Just rewrite this in your head to “Kristof is absolutely aghast that so many Americans believe in the divinity of Jesus.”
There are actually some hardcore leftist pseudo-clergy who are using this argument. They hate the idea that Christianity is a religion, not a secular philosophy on a par with other secular philosophies.
One of the most influential-to-Marxism philosophers prior to Marx was Georg Hegel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Wilhelm_Friedrich_Hegel
His most influential idea was that an idea, or even an entire philosophy, was a “thesis”, and that if you argue against it, or even if you do not agree with it, you create an “antithesis”. And in a weird, Darwinian struggle of ideas, the end result is a “synthesis”, a better combination of the two ideas, or philosophies, into a new idea or philosophy.
It seems to make sense to people who don’t think about it too much.
But if you do, what comes to mind is not philosophy, but religion. Religion defies synthesis, because it refuses to compromise its beliefs with anti-religious ideas and philosophies.
And this bugs the hell out of philosophical types.
This is why they have such a bitter hatred of religion, precisely because it rejects the idea that it is just the same as some armchair philosopher’s theory.
This is why the divine, the unknown and the unknowable of religion are so hated, because philosophy has no such unshakable and unchanging ideas. If God says something, then it is the eternal truth. If a philosopher says something, it is just one guy’s opinion, and doesn’t change anything.
And they just can’t bear that thought.
Very well said! It is the idea that "absolutes" really exist that burns their buns. God laughs in derision at them.