Christopher Hitchens

I miss Christopher Hitchens, I do. He was a pit bull who would give no quarter. He'd get an idea by the throat and shake it to death. He was fun to watch. He was erudite to a fault and wasted no time letting his opponents know precisely that. Barrel-chested with thinning hair often bunched up on top of his head like an afterthought, he could go through nearly a pack of cigarettes during a debate or lecture, “no smoking” signs be damned. It was that smoking that killed him.

During a debate he would lean back in his chair and turn his body away from his opposition as if even being in the same room with a believer was slightly discomforting. Rarely would he look them in the eye as his rapier wit and condescending tone delivered death by a thousand cuts. He was obsessed.

Sometimes, that obsession would blind him to the bigger picture. His concentrated antipathy to religion blocked him from seeing that often religion is the instrument of oppression, not the origin of it. He failed to see religion as a tool for the more prosaic cause of greed. He never once mentioned the herd instinct—more delicately referred to as “peer pressure”—which underlies the binding power of religion.

The power of the herd instinct, for that matter, is overlooked by all the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism. Each one of them makes the mistake of attacking religion from the point of logic, which is all well and good and terribly easy but of limited effectiveness. The value in the Four Horsemen is not that they spread enlightenment though the land—it's not enlightenment which wins the day—it's that they spread the impression of the popularity and hipness of atheism. It's not important to deliver stunning arguments and inevitable conclusions; it's important to give the impression that the opposition are anachronistic buffoons and hopelessly out-of-date. That they're intellectually bankrupt is a bonus and a not terribly convincing argument to the hoi-polloi, it's fashion that counts.

This was apparent when Hitchens debated the Oxford don, Alister McGrath. He (Hitchens) consistently characterized violence, such as suicide bombers, as religious conflict, when, in truth, it's territorial contests using religion as a motivator. The problem with religion is not that it's wrong; it's that it's a glue used to bind people to corrupt causes. Hitchens made reference to that but failed to see its centrality. The problem is not religion, it's the herd instinct. We needn't teach people about the dangers of religion; we need to teach the dangers of blind obedience. One can readily see why the state doesn't want to get into that business; it would just as soon teach blind obedience.

The great power of Christianity is not in its stories or explanation of the world around us; it's in its fanatical obsession with power structure, as evidenced in the first five Commandments. That, plus its promise of salvation after one's death, made it the ideal religion for governments and capitalism. Despite the myth of Christ and the money-changers, the operating sentiment here is “render unto Caesar what is Caesar's; render unto God what is God's”; “Caesar,” being interpreted to mean, “anyone above you in authority.” Constantine was no fool; there were scores of religions competing to replace Roman paganism when he selected Christianity (although, only half-heartedly, it must be admitted) to be the new state religion; not to mention that he moved the seat of power to Byzantium.

I wish Hitchens would have pressed this point more, the utility of religion, rather than narrowly focusing on its falsehood.

And I wish he'd understood better the nature of morality being a natural animal trait that evolved along with the rest of what we are, such as love, loyalty, wariness, fear, anger, etc. Those emotions are not restrained to us; they didn't first appear with the advent of modern humans. Hitchens badgered McGrath over what sort of morality did humans have before Moses brought the Commandments down from Mt. Sinai; and McGrath responded with the notion of “natural morality,” which he ascribed to pre-Christians, as well as those who don't know of Christianity (this during the debate, when McGrath argued for the necessity of god-given laws); but Hitchens failed to clinch the argument by pointing out that “natural morality” was the source of the Commandments, not god. He was so caught up in proving the evil nature of religion that he skipped over its organic nature, how it grew, not just as explanation for the world around us, but because of its cohesive properties in holding communities together. Hitchens failed to see that attacking the intellectual framework of religion was tilting at windmills; he needed to replace the very ground they stood on.

