Backward, atheist soldiers!

Books: Notable anti-religion and anti-Christian books of the past year—particularly Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great—make something out of, well, nothing.

Nineteenth-century novelist Gustave Flaubert used to joke about archaeologists discovering a stone tablet signed "God" and reading, "I do not exist." His punch line had an atheist then exclaiming, "See! I told you so!"

These days, nothing stops atheistic caissons from rolling along the bookstore aisles. Maybe that's because atheists on average have small families and lots of discretionary doubloons jingling in their pockets. Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf), Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell (Penguin), and Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin) all hit bestseller lists during 2006—and a new book, Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great (Twelve), has ascended this year.

Last year's trio emerged alongside anti-Christian books purportedly based on hard reporting. Michelle Goldberg's Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (Norton) typified the genre's misreporting when she wrote that Christian pregnancy counseling centers "usually" present false or exaggerated information—but there's no indication that she visited even one center, let alone the 3,000 or so that exist throughout the country. (Here's some evidentiary trivia: In four pages about me she makes five clear factual errors, along with many questionable interpretations.)

This year it's the same: a new screed by Chris Hedges has as its title not "Mistaken People" or even "Lying Liars," but American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press). The genre is old, with new villains appearing as necessary. Ten years ago Frederick Clarkson's Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy stated that the sky was falling, with Promise Keepers as the spearhead of Christian dictatorship.

The ferocity of these books is sometimes astounding. Here, for example, is Dawkins' view of God: "arguably the most unpleasant character in fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

Even Publishers Weekly noted concerning The God Delusion, "For a scientist who criticizes religion for its intolerance, Dawkins has written a surprisingly intolerant book, full of scorn for religion and those who believe. . . . Even confirmed atheists who agree with his advocacy of science and vigorous rationalism may have trouble stomaching some of the rhetoric: 'The biblical Yahweh is "psychotic," Aquinas' proofs of God's existence are "fatuous" and religion generally is "nonsense."'

Happily, Alister and Joanna Collicutt McGrath have just come out with an effective response, The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine (IVP). The McGraths note, "Until recently, Western atheism had waited patiently, believing that belief in God would simply die out. But now a whiff of panic is evident. Far from dying out, belief in God has rebounded."

The McGraths also point out the folly of believing that if religion were eliminated wars would cease: After all, conflicts often reflect human desires to declare some people as "in" and others as "out," sometimes on the basis of religion, but at other times on the basis of race, ethnicity, tribe, class, gender, or whatever.

Christianity is above all others the religion that seeks kindness to those in the out-group: Jesus told us to love our neighbors and even to love our enemies. When Christians fail to live up to His teachings it's because of sin, not Christianity—and scapegoating religion delays efforts to deal with the real problems of social division.

Scapegoating is also evident in the writing of Sam Harris, who frequently forgets to use reason and instead falls back on words like "preposterous." He asserts certainty about what he admits not knowing: "How the process of evolution got started is still a mystery, but that does not in the least suggest that a deity is likely to be lurking at the bottom of it all."

He complains not only about ignorance but about moral failings: "An average Christian, in an average church, listening to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse."

Yet Harris, for all his attacks on Intelligent Design, does not even understand the distinction between macro-evolution—one kind of creature changing into another—and micro-evolution. One of his proofs of theistic obtuseness is that "viruses like HIV, as well as a wide range of harmful bacteria, can be seen evolving right under our noses, developing resistance to antiviral and antibiotic drugs."

The one good aspect of Harris' work is his understanding that theology has consequences: "There is no escaping that fact that a person's religious beliefs uniquely determine what he thinks peace is good for, as well as what he means by a term like 'compassion.'" Harris at least understands that the biblical theology he hates makes obnoxious sense in a way that liberalism does not; given a suffering world, "liberal theology must stand revealed for what it is: the sheerest of mortal pretenses."

