Debate between Christopher Hitchens and Alister McGrath
Christopher Hitchens, Alister McGrath
Reposted from:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6851159367044940771&hl=en
and
http://www.eppc.org/publications/pageID.390/default.asp
Poison or Cure? Religious Belief in the Modern World
Video of a debate, dialogue, and discussion with Christopher Hitchens and Alister McGrath
Watch on Google Video HERE
YouTube links (thanks to Ronan):
Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM18VXNgvDo
Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36U-DuD5MnQ
Part 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIvB9qTqbJE
Part 4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbkeFEx95ok
Part 5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efkCnz6P9WM
Part 6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVto--zU2WU
Part 7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jdcma46c6Kg
Part 8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsamdA86e8w
Part 9 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oenhstox25E
Part10 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gyAPIkUC_k
Part11 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL9MSlXfEE8
Showing posts with label Hitchens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hitchens. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Sunday, July 1, 2007
"A review of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" by Ross Douthat
Lord Have Mercy: A review of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
ROSS DOUTHAT
Every talented writer is entitled to be a bore on at least one subject, but where religion is concerned Christopher Hitchens abuses the privilege.
For years now, he has supplemented his prolific punditry and criticism with a stream of anti-theistic diatribes, and now these rivers of vituperation have pooled into a single volume, an omnium gatherum of God-bashing (although he insists on using the lower-case "g" throughout) that exceeds most of its predecessors in the felicity of its prose, but matches them in the tedium of its arguments. "I have been writing this book all my life," Hitchens declares in the conclusion to God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, "and intend to keep on writing it." One hopes that someone near and dear to him will have the courage to firmly suggest that he stop.
The book has been written with two main purposes in mind: to show that all religions are false, and to prove that their effects are near-universally pernicious. In each case, Hitchens's argument proceeds principally by anecdote, and at his best he is as convincing as that particular style allows, which is to say not terribly. He succeeds in demonstrating that many faiths are frauds and many prophets have been fakers, that believers commit all sorts of terrible crimes and that Buddhists are no more pacific than Southern Baptists, and that the Bible is neither a work of academic history nor a biology textbook. Then again, I was convinced of these points already, and hoped that Hitchens would pick a fight on more contested territory, such as the origin and nature of spiritual experience, which seems a more likely source for man's persistent religiosity than, say, the fear of thunderstorms or the stubborn refusal to crack open The Origin of Species. But like most apologists for atheism, he evinces little interest in the topic of religion as it is actually lived, preferring to stick to the safer ground of putting the godly in the dock and cataloguing their crimes against humanity.
In this vein, he is exhaustive but largely unpersuasive. I remain unconvinced, for instance, that religious practice has no significant effect on moral character, though all I have to support my intuition is a heap of academic studies suggesting that churchgoing boosts marital happiness, private generosity, and various other indicators of a life well lived, while Hitchens has the devastating rebuttal that Robert Ingersoll, the noted freethinker, was a better husband and father than the Catholic Evelyn Waugh. Similarly, I'm unpersuaded that the Catholic Church's stance on birth control has been a major factor in the spread of AIDS around the world, though again I'm merely relying on statistics—African infection rates, for instance, are highest in heavily Protestant countries; most studies suggest that serious religious practice correlates with lower rates of risky sexual behavior, even among people already infected with HIV—while Hitchens has the irrefutable power of anecdote on his side, specifically a few dumb statements about condoms from Third World churchmen.
I'm also unconvinced that male circumcision is quite the species of totalitarianism that God Is Not Great makes it out to be, though I am perhaps suffering from what Hitchens, in his Marxist phase, would have described as "false consciousness." Nor do I believe that the doctrine of hell has wrecked quite so many millions of childhoods as he claims (though he does have citations from James Joyce and Mary McCarthy on his side); or that religion has likewise ruined the act of coitus (a difficult thing to do, one might hazard) for untold numbers of believers; or that the difference between the Spanish Inquisition and the U.S. military chaplaincy is a matter of degree and not of kind. Although Hitchens may be entirely correct that an atheist need "never again confront the impressive faith of an Aquinas or a Maimonides," because faith of "the sort that can stand up at least for a while in a confrontation with reason" no longer exists, I wish he had risked the confrontation, instead of writing an entire book about religion that includes exactly two quotations from religious intellectuals born since 1800, both taken from the same C.S. Lewis pamphlet.
It might be argued that the brevity of the book and the amount of ground it covers should excuse the less-than-rigorous fashion in which it advances its more controversial arguments. But the demands of brevity should clarify and hone, whereas Hitchens manages to be both short and sloppy. To dispense with both the Old and New Testament in 25 pages is a difficult task, but if he was limited by considerations of length he might have found better evidence for the fraudulence of the Christian witness than, say, the less-than-earthshattering revelation that non-canonical gospels circulated in the centuries after Christ; or the news that the well-known passage in the Gospel of John dealing with the woman taken in adultery was not part of the original Johannine text; or the self-evidently specious observation that the New Testament authors "cannot agree on anything of importance." Hitchens might also have better disguised the fact that he seems to have consulted no New Testament authorities more distinguished than the latest publications from Elaine Pagels, the doyenne of the "lost gospels" industry, and Bart Ehrman, the ex-fundamentalist who abandoned Christianity once it became clear to him that there might have been actual human beings involved in the composition of its sacred texts.
