Hitchens v. God
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To the sometimes solemn literary cottage-industry of neo-atheism, Christopher Hitchens — with his manifesto: God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything — brings his famous English-school-boy wit, come to full blossom now in the great American music hall. Of the late Jerry Falwell, Hitchens told Sean Hannity this week, “If they gave him an enema he could have been buried in a matchbox.” On The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, plugging the new book, Hitchens opened with the line that the most over-rated virtue is faith, defined as “believing the most stuff with the least evidence…” Of his new enterprise, he added: “If you can call somebody a man of faith, or ‘faith based,’ it seems at the moment like a compliment. I’d like to change that.”
Is Hitchens serious? Or is he making familiar old Enlightenment sport at the credulity of the imbecilic natives, here and elsewhere? I suspend judgment, even on a close reading of his book, and finally it may be a matter of taste. But the push-back that he and others are pressing against the rise of fundamentalism and theocracy is more than merely provocative. It is by now a best-selling phenomenon.
Aren’t the real questions: why now? what if anything is new here? and just possibly true? And by the way: who started the donnybrook, and who set the street-fighting terms, between (as novelist Marilynne Robinson has written in a truly impressive review essay, “That Highest Candle” on American Religious Poems ) “those who assign the failings of the country to its lapse from traditional religion, and … those who assign our failings to the obdurate persistence of traditional religion.”
Anthony Gottlieb’s review in the current New Yorker makes Hitchens the fourth into the scrum of “Atheists with Attitude.” First was Sam Harris with The End of Faith, 33 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list in 2004. Then Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett, with the neo-Darwinist Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, an Open Source conversation in March, 2006. We passed on the British biologist Richard Dawkins and The God Delusion last year. Harris was back in the market with his Letter to a Christian Nation. And now comes Hitchens with the seal of his own style on the sure-fire themes.
There are memorably clever turns in Hitchens’s inventory of personal stories. Like the question from the broadcaster Dennis Prager: were Hitchens to find himself at twilight in a strange city, would he feel safer or less safe on seeing a crowd of men approaching and learning that the they were just coming from a prayer meeting? From his own travels in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem and Baghdad (”just to stay within the letter ‘B’”), Hitchens answered, he had reason to feel “immediately threatend” by men coming from religious observances. On each ‘B” hangs a cautionary tale. Much else in the book could be filed under “bombast.”
Page 56: Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience…
Page 64: One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody — not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms — had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think — though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one — that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.
Christopher Hitchens, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Not for Hitchens the aesthetic and existential subtleties of — from the other end of the reading table — Marilynne Robinson’s piece on The Library of America’s American Religious Poems. She writes:
It is important to remember that religious thought has had brilliant expression throughout world culture, and that the idea of the sacred has refined the sense of the beautiful in every civilization. The very narrow sense in which the word is understood in the public conversation in contemporary America — again, by many of its proponents and defenders as well as by its critics — distracts from the profound resonances of religion throughout history. An afternoon with the Vedas, an evening with The Drowned Book, another look at the Oresteia or the Psalms or at Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address would be more than sufficient to recall us all to a recognition of the fact that the Pat Robertsons and the Pat Buchanans of our moment do not epitomize religion…
Marilynne Robinson, “That Highest Candle,” Poetry, May 2007
This, of course, is comparing apples and oranges, but then Hitchens cries out for some comparative context, and we mean to find some for him. Marilynne Robinson is a conversation for another day, let us pray. First, Hitchens’s version of hardball. Questions please!
Christopher Hitchens
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Author, most recently, of God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,
Contributing editor, Vanity Fair and The Atlantic Monthly
Contributor, The Nation, Slate, and The Daily Mirror
Eddie Glaude, Jr.
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Associate Professor of Religion, Princeton University
Author, Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early 19th Century Black America
Co-editor, African-American Religious Thought: An Anthology
- Extra Credit Reading
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Christopher Hitchens — Religion
Anthony Gottlieb, Atheists with Attitude, The New Yorker, May 21, 2007: “So how is a would-be iconoclast supposed to tell exactly what the faithful believe? Interpreting the nature and prevalence of religious opinions is tricky, particularly if you depend on polls. Respondents can be lacking in seriousness, unsure what they believe, and evasive. Spiritual values and practices are what pollsters call “motherhood” issues: everybody knows that he is supposed to be in favor of them.”
Leora Tanenbaum, Christopher Hitchens to God: Drop Dead, The Huffington Post, May 16, 2007: “Yes, yes. Atheists and believers alike know that religion has lubricated mass acceptance of misogyny, slavery, and tyranny. But so have secular, non-religious leaders and regimes. Even after reading Hitchens’ catalogue of atrocities committed in the name of religion, I am still unconvinced that religion, in and of itself, is the problem.”
Lupe, The smartest guy in the room , Lupe’s MySpace Blog, May 18, 2007: “I’m not really a Christopher Hitchens fan, not even an admirer. But I do respect his badass-edness. He’s like the Chuck Norris of intellectuals - fast, hard, brutal, and favors blue jeans.”
Jimmy, Christopher Hitchens and my Universalist ideology. , Jimmy’s MySpace Blog, May 18, 2007: “It’s true that I’m a Roman Catholic. I love my faith; it touches me every time I go to Mass; so then why do I like Christopher Hitchens so much? I admire the man’s passion against religious upheaval in the world.”
Gagdad Bob, Freedom, Virtue, and Alignment With the Real, One Cosmos, May 18, 2007: “Thus, it would not be exactly correct to say that Christopher Hitchens is on my side in the war, since he would go after me with similar gusto once the Islamists were out of the way — just as the Islamists went after America as soon as the Soviet Union was out of the way.”
SkeleTony, Atheism on the Rise?, Man Eats Own Brain, May 18, 2007: “I think we are actually seeing real change occurring. Ten or 15 years ago you could not DREAM of an out-of-the-closet atheist hosting or even being a regular contributor to news and talk shows. Even admitted atheistic actors (Robert Deniro, Katherine Hepburn, Christopher Reeve, etc.) did not go to any measurable lengths to talk about atheism or theism.”
Jib, In re Christopher Hitchens and God, Jiblog, May 18, 2007: “What I do not understand about Hitchens and other atheists of his ilk is their deep, personal animosity towards something they do not believe to exist. It is a vibrant hatred that most people can only summon for the real and the tactile.”
May 19th, 2007 at 1:39 am
How to make Chris Hitchens and his ‘neo-atheist’ cabal lose interest in their current anti-religion activism.
Imagine a new global, ecumenical convocation of the three Abrahamic faiths. All of them, from Branch Davidians to Greek Orthodoxy, from Hassidim to Islamists. And they end their massive convention by issuing the following statement:
We are appalled by the violence and intolerance our beliefs and faith-institutions have engendered, enabled, and otherwise promoted throughout the history of monotheism. We not only regret this, we seek, now, and admittedly belatedly, to atone. We recognize that the harm rises plainly from our claims to certain knowledge of the deity we purport to speak for—and we now candidly admit the implicit and explicit conceit of these claims. We have long claimed humility – but falsely – for surely mere humans cannot humbly claim to know the mind of the universe’s creator.
We therefore renounce our claims to certainty.
Instead of conviction we offer hope: hope that our belief in an immortal soul is neither vain nor mere vanity masquerading as religiosity. Hope that the God we have long believed listens to our self-obsessed entreaties might actually exist in the cosmos beyond our minds’ capacity for imagination and outside of our hearts’ yearnings for the comforts of parental love and approval.
But we no longer promise this to the young we hope to influence. We will instead become, for the first time in monotheism’s troubled and troubling existence, authentically humble.
We confess our abject ignorance.
We confess our dismay that so many more prayers prove futile than those that seem to have been postively answered as articulated. We admit that double-blind prayer experiments yield not a whit of difference in the lives of those prayed for.