Harris also criticizes the niceties of political rhetoric concerning Islam: "The idea that Islam is a 'peaceful religion hijacked by extremists' is a fantasy." Too bad he and other atheistic authors are determined to believe that Christianity is inevitably hijacked by hate, and that they pick up support from reviewers like Natalie Angier, who wrote in The New York Times that "Harris writes what a sizeable number of us think, but few are willing to say."

Harris' work has also engendered several Christian responses this year. Doug Wilson's Letter from a Christian Citizen (American Vision) points out that Harris uses morally loaded words like "should" and "ought"; Wilson rightly asks Harris, "What is the difference between an imposed morality, an imposed religion, or an imposed secular ought? Why is your imposition to be preferred to any other?"

Wilson notes Harris' fondness for Eastern religions, and in particular the "utter non-violence" of the Jains in India. Letter from a Christian Citizen correctly notes that "Devout Jains will wear a mask to avoid breathing in and thereby killing any insect," and then asks whether Harris would commend evangelicals who "forsook the use of antibiotics because of the genocidal devastation it was causing to the microbes within."

Wilson also points out that the litany of religious folks fighting each other that Harris recites "is beside the point. We don't believe that religion is the answer. We believe Christ is the answer." Harris' list of religious messes merely confirms "one of the basic tents of the Christian faith, which is that the human race is all screwed up."

And what about this year's champion screed, offered by Christopher Hitchens? His scorn—"monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents"—oozes off every page of God Is Not Great, with its extraordinary subtitle, How Religion Poisons Everything.

"Everything"? That sounds improbable. Are 1.3 billion Muslims all murderers? Might Christianity have produced 50 percent evil and 50 percent good? If not, how about 40 percent good? Thirty percent? Twenty percent? Ten percent? Will not Hitchens relent from his anger if we can find 5 percent that's good?

God Is Not Great has received extraordinary publicity, including an adulatory review in The New York Times, so it's worth going page by page to see what Hitchens is selling and many atheists are buying:

*On Page 4 he writes that religion produces a "maximum of servility." Islam, maybe, but were Abraham, Moses, and Job servile when they argued with God?

*On Page 5 he writes, "No statistic will ever find that without [religious] blandishments and threats [atheists] commit more crimes of greed or violence than the faithful." Prison Fellowship and other organizations can show that prisoners who go through evangelical programs have much lower recidivism—committing new crimes after release from prison, leading to new sentences—than others.

*On Page 7 he writes, "Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago." Leaving aside the inspiration millions get from daily Bible reading, what about Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches, with all their biblical imagery? Or Pope John Paul II, whose words inspired many people to rise up against Communism in Eastern Europe?

*On Page 17 he writes that religion "does not have the confidence in its own various preachings even to allow coexistence between different faiths." At the annual March for Life in Washington tens of thousands of Catholics and Protestants walk side by side along with individuals from Jews for Life, Buddhists for Life, and so on.

*n Page 32 he writes, "The nineteen suicide murderers of New York and Washington and Pennsylvania were beyond any doubt the most sincere believers on those planes." Todd Beamer, the man who said "Let's roll" on United Flight 93, and made sure it didn't crash into the U.S. Capitol, was a strong Christian believer. So were others who died, stopping the terrorists, when Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania.

Hitchens of course thinks the Bible is nonsense (see also "The world according to Hitch," June 3, 2006). On Page 102 he writes, "It goes without saying that none of the gruesome, disordered events described in Exodus ever took place." Without saying. A slam dunk. On Page 103: "All the Mosaic myths can be safely and easily discarded." On Page 104: All five books of Moses are "an ill-carpentered fiction."

Such pronouncements were repeatedly made in the 19th century, but again and again biblical accounts considered mythical back then have gained new archeological support. For example, scholars at one point said that the Hittites described in the Bible did not exist, nor did rulers such as Belshazzar of Babylon or Sargon of Assyria. Archeologists now have records of all those civilizations and reigns.