Perhaps one should be grateful when Hitchens cites any authority at all, since his artful prose is forever rushing on to the insult and skipping the argument, and sometimes the facts as well. He claims that Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ stars a "lead actor who was apparently born in Iceland or Minnesota," a jibe calculated to amuse anyone who's never set eyes on Jim Caviezel, the lead actor in question, who looks exactly like the dark-haired, dark-skinned Italian-Slovak-Irish mongrel he is. Of the Gospels themselves, Hitchens notes that "the book on which all four may possibly have been based, known speculatively to scholars as ‘Q,' has been lost forever, which seems distinctly careless on the part of the god who is claimed to have ‘inspired' it"—a good line that reveals at best a passing acquaintance with biblical scholarship, since the hypothetical Q is only envisioned as a source for Matthew and Luke, not Mark and certainly not John.
Every book has its errors, of course, but few are quite so tendentious in their interpretation of the facts they manage to get right. Like an overzealous Christian searching pagan texts for anything that could be construed as foreshadowing Christ's coming, Hitchens scours the record of man's inhumanities to man for any hint that they might have been motivated by piety, prophecy, or dogma. No atrocity has been committed and no tyranny established, if you believe his theocentric history of violence, that did not have religion at its root somehow.
This would seem a rather difficult case to make, since a cursory reading of history suggests that loyalty to one's kin, one's tribe, and one's nation—not to mention sundry political ideologies—has sparked at least as much violence as any theological controversy. But fortunately for Hitchens's polemic, religion is so woven into human affairs that nearly every war contains some religious element for his monomania to batten on. And perhaps some readers will even be persuaded by, for instance, his peculiar suggestion that the Hutu-on-Tutsi carnage in Rwanda had less to do with ethnic grievances and the pernicious legacy of Victorian Europe's racial theories than with some minor Marian visionaries, whose prophecies, which included dire and all-too-accurate predictions of imminent mass murder, were briefly co-opted by Hutu thugs.
More likely, though, the reader will come away unpersuaded of anything save the self-evident truth of the matter, which is that human beings, being a clannish and quarrelsome lot, tend to find all sorts of things to fight over, and that nearly every aspect of human affairs can serve as a powerful spur to actions both heroic and deplorable. So religion produces both Torquemada and Dorothy Day; philosophy spurs Socrates to die for truth and Heidegger to prostitute himself for Hitler; science cures polio and speeds our missiles on their way; the bonds of family provide the foundation for innumerable happy childhoods, but also for the Wars of the Roses. None of this is to excuse the crimes of religious believers; it's merely to suggest that the line between good and evil runs through every aspect of human affairs, and denouncing belief in God for poisoning the world is as absurd as denouncing "democracy" because it has empowered tyrants from Hitler down to Hugo Chavez, or "equality" because its partisans have included the Jacobins, the Khmer Rouge, and the KGB.
Of this last objection, at least, Hitchens seems well aware, and he devotes an entire chapter to arguing strenuously that both the Nazis and the Communists were effectively religious and effectively theocratic, their secular experiments poisoned by religion. But with this move he begins sawing off the very branch he occupies, since if faith tends to infect even secular politics, then what separates Hitchens from his religious enemies?
The absence of ideology, he would doubtless claim, and the commitment to skepticism and humanism, "free thought" and above all Science. But Science is not a moral teacher, and Hitchens is nothing if not a moralist, passionately invested in such notions as universal human rights, the wastefulness of violence, the particular inviolability of children, and so forth. Where he finds these principles, I am uncertain, but then he seems to be perplexed as well, given how quickly his attempt to apply evolutionary theory to the thorny problem of abortion collapses into unfortunate-sounding appeals to "creative destruction" and "the pitilessness of nature."
This detour into Social Darwinism is mercifully brief, and for the most part Hitchens hews faithfully to Thomas Jefferson's famous attempt to carve all the miracles out of the Gospels and leave the ethical teaching intact. I do not mean to give offense in calling Hitchens a quasi-Christian moralist, but in his better moments that is what he plainly is—a true believer in the branch of the Enlightenment tradition that is epistemologically materialist but otherwise takes its cues from Christianity. The trouble is that this two-step contains a certain contradiction, which is why liberalism has tended to lurch in one direction or another ever since—toward a spineless relativism on the one hand or a scientistic utopianism on the other, with New Testament morality the first thing to be jettisoned in either case.
Hitchens's own temptations lie in the latter direction. Though he casts himself as a chastened ex-Marxist, he slips all too easily into a boasting utopianism. There is the dream of near-immortality, thanks to "stupendous advances in medicine and life extension, derived from work on our elementary stem cells." There is the usual atheistic claptrap about how the "undreamed of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in the proteins and acids which constitute our nature" are a suitable replacement for the inspiration and consolation associated with religion. And inevitably, there is the fantasy of a sexual utopia, since "the divorce between the sexual life and fear, the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse." (This last bit is the kind of nonsense that only an intellectual could believe—that religion, rather than biology and human nature, is responsible for making sex physically and emotionally perilous, or linking promiscuity with disease, or intertwining the personal and the political.)
At one point, summoning his readers to the salons and barricades of a new Age of Reason, Hitchens adds the caveat that "only the most naive utopian can believe that this new humane civilization will develop, like some dream of ‘progress,' in a straight line." This sounds admirably humble, until you read the next sentence—"we have to first transcend our prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars"—and realize that the only people standing between us and this "new humane civilization" are the unenlightened types who don't agree with Christopher Hitchens about the ultimate purpose of human affairs.
