Category Archives: Atheism

Religion for Radicals

Posted by on September 17, 2009 4 comments

The Immanent Frame has an interview up with Terry Eagleton that is well-worth a read. Here are just a couple of his memorable quotes:

Religion has become a very comfortable ideology for a dollar-worshipping culture. The scandal of the New Testament—the fact that it backs what America calls the losers, that it thinks the dispossessed will inherit the kingdom of God before the respectable bourgeois—all of that has been replaced, particularly in the States, by an idolatrous version. I’m presently at a university campus where we proudly proclaim the slogan “God, Country, and Notre Dame.” I think they have to be told, and indeed I have told them, that God actually takes little interest in countries. Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way. He slips out of your grasp if you try to do so. His concern is with universal humanity, not with one particular section of it. Such ideologies make it very hard to get a traditional version of Christianity across.

I think, actually, [Richard Dawkins is] a pre-Christian atheist, because he never understood what Christianity is about in the first place! That would be rather like Madonna calling herself post-Marxist. You’d have to read him first to be post-him. As I’ve said before, I think that Dawkins in particular makes such crass mistakes about the kind of claims that Christianity is making. A lot of the time, he’s either banging at an open door or he’s shooting at a straw target.

The God of Atheism

Posted by on May 29, 2009 10 comments

Seriously, how much does Herbert McCabe rule? Reading Eagleton lately has made me need to go back and read the real thing. Unlike the new atheists that Eagleton roundly eviscerates, McCabe displays with the utmost profundity that all true criticism of “the gods” that enslave humanity comes precisely from Christianity itself:

“Christianity begins with out father Abraham and with Moses and the rejection of the gods. It begins in that crucial period in the history of humankind when some men and women in the Middle East were called to reject the religion and worship of the gods and to listen, instead to the Voice commanding them to justice and mercy and righteousness among people. This Voice they called the Lord, and he is not a god, or else he is the God to end all gods. He proclaims himself, you might say, as the god of atheism: ‘I am the Lord . . . I brought you out of slavery . . . you shall have no gods.’ The Lord, if he is God, is the God of human liberation from slavery and idolatry of injustice.” (God Still Matters, p. 233)

You could say that McCabe may well be the harbinger of a new form of radically theocentric Christian atheism.

More of Eagleton’s Quips

Posted by on May 25, 2009 7 comments

Eagleton seems to be the king of disarming, funny one-liners. For example:

With dreary predictability, Daniel C. Dennett defines religions at the beginning of his Breaking the Spell as “social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought,” which as far as Christianity goes is rather like beginning a history of the potato by defining it as a rare species of rattlesnake. Predictably, Dennett’s image of God is a Satanic one. He also commits the Ditchkins-like blunder of believing that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world, which is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus. (p. 50).

Hilarious to be sure, but am I the only one starting to wonder if Eagleton relies a little too heavily on his fantastically brash “thinking this is ‘rather like’ this ridiculous other thing that makes you look stupid”-type statements?

Eagleton on Dawkins and Creation

Posted by on May 25, 2009 5 comments

Terry Eagleton’s new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution is, like most Eagleton books eminently entertaining and easy to read. I’ll have more developed (and actually rather critical) thoughts on the book later, but for now I’ll leave you with one of Eagleton’s trademark rhetorical flourishes:

Creation “out of nothing” is not testimony to how devilishly clever God is, dispensing as he can with even the most rudimentary raw materials, but to the fact that the world is not the inevitable culmination of some prior process, the upshot of some inexorable chain of cause and effect. Any such preceding chain of causality would have to be part of the world, and so could not count as the origin of it. Because there is necessity about the cosmos, we cannot deduce the laws which govern it from a priori principles, but need instead to look at how it actually works. This is the task of science. There is thus a curious connection between the doctrine of creation out of nothing and the professional life of Richard Dawkins. Without God, Dawkins would be out of a job. It is thus particularly churlish of him to call the existence of his employer into question. (p. 8-9)

