Posted on 06/22/2007 9:07:12 AM PDT by Caleb1411
Books: Notable anti-religion and anti-Christian books of the past year—particularly Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great—make something out of, well, nothing.
Nineteenth-century novelist Gustave Flaubert used to joke about archaeologists discovering a stone tablet signed "God" and reading, "I do not exist." His punch line had an atheist then exclaiming, "See! I told you so!"
These days, nothing stops atheistic caissons from rolling along the bookstore aisles. Maybe that's because atheists on average have small families and lots of discretionary doubloons jingling in their pockets. Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf), Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell (Penguin), and Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin) all hit bestseller lists during 2006—and a new book, Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great (Twelve), has ascended this year.
Last year's trio emerged alongside anti-Christian books purportedly based on hard reporting. Michelle Goldberg's Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (Norton) typified the genre's misreporting when she wrote that Christian pregnancy counseling centers "usually" present false or exaggerated information—but there's no indication that she visited even one center, let alone the 3,000 or so that exist throughout the country. (Here's some evidentiary trivia: In four pages about me she makes five clear factual errors, along with many questionable interpretations.)
This year it's the same: a new screed by Chris Hedges has as its title not "Mistaken People" or even "Lying Liars," but American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press). The genre is old, with new villains appearing as necessary. Ten years ago Frederick Clarkson's Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy stated that the sky was falling, with Promise Keepers as the spearhead of Christian dictatorship.
The ferocity of these books is sometimes astounding. Here, for example, is Dawkins' view of God: "arguably the most unpleasant character in fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
Even Publishers Weekly noted concerning The God Delusion, "For a scientist who criticizes religion for its intolerance, Dawkins has written a surprisingly intolerant book, full of scorn for religion and those who believe. . . . Even confirmed atheists who agree with his advocacy of science and vigorous rationalism may have trouble stomaching some of the rhetoric: 'The biblical Yahweh is "psychotic," Aquinas' proofs of God's existence are "fatuous" and religion generally is "nonsense."'
Happily, Alister and Joanna Collicutt McGrath have just come out with an effective response, The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine (IVP). The McGraths note, "Until recently, Western atheism had waited patiently, believing that belief in God would simply die out. But now a whiff of panic is evident. Far from dying out, belief in God has rebounded."
The McGraths also point out the folly of believing that if religion were eliminated wars would cease: After all, conflicts often reflect human desires to declare some people as "in" and others as "out," sometimes on the basis of religion, but at other times on the basis of race, ethnicity, tribe, class, gender, or whatever.
Christianity is above all others the religion that seeks kindness to those in the out-group: Jesus told us to love our neighbors and even to love our enemies. When Christians fail to live up to His teachings it's because of sin, not Christianity—and scapegoating religion delays efforts to deal with the real problems of social division.
Scapegoating is also evident in the writing of Sam Harris, who frequently forgets to use reason and instead falls back on words like "preposterous." He asserts certainty about what he admits not knowing: "How the process of evolution got started is still a mystery, but that does not in the least suggest that a deity is likely to be lurking at the bottom of it all."
He complains not only about ignorance but about moral failings: "An average Christian, in an average church, listening to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse."
Yet Harris, for all his attacks on Intelligent Design, does not even understand the distinction between macro-evolution—one kind of creature changing into another—and micro-evolution. One of his proofs of theistic obtuseness is that "viruses like HIV, as well as a wide range of harmful bacteria, can be seen evolving right under our noses, developing resistance to antiviral and antibiotic drugs."
The one good aspect of Harris' work is his understanding that theology has consequences: "There is no escaping that fact that a person's religious beliefs uniquely determine what he thinks peace is good for, as well as what he means by a term like 'compassion.'" Harris at least understands that the biblical theology he hates makes obnoxious sense in a way that liberalism does not; given a suffering world, "liberal theology must stand revealed for what it is: the sheerest of mortal pretenses."
Harris also criticizes the niceties of political rhetoric concerning Islam: "The idea that Islam is a 'peaceful religion hijacked by extremists' is a fantasy." Too bad he and other atheistic authors are determined to believe that Christianity is inevitably hijacked by hate, and that they pick up support from reviewers like Natalie Angier, who wrote in The New York Times that "Harris writes what a sizeable number of us think, but few are willing to say."
Harris' work has also engendered several Christian responses this year. Doug Wilson's Letter from a Christian Citizen (American Vision) points out that Harris uses morally loaded words like "should" and "ought"; Wilson rightly asks Harris, "What is the difference between an imposed morality, an imposed religion, or an imposed secular ought? Why is your imposition to be preferred to any other?"
