"We Believe in God" -- The Greatest Minds Believed

 Is God Cruel?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: REBUTTALS AND CRITICISM

     First Dawkins and now Hitchens. This is a fruitful time for atheists. They sense that people's frustration with religious extremists is at an all-time high, and they and their publishers want to gain the most from it. Thus a surge in books against religion and God. Hitchens is one such opportunist. In his recent work, God is Not Great, he shows a level of aggressiveness and offensiveness toward believers that is beyond equal.  Worst of all, he frames his work with biases and intellectual dishonesty. But many atheists don't mind. As long as he bashes believers, it's all welcome.

"Hitchens is a British-born writer who lives in Washington, D.C., and is a columnist for Vanity Fair and Slate. He thrives at the lectern, where his powers of    rhetoric and recall enable him to entertain an audience, go too far, and almost get away with it. These gifts are amply reflected in “God Is Not Great.”

Hitchens is nothing if not provocative. Creationists are “yokels,” Pascal’s theology is “not far short of sordid,” the reasoning of the Christian writer C. S. Lewis is “so pathetic as to defy description,” Calvin was a “sadist and torturer and killer,” Buddhist sayings are “almost too easy to parody,” most Eastern spiritual discourse is “not even wrong,” Islam is “a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms,” Hanukkah is a “vapid and annoying holiday,” and the psalmist King David was an “unscrupulous bandit.”

"After rightly railing against female genital mutilation in Africa, which is an indigenous cultural practice with no very firm ties to any particular religion, Hitchens lunges at male circumcision. He claims that it is a medically dangerous procedure that has made countless lives miserable. This will come as news to the Jewish community, where male circumcision is universal, and where doctors, hypochondria, and overprotective mothers are not exactly unknown. Jews, Muslims, and others among the nearly one-third of the world’s male population who have been circumcised may be reassured by the World Health Organization’s recent announcement that it recommends male circumcision as a means of preventing the spread of AIDS."

"When Hitchens weighs the pros and cons of religion in the recent past, the evidence he provides is sometimes lopsided. He discusses the role of the Dutch Reformed Church in maintaining apartheid in South Africa, but does not mention the role of the Anglican Church in ending it. He attacks some in the Catholic Church, especially Pope Pius XII, for their appeasement of Nazism, but says little about the opposition to Nazism that came from religious communities and institutions."

Anthony Gottlieb, "Atheists with Attitude, Why do they hate Him?" The New Yorker.

<http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/05/21/070521crbo_books_gottlieb> (07 August, 2008).

Peter Hitchens is Christopher Hitchens' brother. They are three years apart in age, yet they are eons apart in thinking. Christopher is a fanatical atheist; Peter is a firm believer. Read what the other member of the family has to say about his angry atheist brother.

"Christopher is an atheist. I am a believer. He once said in public: "The real difference between Peter and myself is the belief in the supernatural.

"I’m a materialist and he attributes his presence here to a divine plan. I can’t stand anyone who believes in God, who invokes the divinity or who is a person of faith."

I don’t feel the same way. I like atheists and enjoy their company, because they agree with me that religion is important."

"I also think it is wrong, mostly in the way that it blames faith for so many bad things and gives it no credit for any of the good it may have done.

I think it misunderstands religious people and their aims and desires. And I think it asserts a number of things as true and obvious that are nothing of the sort."

Christopher describes how at the age of nine he concluded that his teacher’s claim that the world must be designed was wrong. "I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong."

At the time of this revelation, he knew nothing of the vast, unending argument between those who maintain that the shape of the world is evidence of design, and those who say the same world is evidence of random, undirected natural selection.

It’s my view that he still doesn’t know all that much about this interesting dispute. Yet at the age of nine, he "simply knew" who had won one of the oldest debates in the history of mankind.

It is astonishing, in one so set against the idea of design or authority in the universe, how often he appeals to mysterious intuitions and "innate" knowledge of this kind, and uses religious language such as "awesome" – in awe of whom or what?

Or "mysterious". What is the mystery, if all is explained by science, the telescope and the microscope? He even refers to "conscience" and makes frequent thunderous denunciations of various evil actions. "

"Where is his certain knowledge of what is right and wrong supposed to have come from?