Fish on Religion and Science

Posted by on May 19, 2009 2 comments

Stanley Fish has a great new post following up on criticism of his review of Terry Eagleton’s new book:

Some readers find a point of vulnerability in what they take to be religion’s flaccid, Polyanna-like, happy-days optimism. Religious people, says Delphinias, live their lives “in a state of blissfully blind oblivion.” They rely on holy texts that they are “to believe in without question.” (C.C.) “No evidence, no problem — just take it on faith.” (Michael) They don’t allow themselves to be bothered by anything. Religion, says Charles, “cannot deal with doubt and dissent,” and he adds this challenge: “What say you about that, Professor?”

What I say, and I say it to all those quoted in the previous paragraph, is what religion are you talking about? The religions I know are about nothing but doubt and dissent, and the struggles of faith, the dark night of the soul, feelings of unworthiness, serial backsliding, the abyss of despair. Whether it is the book of Job, the Confessions of St. Augustine, Calvin’s Institutes, Bunyan’s “Grace Abounding to The Chief of Sinners,” Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling” and a thousand other texts, the religious life is depicted as one of aspiration within the conviction of frailty. The heart of that life, as Eagleton reminds us, is not a set of propositions about the world (although there is some of that), but an orientation toward perfection by a being that is radically imperfect.

The key event in that life is not the fashioning of some proof of God’s existence but a conversion, like St. Paul’s on the road to Damascus, in which the scales fall from one’s eyes, everything visible becomes a sign of God’s love, and a new man (or woman), eager to tell and live out the good news, is born. “To experience personal transformation that in turn can truly move and shake this world, we must believe in something outside of ourselves” (Judith Quinton).”The kind of religion that moves me,” says Shannon . . . is the story of hope and love . . . not the idea that any particular story describes concrete historical ‘truth.’” “It isn’t about moral superiority,” says Richard. “It’s about humbly living an examined life held up to the mirror of a higher truth. It certainly does not seem to be about comfort.”

So to sum up, the epistemological critique of religion — it is an inferior way of knowing — is the flip side of a naïve and untenable positivism. And the critique of religion’s content — it’s cotton-candy fluff — is the product of incredible ignorance.

Where Eagleton’s Definitely Right

Posted by on May 4, 2009 5 comments

From Salon’s review of his new book:

Eagleton’s terminology is deliberately provocative, and some Christians won’t find his account of their beliefs, colored as it clearly is by the Catholic “liberation theology” of his youth, to be mainstream at all. Still, he is incontestably correct about two things: There is a long Judeo-Christian theological tradition that bears no resemblance to the caricature of religious faith found in Ditchkins, and atheists tend to take the most degraded and superstitious forms of religion as representative. It’s a little like judging the entire institution of heterosexual marriage on the basis of Eliot Spitzer’s conduct as a husband.

Yeah, pretty much.

Fish on Eagleton on “Ditchkins”

Posted by on May 4, 2009 6 comments

Stanley Fish investigates Terry Eagleton’s new book, Reason, Faith and Revolution. Whatever one thinks of Stanley Fish he is a great reader. Here’s a snippet of the article which describes Eagleton’s assault on Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens whom Eagleton derisively labels “Ditchkins.”

“Ditchkins,” Eagleton observes, cannot ground his belief “in the value of individual freedom” in scientific observation. It is for him an article of faith, and once in place, it generates facts and reasons and judgments of right and wrong. “Faith and knowledge,” Eagleton concludes, are not antithetical but “interwoven.” You can’t have one without the other, despite the Satanic claim that you can go it alone by applying your own independent intellect to an unmediated reality: “All reasoning is conducted within the ambit of some sort of faith, attraction, inclination, orientation, predisposition, or prior commitment.” Meaning, value and truth are not “reducible to the facts themselves, in the sense of being ineluctably motivated by a bare account of them.” Which is to say that there is no such thing as a bare account of them. (Here, as many have noted, is where religion and postmodernism meet.)