We've heard this kind of talk before—transcending the past, building a new humane civilization, escaping the outworn moralities and metaphysics of yore—and its results have tended to be unhappy for those unfortunate enough to be identified with the "prehistory" that needs to be transcended. Perhaps a more modest utopianism will be less pernicious than its predecessors; perhaps Hitchens really means it when he protests, in between the insults, that he only dislikes religion because it won't leave him well enough alone. But there's nothing, either in recent history or in the pages of this smug, incurious book, to give one any confidence of that.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Ross Douthat "Lord Have Mercy: A review of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything." Claremont Review of Books (Summer, 2007).
Reprinted with permission of the Claremont Review of Books.
The Claremont Review of Books offers bold arguments for a reinvigorated conservatism, which draws upon the timeless principles of the American Founding and applies them to the moral and political problems we face today. By engaging policy at the level of ideas, the CRB aims to reawaken in American politics a statesmanship and citizenship worthy of our noblest political traditions.
THE AUTHOR
Ross Douthat is an associate editor at The Atlantic and the author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (Hyperion, 2005) and The Party of Sam's Club, with Reihan Salam, which is forthcoming in 2008 from Doubleday. A native of New Haven, Connecticut, he now lives in Washington D.C.
link
ROSS DOUTHAT
Every talented writer is entitled to be a bore on at least one subject, but where religion is concerned Christopher Hitchens abuses the privilege.
For years now, he has supplemented his prolific punditry and criticism with a stream of anti-theistic diatribes, and now these rivers of vituperation have pooled into a single volume, an omnium gatherum of God-bashing (although he insists on using the lower-case "g" throughout) that exceeds most of its predecessors in the felicity of its prose, but matches them in the tedium of its arguments. "I have been writing this book all my life," Hitchens declares in the conclusion to God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, "and intend to keep on writing it." One hopes that someone near and dear to him will have the courage to firmly suggest that he stop.
The book has been written with two main purposes in mind: to show that all religions are false, and to prove that their effects are near-universally pernicious. In each case, Hitchens's argument proceeds principally by anecdote, and at his best he is as convincing as that particular style allows, which is to say not terribly. He succeeds in demonstrating that many faiths are frauds and many prophets have been fakers, that believers commit all sorts of terrible crimes and that Buddhists are no more pacific than Southern Baptists, and that the Bible is neither a work of academic history nor a biology textbook. Then again, I was convinced of these points already, and hoped that Hitchens would pick a fight on more contested territory, such as the origin and nature of spiritual experience, which seems a more likely source for man's persistent religiosity than, say, the fear of thunderstorms or the stubborn refusal to crack open The Origin of Species. But like most apologists for atheism, he evinces little interest in the topic of religion as it is actually lived, preferring to stick to the safer ground of putting the godly in the dock and cataloguing their crimes against humanity.
In this vein, he is exhaustive but largely unpersuasive. I remain unconvinced, for instance, that religious practice has no significant effect on moral character, though all I have to support my intuition is a heap of academic studies suggesting that churchgoing boosts marital happiness, private generosity, and various other indicators of a life well lived, while Hitchens has the devastating rebuttal that Robert Ingersoll, the noted freethinker, was a better husband and father than the Catholic Evelyn Waugh. Similarly, I'm unpersuaded that the Catholic Church's stance on birth control has been a major factor in the spread of AIDS around the world, though again I'm merely relying on statistics—African infection rates, for instance, are highest in heavily Protestant countries; most studies suggest that serious religious practice correlates with lower rates of risky sexual behavior, even among people already infected with HIV—while Hitchens has the irrefutable power of anecdote on his side, specifically a few dumb statements about condoms from Third World churchmen.
I'm also unconvinced that male circumcision is quite the species of totalitarianism that God Is Not Great makes it out to be, though I am perhaps suffering from what Hitchens, in his Marxist phase, would have described as "false consciousness." Nor do I believe that the doctrine of hell has wrecked quite so many millions of childhoods as he claims (though he does have citations from James Joyce and Mary McCarthy on his side); or that religion has likewise ruined the act of coitus (a difficult thing to do, one might hazard) for untold numbers of believers; or that the difference between the Spanish Inquisition and the U.S. military chaplaincy is a matter of degree and not of kind. Although Hitchens may be entirely correct that an atheist need "never again confront the impressive faith of an Aquinas or a Maimonides," because faith of "the sort that can stand up at least for a while in a confrontation with reason" no longer exists, I wish he had risked the confrontation, instead of writing an entire book about religion that includes exactly two quotations from religious intellectuals born since 1800, both taken from the same C.S. Lewis pamphlet.
It might be argued that the brevity of the book and the amount of ground it covers should excuse the less-than-rigorous fashion in which it advances its more controversial arguments. But the demands of brevity should clarify and hone, whereas Hitchens manages to be both short and sloppy. To dispense with both the Old and New Testament in 25 pages is a difficult task, but if he was limited by considerations of length he might have found better evidence for the fraudulence of the Christian witness than, say, the less-than-earthshattering revelation that non-canonical gospels circulated in the centuries after Christ; or the news that the well-known passage in the Gospel of John dealing with the woman taken in adultery was not part of the original Johannine text; or the self-evidently specious observation that the New Testament authors "cannot agree on anything of importance." Hitchens might also have better disguised the fact that he seems to have consulted no New Testament authorities more distinguished than the latest publications from Elaine Pagels, the doyenne of the "lost gospels" industry, and Bart Ehrman, the ex-fundamentalist who abandoned Christianity once it became clear to him that there might have been actual human beings involved in the composition of its sacred texts.
