The Atheists
Pulpit
I
just heard on the radio that the
publication of O.J. Simpsons new book has been canceled.
Literatures loss, I guess. This particular Literary Event of the Season
was aborted because
of widespread
disgust that Simpson was still profiting from crimes he says he didnt commit.
Like many
other observers, I take his denial with a grain of salt, notwithstanding his
acquittal by a jury of his peers. In this, if nothing else, I find myself in
agreement with Christopher Hitchens, a highly literate man whom I have met
and liked, though I find his writing hard to follow. He usually leaves me clear
enough about whom he hates, but less clear about what he thinks.
Hitchens
leaves the impression that everyone actually agrees with him and knows he is
right, but that most are too dishonest to admit it; hence his mission is less
to refute their arguments than to reproach their hypocrisy. This attitude
finds its expression in the relentless truculence of his prose. He has that
least endearing of English traits: answering disagreements by getting
supercilious. How persuasive you find him depends largely on how much you
are intimidated by British snot.
Writing in the
Wall Street Journal, Hitchens is furiously indignant, as you
might expect, that Simpson is so insouciant about murder and so willing to
capitalize on it. When you have a lemon, they say, make lemonade, but this
lemonade cant be sweetened to Hitchenss taste. To that
extent, he is perfectly right.
But what
puzzles me about Hitchens is that he is so passionately indignant about so
many things. This is the curious thing about atheists, and he is a militant
atheist. Religion poisons everything, he recently told an
interviewer, and he has just written a book on this theme. Everything? Would
that include Bachs music? Thanksgiving dinner?
Why, oh why,
are atheists always so indignant? If I were an atheist, and a believer in Darwin
(which Hitchens also militantly is), I think Id try to roll with the
punches. My philosophy would be that this is just the kind of universe where
Simpsons behavior is more or less what we should expect in the
ruthless struggle for survival.
![[Breaker quote for The Atheist's Pulpit: The "poison" of religion]](2006breakers/061123.gif) But
atheists are also typically indignant that some people believe in God rather than Darwin,
even though belief in God, however irrational, may deter some people from
killing others. Granted, from an atheistic point of view this is often a
disappointing universe, but if a bit of superstition makes it marginally more
bearable at times, why complain? Out in the jungle, the lower animals, as we
used to call them before Darwin abolished the distinction between
higher and lower, kill each other all the time,
with a refreshing lack of moral outrage. Why should man take it so hard?
Isnt what we call morality, in the end, a mere matter of taste?
But Hitchens
cant seem to let go of the idea that there is a difference between
is and ought. For an unbeliever, he spends a lot of time
thundering in the pulpit. He can be equally upset about Mother Teresa and
Saddam Hussein, both targets of angry Hitchens books (along with Bill
Clinton, target of one of my own angry books). If you believe in God, you may
find these furies lacking in a sense of proportion.
Hitchens
calls both Simpson and Osama bin Laden psychopathic killers.
Here again Im puzzled. Just how is Osama bin Laden
psychopathic? Given his premises, he seems pretty rational
to me. But people who dont believe in damnation have an odd way of
believing in diagnosis. If they cant say you belong in hell, they usually
say you belong in a loony bin. Its as if they hate God for not existing,
and for consequently failing to damn people who need damning. At the same
time, they think the whole idea of hell shows how cruel religion is. Go figure.
Because we
need nutrition, we feel hunger. What does it tell us that all men have spiritual
hungers? Only that they are all deluded? Or is it that they all crave the
poison of religion? If the spiritual is a mere delusion, of which
our animal nature has no real need, how odd that it should be a universal
delusion, rather than a local cultural eccentricity.
Even a
Darwinian materialist, after all, might concede that piety can have its bright
side, just as the love of truth or beauty does. For that matter, how does
belief in evolution itself conduce to survival? If its necessary, why did
it take mankind so long to think of it? If its not necessary, what
purpose is really served by advocating it?
Joseph Sobran
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