If this is so, the basis for what Eagleton calls “the rejection of religion on the cheap” by contrasting its unsupported (except by faith) assertions with the scientifically grounded assertions of atheism collapses; and we are where we always were, confronted with a choice between a flawed but aspiring religious faith or a spectacularly hubristic faith in the power of unaided reason and a progress that has no content but, like the capitalism it reflects and extends, just makes its valueless way into every nook and cranny.

For Eagleton the choice is obvious, although he does not have complete faith in the faith he prefers. “There are no guarantees,” he concedes that a “transfigured future will ever be born.” But we can be sure that it will never be born, he says in his last sentence, “if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals . . . continue to stand in its way.”

One more point. The book starts out witty and then gets angrier and angrier. (There is the possibility, of course, that the later chapters were written first; I’m just talking about the temporal experience of reading it.) I spent some time trying to figure out why the anger was there and I came up with two explanations.

One is given by Eagleton, and it is personal. Christianity may or may not be the faith he holds to (he doesn’t tell us), but he speaks, he says, “partly in defense of my own forbearers, against the charge that the creed to which they dedicated their lives is worthless and void.”

The other source of his anger is implied but never quite made explicit. He is angry, I think, at having to expend so much mental and emotional energy refuting the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins. I know just how he feels.

Eagleton’s McCabesque wit will always make him a wonderful read. The real question is when he’s just gonna be straight with everybody and self-identify as a Christian.

Debaptism?

Posted by on April 7, 2009 1 comment

Horstkoetter points us to a rather fascinating report from the BBC about a fellow who, baptized as an infant into the Anglican Church and now a committed atheist, has been issues a certificate of debaptism.

What I found particularly funny is that, according to this report, the Catholic Church is agreeing to remove those who wish to be debaptized from their records as members of the church, while the church of England will not do so. The reasoning: baptism is simply a matter of public record in England. Read more »

The New Atheism and the Cost of Secularism

Posted by on April 7, 2009 12 comments

“Can one really believe–as the New Atheists seem to do–that secular reason, if finally allowed to move forward, free of the constraining hand of archaic faith, will naturally make society more just, more humane, and more rational than it has been in the past? What evidence supports such an expectation? It is rather difficulty, placing everything in the scales, to vest a great deal of hope in modernity, however radiantly enchanting its promises, when one considers how many innocent lives have already been swallowed up in the flames of modern ‘progress.’ At the end of the twentieth century–the century when secularization became an explicit political and cultural project throughout the world–the forces of progressive ideology could boast an unprecedentedly vast collection of corpses, but not much in the way of new moral concepts. At least, not any we should be especially proud of. The best ideals to which we moderns continue to cling long antedate modernity; for the most part, all we can claim as truly, distinctively our own are our atrocities. One could, I suppose, argue that the secular project had somehow been diverted from its proper course at the dawn of the twentieth century, just as the new ideologies were assuming concrete political forms, or had been stalled or subverted by certain intransigent forces of unreason. This would be a more credible claim, however, if the twentieth century’s horrors were demonstrably aberrations within the larger story of the modern world. But, in fact, the process of secularization was marked, from the first, by the magnificent limitlessness of its violence. One does not have to harbor any nostalgia for the old order of Christendom, or of the church’s degrading association with the state, to be conscious of scularity’s cost. . . . In purely arithmetic terms, one cannot dispute the results. The old order could generally reckon its victims only in the thousands. But in the new age, the secular state, with all its hitherto unimagined capacities, could pursue its purely earthly ideals and ambitions only if it enjoyed the liberty to kill by the millions. How else could it spread its wings?”

~ David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions, 222-23.

