From yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Hitchens anticipates that critics will point to those crimes against humanity, dwarfing religion’s sins, committed in the name of secular ideas in the 20th century. He attempts to deflect the challenge with sophistry: “It is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists.” But who is behaving defensively here? Mr. Hitchens is the one who unequivocally insists that religion poisons everything, and it is Mr. Hitchens who holds out the utopian hope that eradicating it will subdue humanity’s evil propensities and resolve its enduring questions.
Nor is his case bolstered by his observation that 20th-century totalitarianism took on many features of religion. That only brings home the need to distinguish, as Mr. Hitchens resolutely refuses to do, between authentic and corrupt, and just and unjust, religious teachings. And it begs the question of why the 20th-century embrace of secularism unleashed human depravity of unprecedented proportions.
Even were he to concede that religion doesn’t poison everything, Mr. Hitchens presumably still would cling to his claim that the findings of modern science prove that God does not exist. Thanks to the knowledge we have attained of how the natural order actually operates — in particular the discoveries of Charles Darwin and modern physics — he concludes that “all attempts to reconcile faith with science and reason are consigned to failure and ridicule.”
This conclusion, however, contradicts that of the late Stephen Jay Gould, to whom Mr. Hitchens himself refers as a “great paleontologist” and whose authority he invokes in support of the proposition that randomness is an essential feature of evolution. Noting surveys that showed that half of all scientists are religious, Gould commented amusingly that “Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs — and equally compatible with atheism.”
This is a wonderful article, but then it appears that the “New Atheists” have made pretty easy targets of themselves. I am more than a little amazed to still hear people blather on about “progress” and so forth as though the 20th century was something other than bloodbath perpetrated primarily by atheists and their allies. Hitchens take, apparently, is a cute one: Stalin’s problem was religion. Yeah, right. He thought so, too.
As far as Christians supposedly saying things like “we’re no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists,” Richard Neuhaus pointed out somewhere that the all-powerful, all-awful Inquisition presided over the execution of some 3000 people over a three hundred year span between the 11th and 13th centuries. That comes to 10 people a year on the entire continent. I think if you check the statistics, you’ll find that more people died of bee stings in that time period than were put to death by the Inquisition. Stalin, of course, killed that many on a slow afternoon.
The popularity of Hitchens & co., like that of Dan Brown, will likely breed a spate of helpful books that can be used to begin to correct the Christian Church’s historical record. I hope we can begin to break the spell of bad history, which generally amounts to little more than anti-Christian propaganda, and which feeds the Crisis of Christian Confidence that lies and the base of the reappraiser movement. The fact is, Christians, particularly Medieval Christians, have generally been better people than we have been taught to give them credit for. They largely opposed slavery (no one owned a serf, for instance), held a high view of women (medieval women, on the whole, owned more property, ran more businesses, and had more legal and social freedom than their great-however-many-times granddaughters in the putatively wonderful Renaissance, this mostly due to the Renaissance’s reintroduction of ancient pagan Roman law, which treated women basically as chattel), and were more respectful of nature (medieval thinkers saw nature as a book written by God in which we can read the Gospel – hence the medieval bestiary) than their secularized descendants who continue to see nature either as something to worship or to be put thoughtlessly to use.
Be that as it may, the Church has been helped by her enemies before (one thinks particularly of Marcion). In responding with confidence in the Gospel, in God’s leadership of His people (and of course, with a clear-eyed understanding of mankind’s sinfulness – the Nostalgic is no truer to history than the Progressive), in both the Word written in Scripture and the Word lived in His Church, we can stand for the entirety of the Christian faith and more boldly challenge the alien ideologies (one thinks particularly, at the moment, of those of the homosexual movement) that seek to subvert her witness and divide her children.
I agree it’s a good piece and I even agree with almost all of DM’s comment (though not the gay bit). As a boring Classicist, could I just point out that the belief that Epicurus and Lucretius were atheists is very heterodox scholarship and tenable only on the very strained hypotheses that the Epicurean gods were ‘non-realist’ gods or that the Epicureans, running scared after Socrates’ condemnation, only pretended to believe in the gods. It is, however, true and important that Epicureanism keeps the gods right out of the workings of the universe, including the human world.
H, like Dawkins, makes a tiresomely false assumption, that his expertise in one discipline makes him an expert in unrelated disciplines. Like Dawkins, H’s arguments are weak and full of holes; like Dawkins, his method is the that-foreigner-doesn’t-understand-me- but -maybe-he-will-if-I-shout. H is preaching to his own choir, but I am not sure there is anyone out there who wants to take the time to demonstrate his rhetorical deficiencies.
The loud, militant atheist is a relatively new thing, and I still wonder why he has appeared at this time.
Madelaine Murray never got so much good press. In any case, it is clear that Hitchens has a religion, and his loud assertions are the usual noise from a True Believer. This crew is, by any standard fanatical, so I wonder why no one objects to their brand of worship, since it is clear that they would not hesitate to push the button that would remove all believers in a deity from this veil of tears. LM