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The Cultural Illiteracy of Atheist Christopher Hitchens
Townhall.com ^ | July 1, 2007 | Mary Grabar

Posted on 07/01/2007 4:42:27 AM PDT by Kaslin

Best-selling atheist authors are riding a wave of ignorance and illiteracy.

The latest offering, God Is Not Great, comes from a bon vivant with a British accent, an attribute that lends sophistication in the eyes of the pseudo-intellectuals whose vision of the Christian is the Bible-thumping backwoodsman.

But Christians on the far right and on the far left, fundamentalists, or literalists of both stripes, have given Christopher Hitchens much to work with.

For example, Memorial Day saw the opening of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where Genesis comes alive with Adam and Eve alongside animatronic dinosaurs from 6,000 years ago. More of God’s country in Tennessee is slated for despoliation with a theme park to be called Bible Park USA.

Then the following week Arianna Huffington preached on CNN that the most pervasive message in the Bible concerns charity. Huffington, the publisher of the blog with the most vile words against Christians, commenting on the Democratic presidential candidates’ interviews on faith, pontificated on how the Bible advocates income redistribution.

We know that the Devil can quote Scripture, but Huffington misrepresents it egregiously. Real charity does not come at the end of a gun pointed by the IRS.

I do not assign the same obviously ulterior motives of political manipulation to those who build creation museums or Christian theme parks. While Huffington and her ilk hate Christianity, the theme park and museum builders have sincere intentions. But, gosh, I wish they’d read some books. And I’m talking about more than the Bible.

We are instructed to love God not only with all our hearts, but also our minds. But it seems that some people have simply abandoned their God-given reason.

These zombie-like people with smiles plastered on their faces are the worst ones to convince those with doubts. I had one of them send me to reading Ralph Waldo Emerson at a time when my faith was already wavering. She cornered me while I was doing laundry. With an expression between one of the early martyrs at the point of death and a hippie on an acid trip she asked me if I "knew Jesus." This of course implied that she did and what was wrong with me? I was out of the club. That was it. Nothing else. No other discussion. I know Jesus. You don't.

What was much more convincing to me were the great works of literature written by Christian authors. Though I saw these authors mocked in graduate school, the force of their ideas showed through. Their wisdom and humanity contrasted sharply with the nonsensical nihilism put out by the trendy authors, and their exponents, the professors.

Reading Milton led me back to the Bible. The late Walker Percy allowed for the idea of evolution. But he, like the proponents of intelligent design that I met at a Christian Faculty Forum at The University of Georgia, read the Bible not literally, like an instruction manual, but allowed for the possibility of a metaphorical meaning that went beyond their understanding. Shakespeare revealed the evil of atheism through characters like Iago. Flannery O'Connor demonstrated how her characters' estimations of their own goodness provided the opening for Satanic influences. Dostoyevsky exposed the evils of pride and self-devised "justice."

Surprisingly, Hitchens cites some of these Christian authors in his claim that atheists are not simply scientists gone off the deep end of rationalism. They appreciate Art:

"We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books."

But Hitchens must be banking on a readership that has not read Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. These Christian authors dramatized the themes and stories of the very holy book that Hitchens disparages. Has he forgotten how Shakespeare explicitly has Iago explain the materialist origins of his wickedness: "Virtue? A fig! 'tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens"? Iago is a sociopath because he is an atheist.

Hitchens gives lip-service to these Christian authors, despite his claims of erudition. Literature endeavors to reveal some truth and its beauty. Therefore, the enterprise has to presuppose some end, some ultimate source of truth. Contrary to his beliefs, that truth does not reside in Hitchens’s brain. That source is God. For if literature does not aim for the revelation of some truth, then what is the purpose of suspending disbelief? (This view, of course, contradicts the postmodern, i.e., atheistic notion of art: the solipsistic presentation of the chaos of the universe—but that is art that only its practitioners seem to enjoy and not the kind of art Hitchens is citing.)