For a Good Flaying

Posted by on March 31, 2009 24 comments

David Bentley Hart’s new book on the new atheists is out and, in his usual take-no-prisoners style, Hart pulls no punches. Rusty Reno has a good review of the book on the First Things website. Here’s a taste:

Thus, if we return to the usual Western Civ lecture hall cliché—ancient science was somehow stymied by dogmatic Christians, only to be recovered and given new life by Renaissance free thinkers—then we can see that it is a hopelessly inaccurate cartoon. As Hart points out, “The birth of modern physics and cosmology was achieved by Galileo, Kepler, and Newton breaking free not from the close confining prison of faith (all three were believing Christians, of one sort or another) but from the enormous burden of the millennial authority of Aristotelian science. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not a revival of Hellenistic science but its final defeat.”

Hart goes on to show how equally cartoonish pictures of Christian persecution, intolerance, and lust for religious warfare cannot stand up to judicious historical analysis. To these topics he adds some very important observations about our supposedly modern, rational, and progressive age. “We live now,” he writes, “in the wake of the most monstrously violent century in human history, during which the secular order (on both the political right and the political left), freed from the authority of religion, showed itself willing to kill on an unprecedented scale and with an ease of conscience worse than merely depraved.  If ever an age deserved to be thought an age of darkness, it is surely ours.”

If we Speak for God, then Everything is Permitted

Posted by on September 15, 2008 2 comments

Žižek takes Dostoyevsky’s dictum “If God doessn’t exist, then everything is permitted” to task, claming, in true Žižek fashion, that the opposite is in fact true: if God does exist everything is permitted to those who speak for God:

“[Dostoyevsky] couldn’t have been more wrong: the lesson of today’s terrorism is that if there is a God, then everything, even blowing up hundreds of innocent bystanders, is permitted to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, as the instruments of his will, since clearly a direct link to God justifies our violation of any ‘merely human’ constraints and considerations. The ‘godless’ Stalinist communists are the ultimate proof of it: everything was permitted to them since the perceived themselves as direct instruments of their divinity, the Historical Necessity of Progress towards Communism.” (Violence, 136)

Žižek makes a very good point, but one that needs two responses. The first response comes (at least to me) through Herbert McCabe. The only god we could ever “act directly on behalf of” is precisely that, “a god,” an inhabitant of the universe, a “top person” who legitimated our activities. The God of the Christian confession is not a top-person, a mere existent whom we could claim to represent directly. Rather God is the reason there is anything at all, the source of all being, and as such lies beyond our ability to directly mediate or claim. McCabe notes that most atheists think of the question of God as though religious people “claim to have discovered what the answer is, that there is some grand architect of the universe who designed it, just like Basil Spence only bigger and less visible, that there is a Top Person in the universe who issues arbitrary decrees for the rest of the persons and enforces them because he is the most powerful being around. Now if denying this claim makes you an atheist, then I and Thomas Aquinas and a whole Christian tradition are atheist too” (God Matters, 7). Only if God is some sort of existent, a “top person” who issues arbitrary decrees could we conceptualize God as the justification for acts of violence. And this is not the God of the Christian faith.

Secondly, a response via Rowan Williams, whose new book on Dostoevsky sheds quite a bit of light on the fragment the Žižek seeks to invert. Williams notes that

“[Dostoevsky] is not really interested in arguing the question–in general terms–of whether God exists. This does not mean that the reality of God is a matter of indifference to him or that he can be claimed from some for of contemporary nonrealism. But the different between the self-aware believer, the self-aware sinner and the conscious and deliberate atheist is not a disagreement over whether or not to add on item to the total sum of really existing things. It is a conflict about policies and possibilities for a human life: between someone who accepts the dependence of everything on divine gratuity and attempts to respond with some image of that gratuity, someone who accepts this dependence but fails to act appropriately in response, and someone who denies the dependence and is consequently faced with the unanswerable question of why any one policy for living is preferable to another.” (Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction, 227)