Perhaps one should be grateful when Hitchens cites any authority at all, since his artful prose is forever rushing on to the insult and skipping the argument, and sometimes the facts as well. He claims that Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ stars a "lead actor who was apparently born in Iceland or Minnesota," a jibe calculated to amuse anyone who's never set eyes on Jim Caviezel, the lead actor in question, who looks exactly like the dark-haired, dark-skinned Italian-Slovak-Irish mongrel he is. Of the Gospels themselves, Hitchens notes that "the book on which all four may possibly have been based, known speculatively to scholars as ‘Q,' has been lost forever, which seems distinctly careless on the part of the god who is claimed to have ‘inspired' it"—a good line that reveals at best a passing acquaintance with biblical scholarship, since the hypothetical Q is only envisioned as a source for Matthew and Luke, not Mark and certainly not John.
Every book has its errors, of course, but few are quite so tendentious in their interpretation of the facts they manage to get right. Like an overzealous Christian searching pagan texts for anything that could be construed as foreshadowing Christ's coming, Hitchens scours the record of man's inhumanities to man for any hint that they might have been motivated by piety, prophecy, or dogma. No atrocity has been committed and no tyranny established, if you believe his theocentric history of violence, that did not have religion at its root somehow.
This would seem a rather difficult case to make, since a cursory reading of history suggests that loyalty to one's kin, one's tribe, and one's nation—not to mention sundry political ideologies—has sparked at least as much violence as any theological controversy. But fortunately for Hitchens's polemic, religion is so woven into human affairs that nearly every war contains some religious element for his monomania to batten on. And perhaps some readers will even be persuaded by, for instance, his peculiar suggestion that the Hutu-on-Tutsi carnage in Rwanda had less to do with ethnic grievances and the pernicious legacy of Victorian Europe's racial theories than with some minor Marian visionaries, whose prophecies, which included dire and all-too-accurate predictions of imminent mass murder, were briefly co-opted by Hutu thugs.
More likely, though, the reader will come away unpersuaded of anything save the self-evident truth of the matter, which is that human beings, being a clannish and quarrelsome lot, tend to find all sorts of things to fight over, and that nearly every aspect of human affairs can serve as a powerful spur to actions both heroic and deplorable. So religion produces both Torquemada and Dorothy Day; philosophy spurs Socrates to die for truth and Heidegger to prostitute himself for Hitler; science cures polio and speeds our missiles on their way; the bonds of family provide the foundation for innumerable happy childhoods, but also for the Wars of the Roses. None of this is to excuse the crimes of religious believers; it's merely to suggest that the line between good and evil runs through every aspect of human affairs, and denouncing belief in God for poisoning the world is as absurd as denouncing "democracy" because it has empowered tyrants from Hitler down to Hugo Chavez, or "equality" because its partisans have included the Jacobins, the Khmer Rouge, and the KGB.
Of this last objection, at least, Hitchens seems well aware, and he devotes an entire chapter to arguing strenuously that both the Nazis and the Communists were effectively religious and effectively theocratic, their secular experiments poisoned by religion. But with this move he begins sawing off the very branch he occupies, since if faith tends to infect even secular politics, then what separates Hitchens from his religious enemies?
The absence of ideology, he would doubtless claim, and the commitment to skepticism and humanism, "free thought" and above all Science. But Science is not a moral teacher, and Hitchens is nothing if not a moralist, passionately invested in such notions as universal human rights, the wastefulness of violence, the particular inviolability of children, and so forth. Where he finds these principles, I am uncertain, but then he seems to be perplexed as well, given how quickly his attempt to apply evolutionary theory to the thorny problem of abortion collapses into unfortunate-sounding appeals to "creative destruction" and "the pitilessness of nature."
This detour into Social Darwinism is mercifully brief, and for the most part Hitchens hews faithfully to Thomas Jefferson's famous attempt to carve all the miracles out of the Gospels and leave the ethical teaching intact. I do not mean to give offense in calling Hitchens a quasi-Christian moralist, but in his better moments that is what he plainly is—a true believer in the branch of the Enlightenment tradition that is epistemologically materialist but otherwise takes its cues from Christianity. The trouble is that this two-step contains a certain contradiction, which is why liberalism has tended to lurch in one direction or another ever since—toward a spineless relativism on the one hand or a scientistic utopianism on the other, with New Testament morality the first thing to be jettisoned in either case.
Hitchens's own temptations lie in the latter direction. Though he casts himself as a chastened ex-Marxist, he slips all too easily into a boasting utopianism. There is the dream of near-immortality, thanks to "stupendous advances in medicine and life extension, derived from work on our elementary stem cells." There is the usual atheistic claptrap about how the "undreamed of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in the proteins and acids which constitute our nature" are a suitable replacement for the inspiration and consolation associated with religion. And inevitably, there is the fantasy of a sexual utopia, since "the divorce between the sexual life and fear, the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse." (This last bit is the kind of nonsense that only an intellectual could believe—that religion, rather than biology and human nature, is responsible for making sex physically and emotionally perilous, or linking promiscuity with disease, or intertwining the personal and the political.)