We will no longer pretend that our child recovered from a sickness because a Deity favored us and our prayer while apparently ignoring the even more devoutly offered prayers of parents and children living in dire poverty and in barbaric, hostile circumstances.
We admit that such beliefs are unconscionable conceits.
And we apologize.
We hope for something more, though: we hope to inspire greater love within the hearts of our co-religionists: not for themselves but for all others – even those others who do not share our beliefs and our hopes. We will no longer demand that human love be personified in our venerated mythological figures, but will hereafter allow and encourage love to be venerated as a good in and of itself. We will remodel our temples, churches, and mosques to reflect this – and will then invite non-believing others to share their stories of the profoundly transforming power of unpersonified love. Because, in our new and earnest humility, we confess that those outside our faith traditions might have profoundly valuable lessons of love to share with us.
And we will edit and revise our sacred texts to reflect this historical reformation from insufferable arrogance and the cocksure certainty of faith to genuine humility and plainly confessed hope.
Any religion or sect that cannot or will not make such a concession to reason, to humankind, and to its own parishioners fully deserves the scorn of Hitchens, Dawkins and the rest of us non-believers too. And why must it fall to plebeian skeptics like me to have to point this out?
May 19th, 2007 at 9:40 am
Nick, Forgive me my morning-after bias, cher ami, but Hitchens’ drinking his own business, no? Though some might say his transfiguration from fiery anti-imperialist to war-mongering crusader fairly smacks of alcoholic rapture, sodden revelation, etc. Where his politics are concerned, I always thought there was an element of self-prophecy in his description of Paul Johnson as someone who, having lost his faith, believes he has found his reason. His atheist bona fides aside, his unswerving faith in his own infallibility suggests at least one ironic parallel. I haven’t read the book, but the excerpts read like dispatches from a closed circuit: he knows where he’s going, and the reader does too. You’ll both be there soon enough — and, it has to be said, most likely entertained if not enlightened along the way. I wonder if one reason for his opposition to religion in all of its manifestations is that he seems to have no feeling for either music or art? Hard to listen to Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring and not marvel at the belief — the belief, not the object of belief — that brought it into being. Much as I sometimes tire of Christian iconography — Bloody Christ, not you again! — there are paintings on Christian themes that I return to again and again — and I say this as someone who was expelled from nursery school for refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance (”one nation, under God”) and whose disbelief has never wavered. Nevertheless, I’m fascinated by other people’s belief, and sometimes charmed by it, as by Updike explaining that the reason he goes to church is that “it’s the only place in public where I’m allowed to sing.”
If you can’t get Gary Wills, Terry Eagleton might be a good replacement (I love the imposture the open source model invites). He wrote a review of Dawkins’ latest that might be usefully brought into the conversation:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html
May 19th, 2007 at 10:25 am
I read Hurley , who I am in line with, after I wrote this:
I love that atheists, non-theists and scientists ( 90% of whom are apparently non-religious) are speaking more loudly now. I think this has to do with the point in history that we have arrived at, the rise of fundamentalism, it’s influences ( here in the USA and in the Middle East) and how it connects to the real and dire problems that we must solve to survive on one planet so interconnected.
Congratulations to Mr. Hitchens on becoming a citizen.
Nick regarding your last two italicized paragraphs: I agree but I would put it this way: In a world that is growing smaller and smaller, intermixed and connected, the virtual walls that each religion traditionally builds, maintains and fortifies around itself in order to “do it’s work” gets penetrated over under around and through more than ever. The reaction, in defense, in some quarters at least, is, as it has been through time, fear and hatred resulting in war and walls, deeper isolation, close-mindedness, intolerance. These “forces of evil” take hold in places, are rationalized (extremism in defense of religion- no sin, even mandatory). It is wrong-headed and worse but understandable. People want to protect their culture, their way of life. Believers in their zeal or fear of losing something precious turn themselves into something ugly too often, turn away from embracing, being expansive and inclusive, having dialogue. They turn towards defensive positions (the opposite of what Jesus preached as I understand Jesus). As well, aand maybe that this point, religious leaders get enthralled with their power over others and their need to protect their domains. ( It is forgotten by laypeople that religious leaders are fallible humans.)
Attacking religion frontally does not work though. Also fighting over religion or against it takes us away from cooperation which we so desperately need.
I have no problem with religion other than intolerance which may be a large part of it as practiced- I don’t know. But we are not going to get rid of religion. I love E. O. Wilson for recognizing this. Religion at it’s best serves, and in my opinion transmits a form of wisdom, maybe not complete, but which imparts a way to live, to appreciate beauty, and feel love. Learning about religion (and experiencing art) makes us feel connected to the past, to others: evolved from that, a part of it, not alien or antagonistic towards it. I don’t want to deny religion it’s place now and in history.
At the same time religions today need to accept and respect science and in places retreat and update interpretations. Fundamentalism is a wall against that. Scripture needs interpretation that works to reflect the whole of humanity, the modern condition in all it’s aspects. There is plenty left for belief in God. But the world needs the sobriety of science and reason to have a chance to survive.
I think this is what is being asked of religion. I don’t think that the rolling sea change that is needed ongoing can happen through iconoclasm (although a bit of iconoclasm maybe necessary) and not especially from a reversal of the intolerance. The imaginary convocation with such a declaration and apology won’t happen of course either. It will be instead a lot of “hard work”, more trying to live together, conversations like this one maybe, and include yet more bloodshed ( everyday), bloodshed that most of don’t want to be a part of, see or know about or have time or stomach for.
It’s also an often ugly battle right here in this country- the battle for tolerance, not imposing what you believe on everyone else.
What so hard about allowing others their widest possible choices to believe, to live to die as they please? That’s what I thought was so great about this experiment which we have to get back to imo. Openness and acceptance has to be all the way around.
May 19th, 2007 at 10:44 am
Speaking as a refugee from fundamentalism, I agree with Hitchens on a lot of his points about religion; however, if faith is “believing the most stuff with the least evidence…” doesn’t this describe some of Hitchens’ political positions, for instance his support of Bush and the Iraq war? Hasn’t this kind of blind faith been a malignant influence on current foreign policy? I’d be interested to hear him address what looks like a clear disconnect here. And should I bring up free market true belief as well? Believing in the most stuff with the least evidence is not exclusive to religion–it seems to be thriving throughout our culture. Maybe that quote itself is the issue, and religion is just one example.
May 19th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
(Enjoyed your ecumenical encyclical, Nick.)
May 19th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
I’m not sure that Hitchens and Robinson are at opposites on the spectrum. As profound as art may be, it is not a belief system. All art starts with the physical medium in some aspect in spite of the objective of transcendence. Some would say this is art’s major drawback and that which differentiates it from religion. Even the bible can be read for its literary value irrespective of the belief system it proposes, just ask Harold Bloom. And yet which religion is deconstructing the bible?
As in art, attempts to canonize interpretation is where the trouble starts. It removes the individual transcendence from the formula: no two individual reactions can be the same so how to form a consensus? A curious paradox is the “Personal Jesus” that enjoys current canonical popularity. But how can something so uniquely personal be canonical? It requires a “willing suspension of disbelief.”
May 19th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
I laughed a little to myself when I opened this thread and saw that Nick had the first comment. I was hoping this would be the case as I was reading the intro. For anyone who wonders why, I refer you to the excellent and, at times, long-winded debate on the Paglia thread.
I’m not going to rehash my theist arguments from that thread, so I’ll try to interject a little new material to this debate. I tried to invoke her name a couple of times on the zoology shows, but this particular topic seems even more suited to her current work. The subject is Mary Midgley. Her most recent book: Science and Poetry. Here’s a brief description from the Guardian UK.
“It is entirely characteristic that her latest book, Science And Poetry takes its epigraph from Richard Dawkins, “Science is the only way we have of understanding the real world”, and proceeds to dance all over this apparently reasonable statement. It’s not that she considers science a bad way of knowing the real world. But it is only one among many, and one which must be kept in firmly its place.”