Nor is Hitchens’s dismissal of religious faith as something that arises from primitive fear and ignorance of the workings of nature as clever or new as he imagines. He only needs to go to one of his referenced authors and read in The Brothers Karamazov, "socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question." In Devils, Dostoyevsky exposes the self-delusion of the atheistic revolutionaries who presume themselves bold and more intelligent that the God-fearing around them. In a send-up of "free-thinkers" meetings, Dostoyevsky has a female student say:

"I mean, we know, for example, the superstition about God derived from thunder and lightning . . . It’s only too well known that primitive man, terrified by thunder and lightning, deified his invisible enemy, conscious of his own weakness with regard to them."

Hitchens, like the other dilettantes writing the books on atheism, now recycles this tired argument and sells it to weekend intellectuals striking a pensive pose with The New York Times and a $4.00 latte in front of them on Sunday mornings.

Another old example that Hitchens uses to claim atheists’ moral superiority is Abraham’s willingness to kill his son Isaac. But this citation betrays ignorance of explications made by everyone from Sunday school teachers to Kierkegaard. Hitchens brags that atheists make the best life in this life and see posterity in their children, whom they treat better than Abraham did Isaac.

But the question remains for the atheists: what do you do with children incapable of fulfilling your demands for immortality?

Hitchens also ignores Dostoyevsky’s prediction of the death toll from atheistic communist regimes. One of the characters in Devils refers to pamphlets that urge "total destruction, on the pretext that however much you try to cure the world, you won’t be able to do so entirely, but if you take radical steps and cut off one hundred million heads, thus easing the burden, it'll be much easier to leap over the ditch."

But if you go into a Christian bookstore you will not likely see Dostoyevsky on the shelf. Instead, you'll find pastel-covered saccharine tomes, the pious stories that the devout Catholic Flannery O'Connor disparaged.

The literalists, the theme park and museum builders, do to the Biblical stories what Disney does to fairy tales, stripping them of the tragic, the comic, and the sublime. In effect, what these people ask is just leave your mind at the door, get on the ride, and be happy!

But easy Christianity is vulnerable to easy atheism. Hitchens is too stupid to see the origin of art: the never-ending artistic imperative to wonder at and explore the mystery of God’s creation. It’s too bad that he has a readership prepared for him by an educational system that ignores, distorts, and disparages Christian art.

Mary Grabar graduated from the University of Georgia with a Ph.D. in English and currently teaches at a university in Atlanta.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: atheism; atheist; christianity; christopherhitchens; hitchens; moralabsolutes; religion
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To: Byron_the_Aussie

Naw, I expect he’ll just turn up dead in a hotel room one day and that will be the end of him. Bless his heart.


41 posted on 07/01/2007 9:20:40 AM PDT by ichabod1 ("Liberals read Karl Marx. Conservatives UNDERSTAND Karl Marx." Ronald Reagan)
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To: Dudoight

Look, Homo Sapiens may have been around longer than 5750 years, but doesn’t it strike you as significant that that is about the earliest that records of civilization can be found?


42 posted on 07/01/2007 9:25:31 AM PDT by ichabod1 ("Liberals read Karl Marx. Conservatives UNDERSTAND Karl Marx." Ronald Reagan)
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To: fanboy88

ibtz


43 posted on 07/01/2007 9:27:12 AM PDT by ichabod1 ("Liberals read Karl Marx. Conservatives UNDERSTAND Karl Marx." Ronald Reagan)
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To: ichabod1

LOL! They know that, but God hasn’t dumped them out of bed on their kiesters lately. I, however, have been known to appear in wrath and sing the National Anthem in their ears :-).


44 posted on 07/01/2007 9:53:12 AM PDT by Tax-chick (Let all creation sing of salvation. Let us together give praise forever!)
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To: fanboy88; martin_fierro; RegulatorCountry

“Juwdahism.” I’m sure that’s a typso, but I can’t figure out quite where it goes.


45 posted on 07/01/2007 9:54:37 AM PDT by Tax-chick (Let all creation sing of salvation. Let us together give praise forever!)
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To: Dudoight

OK, I’ll bite
I am an ignorant fundy creationist - with a degree in biology, a graduate degree, and 3 years of post grad training. You can pick another argument, but I guess your ignorance slur doesn’t hold.


