Hitchens is not Great: The Poison of Pride
By Michael Bresciani (06/09/07)
In the sixties one of the more hackneyed slogans of the time was from
Friedrich Nietzsche’s Joyous Wisdom. “God is dead: Nietzsche. It was often
countered with Nietzsche is dead: God. The prime decade of the new
millennium has a new champion of human presumption and pride in
Christopher Hitchens.
Even a better than middling mind is bound to find a reason to be bored
with Hitchens book “God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.”
Impeccable English and brilliant elucidation does little to keep the mind
from wandering repeatedly to Matthew 6:23b “If therefore the light that is
in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!”
Hitchens either doesn’t know or perhaps doesn’t care that almost all
Christians who see themselves as saved by the grace of God through the
finished work on Calvary don’t consider themselves saved, lead by or
enamored of religion. Most born again people know that the world only
needs a redeemer not a religion.
As a potent polemicist Hitchens drives hard against Mormonism, Buddhism,
Islam and Christianity. Having started his quest to undo senseless and
unfounded faith in God when he was only nine years old, it seems he is
only meandering through a few decades of anti-God reflection with
occasional reference to someone else’s epistemology or his own brand of
overtly verbose but labored tautology.
At other times he resorts to his own trusted solipsism or crescendos into
vitriol. Political correctness, common protocol, decency and deference
fail completely to keep Hitchens from describing Christians in the very
worst light or calling them “morons.” Hitchen’s intelligence although
always recognizable gets mired and smothered in his own arrogance,
pomposity and presumption.
A graduate of both Cambridge and Oxford Hitchens has little tolerance for
the un-lettered as was seen on his recent interview on the O’Reilly
Factor. In June of 2007 he glibly referred to Sean Hannity as
“un-lettered.” Hannity shook off the reference but the slur only served to
backfire making Hitchens appear as is he were pimping his own broader
education. Sean Hannity who is well spoken and well educated remained
composed and did not yield to Hitchens attempt to un-nerve him. Following
the remark, Hitchens seemed to amble aimlessly around the subject at hand
in an almost incoherent kind of psycho babble.
With the same elevated view of himself that was shown on the Factor, in
his book Hitchens speaks down to those he sees as unlearned. From the self
perceived heights of his own learning he never seems to notice that though
not un-learned, he is grossly un-premised. His four objections are the
sophomoric premise that betrays the entire content of his book. Freshmen
epistemologists could handle the best Christopher has in his fusillades
and it is not likely that anyone will have their faith abjured by either
his ranting or his obscurantism.
Hitchens four pronged premise is as follows: “There are four irreducible
objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of
man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to
combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is
both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it
is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.”
The idea that any of the four “objections” are “irreducible” is the
beginning of the slide into presumption. We can only wonder if Hitchens
thinks they are irreducible because he made them or because there is no
possible argument against them.
Someone should have told Mr. Hitchens that only what is objectively
established can suffer reduction. Subjective matters and the un-empirical,
un-witnessed announcement of a big bang that created a universe of stars
and planets is mere “prior philosophic postulation” and it is of the same
substance as faith. For most people lettered or not it takes a great deal
more faith to believe than the Biblical account of creation.
Empiricism by definition is necessarily limited to the arena of repeatable
observable phenomena, or is it? If six billion sentient beings and
millions of species of other creatures came from the non-sentient
incidental gathering of gases and particulates at some unspecified time in
the past that exploded and in time became all that now is, is making this
claim science?
If it all was true then wouldn’t gases and particulates figuratively be
our “heavenly father?” It is surprising that no one in the big bang crowd
has ever been asked to account for the creation of the wandering gases and
particulates. As in who created them, and how did they “evolve.” It seems
that even atheists are plagued with the question of who created the
creator, which for them was a cloud of gases.
With gas clouds as our creator and monkeys as our earliest progenitors it
speaks to the height of presumption that Mr. Hitchens thinks faith in God
as creator “misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos.” The Genesis
account of creation is for many less taxing on the credulity than the
princess kisses frog to produce a handsome young prince kind of story that
the big bang theorists have put their faith in.
Hitchens says that “because of this original error it manages to combine
the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism,” that Hitchens
says, “is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression…”
Glibly dismissing the faith of countless millions of souls because of what
Hitchens lightly refers to as an “error’ is pompous enough, but to connect
it to sexual repression is a leap that sounds like something from the
material of the stand up comic. Belief in the creation story leads to
sexual repression? Move over Sigmund Freud. To think that up to now we
have all erroneously labored under the assumption that all behavior was
linked to the libido. Had Hitchens been contemporary to Freud we may have
been spared these years of wandering, but with new enlightenment we now
know it is directly attributable to our errors concerning the creation
account of Genesis!
Mature Christians rarely resort to mocking unbelievers because they are
cognitively responding to the Masters call to love. At times that may be
hard, but it is a lot easier when it is seen that some of the atheistic
theories come with their own special brand of self mocking as appendages
or supplements. Words like “In the beginning God created the heaven and
the earth.” (Ge. 1:1) and “Be fruitful, and multiply” (Ge.1:22) make us
all glad the yellow pages are replete with a full compliment of
psychiatrists and therapist to help us to deal with the repression these
words create.
Hitchens petted premise and impetus for his book is summarized in the
claim that all of these beliefs or “errors” as he calls them are
“ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.” It’s the old “if you believe it
that’s what makes it true” theorem. But this is not what our faith is
primarily based on.
Long before we begin to trust the finished work and the words of Christ we
acknowledge the historicity of Christ. Our faith is placed in a historical
figure not the shear force of our belief. As always the big bang theorists
have to be reminded that there is an army of witnesses to the life, the
teachings, the death and the resurrection of Christ. There is still not
one witness to the big bang.
Hitchens like so many anti-theists have both underestimated and
misunderstood all three aspects or persons of the Godhead. They doubt the
power of God to create the worlds, they doubt the power of Christ to
redeem the souls of men but the greatest failing is their complete
ignorance concerning the power of the Holy Spirit.
God does not depend on our ability to muster sufficient faith to retain
belief and obedience to him. He has promised to actually give us something
in transaction at the point that we place our faith in him. He endows each
believer with his own Holy Spirit. The force of our belief would not last
a week without the infilling of his Spirit.
It is that infilling that has found me quoting this saying hundreds of
times over the course of my life. “A man with an experience is never at
the mercy of a man with an argument.”
After reading Hitchens I may have to appendage my well used quote with
“even if he is fully lettered.”
Rev Michael Bresciani
(Printer friendly version) Email: Michael Bresciani