Religion may poison some people, but it is not itself a poison. Did we stop doing science after we saw the results of Hiroshima and Auschwitz? Some people did. Some people retreated to communes or hid behind the reactionary ignorance of McCarthyism. But science remains a useful and relevant way of looking at our world, so it did not fade from our collective imagination, no matter how many horrors it allowed us to commit.
Religion is no different. It won’t go away just because people learn about empiricism. It won’t stop being relevant just because we find hints of the ‘grand mystery’ in quantum physics or molecular genetics. It won’t fade into the obscurity of secular unitarianism, agnosticism, or ig-theism. It is here to stay because IT IS IMPORTANT. Hitchens is preaching a dogma of ignorance just as much as Jerry Falwell (God curse his soul). Religion is not a poison to the intellect anymore than science is a poison to the soul.
I embrace both in my life and swim happily in the paradox. And my life is the better for it.
May 19th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
Hurley- Thanks for the Eagleton link. I guess I am a mealy-mouthed liberal. Well Eagleton in his defense of religion is about as bitchy and he claims Dawkins is. And he goes off the deep end on his interpretation, sophisticated, but presented it as though it were more universal than I think it really is. (His version is as representative as fundamentalism is of all who believe in God I suspect. ) So Eagleton does make a case, a rebuttal to Dawkins and maybe Hitchens, of sorts but does not account for all the ugly rest. And in doing so he is unnecessarily demeaning and harsh. So, since I have not read Dawkins’ book, I’ll not swallow whole how he characterizes Dawkin’s views.
I mentioned Daniel Lazare’s review of all mentioned ( Dawkins, Eagleton, Hitchens, Harris) in “The Nation”. The link again:
Among the Disbelievers
May 19th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
I hope someone will ask Mr. Hitchens how he reconciles his (I think reductive) version of Jefferson as heroic deist, who rejects an interventionist God, with this, from Notes on the State of Virginia:
“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”
May 19th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Ok, so I’ve read the syllabus that Nick, Potter and others set forth, both here and in the previous thread. I’ve read Angier on God and the scientists; Eagleton on Dawkins; Dyson on Dennett; and Lazare on everyone. And my reaction is that there’s a lot of agreement here, though it’s latent. I want to try to make it explicit, in a way that I think also amplifies Nick’s opening post here. I promise this is going somewhere.
Each and every one of these readings, in one way or another, is struggling for a distinction – a distinction between religion as an account of creation and our physical world and religion as an account of the numinous, that which has no corporeal, observable effect:
• Angier asks, from the atheist’s point of view, why scientists are willing to allow a place for God when they are so willing to dismiss the case for astrology. Her answer, in short, is that the difference comes down to politics: Attacks on God make on unpopular. But that can’t be it: Many scientists DO criticize religion, and scoff at fundamentalism outright. I see the distinction as being somewhere else: To the extent religion is about ethics and spirituality, scientists are happy to concede its relevance; to the extent astrology is about predicting real-world events, they will have none of it.
• Eagleton argues, from the believer’s point of view, that Dawkins asks too much of religion by asking it to account (correctly, at that) for Creation and the mechanics of the universe; these issues, Eagleton suggests, are not the proper purview of religion.
• Dyson, similarly, chastises Dennett for seeking to use the tools of science to evaluate religion, whereas, in Dyson’s view, these tools were “designed for a different purpose.”
• Lazare closes by allowing that the question of God and questions of “religion and much else about the modern condition” might be decoupled.
So, what I want to ask is this: If the defense of God against the empiricists is that God speaks to concerns not empirically assessable – “it’s not the reality, stupid!” – then does the empirical question about God – “does God exist?” – really matter at all? As noted by many (including Chris here), a lot of ink has been spilled on the God Question of late. And based on the above, it seems that the principal defense is that God is immune from empirical inquiry. If so, I think the faithful must retreat from their attempts to claim special insight into our material world (creation and evolution and all that), but that’s an issue for another day. The deeper question is: If the import of the answer to “the God question” is exclusively metaphysical (or spiritual or ethical or whatever you might call it), can’t believers get where they want to go without demonstrating – or even accepting – the case for God? And can’t non-believers get there too? What does actual belief get you that you can’t get from (to use Dyson’s term) the mere “belief in belief”? If we’ve moved beyond questions about how we got here and religion is best understood as a mechanism for attaining particular mental states (please, please read Geertz’s “Religion as a Cultural System) and guiding us in our interaction with one another, hasn’t it become entirely decoupled with any accounts of what did or did not happen thousands of years ago (including, but not limited to, creation itself)?
To make this a bit more concrete, a wonderful novel of the past five years or so (I don’t want to name it because my comments will give something critical away, but you’ve heard of it) makes this point very nicely. At the end of the novel, it becomes apparent that the entire story has been a lie, designed to put a much more pleasant face on a cold, difficult reality (no, it’s not Ishiguro). The protagonist tells both stories to some other parties who are investigating the events that instigated the story in the first place. He is asked which story is true. He points out to these investigators that it doesn’t really matter, because neither story will definitively answer the original question, and asks them which story they would prefer to be true. They respond that they prefer the first story, which was much more pleasant. His response (strangely omitted in some editions…) is “Thank you. And so it goes with God.” I thought this was really a brilliant remark about religion, which turned a fun, well-written novel into one of my all-time favorites. If we acknowledge (as Eagleton and many others do) that we can’t rely on faith to answer concrete questions about our physical world and rely on God principally for internal reasons – how belief in God makes us feel or act – then belief can be a matter of choice, and there might be a value in choosing a story we believe or even KNOW to be false, simply because – if we can effectuate the self-deception – it will make us feel better than the alternative. I can deny God’s existence based on the evidence but still decide, counter-intuitively, that I want to act AS IF God DID exist. And if the “true believer” and I agree that this belief matters only for metaphysical/spiritual purposes, his or her true belief should be no more compelling or motivating than my synthetic belief, and there’s really no difference between the two. Ultimately, what I get from these articles, and from the novel, is that whether God exists doesn’t matter nearly as much as people think.
Now, I can already hear Hitchens’s response to me: “If he wants to live under a self-imposed delusion, he can be my guest.” That response works if my self-imposed delusion prompts me to kill presumed heretics, or to do other things I ordinarily would not do, or to accept false beliefs about our materialist reality. But at the end of the day, that’s not the kind of belief I wind up with. Rather, I think I end with the belief of Spinoza – a belief that there is something eternal, a knowledge that this belief itself offers me communion with something deeper than that which I can observe, and (most critically) a recognition that there is nothing in my set of beliefs that can be used to justify hegemonic or violent behavior toward those with other beliefs.
Well, I’ve rambled on too long. I look forward to any thoughts/reactions/criticisms.
May 19th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Sutter- great. I want to get E.O. Wilson into this too. He is much more accepting of religion though an atheist. I think it’s because he sees religion as part of evolution and as having a purpose ( as you are getting at).
At the end you say : Now, I can already hear Hitchens’s response to me: “If he wants to live under a self-imposed delusion, he can be my guest.” That response works if my self-imposed delusion prompts me to kill presumed heretics, or to do other things I ordinarily would not do, or to accept false beliefs about our materialist reality.
Don’t you mean that response does NOT work if your delusion prompts you to kill? As long as one is prompted to kill by ones delusions, one cannot “be my guest”.
But “at the end of the day” I agree that it’s where ( what state) one’s beliefs/non-beliefs transport one to that matters and the particulars are of interest of course but should not be a matter of contention so long and they do not ( as you say) “justify hegemonic or violent behavior toward those with other beliefs” or non/belief.
May 19th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
Ambiguity -I am a fellow refugee…which had the unfortunate effect of making me jump from one dogma to another for awhile until I settled on ant-dogma dogma.
