A very bad Hitchens obituary.

Over at the The Edge of the American West, Eric Rauchway (who may or may not be my thesis adviser)[1] asks “Is there some name for the intellectual maneuver of waiting till an opponent is dead, then insisting he must really have agreed with you all along?” The occasion for the question is Ross Douthat’s recent column about Christopher Hitchens, who he first admires as such a hip rebel and then disrespects by implying that Hitchens’ hipness was not only the style, but most of the substance of his critique of religion. Hitchens, Douthat muses, was perhaps “not so much a disbeliever as a rebel… his atheism was mostly a political romantic’s attempt to pick a fight with the biggest Tyrant he could find.”

Of course, dismissing an opponent’s arguments by claiming they are merely the peacock feathers of an ulterior motive is always a clever cop-out, but it doesn’t work especially well when there is actually a substantial argument to confront. No matter – even the sheer weight and scale of Hitchens’ oeuvre is actually evidence, Douthat claims, that he knew he was wrong.

In his very brave and very public dying, though, one could see again why so many religious people felt a kinship with him. When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade”— that “death is no different whined at than withstood.”

Officially, Hitchens’s creed was one with Larkin’s. But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair.

My hope — for Hitchens, and for all of us, the living and the dead — is that now he finally knows why.”

For the moment, we are going to ignore Douthat’s fifth-grade analysis of the implications of atheism, which is typical for someone who thinks that without the threat of hell, life would have no meaning. Rather, I just want to complain briefly about this classic argument so often made by theists.

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Rick Perry and The No True Christian Fallacy

Ricky Perry recently launched a commercial that has sent a shudder down the spines of millions of Americans, many mainline and liberal Christians included. I see no reason to paraphrase so brief an exercise in utter nonsense, so I’ll quote the text in its entirety:

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.

As President, I’ll end Obama’s war on religion. And I’ll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage.

Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again.

I’m Rick Perry and I approve this message.

As I write this, comments have already been disabled on YouTube and the video has gotten a mere 7,400 “likes” compared to 326,000 “dislikes”, which I consider a landslide of dissent.

This latest assault on common sense and basic facts (there is no war on religion, and children remain free to pray in schools) brings to mind 19th century Speaker of the House Thomas Brackett Reed, who spoke readily against those who seem to “never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.” I think Reed would have had a field day with Perry.

However, a question has been brooding in the back of my mind for some time now and the conversations following Perry’s video have brought it to a head. Every time I post a video of some homophobic politician or racist preacher, all the Christians I know jump to their own defense and say, “He’s not a real Christian, but I am. I have gay friends. And I’m a real Christian.”

Where, then, is the concerted effort within Christendom to stand against these allegedly minority voices and instead represent the True Christianity?

For that matter, where is the league of Catholic parishioners who demand that the pedophiles within their ranks see real legal justice? Where are the scientifically literate Protestants who want better science taught in our schools, which includes the teaching of evolution?

Where are all these True Christians?

When it comes to the Republican Party’s possible nomination of Rick Perry for their presidential candidate, I must defer once again to Thomas Brackett Reed.

“They could do worse, and they probably will.”

But when it comes to the matter of True Christianity, I really am asking this question. This is not merely a sardonic, rhetorical exercise. I honestly want to know, when a guy like Rick Perry makes a mockery of the faith he claims to share will millions of his fellow Americans, where are the True Christian leaders taking him to task for his remarks? Does True Christianity even exist, or are there simply as many versions of Christianity as there are people who fall into the broad demographic?

Why Carl Sagan is awesome – post script.

One more point about Carl Sagan and Cosmos – in the last episode, Sagan makes explicit the connection he appears to draw throughout the series between the value of critical thinking in the scientific realm and the value of critical thinking in all human endeavors. While standing in a recreated library of Alexandria, he asks why the knowledge of the Ancients failed to bring us swiftly into the Enlightenment and instead disintegrated into the Dark Ages, only to reemerge hundreds of years later.

I cannot give you a simple answer, but I do know this. There is no record in the entire history of the library that any of the illustrious scholars and scientists who worked here, ever seriously challenged a single political, or economic, or religious assumption of the society in which they lived. The permanence of the stars was questioned – the justice of slavery was not.”

I’ve written several times before on the connection between atheism and social justice, the skeptical movement and other political movements. I’ve argued that anyone who cares about the religiosity of a society also needs to care about politics – that the two are intertwined and cannot be untangled, and that perhaps it is even the political and social arrangements of a society that have the greatest impact on the level and destructiveness of its religiosity. I can’t say how pleased I was to see Sagan invoking the same point – science without a social conscience cannot justify itself all on its own, and if we challenge the irrationality of theism but not of oppression, it is quite possible we will, in the long run, accomplish very little indeed.