At one point, summoning his readers to the salons and barricades of a new Age of Reason, Hitchens adds the caveat that "only the most naive utopian can believe that this new humane civilization will develop, like some dream of ‘progress,' in a straight line." This sounds admirably humble, until you read the next sentence—"we have to first transcend our prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars"—and realize that the only people standing between us and this "new humane civilization" are the unenlightened types who don't agree with Christopher Hitchens about the ultimate purpose of human affairs.
We've heard this kind of talk before—transcending the past, building a new humane civilization, escaping the outworn moralities and metaphysics of yore—and its results have tended to be unhappy for those unfortunate enough to be identified with the "prehistory" that needs to be transcended. Perhaps a more modest utopianism will be less pernicious than its predecessors; perhaps Hitchens really means it when he protests, in between the insults, that he only dislikes religion because it won't leave him well enough alone. But there's nothing, either in recent history or in the pages of this smug, incurious book, to give one any confidence of that.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Ross Douthat "Lord Have Mercy: A review of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything." Claremont Review of Books (Summer, 2007).
Reprinted with permission of the Claremont Review of Books.
The Claremont Review of Books offers bold arguments for a reinvigorated conservatism, which draws upon the timeless principles of the American Founding and applies them to the moral and political problems we face today. By engaging policy at the level of ideas, the CRB aims to reawaken in American politics a statesmanship and citizenship worthy of our noblest political traditions.
THE AUTHOR
Ross Douthat is an associate editor at The Atlantic and the author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (Hyperion, 2005) and The Party of Sam's Club, with Reihan Salam, which is forthcoming in 2008 from Doubleday. A native of New Haven, Connecticut, he now lives in Washington D.C.
link
Friday, June 1, 2007
"God Is Not Great" review by Sam Schulman
God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
by Christopher Hitchens
Twelve. 320 pp. $24.99
Militant atheism has a long and not notably successful history—punctuated, however, by boomlets that tend to occur after terrible and seemingly inexplicable human disasters. The latest such boomlet owes its popularity to al Qaeda, whose attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 created an appetite not only for global explanations but for blame. To our arsenal of defenses against future terrorist attacks, today’s crop of professional atheists urge us to add a mistrust of religion in general, in whatever guise. Thus, according to books by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel C. Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon), and Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation), responsibility for an event like 9/11 ought not to be assigned solely or at all to the small group of radical Islamists who perpetrated the attacks, much less to Islam as a whole, but rather ought to be shared among all religions, including the very moderate kinds of religion that exist in the United States and Europe.
Christopher Hitchens’s new book, God Is Not Great, is the most recent and in many ways the most engaging of these exercises, displaying a range of reference and a degree of energy, wit, and learning that the others conspicuously lack. Correspondingly, however, its flaws go much deeper.
_____________
Hitchens certainly does not share the worst political faults of the others, who tend to skirt the subject of Islam altogether. He begins, indeed, by thoroughly eviscerating the religious program of the “Islamofacists” now waging war against the West. Only then does he proceed to take us on the familiar guided tour of monotheistic religion in general and its metaphysical underpinnings. Highlights here include his discussion of the philosophical “argument from design” that is said to prove the existence of a divine creator. Any such proposition, Hitchens pronounces summarily, is given the lie by the manifestly absurd glitches in our own design as a species: “our easily worn-out knees, our vestigial tails, and the many caprices of our urinogenital arrangements.”
Other religious claims, Hitchens writes, show similarly clear traces of their man-made invention, and are all the more contemptible for that. The Ten Commandments he finds pitiless. On the one hand they are trite—everyone knows that murder and adultery are bad things. On the other hand they demand of us the impossible. (“One may be forcibly restrained from wicked actions . . . but to forbid people from contemplating them is too much.”) Moreover, the God of the Torah neglects to condemn other and arguably greater evils: racism, genocide, slavery. The purview of this God, Hitchens complains, is “oppressively confined and local. None of these [Hebrew] provincials, or their deity, seems to have any idea of a world beyond the desert, the flocks and herds, and the imperatives of nomadic subsistence.”
The same human stain corrupts arguments for the divinity of Jesus, about whose historical uniqueness Hitchens has his doubts. “There were many deranged prophets roaming Palestine at the time, but this one reportedly believed himself, at least some of the time, to be God or the son of God.” Here Hitchens takes on C.S. Lewis, the strongest modern apologist for Christianity, who posited in Mere Christianity (1943) that Jesus must have been either actually the Son of God or a complete madman of no interest in the least. “I do credit [Lewis] with honesty and with some courage,” Hitchens concedes, setting him up for the kill:
When he turns to Islam, Hitchens, unlike many of his fellow polemicists, does not step gingerly. He questions whether it is a separate religion at all, as opposed to “a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms” from Judaism and Christianity. But, precisely because of its lack of originality, Islam is, for him, also the purest type of religion—that is, a showcase of everything evil about religious belief of any kind. After all, in today’s decadent West, “many religions now come to us with ingratiating smirks and outstretched hands.” Islam refreshingly reminds us of the unvarnished truth—which is “how barbarically [the others] behaved when they were strong”—and therefore of the need to free ourselves from all priestcraft if we are ever to realize our human potential for self-sufficient virtue.