Potter - you should add ANTI-theist to your list - for some it is not enough to be a- or non- theist. I suspect Hitchens and Dawkins are in this category. Don’t forget Bertrand Russell -especially don’t forget his teapot before we start weighing theory’s against each other.
May 19th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
The following questions come to mind that I think Hitchins and his detractors might address:
1. As Potter just suggested, does evolution account for our readiness to believe in the existence of something beyond our mundane lives, something not fully comprehensible? Has the religious attitude evolved (I speak of Darwinian evolution) along with human intelligence, but not particular religious contents, so that we may disagree over the contents, but must accept the reality of the attitude?
2. Does religion, to satisfy an evolved need to follow rules of behavior, provide moral codes or standards, so that the need itself to follow moral rules has a legitimacy that particular rules lack?
3. Are modern religions essentially adult versions of the story of Santa Claus? If so, does the editor’s comment that there is a Santa Claus tell us something more profound than how to comfort a child?
4. Assuming that human intelligence has evolved to a level well beyond that of any other animal, and that intelligence entails the exercise of reason, is the most important fault of modern religion its claim to provide authority for beliefs contrary to reason?
5. More specifically, what do we have to fear from religious beliefs, held by people who control social and military institutions, in such things as Armageddon, the rise of the Anti-Christ and the return of Christ, the mandatory veneration of Muhammad, the establishment of “official” religion and other modes of suppression of dissent from religious doctrine, and the imposition by government of fundamentalist codes like Sharia and those of Christian Reconstructionism?
May 19th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
Potter,
I was too ambiguous. Having read a lot of Hitchens’ stuff and seen him in action, my sense is that his response would be “You’re saying we should delude ourselves into believe that which we know is not true. That is always dangerous, and leads to results like 9/11 and the Inquisition and so on.” (The “be my guest” was a rhetorical flourish of the sort I associate with CH.) That rejoinder is effective only if my synthetic belief would prompt me to act in certain ways — as a jihadi, as the perpetrator of genocide, etc. So, CH and I agree, I think, that the kind of faith practiced by many IS dangerous. But I don’t think the response is effective when deployed to rebut the kind of “belief” I describe, which rejects the wordly injunctions of many common Organized Religions in favor of a blander and more neutral spirituality.
May 19th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
Sutter, re your 5:45 PM’s “You’re saying we should delude ourselves into believe that which we know is not true…”
— Mark Twain
More quotes, from Wikiquote’s Richard Dawkins page:
Me too. (I think the problem here isn’t actually the putative existence of supernatural entities. I think it’s the culturally sanctioned, reinforced, or encouraged decision to believe in propositions bereft of any empirical evidence or rational reason. The cure is education – especially mandatory high school level education in logical fallacy. More on this later…)
Right. Like, “God works in mysterious ways.”
And Dawkins, one last time, speaking to the notion that biblical tales aren’t necessarily meant to be taken literally:
No comment.
Anyway, I’ve enjoyed your posts and hope for more from you. (Was delighted to see your byline in this thread.)
Potter, I’m working on my response to Lazare’s review and will post it or a link to it soon (my scarce time permitting).
Hurley, point taken on the first sentence of your 9:40 AM – I regretted it shortly after posting. Even so, there’s an important problem well beyond that of my impolite carelessness:
Although I’m likely to agree with nearly all of Hitchens’s points, I can’t really abide his casual and frequent resort to contemptuousness. And if I won’t like it, neither will many others who might otherwise have possibly been influenced, in the direction he might have hoped for, by his book. A discredited messenger, even if the ‘discredit’ results from pure character assassination and is not genuinely valid, has a much harder task communicating his message. The perceived ‘personal flaws’ of a messenger will work against the message similarly. So, if you’re a messenger who revels in the classic (and clichéd) role of writer that includes heavy partying, it’s not a stretch to imagine that that the many folks you criticize, who are also wont to take affectedly outraged moral umbrage at any and all partying, will excuse away your critique of their irrational beliefs.
And then there’s the elephant-in-the-room noted by ambiguity at 10:44 AM:
Yeah. I’m with ambiguity. It makes Hitchens an easy-to-discredit target for those who might want to simply dismiss his anti-religion activism. I worry, along with Potter, that Hitchens’s entry into this fray over ancient myth will more polarize the disputants than help to illuminate the issues. Spewing contempt and scorn might help to sell books (his book’s first run seems to have already sold out), but how can one’s resort to such tone accomplish anything more than to harden the disputants’ already mutually distrustful positions? Ugh.
Manning, I love your five questions, especially no.s 3 & 4.
Everyone else: this is a fine thread already. Many thanks from this grateful reader.
May 19th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
“Not for Hitchens the aesthetic and existential subtleties of — from the other end of the reading table — Marilynne Robinson’s piece on The Library of America’s American Religious Poems.”
I agree with plaintext that Robinson and Hitchens are not opposites–I would say not even as far apart as a very small table. I found the above quoted segue very jarring, as I had just heard Sam Tanenhaus (editor, NY Times Book Review) ask Hitchens about the very issue in the last (5/11) edition of that publication’s podcast. Hitchens said that
“…without being able to go and sit at the back of some Saxon church and listen to Evensong I would feel very much culturally deprived, or without the poetry, say, of George Herbert or, of course, John Milton.”
He goes on to talk about devotional music, art, and architecture, and says that a cultural landscape without these things would be “completely empty.” He ends by saying that he’s not advocating the abolishment of religion, but its domestication, that religion needs “to be made part of our culture and to understand its limitations.”
The interview is well worth listening to–can be found at the Book Review home page or in iTunes.
May 19th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
The other day on Charlie Rose Hitchens was asked about his friendship with Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. He mentioned that he thought the difference between fiction writers and nonfiction writers was appreciation of music; Amis and McEwan had an appreciation while Hitchens himself did not. He didn’t elaborate any more than that and I wonder if it might figure in to this discussion.
May 19th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
I heard Hitchens recently on ‘On Point’ (another fine show). While I agree with some of the fundamental points he makes I am not convinced his rude approach is the best means to his end.
Perhaps after seeing the success of Falwell and other demagogues has suggested to him that he should use the same tactics to further his agenda.
Christopher, I hope that you also ask Hitchens about his foreign policy views. Especially Iraq. His entry on Wikipedia (need we continue to say ‘caveat emptor’ every time we reference Wikipedia or has it finally become understood?) says that he is pro Iraq invasion. Given that I am against neo-imperialist policies I find that view of his off putting. I seriously doubt he can convert me to the view that invading Iraq was the right thing to do (”if the occupation had not been bungled blah blah blah”) but I would love to hear his best sales pitch on the subject.
If you can get him onto the topic of Iraq please ask him to address the role of recent (e.g. the last 100 years) British, French and American imperialism in the region. In particular the USA’s preference for friendly despotic regimes (the current saudi government, Saddam Hussein, the Shah of Iran) over popular but unfriendly to the US regimes.
May 19th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
P.S. it sure would be nice to preview my post before submitting it. that might allow folks like me to weed out more typos and wordos.
May 19th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
Sutter wrote at 3:39 pm:
I’d like to know Sutter how you can separate our feeling and acting from the physical world? Are we not very much a part of existence, even for our short life, and during it do not our feelings and beliefs prompt us to behave and act in ways that alter our physical world, sometimes with lasting effects? While I think memory and other human limitations mean we are always living in and through the stories we tell, I can’t see how knowingly believing in a false story has value when the result usually does not just end with one person feeling better.
