You Can’t Beat Hot Air’s Headline For This One
Said headline is here:
“Hitchens: The Iraq war is wrong and I believe in God”
Now I spoil the fun and explain some of it. CDR Salamander mentioned his reaction to the Christopher Hitchens lecture at Politics and Prose last week. Now the other Hitchens has his reaction, and it’s an entertaining read.
I liked and enjoyed this book, and recommend it to anybody who is interested in the subject. Like everything Christopher writes, it is often elegant, frequently witty and never stupid or boring.
I also think it is wrong, mostly in the way that it blames faith for so many bad things and gives it no credit for any of the good it may have done.
I think it misunderstands religious people and their aims and desires. And I think it asserts a number of things as true and obvious that are nothing of the sort.
At the heart of this book are two extraordinary, bold statements. One is a declaration of absolute faith, faith that religion has got it wrong, a mental thunderbolt of unbelief.
Christopher describes how at the age of nine he concluded that his teacher’s claim that the world must be designed was wrong. “I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong.”
At the time of this revelation, he knew nothing of the vast, unending argument between those who maintain that the shape of the world is evidence of design, and those who say the same world is evidence of random, undirected natural selection.
It’s my view that he still doesn’t know all that much about this interesting dispute. Yet at the age of nine, he “simply knew” who had won one of the oldest debates in the history of mankind.
Oh yeah, no wonder those two don’t spend much time around each other.
(Sure would be nice if Hot Air would allow comments. They opened registration once about eleven thousand years ago and since then, nada.)
7 Responses to “You Can’t Beat Hot Air’s Headline For This One”
Trackback URL for You Can’t Beat Hot Air’s Headline For This One: http://gmapalumni.org/chapomatic/wp-trackback.php?p=2445
June 3rd, 2007 at 7:37 pm
As so often is the case, South Park nailed this controversy, arguing that if one eliminates the variable of religious faith which Hitch (and Maher and Captain Obvious) claims to be the root cause of conflict, the tendency towards apocalyptic conflict remains.
In the future, in the episode “Go God Go”:
In the concluding episode of this two-part farce, the United Atheist League appears to further complicate matters…
Nietzsche made a lot of things clear with the Will to Power….I’ve been looking for the Will to Tribe follow-up for some time…somebody will write that book. Or it probably has been written and Barry hasn’t told me about it. Bastard, I know he’s in it with the sea otters.
June 3rd, 2007 at 7:45 pm
Ah, yes, you can’t really have a discussion like this without the modern age’s two greatest philosophers.
June 4th, 2007 at 12:19 am
You talking about Maher & Friedman, Parker & Stone, or Campbell & Nietzsche?
June 4th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
What’s the fuss about this little mean sumbitch Hitchens.. I mean who gives a flying- F? What’s the fuss about this little mean sumbitch Hitchens.. I mean who gives a flying- F? Oh, sure I know..it pisses “people like me” off…
Just because he is “progressive” on everything and oh-so-satrical, but surprisingly sees the reality that is GWOT.. His niche I guess. On the other hand his constant “in your face” evangelical atheism makes me want to “break his nose” if’n we ever met (euphemisticly break his nose o’course). I know what to expect if I choose to read him..which bores me..
b2
June 6th, 2007 at 3:28 am
[...] Bob doesn’t like Hitchens very much (although he might like the other Hitch in the previous post). B2 asks why I [...]
June 6th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
Unfortunately, Commander Salamander seems to make the mistake that Hitchens is finding fault in to begin with, a clear sign that the Commander is one of the few people left on the planet to not yet read “God is Not Great”. He is cherry picking of the Bible what he likes and snarling at what he thinks is childish or rubbish, for that matter. Christopher said in the book, and repeats in his lectures that it is the height of egoism to believe that Your take of the Word of God is The take. He also has the idea that since he is parsing the Word of God, he is doing his intellectual part. I get the view. I have been there, but Hitchens is clear that there is anti-intellectualism as a core component to belief of this kind regardless of the parsing. Chap, I dig that you read my blog post on the Hitchens/Hedges debate, and more importantly that you left me a kind note, a pick-me-up really. I will keep you at the top of mind when I re-up all of my links, as they are all left-overs from a conservative past that hardly represents me anymore. Again, thank you.
CB
http://www.crankybastard.blogspot.com
June 7th, 2007 at 3:29 am
Hey, thanks for dropping by. I don’t know CDR Salamander’s faith, and don’t need to know, but there is something to be said in finding a balance between literal-word belief and anything-goes dismissal of a faith’s text.
And this comment is really funny, actually:
…because Hitchens has a take, too, thus making the statement self-referential!
Not being an expert on such things I claim no knowledge. I do know, though, of people who do not deny doubt, and that makes sense to me that someone could have faith with doubt, and have that faith without being in the situation Hitchens refers to above. But ’tis a minor quibble.
Buddha supposedly dismissed any talk of the hereafter because it was just too unknowable–which is freekin’ hilarious…