Further to this point, Rowan Williams’ theology offers a helpful response to Žižek’s critique in that for Williams it is completely impossible for the church to ever make a strict identification between their work and the will of God. The only possible “direct link” we have to the Christian God is the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ which forbids us from gingerly locating ourselves on the side of God and God’s cause. Rather, according to the Christian gospel we are addressed by God precisely as those whose agenda is at cross-purposes with God. Any attempt on the part of the people called by God to equate their will and action with that of God is always to exchange the true God for some miserable godlet, an idol. Moreover, the God whose power is manifest precisely as cross and resurrection does not allow those who would follow God recourse to any other mode of power:

“God’s power ‘tells us who we are’ only in the risk and reciprocity of God’s life with us in Christ, as God displays his identity in the terms of human freedom and human vulnerability. That is the power by which the whole world is given newness of life, humanity itself is given new definition. And because it is that kind of power, refusing to functionalize and enslave what it works with, the process of preaching a transfiguring gospel must take place in a community that resists the idea that one human group can ever have license to define another in terms of its own needs or goals or fantasies. All must be free to find that ultimate self-definition in the encounter with a God who does not use us as tools for his gratification but shares a world of risk and contingency with us to bring us to our fullest liberty in relation with him and each other.” (On Christian Theology, 288-89)

Precisely because our only “direct link” to God is that of the cross and resurrection, Christians can never assume any posture of power than that displayed by God with us. As such, just as God enters into our lives on the path of cruciform vulnerability, so Christians are forbidden to deal with others, including religious others from any standpoint that would instrumentalize them in terms of our own needs, agendas, or fantasies. The cross forbids us any optic that would allow us to see other persons as obstacles to be overcome or destroyed for the sake of our own ends. Rather we are called to kenotically allow the other to be the other, trusting their transformation to the God of the resurrection. Christians, far from having their ambitions legitimated, are called to rest in the contingency and risk of not securing what they perceive the proper place of the other. For the acts of violence and domination that Žižek analyzes are ultimately reducible to a perverse attempt to narrate the other in a particular way, to circumscribe the other as a particular sort of other whose place must be determined by my ideology.

As such, I submit that only the Word of God in Christ, which calls us to this life of kenotic defferal-in-trust is able to actualize events of true peace in this world. For it establishes that we do not speak for God, God speaks for God in Christ. The proper mode of Christian action is always first silence before that speech which calls us out of our delusions and fantasies and into a life of vulnerability and contingency. Only such a mode of living, participating in the kenosis of Christ can be a true event of peace in a world of violences.

Žižek and the Logic of Religious Violence

Posted by on September 14, 2008 6 comments

In his book, Violence, Slavoj Žižek contests the standard story that religious adherents use in response to the claim that religion causes violence. Generally it is claimed that perpetrators of religious violence are “only abusing and perverting the noble spiritual message of their creed.” Žižek argues instead that we should wise up and admit that religions simply are violent and thus “restore the dignity of atheism, perhaps our only chance for peace.” In other words, Žižek calls religions to the mat, insisting that any easy answer of “they aren’t true representatives of my faith…” is necessarily a dodge.

However, what is ironic is that Žižek utilizes the exact same logic in his defense of the moral superiority of atheism to religion. He claims that we should “renounce religion, including its secular reverberations such as Stalinist communism” and that while “there are cases of pathological atheists who are able to commit mass murder just for pleasure,” these events are “rare exceptions.” Here Žižek is simply marshaling the same argument flippantly used by religious adherents to explain away the violent behavior of their fellow-believers. He claims that events of atheist-perpetrated violence are simply exceptions that abuse and pervert the noble morality of true atheism. Why should the exact same argument be more believable as a defense of atheism than of religion?

Myths of Religious Violence

Posted by on September 3, 2008 8 comments

Vinoth Ramachandra’s recent book, Subverting Global Myths, is a tour de force on the major global issues facing our world. Ramachandra offers six interesting chapters which attack, head-on, standard accounts of the modern Western mythos that governs our age. He deals with myths of terrorism, religious violence, human rights, multicultralism, science, and postcolonialism. In each case he does the hard work of looking seriously and circumspectly at the global issue in question rather than allowing certain forms of jingoistic rhetoric to define how we understand such phenomena. This is an incredibly crucial theological task. The kind of historical specificity and engagement that Ramachandra brings to our evaluation of things like terrorism and religious violence is badly needed in a world that too often trades in empty slogans, spun by ideologues.

