Posted on 09/20/2006 1:11:33 AM PDT by Hong Kong Expat
.... The Muslim protesters are actually being highly ungrateful. When the embassies of Denmark were being torched earlier this year, Rome managed a few words of protest about … the inadvisability of profane cartoons. In almost every confrontation between Islam and the West, or Islam and Israel, the Vatican has either split the difference or helped to ventriloquize Muslim grievances. Most of all, throughout his address to the audience at Regensburg, the man who modestly considers himself the vicar of Christ on Earth maintained a steady attack on the idea that reason and the individual conscience can be preferred to faith. He pretends that the word Logos can mean either "the word" or "reason," which it can in Greek but never does in the Bible, where it is presented as heavenly truth. He mentions Kant and Descartes in passing, leaves out Spinoza and Hume entirely, and dishonestly tries to make it seem as if religion and the Enlightenment and science are ultimately compatible, when the whole effort of free inquiry always had to be asserted, at great risk, against the fantastic illusion of "revealed" truth and its all-too-earthly human potentates. It is often said—and was said by Ratzinger when he was an underling of the last Roman prelate—that Islam is not capable of a Reformation. We would not even have this word in our language if the Roman Catholic Church had been able to have its own way. Now its new reactionary leader has really "offended" the Muslim world, while simultaneously asking us to distrust the only reliable weapon—reason—that we possess in these dark times. A fine day's work, and one that we could well have done without.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Actually, he makes a nice counterfoil to the jihadis in illustrating the Pope's point. Reason without faith, faith without reason.
I liked him better when he was being nasty about Clinton! ;-)
Religion deranges Hitchens, that about sums it up.
Actually, the Pope was very brave in the quote he chose. Should he be killed by Muslims, he would be a Christian martyr. And he would have exposed Islam for what it really is.
Muslims should keep the Pope from harm, lest they defame the "religion" they profess.
As painful as the prospect of actually wading through this articles looks to be, I will, with regret, bump for later.
Absolutely.
Hitchens is on the right side in the War on Terror. He understands Islam and clearly understands the current struggle. However, he is above all a God-hating atheist. That's why he has always been a Leftist and why he will always remain a Leftist.
More than anything else, the Left is engaged in a war against God.
Hitchens seems to have no place for God in his life, except perhaps as a mere object of reason. He's seems afraid to step out into the void of faith. His life's view is as empty as that of the muzlims he protests.
Christopher had a major hurt in his life concerning, I believe the death of his brother. That may help explain his hatred of Christianity.
The Pope asked us to distrust reason?
"Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth," wrote John Paul II in the encyclical Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason)
From Paul to Augustine to Aquinas to Benedict XVI at Regensburg, the Church has proclaimed Her love for reason as a gift from God, part of His very essence in fact, and wholly compatible with faith.
Saying that the Pope asked us to distrust reason is like saying the Pope asked us to distrust Jesus.
From the Catechism of the Catholic Church quoting the First Vatican Council on faith and reason:
"Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth."
The irony is that Hitchen's definition of reason is precisely what Pope Benedict was calling into question. It is a modern redefining of reason which, as the Pope noted, "excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific of pre-scientific question."
"Not to act reasonably is is contrary to the nature of God," Benedict quoted Manuel II. The West, the Pope said, is threatened by turning away from the questions which underlie its modern notion of rationality. He challenged Christians to enter into the debate about reason with the "courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur."
We all have tragedies to endure. My first was the sudden death of my father when I was five. He was 37, my mother 33, and there were seven kids. Not a one of us responded to the tragedy then or ever with a rejection of God. Flannery O'Connor, in Wise Blood (I think),sums up our choice pretty fairly: We don't often have to chose between God and Satan. For most of us, the choice is between serving our self or God.
Mr. Hitchens needs to spend some quality time with Richard Neuhaus and Robert George.
"Islam, Catholic, Christian, Hindu or Jew, you are all the same to our Chris."
Chris?
"Religion deranges Hitchens, that about sums it up."
Only Hitchens?
That is an excellent point.
Behold, the two extremes of the equation: faith without thought, thought without faith.
I still prefer Hitchens. He's less likely to kill me for being Catholic (I know he thinks we're idiots, but fools for Christ is part of the deal…)
Good old Hitch has an itch up his anus that the pope won't let him scratch in the manner he prefers (and neither would Cardinal Ratzinger).
That is the source of his conspicuous angst and zeal about the Catholic pope being universally recognized as the most powerful and well-known Christan voice throughout the world.
Boo-hoo.
