The Marquess of Queensbury
The Guardian apparently disapproves of Hitchens’s still-unapologetic atheism; at least it allows its reporter to misrepresent what he said.
If it had been a boxing match Hitchens would have been described as landing blow after blow, many of them decidedly low – especially those about circumcision or women’s rights. He described the aid work done by religious missions as “conscience money” to make up for the harm they have done. After all, why bother treating HIV-infected people in Africa while working against the use of condoms?
That’s not what he said, to put it mildly. This is what he said:
Furthermore, if you are going to grant this to Catholic charities, I would say, which I hope are doing a lot of work in Africa, if I was a member of a church that had preached that AIDS was not as bad as condoms, I would be putting some conscience money into Africa too, I must say. I’m not trying to be funny. If I was trying to be funny, you mistook me. It won’t bring back the millions of people who have died wretched deaths because of that teaching, that still goes on.
Absolutely nothing to do with “why bother,” you see? A million miles from “why bother.” Talk about a “low blow.”
And while we’re on the subject, why is it a low blow for Hitchens to cite genital mutilation (not circumcision – he mentioned a sharp rock and genitals, not circumcision) and women’s rights? I think it’s a much lower blow for Tony Blair to join a woman-hating church in late adulthood.
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I hate when pointing out objective facts gets called a “low blow.” My fellow boxing fans will join me in recognizing that a low blow—hitting below the belt—is an infraction of the rules. The implication of Harris’ tortured, rather cliche boxing metaphor is that Hitch, in bring up genital mutilation and the maltreatment of women, was somehow doing something that was not de rigueur. In fact, bringing up such subjects, in a debate about the utility of religion, is perfectly reasonable.
You know what a real “low blow” is, Mr. Harris? Female genital mutilation.
On the topic of the debate. Blair was as useless as you might expect. Also, Hitchens’s choice in opening remarks largely pre-empted Blair’s criticisms.
But still, I felt like Blair got away with things that Hitch usually blasts with hellfire. In particular, Hitch brought up S. Weinberg’s quote, that (paraphrase) “it takes religion to get good people to do terrible things”. Subsequently, Blair rebutted with the Hitler/Stalin/Pol Pot examples, and those examples went unaddressed and unchallenged by Hitch. This is too bad, since the Stalin/Pol Pot examples in particular need some kind of reply. Since none was given, it’s no surprise to me that Blair was able to pick up 10% of the audience’s votes.
Exactly. And this author manages to be simultaneously snarky and tone-troll-y (not to mention dishonest), a combination that is annoying and irritatingly hypocritical.
“Hitchens shows no sign of preparing to “meet his maker” according to the article. I hate that phrase. Again the mythical gets credit for what humans do. I met my makers and was fortunate to spend a great deal of my first twenty years with them.
Any attack on religion is a low blow. Any attack or mention of its “not nice” properties, because people shouldn’t have to hear about the nasty parts of worship when their God is so merciful and forgiving. So, yes, it is a series of low blows to mention the harm the people do in the name of religion.
Blair was able to pick up 10% of the audience’s votes by successfully, for some, changing the resolution to the religious are a force for good in the world. That allows him to portray Hitchens as anti-theist, which Paul Harris promotes.
Why? Because I can point to so many good religious people. This is predictable and, in some way, promising. Every time Blair comes close to claiming that these people are good because they’re religious, honesty compels him to pull back.
That is comically, and endearingly, weak.
If you don’t want to be struck a low blow probably best not to dangle your testicles in someone’s face.
Their ears are burning over at the Vatican…
Somehow we keep coming back to tea bagging…
Nitpick: the title is Marquess, not Marquis.
(trivia: the 9th Marquess, after whom the Rules are named, was a notable atheist)
Ah. I knew it was wrong (because I didn’t pause to look it up, so it had to be).
The Guardian is normally one of the better British newspapers (in my opinion, the best) but they seem to have acquired some writers on religion who abandon clarity and faithfulness to the material in favour of a kind of slack-jawed apologetics. In recent years I’ve seen similar instances of lackadaisical reporting about Dawkins. It’s most annoying. I don’t expect religion reporters to be sympathetic to atheist ideas, but plain bad journalism is never acceptable.
Is religion a force for good? Sometimes it is, sometimes not. Religious people often do good things, more often than not do bad things. None of these manifestly obvious facts have any bearing on the truth value of religious claims. Every religion makes supremely confident claims regarding the universe we live in and our place in it. It is what defines and sustains the corresponding credo. How they make people act under varying circumstances is supremely irrelevant in assessing (and eventually dismissing) those claims.