Many brilliant people have spent lifetimes studying these writings that Hitchens so blithely dismisses. Princeton's Robert Wilson, who knew 26 ancient languages and dialects and so could read just about all that remains from the ancient Near East, was impressed with the accuracy of those accounts that Hitchens wishes to discard.

Coming to the present, Hitchens on Page 160 calls "the whole racket of American evangelism . . . a heartless con." Hmm. WORLD for two decades has reported stories around this country of compassionate evangelicals who must be dumb, because they've spent their lives in a racket that's yielded them almost no money. They've adopted hard-to-place children, built AIDs orphanages in Africa, helped addicts and alcoholics to turn their lives around, transformed the lives of teens who were heading into drugs and crime, and much besides.

In responding to Hitchens and mini-Hitchenses, it's also worth noting the leadership of Christians over the centuries in setting up hospitals and schools. Historians such as Jonathan Hill of Oxford, Alvin Schmidt of Illinois College, and Rodney Stark of Baylor have described the long-term effect of Jesus telling his followers to love their neighbors as themselves.

The evangelical tendency to help others, not poison them, has even attracted the attention of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who calls America's evangelicals "the newest internationalists" for fighting sexual trafficking in Eastern Europe and slavery in Sudan. As Jewish leader Michael Horowitz has put it, evangelicals "led the way in taking on the slavery issue of our time—the annual trafficking of millions of women and children into lives of sexual bondage . . . led the way in organizing a campaign to end a growing epidemic of prison rape."

Horowitz concluded his message to evangelicals this way: "As you define your human rights successes as central to who you are and what you've done, it will no longer be possible for those who fear your faith to crudely caricature you or to ignore the virtue that Christian activism brings to American life and the world at large." Spoken too soon, because authors like Harris, Dennett, Dawkins, and especially Hitchens, despite all the evidence, still proclaim that religion, or Christianity in particular, poisons everything.

Well, that would mean you're either a Jew or a Muslim.

Wrong. Sorry.

If you're a Jew, you don't evangelize,

Since the word "evangelize" is taken from the Greek/Latin word for "gospel," then it means by definition "to proselytize for chr*stianity." This means that by definition, no non-chr*stian religion, however proselytary, can be said to "evangelize."

I am afraid you are very mistaken about one thing, however. Judaism does not proselytize non-Jews to convert to Judaism. It does have a specific mission, however, to "compel" (RaMBa"M's word) all non-Jews to observe the Seven Noachide Laws (the first of which is a prohibition of idolatry, which applies to every human being and is enforceable by the death penalty)--a mission that will be finally completed by Mashiach. While I doubt you have any first-hand knowledge of Halakhah, it may interest you to know that the basis for this future world-wide "conversion" are the laws concerning milchamot reshut, which stipulate that the besieged non-Jewish population is to accept the Noachide Laws and become permanent tributaries or else have the entire male population slaughtered and its women and children reduced to permanent slave status. (The difference between a milchemet reshut, btw, and a milchemet mitzvah, is that in the latter the enemy--specifically `Amaleq and the Seven Nations of Canaan--is to be exterminated.)

You've never read the Book of Joshua, have you? Perhaps we need to teach it in public school history classes.

so to you it's not really an attack, just a difference of opinion.

Now that is really interesting. When you ridicule the Jewish G-d and Torah you aren't attacking Judaism--you're attacking Evangelical Protestants? Is your scientific thinking equally as "logical?"

It's no danger to your land or your person.

Perhaps you are unaware that the Jewish deed to 'Eretz Yisra'el is the book you enjoy attacking and ridiculing as an "Evangelical Protestant" holy book? What do you think they did, flip open an atlas with their eyes closed and put their finger down on a random page? (BTW, Adam and Eve are buried in Hebron [I've been there]; and that isn't something rural white American Fundamentalist Protestants know.)