Such virtue is, for Hitchens, emphatically not to be achieved by following religious teachings; nor are they the source of it. Human decency, he asserts, “does not derive from religion. It precedes it.” He points to Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and George Eliot, whose moral insights are more valuable than anything we can learn from Scripture. By contrast, most of the evil people in history have been themselves religious; Hitchens adduces the Roman Catholic element in the Tutsi genocide of the Hutu in Rwanda, the Lord’s Resistance Army of Northern Uganda, the Spanish Inquisition. The British, he assures us, abolished slavery not because of agitation by Christian evangelicals but because the practice had become unprofitable.
_____________
According to some of today’s atheists, like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, religion is no longer necessary because mankind has outgrown it: the knowledge supplied jointly by Darwin and modern neurophysiology has made religion obsolete. For others, like Sam Harris (and Brooke Allen in Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers), it is modern liberal political arrangements that have made God-given laws otiose. Hitchens is distinct. He does not feel that science has made us superior to religion at last. For him, religion is fundamentally flawed—a petri dish for all the vices that flesh is heir to. It is proof of the enormous evil of which mankind is capable.
This might be called the Hitchens version of original sin—a doctrine he of course despises. At heart Hitchens is an unrelieved misanthrope. And, to his credit, he does exhibit a deeper familiarity with human depravity than any of our other anti-religionist authors, whose faith in the perfectibility of mankind is almost comically touching. The question, given his root-and-branch misanthropy, is where on earth he derives his conviction that mankind would be better off without religion.
The answer would seem to be: nowhere. Take, for instance, the phenomenon of sexual repression, which Hitchens blames on religion and regards (it goes without saying) as an unmitigated evil. But sexual repression, in one form or another, has characterized every human community in history, and always will. Religion can be a highly efficient means of enforcing sexual repression; but if it did not exist, some other means would have been found to impose limitations on the expression of human sexuality.
Or take the issue of religion and politics. In his own lifetime, as it happens, Hitchens has himself been a true believer, albeit not in God but in revolutionary Marxism. His hard-won and long-overdue disillusionment with that creed has given him some sympathy for religious believers: “to some extent I know what you are going through.” It has also, he thinks, given him special standing to deal with an anticipated objection to his argument about political evil—the objection, namely, that in every instance where power has been allied with militant atheism, the result has been the systematic, deliberate murder of citizens on a scale that renders trivial the total number of victims of religious persecution throughout recorded history.
Indeed, in the face of the horrors perpetrated by “scientific socialism,” whether of the Communist or Nazi variety, most of today’s atheists tend to fall mute. Hitchens, however, has a riposte. Communism and Nazism “did not so much negate religion,” he writes, “as seek to replace” it. That is, the essential wickedness of “scientific” totalitarian regimes is traceable in his view to the fact that they are themselves religions. For Hitchens, in short, everything religion touches is bad, and everything bad is religious—including anti-religion. This is the sort of reasoning that gives syllogisms a bad name.
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What, then, does Hitchens wish to put in place of religion? He calls for a new Enlightenment, and proposes that we realize its promise by imitating the Socratic method of rational thinking—a suggestion that compels him to engage in some fancy footwork in order to deny there was anything supernatural in Socrates’ insistence that he had a daimon, an inner voice, that enabled him to distinguish good from evil. But this recommendation falls into the same morass as Hitchens’s urging of Shakespeare and Tolstoy over the Bible as teachers of morality. In each case the point is not only anachronistic but odd, given that none of these sages, let alone the Enlightenment itself, is remotely conceivable apart from the religious civilization out of which they all sprang.
There is worse to come. Hitchens is what Hazlitt would call a “good hater.” He hates the idea of the fall of man. He hates the doctrine of atonement and sacrifice. He hates the notion of eternal punishment: “ordinary conscience will do, without any heavenly wrath behind it.” He hates the proscription of masturbation and the prescription of circumcision. Most of all, it emerges, he hates Hanukkah.
Why Hanukkah? It is not just the fact that, in America, the Jews borrowed “shamelessly from Christians in the pathetic hope of a celebration that coincides with Christmas,” a holiday that is itself an “annexation . . . of a pagan Northland solstice.” It is the underlying meaning of the events that Hanukkah memorializes: namely, the success of the Maccabean revolt against the heretical Jewish Hellenizers in the 2nd century b.c.e. For, as Hitchens reads it, that victory—won by a hair—allowed Jewish monotheism to survive, and thereby “eventually to lead to Christianity (yet another Jewish heresy) and thus ineluctably to the birth of Islam. We could,” he laments, “have been spared the whole thing.”
This stroke of counterhistory has been heavily prettified in the details. On the one hand, as Hitchens tells it, there were the Hellenized Jews of Palestine—suave, cosmopolitan, athletic, well educated, yearning to enjoy the finer things in life as represented by their Greek overlords. On the other hand, there were the religious fundamentalists of the day, the Jewish reactionaries seeking only to proscribe and to prescribe. In Hitchens’s reconstruction, the Maccabean revolt sounds like nothing so much as the struggle between “aesthetes” and “hearties” in the Oxford of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.
But the Maccabean wars were not like that. The Greeks were not fighting for the mellow and the metro- sexual. They aimed to pour hogs’ blood over the altar, erect statues of Jove in the sanctuary, eradicate Jewish identity itself. Had the Maccabees failed, there would have been a victory not of secular humanism over religious fundamentalism but of the pitiless Olympian gods—and their Egyptian co-deities—over monotheism and the complexities of ethical life.