Here’s another low blow. After mentioning Hitchens’ talk of the ‘numinous’ and the ‘transcendent’, Harris writes:
“If that was a small concession to what Hitchens’s current intimate brush with mortality has meant to him, it was a brief one.”
Hitchens has been talking like this for as long as anyone cares to notice. It certainly precedes his cancer.
I think it’s interesting to talk about Stalin / Hitler and Pol Pot as being examples of people who don’t believe in God and who murdered people in their millions. All three were people who were members of a faith that believed not in God but did believe in Aryan superiority, the well-being of the proletariat or whatever, and all three did horrible things in name of that faith.
There is nothing particularly nasty about what Jesus taught, or what Marx advocated, and in many ways what they had to say was admirable. It is the followers, who spoke in their name, who did such horrible things, whether they were Hitler (who used Darwin’s ideas), Stalin and Pol Pot (who used Marx) or the Spanish Inquisition (which used the ideas of Jesus). In other words, the real harm caused by faith seems not to be the ideas themselves but the way people use (and mis-use) those ideas.
Blair himself is a good example of this.
Jan,
I agree with your general argument, but with one very important caveat. Hitler was NOT an atheist and he DID NOT speak in Darwin’s name. These beliefs are concoctions by anti-atheists. (I’m not attacking you here, by the way, as this particular lie has become commonplace; even the Pope, a man who was once a member of the Hitler Youth and therefore *knows* this to be a falsehood is quite happy to trot it out at speeches in foreign countries in front of dignitaries.)
Just for the record: Hitler was raised a Catholic and there is no evidence he ever rejected his faith. He often compared himself to Jesus and claimed that he was doing god’s work. Nazi stormtrooper belt buckles carried the phrase Gott mit Uns (“God is with us”) — hardly the motto of an atheist. There is a church (can’t recall where just at the moment) built during Hitler’s reign that has loving sculptures of Hitler and lots of Nazi imagery carved into the woodwork. Hitler did try to unite Catholics and Protestants because he saw a united church as part of a greater Germany; in other words, he was a theocrat of the Constantinian persuasion.
As for Darwin, there is not a single reference to Charles Darwin, to any of Darwin’s works, to any of Darwin’s successors, or to the theory of evolution in any of Hitler’s speeches, books, memos, etc. That is, despite there being literally millions of Hitler’s words in the historical record, he never once mentioned evolutionary theory as a basis for his racism and anti-Semitism. He did refer to lots of historical reasons to hate other races, and used the sort of pseudoscience still popular among animal breeders to support his hatred, but not Darwin.
Chris Lawson @ #16: Interesting stuff. I suppose Hitler, who was never excommunicated for his crimes against humanity, died a Catholic. It is hard to suppose he was still a sincere believer.
With reference also to Benjamin Nelson @ #3: both Stalin and Pol Pot were religious leaders in their own way. I am not sure about Pol Pot, but Stalin based himself on received scriptures which he declared beyond challenge, and then proceeded to write a new testament all of his very own, purportedly based on the writings of the holy trinity of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Mao did much the same. Neither Stalin nor Mao was reluctant to make a public example of heretics.
Akhenaton in the period 1350 to 1334 B.C.E. overthrew all other Egyptian gods and decreed that the sun (Aten) was the new and only god, to be worshipped by worshipping the Pharaoh (ie himself). To paraphrase Marx, history repeated itself: first time as farce, next (and umpteenth) time as tragedy.
Both Hitler and Stalin founded short-lived religions. Neither, strictly speaking, was an atheist. Like Akenaton and God knows how many before and since, they did not mind at all being elevated to divine status and being made the objects of mass worship.
The hallmark of a religion in my view is not worship of some divine or diabolical god or other, but the elevation of whatever belief to a status beyond criticism or question. Arguably, from time to time certain scientific theories have even degenerated into quasi-religious dogma. Probably the outstanding example was the one denounced by Carl Sagan re establishment attempts to silence the maverick Velikovsky.
By their gospels ye shall know them.
@ Chris Lawson
I agree entirely with you that Darwin did not write or say anything that could imploy that he would have had any sympathy with Hitler’s beliefs. However, that is the exact point I was trying to make in my fumbling way. Darwin wrote about the survival of the fittest, and I think it was Tennyson who wrote about “nature red in tooth and claw” which in turn influenced other people (Spencer if I remember correctly) who in turn influenced Hitler.
Just as the Spanish Inquisition did not use the ideas of Jesus directly, but used the ideas of people (the early Church fathers) who again based their ideas on St. Paul. It is this garbled transmission of ideas, whereby ideas that were originally loving-and-giving are transformed into hating-and-killing that is the hallmark of almost all organised/well-known religions and idea systems.
