Reader's background: I am an Episcopalian, white, bisexual, cisgender woman in the process of getting her Masters of Divinity. I have a number of important people in my life, one of whom is atheist after a childhood spent in a country where religion is the major determining factor in a person's
ethnic identity, and the leaders of the dominant religion seem to perpetrate a state of tension that leads to continual (ie, for the last several hundred years) ethnic violence.
My project: (and this description is nebulous because I have an instinct about this rather than a clear thought) a paper in which I am trying to figure out a common ground and a common critical language to use to talk between atheist and liberal Protestant(ish)* communities, which seem to have a lot of cultural overlap.
Writer's Background:
The late Mr. Christopher Hitchens.The Book:
God is Not GreatChapter 1
After becoming embarrassed and annoyed at the incompetence of his religious instructors in scientific thought (one teacher tells him that God made the grass green to delight and rest the human eye, and it was very clear to the young Mr. Hitchens that the eye adjusted to find the color green restful rather than the grass changing to fit us) and their seeming inability to justify the point of religious practice, a young Mr. Hitchens sincerely doubted the point of religion. (He seems to be making England's Anglican Church the measuring stick for religion in this example.)
He comes to make four conclusions about religion
1) it misrepresents the origins of man (sic) and the cosmos
2) that (1) makes it maximally servile and maximally solipsistic
3) it results/causes a dangerous sexual repression
4) it is grounded on wish thinking.
Atheism, on the other hand, embraces principles of science and reason rather than faith. Most religions are either irrational and easily turned to violence, or have turned to an "admirable but nebulous humanism" (and here he cites Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor and theologian hanged to refusing to cooperate with Nazis).
I'm going to say that this is a good pick, in terms of strategy. Bonhoeffer is an official saint in several mainline Protestant(ish) denominations, including my own, and his theology is widely read and respected for its focus on social justice. I don't know him well enough to say if he's a liberation theologian, actually, but he's on my To-Read list. Picking Bonhoeffer effectively defangs several strands of Christian thought as "nebulous humanism" rather than the actual religion that Mr Hitchens finds objectionable. However, speaking for the nebula, I don't think we'd agree with his assessment.
Religion, Mr. Hitchens writes, has served its purpose for furthering humanity- it will survive as a vestige of a less advance era, but it has nothing new to say. Atheism is not just an opposition to wonder and amazement- pictures from the Hubble telescope will bring about more awe than Moses and a burning bush.
Consolation, a major component of the point of religion, seems to Mr Hitchens to be better served by actually addressing the harms that influence people's drive to turn to religion rather than merely providing comfort. (Yes, he quotes Marx. No, it's not terribly sensationalist- it's a decent reading of Marx's line, from what I know of him.)
The most devastating critique to be made of religion, Mr Hitchens claims, is that it is man-made. Believers claim to know everything, down to the nubbins, and that is deeply arrogant. To claim certainty is just dead wrong.
Moving into his next argument, Mr Hitchens does not want to abolish religion (which he thinks is impossible anyways), but rather to just leave it alone, and be left alone by it. But this is not to be. For! Mr Hitchens dramatically ends the chapter, "
Religion poisons everything."
*The Episcopal Church maintains that it is both Catholic and reformed. This has some interesting ecumenical ramifications. For instance, when the Roman Catholic church decided that baptisms were only valid when done in "the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit", the Episcopal Church made damned sure that its priests were using that EXACT PHRASE in baptisms. Now, we're free to use a more radical interpretation of the Trinity right after it, but there's now a rule. Reciprocally, when the Methodists and Quakers ordained woman, the Roman Catholic church gave not a single damn. When the Episcopalians did it- big. effing. deal.
My thoughts on this are a bit mixed. Mr Hitchens seems to want to claim himself as a smartass intellectual asshole so that he can proceed to be just that without remorse. It's an choice that gives him a lot of leeway to be smarmy.
On the other hand, he's also arguing cleverly- see the Bonhoeffer note. But he while he pushes the nice religious folks who think that they are doing religion onto the sidelines, he does not offer a clear definition of religion to compare. Which, admittedly, most religious scholars have a huge amount of trouble doing- religion is hard to effectively pin down. Religion can be defined in such a way as to leave out all the nice stuff, or to include only the nice stuff and not the violent stuff, and lots of people do just that. I'm feeling like it's kind of sloppy but! maybe he's doing something with it that will make it clear why later.
On the "radical and devastating critique" that religion is "man-made," I'm not feeling particularly wowed by that. I mean, while I'm in the nebula of fluffy nice people who only
think that we're doing religion, I actually think that it's a fairly well-acknowledged idea that a lot of what a particular religion does it arbitrary and that something else might be just as valid, which acknowledges that religion (at least parts of it) are man-made. Pluralism kind of makes the idea that aspects of religion are influenced by humans not terribly shocking. I waved around a metal ball full of burning incense this Sunday because there's Christians comes from a ritual history that thinks frankincense communicates something about the divine, humanity, and honor- I'm prepared to admit that this is historically contingent.
However, my feeling of threatenedness (or not) may not be the rubric by which Mr. Hitchens wishes to be measured.
On one note, however, I'm going to be clear: every time Mr Hitchens uses the word "man" to mean "humanity" or "human beings," I feel [sic].
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