46 posted on 07/01/2007 9:58:34 AM PDT by Mom MD (The scorn of fools is music to the ears of the wise)
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To: Dudoight

it may be possible that it is a parable or metaphor.
However, genesis shows breathtaking scientific accuracy. How did Moses (who wrote genesis) know that there was light in the universe before the sun, moon and stars? It took modern science until the late 20th century with the COBE experiments to prove this.
The medical advice in the Bible is thousands of years ahead of what was known at the time. If the europeans in the middle ages had followed biblical principles, the black death would not have killed a fraction of the numbers it did,.

Be very careful about limiting God, and calling the Bible parable, hyperbole or pretty stories. Usually in the Bible where parables or metaphor are being used, the text pretty clearly indicates this.


47 posted on 07/01/2007 10:03:31 AM PDT by Mom MD (The scorn of fools is music to the ears of the wise)
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To: Kaslin; 230FMJ; 49th; 50mm; 69ConvertibleFirebird; Aleighanne; Alexander Rubin; ...
Moral Absolutes Ping!

Freepmail wagglebee or little jeremiah to subscribe or unsubscribe from the moral absolutes ping list.

FreeRepublic moral absolutes keyword search
[ Add keyword moral absolutes to flag FR articles to this ping list ]


48 posted on 07/01/2007 10:06:01 AM PDT by wagglebee ("A political party cannot be all things to all people." -- Ronald Reagan, 3/1/75)
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To: ichabod1

The oldest currently inhabited city in the world is Jericho, first established about 9000 BCE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_continuously_inhabited_cities). The cities developed around agriculture (wheat and maize). Before agriculture, homo sapiens were hunter-gathers.


49 posted on 07/01/2007 11:02:28 AM PDT by fanboy88
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To: ichabod1
I specifically excepted the "older" i.e. orthodox Episcopalians from my general stricture.

But the Episcopal Cathedral here is a cesspool of heretical lunacy. The bookstore (and the music) is just about the only worthwhile thing on THAT particular 6 acres of land (the building is awful, the theology is worse.)

50 posted on 07/01/2007 11:08:27 AM PDT by AnAmericanMother ((Ministrix of Ye Chase, TTGC Ladies' Auxiliary (recess appointment)))
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To: padre35

Padre35 - Why are you twisting things to make your argument? China is communist or buddhist? Cambodia is communist or buddhist? Was it the communist who killed the people or the buddhist? Was it the commie atheist who did the killing or the commie buddhist? I do not understand. BTW: Communism is not a religion and Atheism is not a religion.

Hitler and the people of Deutschland are Christians. Hitler’s German Worker’s Party program states: “We demand liberty for all religious denominations in the State, so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the morality and moral sense of the German race. The Party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, but does not bind itself in the matter of creed to any particular confession. It combats the Jewish-materialist spirit within and without us, and is convinced that our nation can achieve permanent health from within only on the principle: the common interest before self-interest.”

Adolf Hitler, in his speech in Munich said “My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.... When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited.”

Clearly Hitler was a Christian. Why do you not accept the truth? Why do you twist the facts? Denial is not a river in Eygpt.

IMHO - I beleive it is pursuit of power and self-righteous that kill people.


51 posted on 07/01/2007 11:50:50 AM PDT by fanboy88
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To: fanboy88

And Hitler said “The nordic gods will awake from a thousand year slumber and shake the dust from their eyes” Hitler was a big fan of Wagner and his “Nordic operas”.

Hmm Hitler the Christian?

“All of these are quotes from Adolf Hitler:

Night of 11th-12th July, 1941:

National Socialism and religion cannot exist together.... The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity.... Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things. (p 6 & 7)

10th October, 1941, midday:

Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure. (p 43)

14th October, 1941, midday:

The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death.... When understanding of the universe has become widespread... Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.... Christianity has reached the peak of absurdity.... And that’s why someday its structure will collapse.... ...the only way to get rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little.... Christianity the liar.... We’ll see to it that the Churches cannot spread abroad teachings in conflict with the interests of the State. (p 49-52) “

Not quite. Hitler used Christianity to gain power then he saw the Church as a threat to his state power, no more no less.

