Christopher Hitchens' lies do atheism no favors

[mgc1961]

While a scientist like Richard Dawkins might be forgiven for not having his philosophic/aesthetic house in order, no such tolerance should be allowed for his notorious comrade-in-arms Christopher Hitchens. In spite of the fact that Hitchens regularly invokes the authority of empiricism and reason—he condemns anything that “contradicts science or outrages reason,” and he concedes something that no poet would: that “proteins and acids … constitute our nature”—he was not a scientist but a literary critic, a journalist, and a public intellectual. So, you would think that the perspective of the arts, literature, and philosophy would find a prominent place in his thought. But that is not the case. He proposes to clear away religion in the name of science and reason. Literature’s function in this brave new world is to depose the Bible and provide an opportunity to study the “eternal ethical questions.”

Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great” is an intellectually shameful book. To be intellectually shameful is to be dishonest, to tell less than you know, or ought to know, and to shape what you present in a way that misrepresents the real state of affairs. In this sense, and in Hitchens’s own term, his book lacks “decency.” (You may think that I lack decency for attacking a man so recently deceased, but I do no more than what Hitchens himself did. Speaking of Jerry Falwell, Hitchens pointedly refuses a “compassionate word” for this “departed fraud.”)

Like Hitchens, I am an atheist, if to be an atheist means not believing in a CEO God who sits outside his creation, proclaiming edicts, punishing hapless sinners, seeking vengeance on his enemies, and picking sides in times of war. This God and his hypocrite followers have been easy targets for enlightened wit since Rabelais, Molière, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, and our own Mark Twain. Of course, this God and his faithful are still very much a problem politically, and Hitchens never lets us forget that unhappy fact. Our own religious right is real, and international fundamentalism is dangerous and frightening, especially for the sad people who must live with it.

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/23/christopher_hitchens_lies_do_atheism_no_favors/

[deucemagnet]

1. Things must be slow at Salon.

This is the second Sunday in a row that they've thrown out some red meat to generate traffic from outraged atheists. Salon was good back in the day, and they've fallen so, so far.

[JoeyT]

2. Curtis White might be an atheist,

but he's not a rationalist. He doesn't even sound like an atheist.

In short, the rich philosophical debates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been nearly totally abandoned, argues Curtis White. An atheist himself, White fears what this new turn toward “scientism” will do to our culture if allowed to flourish without challenge.

After all, is creativity really just chemicals in the brain? Is it wrong to ponder “Why is there something instead of nothing?” or “What is our purpose on Earth?” These were some of the original concerns of the Romantic movement, which pushed back against the dogmas of science in a nearly forgotten era.

http://www.mhpbooks.com/books/the-science-delusion/

An anti-science, anti-materialist atheist. Yyyuuuup.

[skepticscott]

3. Another "I'm an atheist, but...."

hack job from someone desperate to garner attention pay the bills. It really becomes tiresome to dissect the flaws in these articles (which rehash the same talking points over and over and over).

And yes, Salon and Huff Post are like Petri dishes where writers like this breed and prosper.

[pokerfan]

4. PZ has the best response...

I saw with some trepidation an article by an atheist that rebukes the man: the title is “Christopher Hitchens’ lies do atheism no favors“. I felt that trepidation because there really are very good reasons to criticize Hitchens: his politics were vile, he was a cheerleader for war, his ‘solutions’ for problems in the Middle East were little more than excuses for genocide. He had the capacity to be thoughtful and interesting and deep, but when it came to world politics, he was a madman waving a gun. Someone could write a strong, well-researched criticism of Hitchens that would actually have a lot of weight, and it could overshadow the fellow’s virtues (and, by the way, I think we should recognize that he was not a saint, and that like every one of us, he had his flaws).

But I shouldn’t have worried. The author, Curtis White, basically writes an apologia for religion, and goes after Hitchens for…not respecting faith enough. Seriously? Yeah, seriously. This guy is an atheist who thinks the great theological circle-jerk is a beautiful ballet.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/06/23/taking-a-hatchet-to-hitchens/

[onager]

5. ARRGH! The irony, it burns...

To be intellectually shameful is to be dishonest, to tell less than you know, or ought to know, and to shape what you present in a way that misrepresents the real state of affairs.

Which IMO is a nice brief description of just about every "Sophisticated Theology" book ever written. And most of the unsophisticated theology too.

Today's irony meme...