And Another Thing

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen Bill O’Reilly ever talk to anyone. At them, yes, but to them, no. As far as I can tell, his schtick is to talk faster than the person who’s sitting across from him. His technique is to only air his viewpoint and leave his guest sitting there bemused. It works, I guess, he has lots of followers, ones that can’t think very fast themselves.

I saw a clip of O’Reilly sitting down with Richard Dawkins who manfully tried to provide half of the conversation but was never allowed to do so by the O-Master. Needless-to-say, O’Reilly neatly defended his faith and demolished Dawkins in the process. Or so he thought. That Dawkins couldn’t get a word in edgewise didn’t matter.

When Dawkins was able to assert that O’Reilly was an atheist as far as anyone else’s god was concerned, O’Reilly tossed it off with, “I just saw Jupiter and he didn’t look so well.” That was a riposte?

His defense, other than the classic “He’s proved his existence to me, and that’s all that matters,” of Christianity was the equally lame, “Christ was a real person.”

Ergo, he was a real god? How does that follow?

Not to mention that he’s fallen into the trap of thinking his god is real while all the others aren’t. Well, of course, that’s the definition of belief, not a defense of it. Bill, evidently, doesn’t know the difference. Nor, apparently, does he realize that all gods are myths, regardless of upon whom the myth is hung. Call me a god, Bill, but it won’t make me one.

Little Known Fact:

Claiming a personal experience with god as proof of his (usually a “his”) existence is the equivalent of saying that there’s proof of aliens because you’ve been taken up to one of their spacecrafts and been probed. Lucky you. But if you get 5000 people in a room claiming they’ve all had a personal experience with god and that they’ve been probed, the odds of their being correct don’t go up a whit. Infinity doesn’t allow such odds to get to zero, but they can get pretty damn close.

There Are No Atheists in Heaven

I can never watch a show about religion for any length of time before I’m driven to retort the absurdities that are presented. I have no idea what these folks (usually guys) final arguments are; because, if I come across an uncorrected assumption and it remains, not only uncorrected but a pillar of their argument, I can’t go on. Nothing that follows will be correct, so why bother watching. 

That’s my excuse.

Case in point: a recently watched YouTube video on why there logically can’t be any atheists. I never got to the guy’s final argument as per above. The part I did see had him making a syllogism. He began by drawing a circle and saying, “For sake of argument, let’s say that all the knowledge in the universe is contained within this circle.” Okay, we can do that. He continued: “Then, can we make a dot in the center of the circle and agree that it represents your portion of the universe’s knowledge?” Sure, we can do that.

But before we go further, I’d like to point out that “knowledge” is never defined. Is knowledge the same as information? Is knowledge restricted to living things? Does the galaxy possess knowledge in the sense we use it? How would that manifest itself? Offhand, I’d restrict “knowledge” to living entities, although I wouldn’t rule out endless amounts of living creatures in the universe.

He should have stopped there. He went one step further; he said, “All that other knowledge in the universe, the stuff you don’t know, that had to have been put there by someone.”

Uh-uh. False. That’s the uncorrected assumption: the assumption that knowledge was “put” anywhere. Now, not only don’t we have a definition of “knowledge,” we don’t have a definition of “put.” Bill Clinton would be happy. I won’t even get to the rest of the syllogism.

Ergo, whatever followed in his argument, if it was relying on his proof to be correct, could not be correct. Undefined assumptions are no-no’s in debates, sorry.

Coda:

I’d like to further point out that atheism is not the opposite of theism, as is commonly thought. Theism argues that there is a god. Atheism does not argue that there is no god; it argues that there is no evidence nor logical probability for a god.

Thank you, and good night.

Can Religion Be Saved?

Stolen Aart

Wouldn’t It Be Nice?

We have to help them, our Christian brothers and sisters, we really do. They are in a precarious position. Their world is crumbling around them. Heathens are loose upon the fields. The End of Days is surely near.

Or not.

