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Entry: Hitchens' Hubris Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/hitchens_hubris#2735 Post contents: 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? Sent at: 2008 08 30