No Quarter

There was a time in this country when lynching was a public event, when people would look forward to watching a “colored person” be murdered for crimes such as looking at a white woman or not giving up their seat on the bus.

I drive a ’67 Plymouth, and as my car rolled off the assembly line it was publicly acceptable in many places to shout “nigger” at a passerby and, in some communities, this brand of hatred was still acceptable even from the pulpit.

These days, and more so every year, those organizations whose unifying principles revolve around racism or ethnic supremacy have their private meetings and their occasional rallies, but are relegated to the shadows. This is a good thing and our society is tangibly better off for it.

In most states, were one to go to work and publicly state their wish that all “colored people” should go back to Africa, or that lynching and interracial marriage laws should be reversed; his or her job would soon be in jeopardy.

It’s a sad yet telling coincidence that the very reason marriage licenses were initiated in the United States was to ensure that ministers could deny interracial couples the right to marry on religious grounds. How soon we forget. And though there are still communities where, once in a while, we hear of a minister or justice of the peace who refuses to wed an interracial couple on religious grounds, by and large, that form of hatred is no longer acceptable in American culture.

Now the marriage debate has changed course, and once again many (though not all) religious organizations have mounted an offensive to maintain their acerbic beliefs as public policy, freedom and liberty be damned.

I look forward to the day when bigots and homophobes, while still free to passively hate, must meet in secret and would rarely if ever in polite conversation admit they belong to some sort of anti-gay club. Like being a member of the KKK, homophobes should be free to believe whatever they like, but our society should offer them no quarter.

You shouldn’t be able to bring it up at work. You certainly shouldn’t be an educator if you openly promote hateful views to impressionable students. Surely there are white supremacists who are also teachers in this country, but being openly racist is certainly not classroom appropriate, and for good reason. There are black students and white students, Latino and Asian. And there are gay, straight, transgender and bisexual students as well. Every single one of these people has a right to be educated in a safe, positive, supportive environment. And every American, regardless of whichever of the many categories their life falls into, has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Freedom only works if it’s available to everyone.

You can be a bigot and be a school teacher, a senator, a waiter or a police officer, but you should never allow the two to mix. It’s that simple.

Homophobia is a private belief. While I would never vote to take away someone’s right to hate gays, I believe we, as a society, can and should band together and declare: Enough is enough.

In our schools and universities, hate is not welcome.

In our entertainment and media, hate is not welcome.

In our everyday conversation, in our workplaces, in our police and fire departments, in our military and even in our churches, hate is not welcome.

We will give you no quarter.

On having your cake and eating it too: the legacy of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

As many of you probably know, today marks the end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the 18 year old policy of the armed forces that required homosexuals to keep their sexual preferences a secret, and discharged them if they did not. Until today, the United States was the only industrialized nation that forbade open homosexuals from serving in the military.[1]

Almost everyone in the atheist community, of course, recognizes the connection between America’ s backward attitude towards homosexuality and our backward attitudes towards other issues, such as evolution, global warming and stem cell research. The religiosity of the United States is one of the primary forces blocking the moral enlightenment and scientific literacy of this country.

This is easy to see when say, watching a video about the Westboro Baptist Church. However, the effect of Christianity on Americans’ attitudes towards homosexuality is sometimes much more subtle, but only slightly less frustrating. I was recently engaged in a conversation with a Christian who believes, not surprisingly, that homosexuality is a sin. However, she tried to frame the conversation in a way that would distinguish her from the more vehement Fundies – she doesn’t understand, she insisted, why some churches obsess so much about homosexuality and she even has a dear gay friend whom she has known since high school and fully recognizes that he is, in fact, gay and quite happy being gay. Nonetheless, his homosexuality, she maintained, creates a “tension” between himself and God.

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A Defense of Reason on 9/11

Ten years ago today, a small group of men armed with box-cutters believed they were serving their god by hijacking planes and crashing them into a couple of buildings in New York.

I was at Bible college, just getting to my first class when I heard. I hate to admit it, but the class was Men’s Chorus. I was a music major and so that was a fairly common elective.

I remember how all through that day and the weeks that followed we prayed. For our country, for those who lost loved ones, for the police and firemen who served and were lost. And for our leaders. We talked about it in many of our classes and got updates in every other chapel service.

It never once occurred to me that most everyone on those planes were also praying. Including the terrorists.

They each prayed to their different gods, and in response so did most of us, and to be honest, the only solace I get is when I realize none of those gods were honored that day. None of them failed.

Gods had nothing to do with this tragedy. Men did. Men with box-cutters and a fiercely held (clearly irrational) belief system.

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