Your religion is between you and your God,

"My" G-d? Whatever gave you the idea that the G-d of Israel is just one people's G-d or that He is so cavalier as to whether everyone worships Him or not? Perhaps you missed the memo, but HaShem is still a "Jealous G-d," as Mr. Dawkins has pointed out. And Mr. Dawkins wasn't attacking the Baptist man-"gxd" Yushqa but the JEWISH G-d. And you don't notice this? You think Mr. Dawkins (who has attacked Zionism, btw) is just out to defend himself from the Southern Baptist Convention or the United Pentecostals?

and He won't give you brownie points for defending Him.

Now this is really incredible. May I ask how you know this? What do you think He gives "brownie points" for? Defending the shape of the "Jewish nose," perhaps? When Golyat blasphemed the Jewish G-d young David killed him. You don't think that was worth a "brownie point?" Or perhaps you don't consider David Jewish. Perhaps you think he was a "typical bigoted evangelical?" Wow. Was he baptized and everything??? Did he hand out tracts?

Or just maybe Judaism isn't as gentle as you think it is.

So you say "nu, believe what you like", teach your children differently, and move on.

This brings us to the question of why you yourself can't say "nu, believe what you like" and likewise move on instead of attacking other people's beliefs. It does seem that you are a bit inconsistent in whose beliefs you are willing to mock. Let's see . . . there are Yeshivish Orthodox Jews who live in insular communities, don't let their kids read about evolution, won't let them read book espousing the Copernican view of the solar system/universe, and won't let their kids read Charlotte's Web because it's about a pig. And to this you say live and let live. Yet when it comes to "the usual suspects" (ie, rural white [never Black, for some strange reason] American Evangelical or Fundamentalist Protestants) it's open season. Now may I ask why your "live and let live" philosophy is so inconsistently applied? Let's look at the matter scientifically.

You say you think rural white American Fundamentalist Protestants deserve to be mocked because they don't believe in evolution and don't want you teaching it to their kids (or want their kids taught their religion in school). Very well. But let's take a test group. We see that there are Yeshivish Orthodox Jews who fit every one of these criteria (and much more so, actually), yet to them you say "live and let live." Therefore, since religious fundamentalism is common to both groups (the experimental and the test group), then religious fundamentalism is scientifically eliminated as the reason you enjoy making a target out of rural white American Fundamentalist Protestants. So what is the reason then? Simple. They're the only safe target and you don't have the intestinal or testicular fortitude to attack anyone else. (And watch what you say to me. I'm not a chr*stian. I'm a genuine religious minority, and you better respect my beliefs and demonstrate your "solidarity" with me! It's not like I'm some trailer park Pentecostal you can sail into without fear of being accused of bigotry, now, is it?)

Bottom line--the Jewish G-d is the True G-d of all humanity and every human being is statutorily obligated to acknowledge and obey Him and no other "gxd," and the fact that Jews haven't enforced this on humanity is not because the religion has changed but because they have not been in a position to do so. This is what Mashiach is all about.

And finally (not so much to Physicist as to all the other atheists who jumped into this thread which was started as a critique of contemporary atheist fundamentalism), please understand that atheists can commit mass murder as easily as any religious person (as history makes abundantly clear). And the fault did not lie with Jacobinism or Communism or Marxism or collectivism or statism or any other "ism" per se--the problem lies in the very idea of a non-Theistically based moral/ethical system. All such systems are groundless and their rules therefore arbitrary and tyrannical (since they are imposed for no reason). As atheists are fond of pointing out, "just because there is no G-d doesn't mean there are no rules." So the jails are still full and people are still being fried in the electric chair or gassed in the chamber--but for no reason. This being the case, how does the mere non-existence of G-d make all this more palatable to you? Obviously it is not G-d's rules but His Person you object to. And this means you must base all your moral/ethical beliefs on a non-Theistic basis, which is the very heart of Communism (and Jacobinism, and scientific racialism and collectivism and Randianism etc.). Marxism-Leninism was never anything but a symptom. It has always been non-Theistically based moral/ethical systems that constitute the disease.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.