May 19th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
Sidewalker,
I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that one’s choice to believe or not would have no manifestation in the physical world. It presumably will. But again, the kind of belief I’m talking about (not, I suspect, the kind Hitchens is criticizing) is not connected with particular accounts of what happened thousands of years ago, nor is it connected with normative accounts of what God does or does not want us to be doing. So, the kind of faith I can stand behind (and indeed the only kind I can really stand behind, being of the belief that God may exist but that no particular organized religion has the inside track on the details) is a generic, denatured faith in higher meaning, connectedness, communion, and wonder. That kind of faith — whether genuine or synthetic — can be a comfort, and can promote reflection and deliberation, but it cannot form the basis for Sharia or a crusade or witchhunts or pogroms or the like. It’s a weak faith, and I suspect those more theological than I to resist it. But my suggestion is that Eagleton et al. have defended belief from the empiricists by diluting it to this degree, and that once it is so diluted, it’s the kind of faith that no longer really relies on a belief in God.
Ultimately, I’m suggesting that faith is in a bind: To adopt the “strong faith” position, one must engage the empiricist arguments, and cannot simply reply that the religion is beyond scientific argument. One CAN evade this argument by adopting the “weak faith” position (it’s not the reality, stupid), but once you go there, you’ve essentialy acknowledged (I claim) that God is irrelevant, because the things religion is said to do for you are no longer linked to specific descriptive or prescriptive accounts of reality.
May 20th, 2007 at 12:31 am
My own point of view is much closer to Marilynne Robinson’s than Christopher Hitchens but in answer to the question “Why now?” I think the answer is painfully obvious. We have a born again Christian President taking our country straight to Hell and a Christian fundamentalist base who elected him… twice (or at least got him close enough to steal his elections with impunity). And what important issue won him that last election? The war? The economy? noooo, fear of gay marriage! Worse yet this stupid bigotry was called a “moral issue”. Currently we have people running for president who do not believe in evolution or women’s rights. Not to overlook Child raping Catholic priests, violent Islamic fundamentalists and totalitarian Israelis none of whom speak well of their respective religions either. Its no wonder religion has gained a reputation as stupid and loathsome.
I would argue though, that it isn’t religion, but self-righteousness, intolerance and bigotry that are the problems and that although bigots like to cloak themselves in religion, atheists can be just as stupid, self-righteousness and intolerant as anyone else.
May 20th, 2007 at 1:20 am
Peggysue…atheists can be just as stupid, self-righteousness and intolerant as anyone else….
true true….but a key difference - an atheist can’t fall back on divine inspiration and can always be held accountable
May 20th, 2007 at 2:34 am
Sutter, thanks for taking the time to explain further. Your soft faith is obviously different from what I was first imagining. It is hard to toss off the weight of history and all the signification around the idea of god.
I also have a great sense of wonder and awe about our world, though I tend to find comfort in the experience of it without attributing this to an unexplainable “force” or “essence” (I am having trouble finding an appropriate word: hmm…god??). Many scientific explanations, though they are not complete, provide enough insight that I don’t think I need the faith you mention (of course, you could say I have a similar faith in reasoned inquiry).
I can see how your faith can provide comfort, but can you explain how it promotes reflection and deliberation? Since it is faith, it would seem to deny the need for these acts of reasoning?
May 20th, 2007 at 2:47 am
chilton got to it before me, but still (while taking a break from Lazare)…
Peggy Sue:
Sure: anyone taking the position that ‘God doesn’t exist’ is displaying a conceit too. For example, try disproving the existence of Russell’s Teapot or the Invisible Pink Unicorn.
But atheist conceit, it seems to me, is a finely-ground mirrored reflection of theist conceit. Look, I value and trust the humanism of many Christians (notably our own Mr. Lydon); but I sense, even from the Christians I trust, that they do not understand how their expectation that their faith, its constituent beliefs, and its larger, systematized religion, affords anti-humanist fundamentalists the cover they require for their “intolerance, self-righteousness, and bigotry” (to paraphrase you) to flourish as “religious expression” — and therefore to remain beyond meaningful restraints.
If you say, “You can’t hold my beliefs up to the light of empirical scrutiny, because they are religion”, you are invoking a cultural-conventional protection for all the cocksure conceits and bigotries of fundamentalists—even those you despise and would excommunicate from your faith, if you could.
What’s the point of excoriating Bush for all his faith-based beliefs in American exceptionalism and in Old-Testament style hierarchy worship (like the ‘unitary executive’ quasi-authoritariansim) with your right hand if your left hand is simultaneously enabling the very concepts you strive to expose and debunk?
Belief itself is the real problem – whether it’s belief in ‘God’, or belief that ‘God doesn’t exist’. Even Hitchens has an implicit handle on this:
Even so, I’m not at all sure Hitchens would ever be my first pick to champion my own anti-faith activism…
May 20th, 2007 at 4:18 am
A belated (and needed) EDIT to my post above:
Look, I value and trust the humanism of many Christians (notably our own Mr. Lydon). But I sense, even from the Christians I trust, that they do not understand how their expectation that their faith, its constituent beliefs, and its larger, systematized religion, deserves an exemption from criticism affords in turn anti-humanist fundamentalists the cover they require for their “intolerance, self-righteousness, and bigotry” (to paraphrase you, Peggy Sue). This enables those deplorable conceits to flourish under the umbrella of “religious expression” — and therefore to persist well beyond the reach of any meaningful restraints.
It’s late…
May 20th, 2007 at 6:17 am
FYI, Christopher Hitchens along with Ralph Reed participate in a debate on the legacy of the Reverend Jerry Falwell. This was recorded from the Hannity and Colmes show of 16-May-2007.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doKkOSMaTk4
May 20th, 2007 at 8:02 am
posted these elsewhere @ ros but still relevant and interesting to compare dawkins and hitchens…a lot of what he says makes complete sense to me.
http://www.glumbert.com/media/calltoarms
http://www.glumbert.com/media/dawkinsbishop
like nick..i think that gould had it right..in the absence of verifiable facts, atheism is like a counter-belief….skepticism or agnosticism is more real. i’ll repeat the gould quote..
“To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists. If some of our crowd have made untoward statements claiming that Darwinism disproves God, then I will find Mrs. McInerney and have their knuckles rapped for it (as long as she can equally treat those members of our crowd who have argued that Darwinism must be God’s method of action). Science can work only with naturalistic explanations; it can neither affirm nor deny other types of actors (like God) in other spheres (the moral realm, for example).”
stephen j gould
(btw nick..i use dsl, it’s over the phone line, lightening fast over dial-up and really quite affordable..you can talk on the phone and be on-line simultaneously also)
May 20th, 2007 at 8:39 am
Roseinpants on Hitchens- ( and thanks for the pointer to the NYT podcast)
He goes on to talk about devotional music, art, and architecture, and says that a cultural landscape without these things would be “completely empty.” He ends by saying that he’s not advocating the abolishment of religion, but its domestication, that religion needs “to be made part of our culture and to understand its limitations.”
Hitchens repeats this on the “On Point” regarding Spencer and Donne (if I remember correctly). Let’s clarify the differences- atheists, non-theists, anti-theists are individuals and are not all saying the same things exactly.
Nick- I depart with you regarding belief itself. I don’t see how anyone can be anti-belief any more than they can be anti the sun or for that matter anti-evolution after all the evidence. How can belief can be eradicated even if we somehow knew for sure it would create a better world with such a strong root? The ability and/or need to believe grew or evolved in us or is “hard-wired” into us, bound up in us, along with imagination, artistic imagination. We here mention the arts along with religion. This is amazing stuff coming from the mind of man along with all the rest!
Gottleib in his New Yorker piece “Atheists with Attitude” linked in Chris Lydon’s essay above:
Note that according to Gottlieb, Hitchens says all religions need attacking- ie- “domestication”,adjustment, not eradication. The end sentence about Lennon reminds me that I have, in disgust, felt that way too. But I think there are many, very many, who need the anchor that belief/religion provides, not to hide behind to commit awful acts, but to go on, to maintain their sanity,equilibrium through life, to value life, to contribute wonderful things to this world. I would not wish that away. I would wish away all the stupidity, self-righteousness, cruelty and intolerance.
