Letters to the Editor
-
Nietzsche Would Laugh
Thank you for taking this book to task. The American media has proven itself all too ready to lap up the arguments of Hitchens and his ilk. Recently, “Hitch” has been spotted peddling his panacea via The Daily Show, Lou Dobbs Tonight, and the New York Times (where he lurks in the background, encouraging Michael Kinsley’s obsequious “review”). Sam Harris, for his even less tactfully written The End of Faith (2004), received a Penn award, millions of readers, and a contract for sequels.
What frightens me most about these two books in particular is the way they glibly attack toleration of moderate religious belief. This divisive approach is an easy sell, but it fuels the fire for more hatred and future self-important dismissals. Wouldn’t Nietzsche, whom you invoke in your introduction, laugh uproariously at the insistence on viewing the science/religion debate as an either/or proposition? To rephrase: aren’t the anti-moderate atheists nearly as poisonous as the obvious problems they locate? Hitchens and Harris, of course, have the right to air valid concerns about the lack of separation between church and state and the vigor of the Christian Right in the U.S. But their approach will only exacerbate the already steep divides between rural and urban Americas and between America and the Muslim world. We need less ranting and more discussion. We should focus on fostering a divide between religious moderates and religious fundamentalists, not on lumping them together.
Why, then, is the American media so immune to intelligent public discourse on religion? Continental Europe does not have this problem. Nietzsche was a polemic writer, but his ideas were both salubrious and widely read. More recently, in 1995, the Milanese newspaper Corriere della sera ran a series of polite but incisive “conversations” between Umberto Eco, an agnostic, and Maria Martini, a Catholic Cardinal. The conversations were later published as a book, Belief or Non-belief? (2000). Why does such thoughtful discussion of faith look utterly foreign from across the Atlantic? Why are we treated only to Hitchens vs. Sharpton? Such debates are nothing more than pseudo-intellectual remakes of Freddy vs. Jason and Alien vs. Predator.
-
Ben, your hostility marks you as a loose cannon. The follow is for others who have been following the discussion.
I'm not religious, so I can't be a zealot. It's merely reasonable that if there are two sides to a story, both should be examined. If the point is that some of people who know a person (be it Mother T, Bill Clinton, or Abe Lincoln) deride that person, but other people as familiar with that person offer praise, both arguments should be examined.
Anytime one is relying on personal accounts, one should remember Rufus Griswald. This is the man Edgar Allan Poe Poe appointed as his literary executor, who made a living from then on speaking on Poe, and describing him as an alcoholic and a drug abuser? He lied. Hugely. And an accurate view of Poe was skewed for decades, mabye forever. The lies still linger in the popular imagination. He had a grudge against Poe, and though he knew Poe and was even appointed by Poe his literary executor, he's completley unreliable as a source, less reliable than biographers who never even knew Poe and did not even live in his time. And Griswald might have known Poe better than anyone else in his lifetime who commented on Poe. But he's still, as the facts have shown, utterly unreliable.
So it takes more evidence that a person's claims to prove, to document something. I've read the attacks on Mother Theresa. They aren't any better substantiated than those of people who knew and loved her. So I can't rely on one more than the other.
-
Christopher1988, Well kudos to you for not being a
zealot. It doesn't change the facts of my posting.
-
Religion
From the perspective of an abode so far beyond the abodes of universes that it would be nonsense to even try and assess the distance, it would be observable that those who oppose God and religion are upon exactly the same wavelength as those of us humans here on earth who promote God and religion. The affirmation in denial and the denial in affirmation!
The thing about God and no God is that they assure dialogue for the individual and society. Without them we would be hurled into the vastness in no time whatsoever. Nietzsche knew this, and because he couldn't speak wholistically about God he took the negative route with just as profound a result as if he had taken the positive way. He knew that only in silence and solitude - beyond belief and disbelief - is found the shining way of the heart. God or no God is meaningless next to that.
Hitchen's doesn't sound to be wishing to lead the way for anyone but himself, which is the hallmark of success in today's publishing environment, and the only sure-fire way of being known today. The bogeyman for him is God and that's all there is to it. Who can blame him? Its obviously one of the effects life has had on him and is therefore valid for him.
Giles Harvey may have done better to write of how such a view as Hitchens' can be valid and practical. Hitchens,afterall, is doing nothing more than fortifying his own mind against a very real, violent and endemic religous irrationality. His rationale may be second or third rate to genius, but at least its a rationale and... boy... losing the mind is no avenue of delights. That kid may well have need of his dad to run rings around him on the soccer field in order to learn.
-
From Voinovich's "Monumental Propaganda"
The Marxist-Leninist were good Marxist, kind people. They wanted to esablish a good life on earth for good people and a bad life on earth for bad people, but it had to be done in accordance with the World Outlook. And therefore they killed bad people, but whenever they could, they left the good people alive. The Stalinists, however were essentially democrates-they killed everybody without distinction, and they regarded the World Outlook not as a dogma but as a guide to action. Consequently, the Marxist-Leninists were regarded as humanists and devotes of the Sole Correct Scientific World Outlook, while the Stalinists were devoted to Stalin and were prepared to follow him in any direction, wherever it might lead them.