I mean, just imagine Stalin, Pol Pot or Hitler allowing themselves be crucified so as to prevent suffering of other people.
Jan, Spencer actually coined the phrase which Darwin picked up in later editions as a shorthand metaphor. Neither of them ever meant it to intimate innately superior species or races.For what its worth I don’t think its the garbled message that is the problem, it is the unquestioning belief in the truth and justice of one’s cause; combined with the utopian ideal making any sacrifice worthwhile. Hitler, Pol Pot, Torquemada and Stalin didn’t kill all those people; others, who really believed they were right did it for them.
A footnote to the use of “survival of the fittest”; Dawkins writes in TGSOE that Wallace (co-discoverer of natural selection) asked Darwin to drop the term “natural selection” because he thought that “intelligent persons” struggled to understand the lack of agency involved when they saw the word “selection”. For this reason Wallace favoured “survival of the fittest” – here’s the rather sweet letter – which has more unfortunate overtones now, obviously.
Are we going to argue that Martin Luther was not a sincere believer? Are Christians aware of his beliefs and policies towards the Jews?
The reports about the Hitchens-Blair debate almost, without exception, show a peculiar deafness to the actual course of the debate. Did anyone, I wonder, bother to count the number of times that Blair repeated the old saw about religious people doing nice things? Or the equally old saw about “true” religion. Of course, “true” religion is the compassionate kind. The engagement of some Christians with works of charity is, indeed, a reasonably prominent part of what Christians think of themselves as doing nowadays, but I wonder if anyone has bothered to calculate the amount of money and time they spend on such things in contrast to the money and time they spend on church buildings, the paraphernalia of worship, and things that contribute very little to human welfare.
It’s certainly true that, since churches have been effectively shut out, in most places (at least in the democractic West), from the exercise of political power — at least the direct exercise of political power — when, that is, as AC Grayling says, they have been on the back foot — they have adopted the posture of compassion and concern for the poor and the marginalised. But it doesn’t take much historical digging to find a time when the church, firmly on its front foot, not only lorded it over the poor and the marginalised, but conspired with other powerful classes in society to treat such people with contempt.
It’s quite common, nowadays, to pretend that the church’s misuse of power was simply a matter of politics, and did not touch the heart of the religion itself, just as the “Science and Religion” crowd suggest that Galileo’s condemnation was really political and not religious. But institutional religion in particular is involved in politics all the time. That’s just the nature of institutional reality. So, it’s more than a bit dishonest to shrug off the worst features of religion’s hegemony in the past, as well as now in places where religion’s exercise of power remains undiminished, and dismiss it as irrelevant to an understanding of what religion is and how it acts. It won’t do to point to the selfless religious activists who offer support for people in need, and ignore the viciousness of religion in so many of its other guises, like the condemnation of condoms, the excommunication of people for participating in abortions, no matter how morally justified, the cover up of sexual and other forms of abuse, and the transfer of abusers in order to spare the church negative press, the exclusion of women from high office in the church, and so on. (And this does not even mention the manifold ways in which Muslims today offend against humanity and compassion.) Whatever we believe, there will always be people who will be moved by the sufferings of others, whether for religious or other reasons. It’s simply special pleading to suggest that the existence of such compassionate people is of the essence of religion, when its long history of inhumanity is relegated to the realm of accident.
Jan Frank has suggested that Jesus was, somehow, an exception. “I mean, [says he/she] just imagine Stalin, Pol Pot or Hitler allowing themselves be crucified so as to prevent suffering of other people.” In what way was Jesus’ crucifixion meant to prevent the suffering of other people? The crucifixion of Jesus is so deeply embedded in a mythicising narrative that it is hard to know why he was crucified or whether it was something that he sought. Quite aside from this, if the stories are to be believed, he asked his followers to follow him in the way of the cross, and to share in his suffering, as many people do to this day, through self-flagellation, the wearing of hair shirts, and in some cases the deliberate seeking out of martyrdom. They also seek to perpetuate the sufferings of others by refusing to allow for the assisted dying of those whose lives have been crushed by great pain or distress, and they invite those who are dying to allow these sufferings to redound to their spiritual good. There are, indeed, sayings that seem to suggest that Jesus was concerned about hungry and socially marginalised people, but to what extent, I wonder, is this really just an aspect of growing antisemitism in the face of Jewish non-belief, rather than encouragement to true charity, since it is the Jewish leaders who were being singled out for condemnation throughout Christian canonical texts and commentaries. Besides, those who do not believe and follow Jesus are threatened with hellfire by Jesus himself. “Since you did not do it to one of these, my brothers, you did not do it unto me. Depart from me into the fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
It is worthwhile remembering that burning heretics to death was considered to be condign punishment for heretics, since it was a foretaste of what they would endure in the hell that awaited them, just as the eucharist was the foretaste of the heavenly banquet. And, as for Pol Pot and others of the same ilk, it ill befits those who defend religion to chalk up these monsters as representative of rational atheism. They may not have believed in gods, but they believed, as Ian MacDougall points out, in certainties that take religion as their model. The influence of religion, and its bad intellectual habits, has penetrated much deeper than the content of religious beliefs. Religion represents an entire way of thinking, and it is unsurprising that people like Marx and Engels, who spoke with such prophetic urgency of the coming revolution, should have inspired religiously shaped ideologies which spoke of the future in such plainly religious, apocalyptic terms; nor is it very surprising that so much harm was done by ideas so firmly held in the face of evidence that would have made even religious certainty falter.