May 20th, 2007 at 9:22 am
Richard Kearney would be a great guest to have on. I believe he even lives in Boston.
http://www2.bc.edu/~kearneyr/
Here is a review of his book, “The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion”
http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=1241
I listened to a three part lecture series on CBC’s The Best Of Ideas last fall and found his ideas very engaging, and this from a deep skeptic of godly notions.
You can listen or download that series here:
http://collectik.net/collectik/reco/mackinaw
May 20th, 2007 at 11:02 am
Wow, what a great thread! I especially like the ‘weak faith’ idea…it seems to me that ‘weak faith’ is the very gift the Enlightenment gave Western society. As I argued on the Mary’s Notes that proceeded this thread, it is the idea of ‘weak faith’ (and the overall non-importance) of the god issues that allows modern Western science to take the great steps it has.
I read Lazare and Gottleib’s respective reviews of the ‘neo-atheists.’ I think Lazare makes a fundamental critique: these accounts are all ahistorical. Hitchen’s attempts to formulate a ‘religion’s worst hits’ list ignores the many positive elements that the several religions have contributed to world culture (as Gottleib points out). Gottleib’s essay does attempt to historicize Western atheism, but for some reason Gottleib passes over Kant and the key moments of the end of the Enlightenment. For Western science/reason to bring a critique against UNIVERSAL religion, Western reason must first critique itself. This was Kant’s unfinished project. In our contemporary moment, we are much more open to subaltern knowledges (different ways of knowing the world). Western science/reason could also use some of that humbleness Nick proposes for religion (a proposal I fully support, by the way). Last time I checked, the Theory of Everything (the ‘holy grail’ of science…even scientists cannot escape the language of Christianity) was postulating that 60%-90% of the so-called ‘known universe’ is actually composed of a combination of dark matter and dark energy. That’s a lot of uncertainty.
So the combination of Western reason/science a) remaining undecided (for the moment at least) on the composition of the vast majority of the universe and b) closing itself to any non-Western knowledges, leads me to say that rhetorically violent assertions of non-belief on the part of Western reason/science cause more problems than they solve.
May 20th, 2007 at 11:05 am
[I just read ambiguity’s post on the same topic. Consider this a seconding of the motion to raise the question]
Beyond my plea for a reconsideration of Western metaphysics, I think I have a question that Hitchens might actually respond to. Couldn’t the disdain Hitchens showers upon believers (believing the MOST incredible thing with the LEAST amount of evidence) also be directed towards the ‘priests’ of free-market capitalism? Can’t we just come out and say that free-market capitalism IS a religion, complete with its greater (Adam Smith) and lesser (Ronald Reagan) saints? Talk about belief against all odds and evidence: as the US Congress begins to renegotiate a trade deal, how can people ignore the horrible global effects of NAFTA? How can ‘believers’ remain blind to the abundant global poverty, weakening of labour unions, horrible global working conditions etc.?
But even on the level of the basic mythology: an “invisible hand”? A belief that one fundamental element governs humanity (either self-preservation or, in more vulgar varieties, greed)? An unshakeable belief that “opening markets” (de facto conversion) will lead to an earthly paradise?
May 20th, 2007 at 11:40 am
I just watched a bunch of YouTubes with Hitchens and I recommend 2 below of the bunch. Hitchens has allowed a bit of a circus around him. I know ROS will do much better.
My notes of what Hitchens says:
religion is innately irrational
that he is not a conservative “no kind of conservative” and appears not to be uncritical of Bush. Hitchens is or was convinced that Saddam harbored terrorists and this justified the war. He criticizes Christian churches for being on the whole against the war. OTOH he criticizes the US for supporting the Saudi’s and Israeli settlers and extreme Christians here in this country.
His debating partner in many of these youtubes, Andrew Sullivan, says ( rightfully I think) that the issue is the fusion of faith with political power.
Hitchens says that he is convinced that the main source of hatred in the world is religion. Then he asks “How are we going to stop religion?”
My not well formed here question to Hitchens would be -if he could or could have stopped religion ( from it’s inception) somehow, would he ( have)? The answer would indicate whether he thought that on balance we are much worse off with religion than without it. Does he think that intolerance, hatred and all the rest could have been prevented by not having religion? or would all those presumably decidely negative aspects of humanity have found another seed to form around?
Here is the YouTube of Hitchens on religion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY8fjFKAC5k&mode=related&search=
Hitchens on Islam:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an7TaDQ5Yo0&mode=related&search=
May 20th, 2007 at 11:59 am
I plan to respond to Sidewalker soon, but first I wanted to suggest one question for Hitchens. Hitchens and I might well agree on the theological question. But one defining characteristic of Hitchens’s career has been anti-totalitarianism. For example, that is (rightly or wrongly) the basis for his support of the war on terror. Given that Hitchens comes to the religion question from the perspective of politcs (rather than zoology or evolutionary biology or philosophy, a la Gould, Dawkins and Dennett), I wonder what he has to say about the role that religious belief has played in resisting totalitarianism? That is, does he deny that faith played a role in overcoming the yoke of communism in the Eastern Bloc, or that spiritual resources provide a bulwark against the “total” control of the state that distinguishes totalitarianism from “mere” authoritarianism? Or is his claim simply that the harm it has done outweighs these credits on the religion ledger?
May 20th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
Sutter and silvio.rabioso pose interesting questions — no such thing as a free market, no matter that the world is being throttled by that cartoonish abstraction, the invisible hand. Sutter right to point to the role of “faith” i.e. the Catholic Church in the decline of the Soviet Union — though what that role actually was has yet to be settled. Whatever it was to its defenders, it has to be set alongside the Church’s stand on the use of contraception in the fight against AIDS: JPII and his minions have the blood of millions on their hands. More to the point of Sutter’s comment, one of the admirable movements in contemporary Catholic praxis is/was liberation theology, which Ratzinger recently went to Brazil to condemn, managing along the way to dismiss the European genocide in the Americas
May 20th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
A couple of questions for Hitchens from a fellow non-believer.
1) I heard him say on Brian Lehrer’s show that the Bible asks us to admire a God who would demand that a man sacrifice his son. But does the Bible really ask that, or are we the ones deciding that it is asking that? I believe Genesis is one of the books authored by “J.” Harold Bloom, for one, famously saw J as a bit subversive, and even went so far as to suggest that J is a woman since he sees the J parts of the Bible as dismissive of patriarchal authority. When I read the passage about the would-be sacrifice of Isaac, I always think that we’re supposed to be troubled by this perverse deity, not admiring of him. As I said, I don’t believe in God, but I always admired the Hebrew Bible for the ways in which it often invites us to disbelieve, invites a constant re-examination of our thoughts and attitudes about morality and God. I ask all of this because I believe Hitchens has said that George Eliot is a better moral guide than the Bible. An who can argue with any admirer of George Eliot? Still, I wonder whether the Bible has something offer us as a work of literature. Perhaps the problem isn’t the Bible but the way we read it. I have always thought that in the pre-modern period, before the invention of modern notions of historiography, people did think about the Bible the way we think about literature–that is, something that provoked thought, not something to be followed uncritically. I always see in the modern arguments about the Creation story the influence of the Enlightenment and modern science. The people who are so dogmatic about the idea that the earth was created in 6 six days are, in a way, the people who are thinking the most “scientifically”–that is, they need to decide whether a story is true or false as if it were a newspaper article. I don’t think Ancient Israelites would have much trouble viewing the story as a metaphor because they knew nothing of modern science or historiography, and because they probably knew that the Bible’s version of creation was just a re-worked Babylonian creation myth.