In the process, Ramachandra is just incredibly insightful in the perspective he brings to certain key issues. Take for example, these quotes in which he is taking to task the notion that religious is the “cause” of violence:

“Consider the following analogy. Given the universality of sexual experience, it is hardly surprising that this powerful human drive should also be the site of rape, pedophilia, bestiality, genital mutilation and other grotesque acts. most of us woudl regard these acts as twisted perversions of a healthy and important part of our human identity and flourishing. (Indeed, we have been taught by feminists that rape is primarily about power, not sexual pleasure.) Why not apply the same reasoning to religious faiths? Given the universality of religious experience, it is hardly surprising that certain acts of grotesque violence should not only occur in religious communities but be imbued with religious meanings and justification.” (p. 79)

“Christians of all people, should be least surprised by the phenomenon of religious violence. At the heart of Christian faith stands a cross, an instrument of torture, degradation and mass execution. Orthodox Christian theology has always insisted that the one who was crucified at the instigation of the religious leaders of his society was no less than the incarnate Son of God. A God who has chosen to be vulnerable to suffering and death cuts away the ground from beneath an atheism of protest, because protest atheism envisages God as a cruel tyrant who manipulates people and moves them around like pieces on a chessboard. It also cuts away the ground from beneath every form of religious theism that seeks to co-opt God in the service of a political ideology.” (p. 82)

Ramachandra’s book represents the best of Christian social criticism. A profound understanding of Christian theology and the global realities that are shaping our world. Ramachandra is neither an alarmist, an ideologue, or a sectarian. Rather, he is simply a Christian who is willing to do the hard work of engaging in thick description and careful critique of the dangerous myths which shape the current global order. His book should be commended to all of us interested in forming a Christian way of understanding and being in the contemporary world of culture and power.

Milbank on Scientism, Sex, and Personhood

Posted by on June 5, 2008 8 comments

The latest issue of The Other Journal has a fascinating interview with John Milbank on contemporary atheism.  In the process a whole mess of things get talked about, including the sexualization of contemporary culture in contrast with the sort of inverted totalitarianism that obtains in regard to all other forms of freedom.  Here’s just one snippet:

“Science is the freedom to know and is Faustian. Beyond this is the right to choose one’s lifestyle. But of course one can’t interfere with the freedom or happiness of others nor the power of the State. The really crucial thing here which the left has missed is that sexual freedoms have increased exponentially while all other freedoms have declined.

Today in Great Britain you scarcely have the right to demonstrate and a higher proportion of the population is in prison than are in China. The boy at the shop counter with no customers is not allowed to read a book to improve himself all day, but who cares what he gets up to with sex and drink after the shop closes? Of course there’s also a double think about sex—its all OK, male sexuality is nearly always exploitative, etc… But in general it would seem that, as Adorno and Horkheimer predicted, sexualization is intended to keep us all quiet: neurotic, hysterical, frustrated and unhappy but still ‘looking’. With sex divided from procreation, science and sexual freedom come together.

So by supporting the total disjuncture of sex and procreation, the left is really supporting a new mode of fascism. ‘Women’ are lined up with science and choice in order to produce a new kind of ideal human subjectivity—male and autonomous and yet pliant in ‘female’ manner. The newly envisaged female body is the final site of the coming together of scientific objectivity and absolute freedom of choice. Perhaps one could even speak here of a new racism of the human race as such—it’s to be made the object of an endless ‘objective’ improvement and expression of a will to freedom/will to power. Of course this also means that the specific phenomenology of the female body is destroyed. It’s denied that this body is inherently linked both to the male body (as also vice-versa) and to another body that is itself and yet becomes not itself—the baby. Having denied the link of babies to men and also to women save as objects of their (‘male’) choice, babies thereby become pure consumer objects and all human personhood is abandoned.”

