
Tom (in fact both of you): instead of investigating the flaws in your own theological assumptions, you choose instead to attack the assumptions of straw men that you erect. This is both hilarious and saddening that you are so defensive and afraid of examining your own beliefs, choosing instead to attack that which you do not understand (science, rational thought, atheist literature).
To end with a wonderful quote from Bertrand Russell(1925): “I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man’s place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a spender of their own.”
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Hmm, my lengthy response still hasn’t appeared....
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Hitchens claims that, “As in all cases, the findings of science are far more awe-inspiring than the rantings of the godly.”
Looking for art in science
Is a peculiar aspiration,
For there is little wonder
Once man denies Creation
And his reduction to mere numbers
O’er the passing of the years,
Leaves us with naught but the aesthetics
Of damned chess-club engineers
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Schoenberg only wrote atonally for a very brief period and soon moved onto dodecaphonicism, which is extremely structured - not ‘random’ at all. He was also a man of deep, if confused, religious beliefs and of his two major pupils Anton Webern was a very devout R.C. But I still agree with you that his music is awfully ugly.
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One small point. The premier chronicler of the mass murder committed by the Bolsheviks is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who would certainly disagree with the claim that Stalin’s crimes had nothing to do with atheism. In fact, Solzhenitsyn--one of the giants of the 20th century--argued that the calamity that befell Russia was the direct result of men forgetting God: http://www.roca.org/OA/36/36h.htm
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Claudio:
“Those are natural effects that all human beings are capable of. Radical belief in God merely makes them more probable.”
Then what about USSR or North Korea or China? They are responsible for about 70 million dead. Shouldn’t we then say that “[greed, hatred, and power-lust] are natural effects that all human beings are capable of. Radical disbelief in God merely makes them more probable”?
Douglas:
“Except that Stalin didn’t kill people “in the name of atheism”. Stalin killed because he was a bad person.”
Sometimes these atheist make me laugh. Thank you for that. A few lines up, you used Hitler, a Roman Catholic,* as a “proof” that Christianity was bad, ie. that it caused the Holocaust. Here you use Stalin to prove the opposite. Is that intellectual honesty? Is that intellectual consistency?
“It was also a ‘personality cult’, a la North Korea, where the leader is held to be almost divine, unquestioningly. In that way, it is closer to dogmatic religion than to atheism. It had naff all to do with atheism. People don’t do bad things in the name of atheism, but they DO do bad things in the name of ‘God’. As I pointed out in the above comment I left.”
You don’t know much about religion do you? Perheps you have learned about it from blockheads like Dawkins, Hitchens or Dennet?
Your argument is as follows: Some atheists kill people,in fact a lot of people, in fact the largest number ever in the history of Man. Of course they did not do this because they were atheists, they did it because they were bad men/women. And I agree, people have a tendency to be bad if they do such things. If you had stopped there, I might