2) My second question is just about whether it’s really fair to call Muhammed an illiterate plagiarist. Is it? In a sense he was both, but I also think that in his time and place not being able to write was much like not being able to program a computer–that is, it was a specialized technology that scribes used, but was perhaps not so useful to ordinary people, who might not have cultivated the skill. It doesn’t mean that he wasn’t intellectually sophisticated. Also, as I mentioned above, the reworking of the myths of other people can seen as a literary exercise (as is the case with the creation story in the Hebrew Bible). I think it’s not quite right to impose modern ideas of authorship on people of Muhammed’s time. The idea that one doesn’t appropriate or re-work other people’s ideas is an entirely modern literary concept. I have always thought that Muhammed appropriated old myths because he wanted to co-opt them and channel their power into his new religion, not because he was too unimaginative to come up with his own. Anyway, Muhammed is more sophisticated and creative than the phrase “illiterate plagiarist” suggests.
May 20th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
Hit the wrong button-
Can Hitchen’s realistically imagine organized religion as a force for good? To the improbable idea of a Pope endorsing the use of birth control, environmental awareness, etc? The Dalai Lama, whose immortality he liikely settled by describing him as a “Hindu stooge,” has occassionally made vague gestures in the right directions. There are recent historical examples of religious figures who have done undeniably great things– Gandhi, MLK — but does he see anyone on the religio-political horizon who might yet do something worthwhile on a grand scale? I don’t, but I’d be happy to know about them if they’re out there.
May 20th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
Pardon last post — all thumbs.
May 20th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
this topic has real potency. 911 seems to have tripped a semi-latent late reformation switch and patience with religious thought is fading or gone in certain quarters.
is a polarity forming with little or no middle ground? have battle lines al;ready been drawn?
May 20th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
I have heard Mr. Hitchens on some programs promoting his new book and yet I have not heard his thoughts on Spinoza. From what I have gathered, much of the foundation of his thought in this work is basically Spinozism. If this is the case, why not openly market the book as a reinterpretation of Spinozism for the current political reality. Forgive me if the book actually states those goals as I live in Israel where the book has yet to be published. Considering that Radio Open Source is one of the few American Media outlets that has recently talked about Spinoza in a meaningful way, I am hope that we could hear Mr. Hitchens thoughts on Spinoza especially regarding miracles, superstition, political philosophy and Bush
May 20th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
Great thread!
I caught Mr. Hitchen’s act last week on “On-Point” on BUR.. Ironically the successor to our dear lost “The Connection.” I just want to say that a lot of what he says makes a lot of sense, he’s a bright man with a very good point, but does he have to be such a jerk while making it. He seems to relish in his ability to talk down to people of faith and say they are misguided, under informed and all around idiots who’s meaning in life is, in short, without meaning.
Anyway, I’m not one of them so he can’t cut on me for that. But I will say that religion has helped to create and perpetuate humanity as we know it, and shapes our morality, even for the non-religious of us. For example I live in a country that was officially “Godless” for about 70 years and the absence of it quickly created some rather negative effects which we can see today in this society.
So, all I really want to say is: “don’t throw the baby Jesus out with the bath water”
May 20th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
On Dora’s No. 1- It’s the subsequent canonization/crystallization of the Bible and it’s subsequent layers of commentary and interpretation that also have been made holy that I think is at the heart of the complaint.
Correct me if I am wrong please anyone but one is invited to ask questions within orthodox religion ( my reference is Judiasm) but within certain boundaries and then, after, to come back to the (pre-ordained) “correct” answers. To use the Bible as a point from which to push off to a more free and personal interpretation as one can with literature, or to ask questions that a child would (as per Hitchens) by definition is already outside of religion or religious dogma and heresy or schism. I agree with the suggestion about how these stories might have been embraced originally in a much more relaxed manner though this may be wishful thinking along with a wish for more of that now.
Hitchens mentions that we can learn as much from Shakespeare and George Eliot and I presume he picked those names carefully ( as well he mentions Spinoza) but how were they in turn influenced by religion?
May 20th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
Gandhi was a lawyer.
May 20th, 2007 at 8:11 pm
The American Quaker, author of a preeminent “Journal” or spiritual autobiography, John Woolman, was called “an illiterate tailor” by someone who greatly admired his writing (see John Greenleaf Whittier’s preface to one edition of Woolman’s Journal). The word “illiterate” is indeed a slippery one!
May 20th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
Sidewalker, you write, “I can see how your faith [by which I assume you mean what I’ve called “weak faith” — I’m not sure it’s mine] can provide comfort, but can you explain how it promotes reflection and deliberation?”
This is an entirely fair question. Comfort is the easiest of the three. But I’ll stick with reflection and deliberation too. I think what I mean here is a kind of moral reasoning. Our most commonly held Western liberal ethics — utilitarianism and contract-theory deontologies — both resort in some form to a “view from eternity.” Utilitarianism askes practitioners to think of the greatest good for the greatest number, in a way that does NOT privilege the self in making moral computations. So, I should jump in front of the truck to save five others, even though I personally might prefer that I live and the others perish. Contract theory, at lease as nuanced by Rawls, asks us to envision the decisions that would be made about justice in an “original position,” again without reference to the actual contingent preferences that I have as me. I would suggest that both these modes of moral reasoning are eased by weak faith — the belief in interconnectedness and common purpose. This isn’t to say that faith is essential to morality (a debate I stayed out of here). But the diluted faith I discuss above does, for me anyway, lend itself to a sort of escape from self-interestedness, even when that faith is entirely divorced from beliefs in a particular God.
All this said, I’m not sure where I fall. It’s either with the nonbelievers, the weak believers, or the synthetic believers. My main point above is that as among these three groups, it may well not really matter whether or not God exists.
May 20th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
Sutter, were I healthier or less busy with all my reaction to Lazare, I’d have pointed out the following much sooner than this:
Your ‘weak faith’ is essentially indistinguishable (to me, at least) from Daniel Dennett’s ‘belief in belief’, which he details in Breaking the Spell. You can also get a sense or sketch of it on the seventh page of this PDF file:
http://www.rsa.org.uk/acrobat/dennett_130306.pdf
Give it a gander; it begins in the paragraph commencing with:
“I’ll just mention one more point: belief and (sic — transcription error — it should have been ‘in’) belief.”
May 20th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Nick — it might well be the same. Probably depends on the God the belief in belief has in mind.
I’m looking forward to your thoughts on Lazare, and I hope you feel better. I’m expecting Hume on natural religion in the mail tomorrow, so maybe that’ll give me something useful to say…
May 20th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
Correction to m earlier post. The story of Abraham is considered to be an “E” text, I believe. Still, the general point I was trying to make remains the same.
May 21st, 2007 at 8:59 am
Two Brief points:
1) Belief that there is no god is as faith based as belief in god. Mr. Hitchens position is inherrently no more evidence-based than that of the faithful he disdains. Agnosticism is the more science-based position.
2) I agree with Mr. Hitchens’ point that religion has been the root of many of the world’s problems, but it has also been the source of inspiration both for good humanitarian efforts and great contributions in the arts. Religion keeps many “in check” that otherwise might do evil. If Mr. Hitchens’ was able to end organized religion tomorrow, people would find something else to inspire their hatred and cruelty.
3) Mr. Hitchens’ apparently does not realize religion is part of the human psyche. His own passionate belief that their is no god is one proof of this- Atheism is his religion- and he is passionate in his attacks on other religions and defense of his own.
May 21st, 2007 at 9:06 am
oops I guess that was 3 points.
May 21st, 2007 at 9:21 am
Nick,
I’d be more active on this thread if I were not attending a 3-day retreat with my spiritual teacher Lama Jetsun Kushok. In fact, I have to leave right now (but I could not resist checking this thread first). I just want to share with you the closing line from the long life prayer for my teacher… “May you gaze directly upon the face of reality and dwell always in that joy that does not fail”.
One could also argue that science is just another Patriarchial religion.