–Ben Suriano, “Three Questions on Modern Atheism: An Interview with John Milbank“, The Other Journal June 4 (2008)

The Drama of Atheist Humanism Continues…

Posted by on October 19, 2007 5 comments

 I recently came across this interesting post by decorated atheist blogger, P.Z. Myers.  He related a rather disturbing lecture that was given recently by Christopher Hitchens, in which he definitively wed militant atheism to American imperialism at its worst.  Here is a lengthy quote from his post:

[Hitchens] told us what the most serious threat to the West was (and you know this line already): it was Islam. Then he accused the audience of being soft on Islam, of being the kind of vague atheists who refuse to see the threat for what it was, a clash of civilizations, and of being too weak to do what was necessary, which was to spill blood to defeat the enemy. Along the way he told us who his choice for president was right now — Rudy Giuliani — and that Obama was a fool, Clinton was a pandering closet fundamentalist, and that he was less than thrilled about all the support among the FFRF for the Democratic party. We cannot afford to allow the Iranian theocracy to arm itself with nuclear weapons (something I entirely sympathize with), and that the only solution is to go in there with bombs and marines and blow it all up. The way to win the war is to kill so many Moslems that they begin to question whether they can bear the mounting casualties.

It was simplistic us-vs.-them thinking at its worst, and the only solution he had to offer was death and destruction of the enemy.

This was made even more clear in the Q&A. He was asked to consider the possibility that bombing and killing was only going to accomplish an increase in the number of people opposing us. Hitchens accused the questioner of being incredibly stupid (the question was not well-phrased, I’ll agree, but it was clear what he meant), and said that it was obvious that every Moslem you kill means there is one less Moslem to fight you … which is only true if you assume that every Moslem already wants to kill Americans and is armed and willing to do so. I think that what is obvious is that most Moslems are primarily interested in living a life of contentment with their families and their work, and that an America committed to slaughter is a tactic that will only convince more of them to join in opposition to us.

Basically, what Hitchens was proposing is genocide. Or, at least, wholesale execution of the population of the Moslem world until they are sufficiently cowed and frightened and depleted that they are unable to resist us in any way, ever again.

This is insane. I entirely agree that we are looking at a clash of civilizations, that there are huge incompatibilities between different parts of the world, and that we face years and years of all kinds of conflict between us, with no easy resolution. However, one can only resolve deep ideological conflicts by the extermination of one side in video games and cartoons. It’s not going to work in the real world. We can’t simply murder enough Moslems to weaken them into irrelevance, and even if we could, that’s not the kind of culture to which I want to belong.

A clash of whole civilizations is a war of ideas. The way we can ‘conquer’ is on the cultural and economic level: the West should not invade and destroy, but should instead set an example, lead with strength, and be the civilization that every rational citizen of the other side wants to emulate. Yes, there will be wars and skirmishes, because not everyone on either side is rational, but the bloodshed isn’t the purpose. Hitchens would make it the raison d’etre of the whole Western effort.

This whole last third of his talk had me concerned about the first part. He had just told us in strong terms about the failures of religion and its detrimental effect on our culture, and now he was explaining to us how the solution in the Middle East was to simply kill everyone who disagreed with you. He didn’t relate the two parts of his talk, which was unfortunate. I’d like to know whether he thinks the way atheists ought to end religion in America is to start shooting Baptists, or whether he sees other ways to educate and enlighten … in which case I wonder why he doesn’t see any virtue in applying those same methods to Islam. I didn’t ask the question since the line for the microphone was long, and I had a depressing feeling that the solution would involve sending the Baptists over to Iraq to kill and be killed. This is not my freethought movement.

The Hitchens solution is not my solution.