I always thought many of those with BDS have the same itch.
While I think of it, you're another one who might appreciate this article: Faith, Reason and Politics: Parsing the Pope's Remarks -- it's from Stratfor and very good (the link at the top requires registration, but the article is reproduced in full at post #14).
Hey Chris, the canon of Western thought would benefit greatly if we left out Spinoza and Hume entirely. Voltaire too.
They were all agnostic/atheist whackjobs!
"the man who modestly considers himself the vicar of Christ on Earth"
I got this far.
Hitchens is, pardon my vulgarity, utterly full of shit.
The idea that the Pope's position in the Church and the faith is a self-imposed vanity is so completely moronic and so spitefully untrue...there's no words.
I did'nt bother to read the rest.
"When the embassies of Denmark were being torched earlier this year, Rome managed a few words of protest about … the inadvisability of profane cartoons. In almost every confrontation between Islam and the West, or Islam and Israel, the Vatican has either split the difference or helped to ventriloquize Muslim grievances."
The tree is known by its fruit. Thanks for posting this.
There is BDS, which is Bush Derangement Syndrome. Could Hitchens have PDS, or Pope Derangement Syndrome?
"While he was at Oxford he became aware that his parents had quietly separated - he saw his mother walking down the high street with a man carrying her shopping bags, and afterwards she told him she was living with this man and what did he think? He made encouraging noises - he wanted his mother to be happy - but didn't pay much attention.
"In 1973 he had a phone call from his father asking if he knew where his mother was, because her passport was missing. He said he didn't. A few days later he was in bed with a new girlfriend when the phone rang and it was an old girlfriend asking if he was all right. He said yes, fine. Because, she said, there was a story in The Times that a woman with his mother's name had been murdered by her lover in a hotel in Athens.
"'So I went out and got the paper and there it was.' He contacted the police and then flew out to Athens to identify the body - he was taken to the hotel room where it happened. The police at first believed it was murder, because there was blood everywhere. But then they found a suicide note addressed to Christopher, saying, in effect, 'You will understand one day.'
"Apparently, the couple had made a suicide pact and had both taken pills, but the man had also slit his throat and wrists. Hitchens believes that his mother had come to her senses at some stage and tried to ring for help, but there was no response.
"After a long police inquiry, he buried the bodies in Athens and brought the effects home. He had to take the man's effects to his family - an ex-wife and daughter - 'and they weren't particularly pleased to see me'. He found out later that the lover was a defrocked priest with a history of manic depression. He believes that he must have talked his mother into the suicide pact. 'She probably thought things were getting sordid - he wasn't able to hold a job down, she couldn't go back, she was probably about the age I am now and perhaps there was that - she'd been very pretty - and things were never going to get any better, so why go through with it? She might not have been that hard to persuade, but I know that she did try to save herself because I have the photographs still. So that was sort of the end of family life really.'"
It looks like Hutchens thought his mother's lover was mentally ill because of his Catholicism, and even though the guy was a bad Catholic (defrocked, married, divorced, adulterous affair with a married woman--Christopher's mother) -- still, it's all the fault of crazy neurotic guilt-producing Catholicism.
Pray for Christopher Hitchens.
He did get that part right, but should have added that Islam is also not capable of an Enlightenment or even Medieval scholasticism. Islam cannot allow the reasoned theological thought of a Thomas Aquinas anymore than it can the thinking of a Descartes or Kant or the skepticism of a Voltaire. Islam is the ultimate in fundamentalism.
Thanks for that link, maryz. I'm particularly grateful because I avoided that thread when I saw that registration was required. I'm looking forward to reading that article in depth.
. . . and for his mother, and the failed priest (as well as his abandoned family. It's always easier to pray for the victim, though I always try to get one in for the "perp," who probably needs it more.
Thanks for the post, though -- makes it easier to understand.
That's... a very strange thing to say. To refuse to step into the void makes one's life empty??? And disbelieving in gods makes one's life as empty as firmly believing in a very personal god?
(I do think that Hitchens' point about Catholic hypocrisy regarding conversion by reason instead of by the sword is kind of a moot point in the context of today's war on islamofascist terror.)
I don't feel a real need to analyze why Hitchens has such an intense hatred of all religions -- it is just a defect in his makeup that I take into account in reading his, otherwise, intelligent output.
It is a shame that it colors so much of his thinking -- its like having a thoroughly bigoted, intelligent, friend who is normal in other matters: It keeps you at a distance and gives you a sorid feeling after you have spent time together.
No reasonable person can say that there is no Leftist Marxist-Islamist Alliance.
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