Hitchens Puts Down Payment on After-Life Cottage Near Lake of Fire
Nick Gillespie | May 2, 2007, 7:13am
Radar interviews Christopher Hitchens on his new book God Is Not Great. Some snippets:
The two leading public intellectuals of the American Right in the last two, three decades are Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss. Ayn Rand raised a huge number of free market concerns and was a libertarian, and Leo Strauss is well known to be the philosopher of what is now stupidly called neo-conservatism. Both had contempt for religion. Their attitudes toward it was the same as mine: that it's a silly man-made illusion.
On the Democratic side, almost all their heroes are religious. Martin Luther King. The Kennedys. People like that. The left is saturated with the religious. A lot of my book is an attack on liberal religious illusions....
[A] Quaker is not a jihadist. Quakers don't preach anything evil. But they preach non-resistance to evil, however, which I think is an evil notion, but it's not the same as putting a bomb in a girl's school in Belgium. The surrender of reason to faith is what leads to those bombs going off in Belgium, so I'm opposed to any of those surrenders....
Everything we [atheists] believe in depends on everything being open to doubt and experiment. If we hold those views very strongly and say that we don't think any other views are valid-a view that isn't in favor of free inquiry and skepticism-that doesn't make us dogmatic. Our belief is in objective scrutiny and evidence-including our own....
We can't have a state without religion. You cannot prevent people from worshipping in their own way. But I think society could, through its education system and the examples of its politicians, gently suggest that reading Jefferson or Voltaire or Paine wouldn't be harmful to you.
More here.
I'm a confirmed "apatheist" who can't really get riled up one way or another about issues of faith (issues of religiously or ideologically fueled violence and inhumanity are very different matters).
I think that religion can be a force for great good; if nothing else, the Baptist thinker Roger Williams is one of the great architects of the secular state, which is something really great. And there seems to me little question that while religious fanatics are clearly a serious global problem, most of the great state evils (at least in the 20th century) sprung from ideologies that were avowedly secular. So I think there might well be a root-level problem here--about all attempts to constrain individuals via coercive power--that's going unaddressed.
In any case, I look forward to reading Hitchens' book, which I'm sure presents a lucid and entertaining case for telling G-d to go to hell.
I am left wondering, though, are we not reading Jefferson and Voltaire as much as any two figures in our schools?
Hitchens interviewed (2001) by Reason here (in which, among other things, he explains why he's no longer a socialist and expresses lurve for Margaret Thatcher).
Hitchens participates in a 2003 Reason forum on foreign policy here (in which he, Ron Bailey, and others address the question of whether democracy can be spread at gunpoint).
Update: New York magazine interviews Hitchens (and supplies photo up top), who outs Karl Rove as an unbeliever, discusses praying (unsuccessfully) for an erection, and says this about the war in Iraq: "When it does become the property of historians rather than propagandists and journalists, it'll become plainer than it is to most people now that it was just."
Ron Hardin | May 2, 2007, 8:07am | #
Jerome Tucille, in the wonderful and recently republished ``It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand,'' describes a regular salon with Ayn, when it is discovered that an accompanying wife, Joey, was religious :
Branden hustled her into an adjoining room and sat her down at a desk with a handful of Rand's anti-God essays. Joey, relieved to be out of earshot of all this talk of second-handers and floating concepts, pored over the pamphlets while the meeting continued in the other room. When she completed her assignment and returned to the gathering, the drone of conversation suddenly stopped and she found herself skewered by some twenty pairs of drilling eyes.
Branden took the initiative. ``Well?''
``I found it all very interesting, Nathan.''
``She found it very interezting,'' Branden repeated the information to the others at no extra charge. ``Anything elze?''
``The arguments are very good, but I'm still not an atheist if that's what you're getting at.''
Rand decided to take over. This was unquestionably a matter that demanded her personal intervention. ``You haf read ze proofs?''
``They're all very good and thought-provoking, Ayn. But you don't shake a lifetime of religious faith with a few articles. I'll have to think about it a while.''
``You haf read ze proofs and you ztill inzist on wallowing in your mindless myztizizm? Faith is irrational which means ...''
``Which means zat faith is immoral,'' said Branden.
``Which means it is anti-life,'' said Peikoff.
``Which means it is anti-man,'' said Hessen.
``Which means it is anti ... anti ...,'' said Barbara Branden, searching for a suitable phrase.
``Enoff!'' said Rand, clapping her hands. ``Zere has been enoff zmall talk for vun night. Do you haf anymore questions to ask me?''
This was the signal that the meeting was adjourned for the night. No one had any questions. Ayn was getting a headache. It was time for everyone to go home.
p.23-
dhex | May 2, 2007, 4:01pm | #
"I guess opinions can differ, if you can possibly find him a puddle, what do you think of Hitchens, who seems to have problems staying on a single coherent point for more than half a sentence at most."
hitchens is a witty, erudite dude whose mind is slowly (or not) being drowned in the alcomahol. it used to be that even when i thought he was dead wrong, i was always entertained. now, i have about zero interest in books about atheism, because the time when he could have made it interesting to read seems long past.
harris is, to my ears, something like a fratboy atheist. DOOOD THIS IS TOTALLY GAY type atheist. pretty useless for my purposes, a la the snippet from your link below:
"But there are several problems with such a defense of moderate religion. First, many moderates assume that religious "extremism" is rare and therefore not all that consequential. Happily, you are not in this camp, but I would venture that you are in a minority among religious moderates. As you and I both know, religious extremism is not rare, and it is hugely consequential. Forty-four percent of Americans believe that Jesus will return to earth to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years. This idea is extreme in almost every sense-extremely silly, extremely dangerous, extremely worthy of denigration-but it is not extreme in the sense of being rare."
not only is it not particularly dangerous (silly or not, it's a pre-rational stance, something harris doesn't seem to comprehend) it's something that doesn't particularly affect day to day life in the u.s.
the victimhood mode of narration for public atheists (something dawkins generally doesn't tap dance in too much, thank zogness) just galls me. atheists don't get atheist-bashed, by and large, and they don't get lynched by the religious. it sucks to have your neighbors act like dicks because of metaphysical differences but that's when you either learn to deal with being a minority that has to deal with non-coercive social sanctioning, or you move to a city with the rest of us perverts, heathens and weirdos and try not to slip on all the astroglide.