Wilson notes Harris' fondness for Eastern religions, and in particular the "utter non-violence" of the Jains in India. Letter from a Christian Citizen correctly notes that "Devout Jains will wear a mask to avoid breathing in and thereby killing any insect," and then asks whether Harris would commend evangelicals who "forsook the use of antibiotics because of the genocidal devastation it was causing to the microbes within."
Wilson also points out that the litany of religious folks fighting each other that Harris recites "is beside the point. We don't believe that religion is the answer. We believe Christ is the answer." Harris' list of religious messes merely confirms "one of the basic tents of the Christian faith, which is that the human race is all screwed up."
And what about this year's champion screed, offered by Christopher Hitchens? His scorn—"monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents"—oozes off every page of God Is Not Great, with its extraordinary subtitle, How Religion Poisons Everything.
"Everything"? That sounds improbable. Are 1.3 billion Muslims all murderers? Might Christianity have produced 50 percent evil and 50 percent good? If not, how about 40 percent good? Thirty percent? Twenty percent? Ten percent? Will not Hitchens relent from his anger if we can find 5 percent that's good?
God Is Not Great has received extraordinary publicity, including an adulatory review in The New York Times, so it's worth going page by page to see what Hitchens is selling and many atheists are buying:
*On Page 4 he writes that religion produces a "maximum of servility." Islam, maybe, but were Abraham, Moses, and Job servile when they argued with God?
*On Page 5 he writes, "No statistic will ever find that without [religious] blandishments and threats [atheists] commit more crimes of greed or violence than the faithful." Prison Fellowship and other organizations can show that prisoners who go through evangelical programs have much lower recidivism—committing new crimes after release from prison, leading to new sentences—than others.
*On Page 7 he writes, "Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago." Leaving aside the inspiration millions get from daily Bible reading, what about Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches, with all their biblical imagery? Or Pope John Paul II, whose words inspired many people to rise up against Communism in Eastern Europe?
*On Page 17 he writes that religion "does not have the confidence in its own various preachings even to allow coexistence between different faiths." At the annual March for Life in Washington tens of thousands of Catholics and Protestants walk side by side along with individuals from Jews for Life, Buddhists for Life, and so on.
*n Page 32 he writes, "The nineteen suicide murderers of New York and Washington and Pennsylvania were beyond any doubt the most sincere believers on those planes." Todd Beamer, the man who said "Let's roll" on United Flight 93, and made sure it didn't crash into the U.S. Capitol, was a strong Christian believer. So were others who died, stopping the terrorists, when Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania.
Hitchens of course thinks the Bible is nonsense (see also "The world according to Hitch," June 3, 2006). On Page 102 he writes, "It goes without saying that none of the gruesome, disordered events described in Exodus ever took place." Without saying. A slam dunk. On Page 103: "All the Mosaic myths can be safely and easily discarded." On Page 104: All five books of Moses are "an ill-carpentered fiction."
Such pronouncements were repeatedly made in the 19th century, but again and again biblical accounts considered mythical back then have gained new archeological support. For example, scholars at one point said that the Hittites described in the Bible did not exist, nor did rulers such as Belshazzar of Babylon or Sargon of Assyria. Archeologists now have records of all those civilizations and reigns.
Many brilliant people have spent lifetimes studying these writings that Hitchens so blithely dismisses. Princeton's Robert Wilson, who knew 26 ancient languages and dialects and so could read just about all that remains from the ancient Near East, was impressed with the accuracy of those accounts that Hitchens wishes to discard.
Coming to the present, Hitchens on Page 160 calls "the whole racket of American evangelism . . . a heartless con." Hmm. WORLD for two decades has reported stories around this country of compassionate evangelicals who must be dumb, because they've spent their lives in a racket that's yielded them almost no money. They've adopted hard-to-place children, built AIDs orphanages in Africa, helped addicts and alcoholics to turn their lives around, transformed the lives of teens who were heading into drugs and crime, and much besides.
In responding to Hitchens and mini-Hitchenses, it's also worth noting the leadership of Christians over the centuries in setting up hospitals and schools. Historians such as Jonathan Hill of Oxford, Alvin Schmidt of Illinois College, and Rodney Stark of Baylor have described the long-term effect of Jesus telling his followers to love their neighbors as themselves.
The evangelical tendency to help others, not poison them, has even attracted the attention of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who calls America's evangelicals "the newest internationalists" for fighting sexual trafficking in Eastern Europe and slavery in Sudan. As Jewish leader Michael Horowitz has put it, evangelicals "led the way in taking on the slavery issue of our time—the annual trafficking of millions of women and children into lives of sexual bondage . . . led the way in organizing a campaign to end a growing epidemic of prison rape."