It’s not just Christianity, of course, the Enlightenment takes its aim at everyone. Science has fierce partisans and factions, but it has no sects. (About cults, we’re not so sure.) But my personal world is curiously devoid of Muslims, Jains, or Hindus and is mainly peppered with a few Jews and a slew of New Agers. My knowledge of religion is fairly restricted to Christianity, American style, and people who believe in homeopathy and aroma therapy. Those are the people I’d most like to help, but everyone else could use it, as well.

That being said, I have absolutely no idea how to go about helping them. The Christians. As the first rule of psychology has it (or possibly it’s the twelfth), one has to recognize the need for help before one is able to accept it. My read is that Christians, because of their continuing numerical dominance, aren’t yet aware they’re losing the fight for the heart and soul of the future. They’re still in the stage of denial.

So, what to do?

How about if we begin by removing religion from the political arena? Wouldn’t that be nice? Could we have freedom, not just of religion, but from religion? Wouldn’t that be nice? Is there any way for Christians to understand that there are ten thousand religions in the world; and that, if we base our morality on “God says so,” we’ll never come to any agreements? Wouldn’t that be nice?

What would happen if one Sunday morning every pastor in the land went before her or his congregation and said, “We are not a Christian nation, we are a nation of all faiths or lack thereof; we must learn to be Christians in a pluralistic world”? What if all the pastors told the truth?

Wouldn’t that be nice?

Well, you can see where that would lead: fornication and drug use, gluttony and sloth. The Four Horsemen would terrorize the nation. Communism!

No, the Christian community is not about to talk compromise. They’re in it for the long haul. They started out in little cells in the catacombs and they’re willing to retreat there if they have to. They’ll reluctantly talk to the Jews, they wouldn’t think of talking to a Muslim, and they have no idea what language the rest of the world speaks. That their world continues to fade, that peace, rationalism, acceptance, and atheism continue to grow, has yet to sink in. That their fate was sealed by the inevitable evolution of consciousness, passes their consciousness by. Helping them over that hump is going to be a big hurdle. It’s like trying to talk to a Cajun gone mad with a shotgun in his hand. You best be careful. Real careful.

But we gotta do it; it’s our duty. It’s the rational thing to do. It’s no point getting mad at them, and ridicule doesn’t help, at all. We have to find a way to open the dialogue. They aren’t going to do it; they have no cause to. They still think they have a chance at winning. It’s our job to save them from as much damage as possible, to find a way to let them down easy.

How about “Take a Christian to Lunch Day”? You don’t even have to worry about mixing milk with meat with Christians, they can eat anything. And drink, too. Don’t forget Jesus and the wine trick. You just can’t smoke with them; that’s with the Saracens.

Maybe we should start with comparative religion classes in the public schools. Teach religion as part of folk arts where it truly belongs. Heck, that could start in kindergarten. By high school, kids could be studying the role of religions in society and history. They could study the varieties of myths that underlie religions. Once we had a public educated about religions, then, maybe, we could have a national dialogue about the rightful place of religion, folk beliefs, and traditional cultures in our society. We, certainly, don’t want to lose the rich heritage of how the peoples of the world solved the mysteries of leaving the dream time. These beliefs, these longings, go back to before people were people; it would be a shame to dismiss them simply because of their naiveté. Losing them, we would lose the beauty of their allegory; we would lose the nuance of their experience.

We must save these religions, now, before they’re swamped by the flutter of tomorrow. Before they’re lost in the flight of new wings. Like folk music or quilt patterns, the varieties of religious experience must be preserved lest we forget one day that people once talked in tongues. Or fed the hungry. Or wore white robes with pointed hoods. It’s now that we should start talking with the preachers and priests who remain about what and how best to preserve their memory on the landscape of the stars. We should start now, while they still feel their power. Soon, it will be too late. Soon, the sweat and fog of panic will cloud their minds. We should start assuring them now that we will always love them, they will always find a place in our hearts and our community. We will remember them. We will not forget.