While I applaud Myers for at least having some moral backbone in the face of Hitchens’ ridiculousness, I can’t help but think that Htichens’ perspective is a bit more perversely logical.  It may be impractical, and almost certainly is unachievable, but I can’t fault Hitchens’ logic – if in fact he’s correct that it is religion that “poisons everything”.  And at this point I’ll cede the floor to some experts who have far more precedent to speak to such cultural issues: Matt Stone and Trey Parker.

In the most recent season of South Park we have been given a wonderful two-part episode dedicated entirely to atheism, and particularly to Richard Dawkins (though you could substitute Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens and the story would remain absolutely the same since these guys are all pretty much clones of each other). 

 Anways, upon learning that s/he has to teach evolution in class, the 4th grade teaching, Mr. Garrison (technically now Ms. Garrison, I suppose) throws a moral fit and will only relate evolution to his/her students as a long process of ”retarded fish-frogs” having “butt-sex with a monkey”.  So, to rectify the problem, Richard Dawkins is brought in to do some proper scientific teaching.  In the process, Dawkins, inexplicably attracted to the now-female Garrison ends up convincing him/her of atheism and the two join forces to rid the world of religion using Dawkins’ brilliance and Ms. Garrison’s “balls” (i.e. he’s an asshole to anyone who questions atheism).

Meanwhile, Eric Cartman, unable to wait for the Nintendo Wii to come out has Butters help freeze him up in the mountains so he can be thawed out three weeks later when the most awesome gaming system in the history of the world is made available to children everywhere.  Well, naturally a freak avalanche buries him where he lies frozen in the ground from som 500 years, only to be thawed out in the future – a future in which all the world is atheist thanks to the brilliant Dawkins and the ballsy Ms. Garrison.

However, it does not take long before the Wii-stricken Cartman finds himself embroiled in the vicious wars which are currently raging between the various factions of atheists who war of which answer to the “great question” (which turns out to be what atheists should call themselves) is more scientific.  So, as the United Atheist League, the United Atheist Alliance and the Allied Atheist Alliance (this one made up entirely of the now-sentient atheist sea-otters) war with one another and seek to annihilate each other completely, all the while rejoicing joyously at the absence of the foolish religions of the past.

 As they war against each other with battle cries of “Our science is great!”, “Science dammit!”, and “Oh, my science!”,  Cartman seeks a way to get back to his time so as to finally be able to play the Wii.  In so doing he gets hold a of timephone with which he can call the past and ends up letting it slip to Dawkins that Ms. Garrison wan’t born a woman, at which point Dawkins runs vomiting from her bedroom with his jilted tranny lover yelling after him that he’s a going to “burn in hell.”  And so the future is saved, with all humans and sea-otters living together in zen-like harmony without the tyrany of atheism! 

Peppered throughout are razor-sharp lines like when Stan Marsh questions Dawkins, asking genuinely if evolution might be the answer to “how” and not the answer to “why”, only to be slapped in the dunce chair by Garrison with the dunce cap reading “I have faith.”  Or likewise, when Garrison, prior to being converted to atheism by the eloquent Dawkins states that he’s not an atheist because “you can’t disprove God.”  Dawkins then responds “Well, you can’t disprove that there’s a flying spaghetti monster either, so should I believe in a flying spaghetti monster?”  To which Garrison (channeling the writers, I assure you) responds, “Oh WOW, you’re right!  THANK YOU, RICHARD!  It’s so simple!  God’s a spaghetti monster!  Guess what everyone?  I’m an atheist!!”

The point, both of all this fun rambling, and this particular episode of South Park should be painfully obvious.  The common throwaway line that religion is the source of all violence in the world and atheism would lead to a great era of peace is pure fantasy.  So, as Hitchens’ goes on advocating the genocide of religious “fanatics”, I’ll continue to watch South Park and the Daily Show.  In an age where all political posturing is nothing more than theatrics, at least we’ll never be short on entertainment.

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