Horowitz concluded his message to evangelicals this way: "As you define your human rights successes as central to who you are and what you've done, it will no longer be possible for those who fear your faith to crudely caricature you or to ignore the virtue that Christian activism brings to American life and the world at large." Spoken too soon, because authors like Harris, Dennett, Dawkins, and especially Hitchens, despite all the evidence, still proclaim that religion, or Christianity in particular, poisons everything.
For people who claim to be filled with Christian love, these Christians sure do spew a lot of hatred towards atheists.
All dressed up with nowhere to go.
This is a legitimate gripe by Hitchen's. A few Buddhists and Jews marching with some Christians at a pro-life rally was probably done for political expedience rather than an agreement on theology.
It doesn't change the fact that even the most loving and generous of my evangelical friends maintain that if you don't believe in Jesus divinity, you are going to Hell.
Children who are brainwashed at a very young age to believe that they are the creations of mythical skygods who exist only in the scribblings of ancient scrolls and are thousands of years past due for their miraculous return tend to cling on to these false hopes for life.
Unless, they get their hands on a real science book and learn some truth.
The ferocity of these books is sometimes astounding. Here, for example, is Dawkins' view of God: "arguably the most unpleasant character in fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
Hitchens of course thinks the Bible is nonsense (see also "The world according to Hitch," June 3, 2006). On Page 102 he writes, "It goes without saying that none of the gruesome, disordered events described in Exodus ever took place." Without saying. A slam dunk. On Page 103: "All the Mosaic myths can be safely and easily discarded." On Page 104: All five books of Moses are "an ill-carpentered fiction."
As incredible as it seems (and it does and is), these "gentlemen" believe they are insulting "chr*stianity" by attacking the Hebrew Bible and Hebrew G-d. And apparently this is also what everyone else believes, because there are precious few Jewish voices raised in response while chr*stians do all the defending. Why is it that "anti-Semitism" is the deadliest of all charges yet it never seems to apply to attacks on the Jewish G-d and Scriptures? It's always defined as hostility to Jewish noses, or pawnbrokers, or bankers, or Hollywood, but never has anything to do with opposition to the actual Jewish religion (the lone exception being chr*stian supersessionism, which always manages to elicit a charge of "theological anti-Judaism" while none of these attacks on G-d Himself ever seems to do this). With G-d and the Jewish People being so allegedly unconcerned with each other and the fortunes of each being inversely proportional to the fortunes of the other, the world can perhaps be forgiven for believing that G-d and the Jewish People are either unconnected or enemies.
I note that the Moses-hating Hitchens has actually accused Jerry Falwell of "anti-Semitism." Perhaps he would apply the same label to Moses?
Harris' work has also engendered several Christian responses this year. Doug Wilson's Letter from a Christian Citizen (American Vision) points out that Harris uses morally loaded words like "should" and "ought"; Wilson rightly asks Harris, "What is the difference between an imposed morality, an imposed religion, or an imposed secular ought? Why is your imposition to be preferred to any other?"
Only G-d can say "should" and "ought." People who insist that G-d is a tyrant nevertheless continue to insist that "we have to have rules" and continue to use these words. Apparently it is not the rules but the mere existence of G-d itself that they find so objectionable?
It is often said that while Theists have to deal with the existence of evil that atheists have to deal with the existence of everything else. Actually, this is not so. Without a Creator of All Things, objective good and objective evil (and please note my use of the term "objective") does not and cannot exist. To insist that man is no more than any other animal, and then to act as if a war between nations of men is somehow of more moral significance than a war between two anthills is to insist on a contradiction.
Wilson notes Harris' fondness for Eastern religions, and in particular the "utter non-violence" of the Jains in India. Letter from a Christian Citizen correctly notes that "Devout Jains will wear a mask to avoid breathing in and thereby killing any insect," and then asks whether Harris would commend evangelicals who "forsook the use of antibiotics because of the genocidal devastation it was causing to the microbes within."
Their praise of jainism is perfectly understandable. This is quite literally an atheist religion that considers prayer a sin. It also regards all life as "holy." Considering what many liberals believe, this seems to be the state religion they are promoting.
Scapegoating is also evident in the writing of Sam Harris, who frequently forgets to use reason and instead falls back on words like "preposterous." He asserts certainty about what he admits not knowing: "How the process of evolution got started is still a mystery, but that does not in the least suggest that a deity is likely to be lurking at the bottom of it all."
