US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3942

On June 04 2016 20:10 NukeD wrote:

You guys seriously need to stop being outraged by everything or stop catering to those who are outraged by everything.

EDIT: I wonder what the reaction would be if it was a female xman choking a male xman.

On June 04 2016 20:56 NukeD wrote:

And here I am thinking I would be demonized for thinking the outrage on the poster is ridiculous. You never can tell with TL!

On June 04 2016 22:41 ticklishmusic wrote:


TIL marriage equality is stupid

On June 04 2016 23:30 SK.Testie wrote:


I reiterate for like the 5th time, if you're going to say they're dummies please prescribe me some reading to do from your side that has arguments that trump theirs rather than attacking them. Show me who you hold in high esteem rather than discredit them. I feel that's a better way to sway me to your side and for me to gain your perspective. I have my own gripes with each of them, but surely if you're going to tout them as unintelligent you must surely come from a higher plane of existence with the writings of ... who exactly?

While a scientist like Richard Dawkins might be forgiven for not having his philosophic/aesthetic house in order, no such tolerance should be allowed for his notorious comrade-in-arms Christopher Hitchens. In spite of the fact that Hitchens regularly invokes the authority of empiricism and reason—he condemns anything that “contradicts science or outrages reason,” and he concedes something that no poet would: that “proteins and acids … constitute our nature”—he was not a scientist but a literary critic, a journalist, and a public intellectual. So, you would think that the perspective of the arts, literature, and philosophy would find a prominent place in his thought. But that is not the case. He proposes to clear away religion in the name of science and reason. Literature’s function in this brave new world is to depose the Bible and provide an opportunity to study the “eternal ethical questions.”

Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great” is an intellectually shameful book. To be intellectually shameful is to be dishonest, to tell less than you know, or ought to know, and to shape what you present in a way that misrepresents the real state of affairs. In this sense, and in Hitchens’s own term, his book lacks “decency.” (You may think that I lack decency for attacking a man so recently deceased, but I do no more than what Hitchens himself did. Speaking of Jerry Falwell, Hitchens pointedly refuses a “compassionate word” for this “departed fraud.”)

Like Hitchens, I am an atheist, if to be an atheist means not believing in a CEO God who sits outside his creation, proclaiming edicts, punishing hapless sinners, seeking vengeance on his enemies, and picking sides in times of war. This God and his hypocrite followers have been easy targets for enlightened wit since Rabelais, Molière, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, and our own Mark Twain. Of course, this God and his faithful are still very much a problem politically, and Hitchens never lets us forget that unhappy fact. Our own religious right is real, and international fundamentalism is dangerous and frightening, especially for the sad people who must live with it.

As critics have observed since its publication, one enormous problem with Hitchens’s book is that it reduces religion to a series of criminal anecdotes. In the process, however, virtually all of the real history of religious thought, as well as historical and textual scholarship, is simply ignored as if it never existed. Not for Hitchens the rich cross-cultural fertilization of the Levant by Helenistic, Jewish, and Manichaean thought. Not for Hitchens the transformation of a Jewish heretic into a religion that Nietzsche called “Platonism for the masses.” Not for Hitchens the fascinating theological fissures in the New Testament between Jewish, Gnostic, and Pauline doctrines. Not for Hitchens the remarkable journey of the first Christian heresy, Arianism, spiritual origin of our own thoroughly liberal Unitarianism. (Newton was an Arian and anti-Trinitarian, which made his presence at Trinity College permanently awkward.) Not for Hitchens the sublime transformation of Christian thought into the cathartic spirituality of German Idealism/ Romanticism and American Transcendentalism. And, strangely, not for Hitchens the existential Christianity of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Karl Jaspers, Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, and, most recently, the religious turn of poststructural thought in Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Žižek. (All of these philosophers sought what Žižek calls Christianity’s “perverse core.”) And it’s certainly not that he didn’t have the opportunity to acknowledge these intellectual and spiritual traditions. At one point he calls the story of Abraham and Isaac “mad and gloomy,” a “frightful” and “vile” “delusion,” but sees no reason to mention Kierkegaard’s complex, poetic, and deeply felt philosophical retelling of the story in “Fear and Trembling”. In this way, Hitchens is often as much a textual literalist as the fundamentalists he criticizes.