Hitchens’s yearning for a world purified of Jews (and therefore of Christians and Muslims) may remind some of Nietzsche. The comparison is unfair, but inevitable. Hitchens’s sketch of a new Enlightenment posits not a world of supermen but only a mild utopia, populated by men in togas discoursing eternally on the eternal verities, a world like the one painted by the Victorian romanticist Lawrence Alma-Tadema, or envisioned by Oscar Wilde in his gullible, amateurish tract The Soul of Man under Socialism. But that is just the trouble. Shorn of the culture we have, a culture nurtured and preserved by monotheistic religion, his proffered utopia amounts to just another invitation to barbarism. Hitchens here shows himself to be more credulous and sentimental—and much more insidious—than any of the religious mythmakers he so earnestly despises.
link
by Christopher Hitchens
Twelve. 320 pp. $24.99
Militant atheism has a long and not notably successful history—punctuated, however, by boomlets that tend to occur after terrible and seemingly inexplicable human disasters. The latest such boomlet owes its popularity to al Qaeda, whose attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 created an appetite not only for global explanations but for blame. To our arsenal of defenses against future terrorist attacks, today’s crop of professional atheists urge us to add a mistrust of religion in general, in whatever guise. Thus, according to books by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel C. Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon), and Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation), responsibility for an event like 9/11 ought not to be assigned solely or at all to the small group of radical Islamists who perpetrated the attacks, much less to Islam as a whole, but rather ought to be shared among all religions, including the very moderate kinds of religion that exist in the United States and Europe.
Christopher Hitchens’s new book, God Is Not Great, is the most recent and in many ways the most engaging of these exercises, displaying a range of reference and a degree of energy, wit, and learning that the others conspicuously lack. Correspondingly, however, its flaws go much deeper.
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Hitchens certainly does not share the worst political faults of the others, who tend to skirt the subject of Islam altogether. He begins, indeed, by thoroughly eviscerating the religious program of the “Islamofacists” now waging war against the West. Only then does he proceed to take us on the familiar guided tour of monotheistic religion in general and its metaphysical underpinnings. Highlights here include his discussion of the philosophical “argument from design” that is said to prove the existence of a divine creator. Any such proposition, Hitchens pronounces summarily, is given the lie by the manifestly absurd glitches in our own design as a species: “our easily worn-out knees, our vestigial tails, and the many caprices of our urinogenital arrangements.”
Other religious claims, Hitchens writes, show similarly clear traces of their man-made invention, and are all the more contemptible for that. The Ten Commandments he finds pitiless. On the one hand they are trite—everyone knows that murder and adultery are bad things. On the other hand they demand of us the impossible. (“One may be forcibly restrained from wicked actions . . . but to forbid people from contemplating them is too much.”) Moreover, the God of the Torah neglects to condemn other and arguably greater evils: racism, genocide, slavery. The purview of this God, Hitchens complains, is “oppressively confined and local. None of these [Hebrew] provincials, or their deity, seems to have any idea of a world beyond the desert, the flocks and herds, and the imperatives of nomadic subsistence.”
The same human stain corrupts arguments for the divinity of Jesus, about whose historical uniqueness Hitchens has his doubts. “There were many deranged prophets roaming Palestine at the time, but this one reportedly believed himself, at least some of the time, to be God or the son of God.” Here Hitchens takes on C.S. Lewis, the strongest modern apologist for Christianity, who posited in Mere Christianity (1943) that Jesus must have been either actually the Son of God or a complete madman of no interest in the least. “I do credit [Lewis] with honesty and with some courage,” Hitchens concedes, setting him up for the kill:
Either the Gospels are in some sense literal truth, or the whole thing is essentially a fraud. . . . Well, it can be stated with certainty, and on their own evidence, that the Gospels are most certainly not literal truth.
When he turns to Islam, Hitchens, unlike many of his fellow polemicists, does not step gingerly. He questions whether it is a separate religion at all, as opposed to “a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms” from Judaism and Christianity. But, precisely because of its lack of originality, Islam is, for him, also the purest type of religion—that is, a showcase of everything evil about religious belief of any kind. After all, in today’s decadent West, “many religions now come to us with ingratiating smirks and outstretched hands.” Islam refreshingly reminds us of the unvarnished truth—which is “how barbarically [the others] behaved when they were strong”—and therefore of the need to free ourselves from all priestcraft if we are ever to realize our human potential for self-sufficient virtue.
Such virtue is, for Hitchens, emphatically not to be achieved by following religious teachings; nor are they the source of it. Human decency, he asserts, “does not derive from religion. It precedes it.” He points to Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and George Eliot, whose moral insights are more valuable than anything we can learn from Scripture. By contrast, most of the evil people in history have been themselves religious; Hitchens adduces the Roman Catholic element in the Tutsi genocide of the Hutu in Rwanda, the Lord’s Resistance Army of Northern Uganda, the Spanish Inquisition. The British, he assures us, abolished slavery not because of agitation by Christian evangelicals but because the practice had become unprofitable.
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According to some of today’s atheists, like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, religion is no longer necessary because mankind has outgrown it: the knowledge supplied jointly by Darwin and modern neurophysiology has made religion obsolete. For others, like Sam Harris (and Brooke Allen in Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers), it is modern liberal political arrangements that have made God-given laws otiose. Hitchens is distinct. He does not feel that science has made us superior to religion at last. For him, religion is fundamentally flawed—a petri dish for all the vices that flesh is heir to. It is proof of the enormous evil of which mankind is capable.