I must confess to confusion when evolutionists attack "intelligent design" then turn around and say that evolution does not exclude G-d. "Intelligent design" accepts evolution in toto, merely insisting taht G-d actually "guides" it. To attack the belief that evolution is guided by G-d and then to insist that evolution "rightly understood" does not exclude G-d makes absolutely no sense.
I wish to point out again an observation I made recently on another thread: that the worship of "critical thinking" and the insistence on "self-evident truths" is a contradiction. If one thinks critically, nothing is "self-evident." If certain things are "self-evident," they have never been critically examined.
I only wish that the atheists of the world would stop embarrassing me by picking on chr*stianity and see that their real threat comes from Judaism/Noachism. Chr*stianity, for all the legalism that has crept into so much of it (and liturgical chr*stianity is especially confused here) is, after all, a salvational religion. Judaism/Noachism, on the other hand (like islam), is statutory. But since "everyone knows" that Jews are irreverent freethinkers who are against religion, no one seems to have noticed this.
I have always found it strange that if one doesn't accepts Jesus' message of love and accept him as the savior, one is condemned to eternal torture. It makes Jesus appear as a narcissist and sadist of the first order.
I'm going to guess that there are millions of systems where it didn't work out that way. However, with the sheer numbers of galaxies out there, and the ranges where it could theoretically work, and the billions of such sites, there may indeed be other intelligent life.
If so, I would suspect at some point in their civilization cycle, they too would have considered themselves a unique wonder.
You obviously haven't been on any ID threads lately. "'Stuck in the Mud' Monkey Worship" was one of the more friendly terms used for evolution.
I’m reading Dawkins’ book now. It’s good.
Atheism is a creed, so is therefore covered under civil rights laws.
Forgive me. I am not an advocate of "intelligent design," but a literalist creationist.
Okay. So G-d doesn't "guide" evolution, but evolution "rightly understood" doesn't mean that G-d doesn't actually guide it after all.
So how does G-d "guide" evolution without "guiding" it?
And has been around since God created it 6000 years ago, but only recently decided to be infectious?
Actually, those examples seems to bolster Hitchens' argument. From initial argumentation and push-back against God, in the end, these three became quite servile to His will.
Don’t say things like that, you’re making us look bad.
If you live your life as if there is no God, for your sake you better damn well be right.
There's a corollary to that: If you believe that there is only one denomination, sect, or faith tradition that is 100% the only one to pick, then you had better well have chosen wisely.
Not every atheist is anti-Christian. We may not have chosen as you have, but generally, we celebrate your right to make your choices freely.
Now you see, this is what happens when people think the only alternative to atheism is chr*stianity. It ain't so. Chr*stianity is a johnny-come-lately.
The only "choosing" involved is G-d's. If your mother was Jewish, you're Jewish and there's nothing you can do about it. If your mother wasn't Jewish, then you're a Noachide and the only way you can change that is to convert to Judaism, though there is no obligation for you to do so.
See, it's not about "salvation." It's a simple statutory situation. Jews have certain laws given to them, non-Jews have certain laws given to them, and at the end of life we'll be judged (and G-d has many more decisions at His disposal than just "Heaven and Hell").
Well said. And it's also not a contradiction for an atheist to believe that Christianity is man's best hope for a positive future, even if he believes it to be objectively false.
I don't know.
But according to some homeschooling creationists, I am an ignorant monkey-worshipping idolater because I seek to understand paleontology and evolution by studying empirical evidence.
I hope I’m not the only one that finds the book of Job a disgusting amoral mess.
An interesting discussion.
I think critics of religion are on solid ground when they critique the theologies, which consist, in large part, of accounts of miraculous and improbable events. Extracting God’s intent from these accounts is not easy. The humans who have written down these accounts have garbled the message.
As a result, the issue of whether religion, per se, has good or bad effects on human behavior is complicated. Some bad things have been done in the name of religion, but so have some good things. Whether the net impact is good or bad is debatable. To the extent that the behaviors urged by religion are good—like “love thy neighbor,” “let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” and “turn the other cheek”—I think religion would have a net positive impact. To the extent that behaviors urged by religion are bad—like persecuting heretics, crusading against unbelievers, and condemning the harmless nonconforming behaviors of others—I think religion would have a net negative effect. The question is which of these tendencies is greater. I don’t think we have enough evidence yet to know for sure.
Whether a particular religion is having a good or bad effect depends upon the behavior of its adherents. In my opinion, those who do good deeds are likely closer to getting God’s message than those assaulting their fellows.
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