Hitchens Eulogizes Falwell
Very topical since I plan on buying Hitchens's latest book, God Is Not Great, this afternoon.
posted by Lynn @ 1:22 PM
4 comments
State Street
"You are who you think you ain't."
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Very topical since I plan on buying Hitchens's latest book, God Is Not Great, this afternoon.
About Me
- Name: Lynn
- Location: Chicago
I avoid identity issues, but I will tell you I am a frumpy geezer.
Previous Posts
- Presidential Election 2008: special State Street b...
- Toxic Political Blogs
- Just say no to Middle East conflict
- Hugo Chavez: some logic please
- Who is the dupe?
- The Venezuela/Soviet Union Analogy: does it hold w...
- Tailor Made for Drifting & Dreaming
- Boot Liquor: Dial it Up!
- Rebellion, Please
- The Queen and I
Stuff
4 Comments:
Oh, yes, Hitch has been a favorite of mine for many years. I have followed and enjoyed his iconoclasm and wit as a modern-day Oscar Wilde (only angrier). But boy, can he write.
Here's a couple of paragraphs from the first chapter in the book you have (already?) bought about us atheists,
There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness. We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form of one of man's most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no spot on earth is or could be "holier" than another: to the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock, we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or the gallery to another, or to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty. Some of these excursions to the bookshelf or the lunch or the gallery will obviously, if they are serious, bring us into contact with belief and believers, from the great devotional painters and composers to the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Newman. These mighty scholars may have written many evil things or many foolish things, and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow. Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism, as did, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor hanged by the Nazis for his refusal to collude with them. We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness.
While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way-one might cite Pascal-and some of it is dreary and absurd-here one cannot avoid naming C. S. Lewis-both styles have something in common, namely the appalling load of strain that they have to bear. How much effort it takes to affirm the incredible! The Aztecs had to tear open a human chest cavity every day just to make sure that the sun would rise. Monotheists are supposed to pester their deity more times than that, perhaps, lest he be deaf. How much vanity must be concealed-not too effectively at that-in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan? How much self-respect must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness of one's own sin? How many needless assumptions must be made, and how much contortion is required, to receive every new insight of science and manipulate it so as to "fit" with the revealed words of ancient man-made deities? How many saints and miracles and councils and conclaves are required in order first to be able to establish a dogma and then-after infinite pain and loss and absurdity and cruelty-to be forced to rescind one of those dogmas? God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.
Orla
Orla,
I have not had time to get far into the book. I am looking forward to it though. I agree that he can write, even though I disagree with his stance on the Iraq War.
The Religious Right confuses the right to express one's religious belief with the falsely presumed "right" to impose their beliefs as public policy. Now, they see any resistance to subordinating to their opinions as being anti-religion.
Religion has been the progenitor of both good and ill. Reason is the threshing machine with which the founders separated the two.
The more forcefully one claims to speak for God, the more certain I am he does not.
epm,
Nicely said!
Post a Comment
<< Home