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Backward, atheist soldiers!
WORLD Magazine ^ | June 30, 2007 | Marvin Olasky

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.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: alistermcgrath; atheism; christianity; enjoythevoid; islam; judaism; nihilism; olasky; religion
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1 posted on 06/22/2007 9:07:14 AM PDT by Caleb1411
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To: Caleb1411

The big problem with the idea of there being no God is that there are too many people who fancy that they could fill the void.


2 posted on 06/22/2007 9:11:12 AM PDT by massgopguy (I owe everything to George Bailey)
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To: Caleb1411

I would encourage all freepers to use the Truth Project in a small group:

http://www.thetruthproject.org/


3 posted on 06/22/2007 9:12:15 AM PDT by PeterPrinciple ( Seeking the truth here folks.)
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To: Caleb1411

I’ve been told Atheism is not a religion. If that’s true, we can ban these people from talking without having to listen to them scream about discrimination...


4 posted on 06/22/2007 9:13:18 AM PDT by Tzimisce (How Would Mohammed Vote? Hillary for President! www.dndorks.com)
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To: Caleb1411; Calm_Cool_and_Elected

ping for later


5 posted on 06/22/2007 9:15:33 AM PDT by Calm_Cool_and_Elected (So many books, so little time!)
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To: Caleb1411
The McGraths also point out the folly of believing that if religion were eliminated wars would cease...

Maybe someone forgot about the Soccer War that broke out a while back?

6 posted on 06/22/2007 9:15:45 AM PDT by FormerLib (Sacrificing our land and our blood cannot buy protection from jihad.-Bishop Artemije of Kosovo)
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To: Caleb1411

If you live your life as if there is no God, for your sake you better damn well be right.


7 posted on 06/22/2007 9:15:48 AM PDT by stm (Fred Thompson in 08!)
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To: Caleb1411
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."

How come Sammy doesn't understand that an HIV virus that mutates is, um, still an HIV virus?

Oh right, it's because most people who stump for evolution don't actually know very much ABOUT evolution.

8 posted on 06/22/2007 9:16:26 AM PDT by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus (Fred Thompson is Duncan Hunter without the training wheels)
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To: Caleb1411
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!"

That's funny.
9 posted on 06/22/2007 9:16:31 AM PDT by HaveHadEnough
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To: Tzimisce

Aetheism is hardly a religion, it’s a misguided way of life.


10 posted on 06/22/2007 9:17:11 AM PDT by stm (Fred Thompson in 08!)
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To: massgopguy

An old guy told me once that he was like that before he went to Vietnam. he said a bunch of his fellow soldiers were the same way. Real hardasses.

then he said he came to the realization that there is no such thing as an athiest in a foxhole.


11 posted on 06/22/2007 9:17:26 AM PDT by HOTTIEBOY (The more people I meet, the more I like my dog.)
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To: Caleb1411
"An average Christian, in an average church, listening to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse."

I'd say the manking caused "Global Warming" believers is a good counter point to this point!

12 posted on 06/22/2007 9:18:09 AM PDT by TheDon (The DemocRAT party is the party of TREASON! Overthrow the terrorist's congress!)
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To: Caleb1411
Here's something to have a little fun with atheists - You might be a fundamentalist atheist if....
13 posted on 06/22/2007 9:18:50 AM PDT by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus (Fred Thompson is Duncan Hunter without the training wheels)
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To: Tzimisce
I’ve been told Atheism is not a religion.

Well, atheism is not a religion, but it is a faith-based belief system.

14 posted on 06/22/2007 9:21:05 AM PDT by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus (Fred Thompson is Duncan Hunter without the training wheels)
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To: Tzimisce
we can ban these people

That happens here when someone admits to not being a supernaturalist.

15 posted on 06/22/2007 9:21:46 AM PDT by ASA Vet (Pray for the deliberately ignorant)
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To: massgopguy

atheist is short for autotheist


16 posted on 06/22/2007 9:28:34 AM PDT by TheDon (The DemocRAT party is the party of TREASON! Overthrow the terrorist's congress!)
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To: Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus
You believe the astronomical size of the universe somehow disproves God, as if God needed a tiny universe in order to exist.

I went around and around with an athiest on another forum over this point....he just couldn't give up the idea that a big universe meant there was no God. When I asked him what size universe would accomodate the concept of a God he had no answer.

17 posted on 06/22/2007 9:29:55 AM PDT by HerrBlucher (Tack it up and shut em down Fred!)
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To: Tzimisce

Ban people from talking?

Do you have any idea how that sounds in a free country?


18 posted on 06/22/2007 9:35:28 AM PDT by najida (Just call me a chicken rancher :))
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To: Caleb1411

Atheism is irrational. For atheists the existence of God is not even open to question: not only does God not exist, but there isn’t even the possibility of his existence.


19 posted on 06/22/2007 9:35:54 AM PDT by windsorknot
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To: Tzimisce

Nothing turns me off from religion more than the behavior of Christians in threads about Atheism.


20 posted on 06/22/2007 9:42:09 AM PDT by gura
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