Letters to the Editor
-
This is silliness
Chris Hitchens asserts a priori there is no diety there is no reason to think of one there is no argument that flows from even discussing it. Period. Therefore anyone who does is engaged in a meaningless and dangerous waste of time. All the letters here which try to put nuance on that are missing the point. Chris Hitchens position is no different from one of any of the Stalinist states of the past and present who simply wave off religion as anathema. Period. Full stop. By decree. It's about conciliation or a 'meeting of the minds'. It is about the statue of the Great Leader in the town square that every year the whole village lays flowers on for the the Great Leader's Birthday. The party has spoken.
Picture Dr. Dawkins if he was an alcoholic mid level regional Soviet bureaucrat.
-
@Lev Raphael
I'm sorry, but we humans have been in our current form for about 150,000 years, and God has only been around for about 2500 of them. That's a long gap.
I'd say your devil looks a lot like God.
Besides, the same brain that kills for God, kills for Authoritarianism as God with a different name. It's the same dogmatic "belief" in an absolute ideology given birth to by the fundamentalist mind, the fearful mind, the mind that denies the empirical unity of all life.
-
@coolidge
[post scriptum question: If 91% of the USA believes in god why do these atheist books keep getting published and publicized?]
Because that 91% only read one book and it's given out free on street corners and hotel rooms.
-
Christopher Hitchens's take on God
We humans appear finally to be exploring new and different roads to a better understanding of our general nature, a search which will hopefully lead us to less destructive collective action. Popular roads to go down are those which tend to blame religion, God, and ideologies of all sorts. Christopher Hitchens is clearly one who singles out God. But in fact this is scapegoating rather than exploring. More useful are the works of people who tryto find an understanding of the underpinnings of human nature, ordinary human nature if you will, as it manifests in non-pathological individuals and in groups which may or may not become pathological. They ask questions like: Why do fairly normal humans turn beliefs into murderous ideologies; why don’t humans act more ethically; why is human empathy limited? Why are we so sure we are right? Why can’t very smart people see the damage they are wreaking? What can we do to better understand ourselves and our own destructive tendencies? Books like Hitchens’s tend to set us against each other yet again, defending and entrenching our “either/or” mentalities rather than growing in our understanding of ourselves and just perhaps in our abilities to control our dark sides. E.K. Buddenhagen
-
Religion, Theology, and the Absence Thereof
I teach philosophy in a theology department at a religious school. I feel I have a pretty decent grasp of the history of world religions, theology, and philosophy. This stuff is very important to people. Smart people can think critically about it.
Some of it might be true. The survival of subjective consciousness (i.e., the immortality of the soul) is false. The resurrection of the flesh when Jesus returns at the end of time is farfetched myth. A virgin giving birth to the savior of the world? A brilliant, albeit derivative, story. False, but so is Lord of the Rings, and it's also a nice story.
For those intellectual theists out there, forgive me, but please explain what it is you believe in without using metaphorical, romanticized language. Tell us exactly what it is. I am willing to listen. I have come to my current state of belief by not being convinced by the evidence in favor of the existence of any gods. The burden of proof is not on me to disprove gods, angels, demons, life after death, intelligent design, cosmic consciousness, et al. You have to prove it, or admit that your beliefs are rationally ungrounded. Take the leap of faith, if you will. I won't because I can't. It's just plain silly.
Vishnu stole my lunch money!
-
@RealName
Pretty ironic post. In addition to misusing "a priori", It sounds like you're making statements and conclusions a priori to reading the book.
a priori, literally "of the former" means knowledge independent of prior experience. I'd say we all have plenty of experience with the "God" effect, whether believers or not, and enough experience and knowledge of history to make several conclusions.
Since I haven't read this book, I feel it's dishonest to make direct comments/conclusions and dramatic emotional statements that are pure rhetoric and pure assumption.
-
Mister Harvey
Along with your valid and insightful criticisms of Mister Hitchens' nonetheless valuable polemic, what you do within your essay is simply beautiful. Sir, you succinctly argue for the emotional component to the god debate. I thank you.
As an unbeliever myself, to paraphrase the opening of my favourite of your beautifully excised paragraphs, I have long been stymied by my own base contradiction. When the day is bright and temperate, grass springing yellowgreen and sky implacably cerulean; when the meal and company have been delightful; when the sexual union has seemed uniting and much more than simply releasing; when I am ill with the dog lying beside me in seemingly clear empathy; when everything seems somehow more than perfect, I am overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude. I say to my companions "I don't know who or what to thank, though I have to thank someone or something for this".
That truth is sometimes lost within the labyrinthine arguments of those who argue against religion. "The ineffable" is the phrase that comes to mind. Facts do not change attitudes. Surely I am small minded and fearful of what lurks beyond the perimeter of the campfire's bowl of light. Religion though, and its attendant god concept, is not only about protection from bogeys. Sometimes overflowing from somewhere within me is so much gratitude for the joy, the inescapable, ineluctable wonderfulness of life, of Life, that I feel I must give thanks to someone, to something. Perhaps my thanks simply fade off into the ether. I expect that is the case, though of course I cannot know for sure. I do know though, there is no room for thought at those moments of transcendence, only gratitude to whatever, call it the Universe. Hitchens made reference to it, in much less sentimental a fashion, when recently debating the Reverend Al Sharpton on this topic in New York City. He spoke of his "not being able to do without" the poetry of John Donne, so I believe he in some fashion understands, while he removes in his mind attribution of that feeling to anything supernatural.
By taking the Hallmark, syrupy, sentimental aspect out of religion and of the God concept, Hitchens and so many others of his ilk do themselves and their cause no good turn. They need better to take it into account and answer it directly, as it is a primary basis for many people's call to religion and that cry is not answered by logic.