In one way or another Hitchens raised all these concerns in his debate with Blair, whose intellectual standing should surely have taken a nosedive after one of the most inept attempts to defend religion in recent memory. Hitchens may not have responded to the references to Pol Pot, Stalin or Hitler, but these references do not, in any reasonable sense, do what Blair hoped they would. In fact, the fact that Mao adopted a kind of fervent religious rhetoric, instead of adopting the less obviously religious, humanistic rationality of the Chinese philosophical tradition, is a good sign of how deeply Marxism had been colonised by religious patterns of thought. No one wins by trying to refute these silly stereotypes that the religious continually raise in debate. Speaking about historical necessity is very similar to the idea of knowing the will of a god. If anyone has any doubt about this, just read Hegel.
In support of Egbert’s last comment, it is worthwhile pointing out that Hitler claimed, rightly, that he did not suggest doing to the Jews anything which Luther did not also approve. Indeed, Luther believed that not only should Jews be killed, but that their houses should be destroyed, and the ground levelled, so that no one would even know that Jews had lived amongst them. Luther also, it should be added, affirmed a memorandum by the reformer Melanchthon, that prescribed death for Anabaptists. The Reformation may have, in the views of its leaders, sought to purify religion; but it also showed religion in its true colours, and this has very little to do with love and compassion.
Oh my, that was longer than I thought!
More christian lies. But when your entire belief system is based on a lie, lying come easy.
While agreeing with what has already been written (excellent post Eric BTW), I’d like to observe that it isn’t just people that are affected.
“Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.””
Consider how many billion acts of cruelty have been committed as a result of this verse alone – and not just limited to kosher (or halal) slaughtering methods still sanctioned today. For more than five thousand years this pernicious crap has prevented our species from having a sane relationship with the planet that is our only home. Not only that but it has contributed to the destruction and even extinction of people that did have a saner relationship with the planet – I’m reminded that the last Beothuk was hunted to death by christians, not by fellow “savages”.
Good post, though, Eric.
I and a few friends created a questionnaire in the multiple choice magazine style, lampooning God’s morality. I posted this re the Jewish question:
Blair’s going with (c).
Um… what? So pointing out the truth of the matter is a “low blow”?
You know, the other day I was talking to somebody about Charles Manson — about his recordings, of course! — and the person I was talking to had the audacity to bring up Manson’s involvement with an apocalyptic racist cult that committed several shockingly brutal murders. What a low blow!
Like Eric, I’m having a hard time with Jan’s suggestion that “the real harm caused by faith seems not to be the ideas themselves but the way people use (and mis-use) those ideas”. If I could distill a reply down to its essentials, I would say this: It’s not enough to just blame people — you have to blame institutions, and institutions are idealizations, and hence kinds of ideas.
I also agree with Eric in his reply to Ian, though we would have different emphasis. Eric wrote: “They may not have believed in gods, but they believed, as Ian MacDougall points out, in certainties that take religion as their model.” But that’s consistent with the apologist’s story. (The apologist will just say, “The model of power-brokering is not unique to religion, it is only unique to politics.”) That’s why I was so frustrated to hear the Stalin/etc. reference made in debate without explicit rebuke.
While I understand why Ian has argued the way that he has, I can’t agree that “Stalin and Pol Pot were religious leaders in their own way.” The problem is that once you take gods and spirits out of religion, you stretch the meaning of “religion” to the point of disutility. If you put it that way, then religion just seems to mean “totalitarianism”, but that’s both overselling the point and begging the question.*
*(And, in fairness, I would be just as incredulous to an apologist if they were to say, with a beam in their eye, that “the true spirit of religion is what’s left over once you take away all the nasty politics”. That’s just as much of a case of oversell / question-beggary.)