May 21st, 2007 at 9:37 am
I would not agree that science is patriarchial-no more so than western culture as a whole has been. There are certainly many brilliant women in the sciences and have been from the beginning-
I do agree there is faith within science as well- faith in the observable being truth, and the unobservable being unknown. Science is a search for truth, as is religion, and thus they are not diametrically opposed.
Antagonistic Atheism as Mr. Hitchens’ practices seems more to be a search for publicity.
It worksfor this, but I would question the contribution it makes to the world. Does Mr Hitchens’ believe his points will make the world a better place?
May 21st, 2007 at 10:15 am
PeggySue, could you please lay out the case you suggest can be made that science is itself a patriarchal religion? I have to admit that I’m very skeptical. I have no doubt that “the scientific community,” i.e. the social institution of people practicing the sciences, can be sexist and dominated by men (paging Larry Summers…), but that , it seems to me, is a far cry from stating that “science” — the set of deductive and inductive tools that draws conclusions about our physical world based on experience, observation, and proof — is itself patriarchal or bears the hallmarks of religion. I’m curious, then, what you mean.
May 21st, 2007 at 10:15 am
Thanks again, Sutter, for engaging my questions. I have one more. You mention two of the most commonly held Western liberal ethics, but do not include the third one, moral virtue. Why is that? Are you waiting for that book on Hume?
I am inclined to reject modernist notions of moral virtue in favor of what Bauman calls the moral impulse. Where does this come from? I don’t have a well thought out answer but I would risk that it comes from the human vulnerabilities that push so many people in the direction of religions. Also, as social animals that require such a long nurturing period, our dependencies necessitate acting for the other. I draw here on Levinas, who talks about being for the other. This kind of relationship is not based on contracts, obligations, fear of punishment; not based on power, but rather of infinite openness to the others needs.
May 21st, 2007 at 10:49 am
Sidewalker,
You’re right. I’ve always given virtue ethics short shift — probably because it had a more limited role in the field in which I was first introduced to ethical theory. You clearly know much more about virtue ethics than do I, but my initial cut would be that I might also be more inclined to self-betterment if I believe in something than if I believe in nothing (lol — I just mistyped “if I believer in nother,” which of course I do). But I’d be skeptical about the application of “weak faith” to guide anyone in the selection of which virtues in particular are to be pursued. I guess I need to go back to Aristotle and MacIntyre…
May 21st, 2007 at 11:12 am
Groted Does Mr Hitchens’ believe his points will make the world a better place?
I believe his points will make the world a better place. He has to call attention. And that he has. Discussion makes the world a little better don’t you think?
Hitchens states his main points :
There are four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.
Argue those points first. I think Hitchens has contradicted himself here and there or has seemed to. I still don’t know if he really would get rid of all religion if he could. He suggest he would settle for tolerance.
I think we should start with his definition of religion.
All the other comments he makes should be considered after those main points it seems to me.
May 21st, 2007 at 12:35 pm
One answer to the question, why now is that atheistic monographs gain credibility and power when major religious or religious political figures are hypocritical (publically, visibly), rationalizing 9/11 attacks as caused by homosexual sin or justifying war and murder on the blessing of their god. Just as David Halberstam said, journalists become more powerful when the government is lying.
Hitchens, at least his talk show persona (bombastic, defiant, stubborn, vulgar, flipping off the audience) reminds me of the friend of mine in college (a christian school) who crafted a lewd vulgar persona–flaunting his collection pornography, cheating on tests to defy the honor code and cursing wildly in all settings. As seen from my perspective, he had created this public self as a means to shock the lily sorority/fraternity crowd in their absurdity, their hipocrisy, and the way in which they poisoned life for my friend.
In a similar way, Hitchens, while I hope not to characterize him as vulgar, has created a dagger of a diatribe, meant to equal in disrespect, harshness, and shock what religion as disgraced by its practitioners should be practicing in humility, tolerance, and love. He is certainly uproarishly disrespectful to the religious person, basically calling them ignorant, and in such a overwrought manner that one must question his motivations. But an inquiry into personal motivations is a digression.
Why now? Maybe 9/11, Bush’s Iraq war, etc. have raised the stakes to such a degree to this kind of bullying is our only shot at reconciliation and recognition of our interdependence on each other as a human community.
But that doesn’t REALLY speak to why now. Now is always the time to reconsider the evil within human nature and its manifestation through institutions. Religious systems–like political, social systems; hell all human relationships!–carry inherent to them a poison, which begs confrontation, now.
Thank God, Hitchens has taken up the challenge.
But, certainly religion, as M. Robinson’s work continually reminds us, is not all poisonous to EVERYTHING. Certainly, religion helps us. Unhampered by religion, we have the heroic poetry and prose of Emerson, Dickinson, Whitman, the visions of Martin Luther King and others. There is nothing less poisonous than the notion that we should love ourselves, and love our neighbor as ourself. The poison lies in our inability to reduce this simple truth. We are probably most poisonous in our reduction of the first truth: Love yourself. I certainly beat up on myself daily. The twentieth century went a long way in proving our hedonism and hatred. But the notion of God must be kept alive, defined as Love. Maybe it is religion that hinders this truth. Maybe that’s what Bonhoeffer meant by a religionless Chrisitianity.
But I digress again. Surely, Hitchens wasn’t motivated, now, by a marketplace which has deemed lucrative this type of harsh unheroic heralding of hate aimed at our transcendent heart.
May 21st, 2007 at 1:32 pm
Don’t blame Christianity for GW Bush’s behavior, imagine what he’s be like if he wasn’t a Christian? He was by anyone’s measure, even his own, an immoral person before his being born the second time. Does he have it wrong? Yes, but you can’t blame Jesus for that.
Mr. Hitchens also recently refered to the Reverend Al Sharpton as a thug in a suit. Well, welcome to America, we’re a nation of thugs, from the top down, he should have noticed that before he signed up. Americans admire thug-dom, and it’s common to have a “thug” rise to be an important, influencial person.
May 21st, 2007 at 1:43 pm
I think none of the “Atheists with Attitude” has sufficiently addressed how and why it is logical to apply causation to religion’s supposed balefule effects–inquisitions and the like–but to write off any associated beneficial if not heroical effects–such as Abolitionism, Anti-Apartheid, or Civil Rights. Did religion “poison” MLK or Bishop Tutu?
In his book, Hitchens writes that Bonhoeffer’s theology was merely an atavistic ethical porridge (an “admirable but nebulous humanism”). This conveniently buttresses Hitchens’ notion that religion has nothing positive left to say (though maybe “saying” is besides the point). But what is his data for this? Perhaps Bonhoeffer would have gone to the gallows as an atheist, perhaps not. It’s difficult to establish.
Like Harris and Dawkins, Hitchens defends the noble (sacred?) ground of reason and science against assault by “faith” by using the most unrigorous standards of evidence one can imagine. Religion is not some consistent, predictable and quantifiable element, like mercury or polyvinyl chloride, that can be isolated in an experiemental study. It is variegated, everchanging, and ineradicably pervasive. We all have a metaphysics, whether or not there is a deity at the top of the flow chart. (Or the bottom). An intelligent, educated man like Hitchens knows, or should know, that there is no single correct world picture suggested by the tangible universe; and to suggest that some people have got it right, others wrong, and moreover that it’s all very simple, is an insult to our entire civlization.
May 21st, 2007 at 2:06 pm
My preliminary reaction to Lazare is here: Response to Daniel Lazare’s atheism book review – Part 1: “A solipsism as big as all existence”
It’s not short, but I request that anyone who has responded to my posts thus far or intend to respond to my forthcoming posts read it first. It addresses the essence of Peggy Sue’s
“May you gaze directly upon the face of reality and dwell always in that joy that does not fail.”
It also cites orlox and Manning, and touches on many other issues this thread’s writers have brought up here. I want to respond to several points made recently on this thread, but I’m absolut