How can the idea of a conscience have any meaning in a world of random chance, where in the end we are all just collections of molecules swirling in a purposeless confusion?

If you are getting inner promptings, why should you pay any attention to them? It is as absurd as the idea of a compass with no magnetic North. You might as well take moral instruction from your bile duct.

On the few occasions where Christopher is prepared to admit that religious people have done any good, he concludes that they did so in spite of their faith, not because of it.

He even suggests that the atheist Soviet tyranny was itself a form of religion.

You can’t win against this sort of circular absolutism.

Yet he has this absurdly backwards. Religious and unbelieving people have both done dreadful things, and the worst of them have committed their murders and their tortures in the belief that they were doing good.

Nothing is proved by either side in this argument, by pointing to the mountains of skulls piled up by evil atheists, and evil theists.

What they have in common is that they are human, and capable of the sin of pride. The practice of religion does not automatically prevent this, and nobody said it did.

It sometimes joins in with it, as Christopher points out."

"There is one chapter in this book whose implications are sinister. It is Chapter 16, which attempts to suggest that religion is child abuse.

On the basis of such arguments, matched by similar urgings from Professor Richard Dawkins, I can see a movement growing to outlaw the teaching of faith to children.

Then what? Liberal world reformers make the grave mistake of thinking that if you abolish a great force you don’t like, it will be replaced by empty space.

We abolished the gallows, for example, and found we had created an armed police and an epidemic of prison suicides. We abolished school selection by exams, and found we had replaced it with selection by money. And so on.

We are in the process – encouraged by Christopher – of abolishing religion, and so of abolishing conscience, too.

It is one of his favourite jibes that a world ruled by faith is like North Korea, a place where all is known and all is ordered."

On the contrary, North Korea is the precise opposite of a land governed by conscience.

It is a country governed by men who do not believe in God or conscience, where nobody can be trusted to make his own choices, and where the State decides for the people what is right and what is wrong.

And it is the ultimate destination of atheist thought.

If you do not worship God, you end up worshipping power, whether it is Kim Jong Il, Leon Trotsky or the military might of George W. Bush. In which case, God help you."

Peter Hitchens, "Hitchens vs Hitchens." Mail Online. <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/newscomment.html?in_article_id=459427&in_page_id=1787&in_a_source>  (07 August, 2008).

"...following his own broken compass all over the map, servile to no one, insulter of many, drinker and smoker nonpareil."

"But yet, there's something all these utterly rational missalettes miss. The hunger. The need. And for all the bad things it has wrought, the profound and revolutionary social force that religion has been in the life of man. Because we need Him, He persists. No matter how big the book thrown at Him, His book is always bigger. No matter how much closer we get to finding God's face through a telescope, many more of us will still be baying, or praying, at the moon."

Mark Warren, "Thank God for Christopher Hitchens." Esquire. <http://www.esquire.com/fiction/books/Hitchens0507> (07 August, 2008).

"Normally, too, Hitchens is a fair man in debate — although employing often enough those wicked and withering rhetorical ploys that the British often display in verbal jousting. Agent Provocateur is Hitchens’s chosen pose. But this time it is a bit disappointing to find so much hostility and so many — unusually many — intellectual missteps in his latest tirade (not his first) against religion, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything."

"For something peculiar happens to Hitchens when he wrestles against God with murderous intent. Hitchens always loses (and may secretly suspect that). Preposterous as this seems, one senses he may fear that one day he will wake up and see it all plainly, right before his eyes. Otherwise, why year after year keep striking another stake in the heart of God?"

"Engaged in polemics, atheists like to do two things, which certainly Hitchens does. The first is to make fun of believers on every matter possible, even when that requires outrageous misstatements of fact and employs such clumsy logic as they would mock in others. The second is to generate as many incoherencies in the faith of believers as their fertile minds can make up. Hitchens is in our time one of the great masters of mockery and satire."

Michael Novak, "Christopher Hitchens Is a Treasure. A good, useful atheist." <http://www.michaelnovak.net/Module/Article/ArticleView.aspx?id=238> (07 August, 2008).