This might be called the Hitchens version of original sin—a doctrine he of course despises. At heart Hitchens is an unrelieved misanthrope. And, to his credit, he does exhibit a deeper familiarity with human depravity than any of our other anti-religionist authors, whose faith in the perfectibility of mankind is almost comically touching. The question, given his root-and-branch misanthropy, is where on earth he derives his conviction that mankind would be better off without religion.
The answer would seem to be: nowhere. Take, for instance, the phenomenon of sexual repression, which Hitchens blames on religion and regards (it goes without saying) as an unmitigated evil. But sexual repression, in one form or another, has characterized every human community in history, and always will. Religion can be a highly efficient means of enforcing sexual repression; but if it did not exist, some other means would have been found to impose limitations on the expression of human sexuality.
Or take the issue of religion and politics. In his own lifetime, as it happens, Hitchens has himself been a true believer, albeit not in God but in revolutionary Marxism. His hard-won and long-overdue disillusionment with that creed has given him some sympathy for religious believers: “to some extent I know what you are going through.” It has also, he thinks, given him special standing to deal with an anticipated objection to his argument about political evil—the objection, namely, that in every instance where power has been allied with militant atheism, the result has been the systematic, deliberate murder of citizens on a scale that renders trivial the total number of victims of religious persecution throughout recorded history.
Indeed, in the face of the horrors perpetrated by “scientific socialism,” whether of the Communist or Nazi variety, most of today’s atheists tend to fall mute. Hitchens, however, has a riposte. Communism and Nazism “did not so much negate religion,” he writes, “as seek to replace” it. That is, the essential wickedness of “scientific” totalitarian regimes is traceable in his view to the fact that they are themselves religions. For Hitchens, in short, everything religion touches is bad, and everything bad is religious—including anti-religion. This is the sort of reasoning that gives syllogisms a bad name.
_____________
What, then, does Hitchens wish to put in place of religion? He calls for a new Enlightenment, and proposes that we realize its promise by imitating the Socratic method of rational thinking—a suggestion that compels him to engage in some fancy footwork in order to deny there was anything supernatural in Socrates’ insistence that he had a daimon, an inner voice, that enabled him to distinguish good from evil. But this recommendation falls into the same morass as Hitchens’s urging of Shakespeare and Tolstoy over the Bible as teachers of morality. In each case the point is not only anachronistic but odd, given that none of these sages, let alone the Enlightenment itself, is remotely conceivable apart from the religious civilization out of which they all sprang.
There is worse to come. Hitchens is what Hazlitt would call a “good hater.” He hates the idea of the fall of man. He hates the doctrine of atonement and sacrifice. He hates the notion of eternal punishment: “ordinary conscience will do, without any heavenly wrath behind it.” He hates the proscription of masturbation and the prescription of circumcision. Most of all, it emerges, he hates Hanukkah.
Why Hanukkah? It is not just the fact that, in America, the Jews borrowed “shamelessly from Christians in the pathetic hope of a celebration that coincides with Christmas,” a holiday that is itself an “annexation . . . of a pagan Northland solstice.” It is the underlying meaning of the events that Hanukkah memorializes: namely, the success of the Maccabean revolt against the heretical Jewish Hellenizers in the 2nd century b.c.e. For, as Hitchens reads it, that victory—won by a hair—allowed Jewish monotheism to survive, and thereby “eventually to lead to Christianity (yet another Jewish heresy) and thus ineluctably to the birth of Islam. We could,” he laments, “have been spared the whole thing.”
This stroke of counterhistory has been heavily prettified in the details. On the one hand, as Hitchens tells it, there were the Hellenized Jews of Palestine—suave, cosmopolitan, athletic, well educated, yearning to enjoy the finer things in life as represented by their Greek overlords. On the other hand, there were the religious fundamentalists of the day, the Jewish reactionaries seeking only to proscribe and to prescribe. In Hitchens’s reconstruction, the Maccabean revolt sounds like nothing so much as the struggle between “aesthetes” and “hearties” in the Oxford of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.
But the Maccabean wars were not like that. The Greeks were not fighting for the mellow and the metro- sexual. They aimed to pour hogs’ blood over the altar, erect statues of Jove in the sanctuary, eradicate Jewish identity itself. Had the Maccabees failed, there would have been a victory not of secular humanism over religious fundamentalism but of the pitiless Olympian gods—and their Egyptian co-deities—over monotheism and the complexities of ethical life.
Hitchens’s yearning for a world purified of Jews (and therefore of Christians and Muslims) may remind some of Nietzsche. The comparison is unfair, but inevitable. Hitchens’s sketch of a new Enlightenment posits not a world of supermen but only a mild utopia, populated by men in togas discoursing eternally on the eternal verities, a world like the one painted by the Victorian romanticist Lawrence Alma-Tadema, or envisioned by Oscar Wilde in his gullible, amateurish tract The Soul of Man under Socialism. But that is just the trouble. Shorn of the culture we have, a culture nurtured and preserved by monotheistic religion, his proffered utopia amounts to just another invitation to barbarism. Hitchens here shows himself to be more credulous and sentimental—and much more insidious—than any of the religious mythmakers he so earnestly despises.
link
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