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Entry: Hitchens' Hubris Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/hitchens_hubris#2776 Post contents: 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." Sent at: 2008 07 24