“...China is communist or buddhist...”

Really? So China isn’t a buddhist nation suffering under communism? Tsk tsk, you are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts, the facts are Atheism has put more people in cemeteries then any other philosophy known to man, with very little in return for the good of all of mankind.


52 posted on 07/01/2007 12:10:30 PM PDT by padre35 (Quod autem isti dicunt non interponendi vos bello)
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To: ichabod1

Fascinating point of view. What about those homo sapiens fossils found dating 30,000 years ago? 100,000 years ago? If they were hunter/gather’s does that mean they had no civilization? What are the parameters for defining ‘civilization’.

Then I am to assume, from your reasoning, that unless they were civilized they did not exist by your definition. Thus, they were suddenly created 5750 years ago because they became civilized?

This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Too many gaps in logic and it has nothing to do with faith. My faith is as solid as a rock.


53 posted on 07/01/2007 12:14:09 PM PDT by Dudoight
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To: Mom MD

You must never have met any ignorant ‘educated’ persons. You gotta be kidding me...look at the democrats.


54 posted on 07/01/2007 12:21:06 PM PDT by Dudoight
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To: Dudoight

Your statement show that you have bought into a false stereotype of creationists. Most creationist’s are not ignorant at all - they understand the arguments for evolution but simply find them unpersuasive. For example, My dad grew up as an evolutionist and went to a secular state university and graduated with dual degrees in Electrical Engineering and Agriculture. Shortly after graduation, he rejected evolution because he realized that it could not explain the complexity of the coded information contained in the human DNA.

DNA is a code not unlike binary computer code and as an electrical engineer my dad did a lot of computer programing. He came to the realization that the DNA coding for a simple protein could not have been generated by chance any more easily than a fairly simple computer program. Dad ran the statistical math and found that even if he split the mass of the earth into mutating organisms, he would be lucky to create one simple protein by chance in the entire supposed evolutionary age of the earth. Since that time, dad has continued to read lots of information about the Creation versus Evolution debate. Everytime he hears about important new evidence that has come out out, he studies it carefully. However, this has only convinced him even more that evolution cannot explain the complexity of life. So, when people refer to Creationists as ignorant, I think of my dad and recognize this this ridiculous name calling for what it is: A copout to avoid dealing with the arguments that have been raised.


55 posted on 07/01/2007 12:24:12 PM PDT by dschapin
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To: dschapin

Hey...I agree with your dad. I just don’t agree that homo sapiens was created a mere 6000 years ago. I think Intelligent Design is sound. The Discovery Institute does try to distance itself from the “Creationists”.


56 posted on 07/02/2007 5:16:06 AM PDT by Dudoight
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To: Dudoight
3)Seventy-three percent of Evangelical Protestants say they believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years.

4)39 percent of non-Evangelical Protestants and 41 percent of Catholics agree with that view (#3)

Yikes..

I guess this explains why it is so easy for politicians and hustlers to con people into believing global warming hysterics. Some will believe anything.

57 posted on 07/02/2007 10:40:32 AM PDT by GunRunner (Come on Fred, how long are you going to wait?)
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To: Dudoight

Anyone who goes on “polls” to judge science should either go back to school or just not give their opinion on a subject they know little about. There is a good reason why I don’t comment on “the rapture” or other mythology that close friends of mine believe in.


58 posted on 07/03/2007 11:18:10 PM PDT by Clemenza (Rudy Giuliani, like Pesto and Seattle, belongs in the scrap heap of '90s Culture)
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To: Clemenza

I think the poll was not a judgement on science. I rather think it was a query to find out what people ‘believe’.

Quite frankly, the poll knocked my socks off. I had no idea that many people thought that man was ‘created’ less than 10,000 years ago. The poll proves nothing about science but makes an astounding statement about the assumptions of those polled.


59 posted on 07/04/2007 5:11:52 AM PDT by Dudoight
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