"So only atheists are in a comfortable position to cast the first stone, and Christopher Hitchens, in "God Is Not Great," relishes the role. He has the credentials, as both a combative journalist and a surprisingly erudite literary scholar, and he wants to break the diplomacy barrier and expose the preposterous presumptions and ignoble machinations that stain the history of all religions, bringing discredit that tends to get magnified over the years by a persistent pattern of coverup, veils of illusion , and denial of one design or another."

"At their best, his indictments are trenchant and witty, and the book is a treasure house of zingers worthy of Mark Twain or H. L. Mencken. At other times, his impatience with the smug denial of the self-righteous gets the better of him, and then he strikes glancing blows at best, and occasionally adopts a double standard, excusing his naturalist heroes for their few lapses into religious gullibility on the grounds that they couldn't have known any better at the time, while leaving no such wiggle room for the defenders of religion over the ages."

C. Dennett, "Unbelievable," Boston.com. <http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2007/05/13/unbelievable> (07 August, 2008).

"Christopher Hitchens is an essayist and pundit who loves a good fight and is never afraid to pick on someone his own size; but this time he's outdone himself. He's picked on God.

Hitchens' quarrel with God is too complex to invite summary, but it can be fairly said that he considers religion just plain childish.

"It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species," he writes, "and it is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge as well as comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs. Today, the least educated of my children knows much much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion."

But Hitchens is not satisfied to merely refute religion. He must also demonize it as "an enemy of science and inquiry," as "subsisting largely on lies and fears," and as "the accomplice of ignorance and guilt as well as of slavery, genocide, racism and tyranny." Hence the book's subtitle, "How Religion Poison's Everything."

"And he does mean everything. As he would have it, religion foments hate and war. It justifies the torture and murder of "heretics" and "infidels." It represses healthy human sexuality. By discouraging contraception and encouraging reliance on prayer instead of medicine, it is even bad for your health.

This is, of course, a familiar augment. Hitchens has nothing new to say..."

"But what is the point of writing such a book? Surely, it will change no minds. Surely, with a title like this, it will not be read by anyone who does not already agree with it.

Hitchens is, if he will forgive the religious reference, preaching to the choir."

B. De Silva, "Pundit Christopher Hitchens Picks a fight in book, 'God is Not Great," Rutland Herald.

<http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070425/NEWS04/704250315/-1/HSSPORTS> (07 August, 2008).

A profile on Hitchens by NPR stated: "Hitchens is known for his love of cigarettes and alcohol -- and his prodigious literary output."  Hitchens admits to drinking heavily; in 2003 he wrote that his daily intake of alcohol was enough "to kill or stun the average mule." ...He drinks, he says, 'because it makes other people less boring. I have a great terror of being bored. But I can work with or without it. It takes quite a lot to get me to slur.'"

"Christopher Hitchens,"  Wikipedia. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens> (07 August, 2008).

"The stories about Hitchens mostly feature his stomach for whisky and dialectic. But I hear enough about him making lecherous grabs at male friends to ask him later, by e-mail, if he is bisexual. He says no. But when younger and prettier, he received much attention from men and at public school he “of course” had homosexual experiences – “everyone did”. He says the rumours probably refer to the time he “smooched” the brother of a girlfriend “who he then very much resembled and it seemed somehow irresistible”.

"His first wife has forgiven him for leaving her while pregnant for Carol Blue: “I’m invited to stay now. And we’re friends and quite good parents. At the time she was very cross but she says now: ‘When I met you, I realised I was looking for trouble.’ "

"But what he can’t abide is Peter’s Christian faith and belief in intelligent design...I wonder whether he envies the faithful as he gets older and death looms, since all that secularism offers in place of everlasting life is “life’s a bitch and then you die”.

Janice Turner, "Man v God." Times Online. <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article1855247.ece?openComment=true> (07 August, 2008).

Troy Jollimore, "Lord, are you there? Didn't think so." San Francisco Chronicle. <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/13/RVG4CPKERN1.DTL&type=books> (07 August, 2008).

OTHER REBUTTALS

Atheism Ranting: The Pity and Poverty of Modern Anti-Theism
Chapter-by-Chapter Reviews
D-Souza-Hitchens Debate
God is Greater than Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens v. Hitchens
Is Christianity Good for the World?
Hitchens Doesn't Have the Goods

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