This case has been well made by others, if mostly in places far more obscure than Hitchens’s privileged position on the New York Times best-seller list. For example, William J. Hamblin wrote a thorough and admirably restrained review (“The Most Misunderstood Book: Christopher Hitchens on the Bible”) in which he held Hitchens to account for historical howlers of this kind:

In discussing the exodus, Hitchens dogmatically asserts: “There was no flight from Egypt, no wandering in the desert . . . , and no dramatic conquest of the Promised Land. It was all, quite simply and very ineptly, made up at a much later date. No Egyptian chronicle mentions this episode either, even in passing. . . . All the Mosaic myths can be safely and easily discarded.” These narratives can be “easily discarded” by Hitchens only because he has failed to do even a superficial survey of the evidence in favor of the historicity of the biblical traditions. Might we suggest that Hitchens begin with Hoffmeier’s Israel in Egypt and Ancient Israel in Sinai? It should be noted that Hoffmeier’s books were not published by some small evangelical theological press but by Oxford University—hardly a bastion of regressive fundamentalist apologetics. Hitchens’s claim that “no Egyptian chronicle mentions this episode [of Moses and the Israelites] either, even in passing” is simply polemical balderdash.

Hamblin is thorough, patient, relentless, but also, it seems to me, a little perplexed and saddened by Hitchens’s naked dishonesty and, in all probability, by his own feeling of impotence. You can hardly blame him. Criticism of this character would have, and surely should have, revealed Hitchens’s book for what it is … if it hadn’t been published in The FARMS Review of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. Hitchens need never have feared the dulling of his reputation for intellectual dash and brio from that source.

As Hamblin’s case makes clear, even defenses of religion in the publications of university presses are not worthy of the attention of the so-called “new atheists.” But what would Dawkins or Hitchens do with a book like Robert N. Bellah’s “Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age” (Harvard, 2011)? This book is a critique of Western culture operating under the one-sided influence of “theoretic” (scientific) culture, and a historical account of how the theoretic is dependent on the mythic. In a review by Linda Heuman in Tricycle Magazine (Summer 2012), she writes,

Bellah simultaneously undermines our unexamined confidence in the absolute authority of reason and increases our confidence in other kinds of truth. . . . In this view of human development, we are first embodied knowers, then storytellers, and only then analytic thinkers. Reason comes not first but last—it is the newest member of an established team, not the captain but a co-player.

Hitchens’s most egregious misrepresentations are reserved for what he calls, with a great intellectual wheeze, “Eastern religion,” as if all the varieties of Hinduism and Buddhism could be lumped together. In his chapter “There Is No ‘Eastern’ Solution” (all ten pages of it) he reduces the religious traditions of Asia to the frauds perpetrated by one famously noxious guru (Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh) and a few gratuitous slanders on the Dalai Lama. On the basis of a sign he once saw at Rajneesh’s ashram—“Shoes and minds must be left at the gate”—Hitchens concludes that Buddhism is a faith that despises the mind. Never mind that Rajneesh was no Buddhist and barely recognizable as Hindu.

God knows why Hitchens was so irate with Rajneeshism; it was a cult made for the worldly Hitch. The Sannyasa movement was interdenominational and emphasized the importance of capitalism, science, and technology over dogma. Far from being a religious fundamentalist, Rajneesh actually burned five thousand copies of a book, “The Book of Rajneeshism,” purporting to systematize his religion. His Indian critics complained not that he was a fundamentalist but that he was bourgeois. Sannyasa’s primary success was as a business enterprise with a surprisingly corporate structure. As Hugh Urban reports, “By the 1980s, the movement had evolved into a complex, interlocking network of corporations, with an astonishing number of both spiritual and secular businesses worldwide, offering everything from yoga and psychological counseling to cleaning services.”

What’s more galling for those who actually know something about Buddhism is the fact that Hitchens refuses to acknowledge its rich philosophical traditions. For example, the “Heart Sutra” and its many commentaries unite metaphysics and ethics with a profundity that the West would not begin to achieve until Spinoza. (Even Dawkins is willing to concede that Buddhism shares little with fundamentalist religion, and is instead a meditation on ethics: “There is something to be said for treating these not as religions at all but as ethical systems or philosophies of life.”) Nor did he take the trouble to learn about the secular Buddhism advocated by lay scholars like Stephen Batchelor, author of “Confession of a Buddhist Atheist.”