[Warren Stupidity]

6. Well I had to go research Hoffmeir.

He is essentially at odds with the mainstream of serious biblical archeology, and admits that there is no physical evidence for exodus ( but is off looking for it.) Slamming Hitchens for presenting the mainstream view on exodus would be, err, dishonest.

[skepticscott]

7. Wow, strange that White doesn't mention that

Does that make him the same type of intellectually dishonest fraud that he accuses Hitchens of being?

[dimbear]

8. I read the three paragraphs without coming across a Hitchens lie and lost patience.

Way to get to the point.

[skepticscott]

9. Dropping Hitchens' name

is the only way he can get attention. I suspect he knows that, and it galls him. But he knows if he goes on his own merits, he won't get a tenth of the book sales that Hitchens did.

[trotsky]

10. Holy freaking crap that's a terrible article.

"if to be an atheist means not believing in a CEO God"

No, it just means you don't believe in gods. You have yet to be convinced of their existence. Given the narrow definition he tries to apply to "atheist" this guy clearly has no idea what he's talking about.

I especially love how he tries to discount Hitchens' idea of innate conscience with this:

To bring the case closer to home, is our own passionate approval of the most massively destructive social system in human history—capitalism and capitalist militarism—an expression of conscience? Even though our Predator missiles may occasionally (or regularly) fall on children, are we sorry that we have them? Or are we proud of our high-tech ordnance? If you were to go to an air show—the fighter jets and bombers ripping through the suburban sky— and suggest that we’d feel very differently if these machines were bearing down on our town and that we ought to be ashamed of ourselves for allowing them to bear down upon others, how many in that crowd would agree? You’d be labeled anti-American and led to the nearest exit for your own safety. For the rest of the crowd, dissolved in oohs and aahs, our military power, as with Rome’s, is merely the brutal (and “beautiful”) confirmation of our superiority.

Uhh, did this guy conveniently set aside the fact that being an audience of Americans, is statistically far and away CHRISTIAN in composition? And did this guy sleep through the Bush years where his war on Iraq was at least partially justified because, as the boy tyrant claimed, "god told him to"?

Unbelievable, how sloppy this article is. He's dragging out Hitchens' corpse to try and make some money off of it. Pathetic, sad, and what an insult to the memory of Hitchens to have such a lightweight try and counter his ideas.

[skepticscott]

11. It's also ironic

(The article is overflowing with ironies) that in attacking Hitchens, whom he paints as deeply flawed intellectually, he's doing exactly what he and others regularly accuse atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins of doing, namely shooting at the easy targets among vapid Christian fundamentalists, while ignoring a litany of Serious Theologians and Deep Philosophers (whose names he pompously scatters in his wake). Does he not know of any atheist writers that he regards as more intellectually rigorous than Hitchens? If he does, why doesn't he do what he implies Hitchens should have done and weigh in against THEIR arguments. If he doesn't, one has to wonder why he's an atheist to begin with.

[Zoeisright]

12. I'm not going to respect ANYTHING

that enables the mass slaughter of innocent people.

I.E., Christianity and any other religion.

[Iggo]

13. Trash.

I ain't got time for dis.

[OriginalGeek]

19. Ain't nobody does.

[Rob H.]

14. I'm surprised none of the obsessively anti-atheist members

over in The Group That Must Not Be Named posted this as soon as it showed up on Salon. (Which isn't to say that I'm not pleasantly surprised it wasn't; far from it.)

[trotsky]

15. Well as they've proven (by getting themselves banned from the group), they all lurk here...

obsessively monitoring our behavior and policing our posts. So it's not like they don't know about this by now. Who knows, seems like awfully tempting candy for them to resist as it bashes one of the evil "New Atheists" and promotes religion. That's a winning formula.

[skepticscott]

16. Not only that, but it's done by someone

who is at least superficially an atheist themselves, but like so many of the "atheist, but" crowd, seems determined to ingratiate themselves as an "acceptable atheist" to all of the Serious Liberal Believers out there.

[mr blur]

17. Whoever can you mean?

[gcomeau]

18. Summarized version

"I make apologies for religion and Hitchens didn't. Since he did not approach the issue in the same way I did he was being dishonest since people who don't cut religion that same slack I do must be lying about it."


There, I saved anyone who hasn't tried to wade through that lengthy bit of idiocy a good part of their day. You're welcome.