Apocryphal Death Bed Conversions
Jake Meador
The Federalist
In a recent essay for the New Yorker, Lawrence Krauss bemoaned the common habit among some conservative Christians of conjuring up fanciful deathbed conversion narratives about prominent non-Christians. He specifically mentions the well-known tale of evangelist Elizabeth Cotton, who made up such a story about Charles Darwin. She claimed that he told her from his deathbed that he wished to “recant the doctrine of evolution in exchange for Christian salvation.”
Krauss’s odd phrasing aside, he points to a problem that really does exist in pockets of conservative Christianity. In addition to the stories of Darwin, other conservative Christians have made up similar tales about other prominent enemies of the faith—Voltaire and Thomas Paine, most notably. Making up a conversion story about a famous person is obviously a horrible thing to do. At its root it is lying about a person’s views of God, which is horrifying enough, but it also implies a certain distressing insecurity in the believer. Krauss is right to condemn this sort of thing.
Showing posts with label Hitchens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hitchens. Show all posts
Saturday, 18 June 2016
Friday, 11 March 2016
Bang, Bang. You're Dead.
False Allegiances and Irrelevance
We have often observed that the materialistic atheists amongst us are often the most strident moralisers in the market place. They are always telling us what they deem to be right and wrong, moral and immoral, evil and good. Islam, insists Richard Dawkins, is a perverse, wicked thing. Christianity is so morally bankrupt that any parent who attempts to teach its basic doctrines to her or her child, should suffer their children to be removed from their care. Morally bankrupt?
Christopher Hitchens, whilst alive, thundered like a Titan against totalitarianism, communism, and any authoritarian standard within his line of sight. He thought abortion was OK, but grabbing someone off the street and torturing them was very bad form. All of which was and is entertaining but hardly relevant to materialism or atheism, let alone their conjoint.
There is an instructive video entitled Collision in which Christopher Hitchens debates Douglas Wilson.
We have often observed that the materialistic atheists amongst us are often the most strident moralisers in the market place. They are always telling us what they deem to be right and wrong, moral and immoral, evil and good. Islam, insists Richard Dawkins, is a perverse, wicked thing. Christianity is so morally bankrupt that any parent who attempts to teach its basic doctrines to her or her child, should suffer their children to be removed from their care. Morally bankrupt?
Christopher Hitchens, whilst alive, thundered like a Titan against totalitarianism, communism, and any authoritarian standard within his line of sight. He thought abortion was OK, but grabbing someone off the street and torturing them was very bad form. All of which was and is entertaining but hardly relevant to materialism or atheism, let alone their conjoint.
There is an instructive video entitled Collision in which Christopher Hitchens debates Douglas Wilson.
Monday, 8 February 2016
Mass Murder and the Totalitarian Embrace
Why Atheism Has Produced Mass Murder
The celebs amongst the secular atheist crowd are known for drawing long bows between the monsters of the twentieth century (Mao Tse Tung, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, and the Nazis) and religion. The intent is to portray as many as possible of the monsters as having religious belief of one kind or another. After all, the object is to prosecute a Donald Trumpian type of argument whereby religion is evil, evil, evil and does all kinds of evil things.
The bow gets pretty long, but you have to admire a trier. Did not Stalin train in a Russian Orthodox seminary? Did not Hitler reflect in certain ways his Catholic upbringing? Sure, it's hard to find a religious connection in the case of Mao Tse Tung. But Pol Pot--well, Cambodia was a French colony, so we should assume the Jesuits had some influence over PP.
But one thing we can be definitive about, we are told, is that the atheism they all shared in common to one degree or another was in no way connected with their mass murders of multitudes of human beings. As David Berlinski writes:
The celebs amongst the secular atheist crowd are known for drawing long bows between the monsters of the twentieth century (Mao Tse Tung, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, and the Nazis) and religion. The intent is to portray as many as possible of the monsters as having religious belief of one kind or another. After all, the object is to prosecute a Donald Trumpian type of argument whereby religion is evil, evil, evil and does all kinds of evil things.
The bow gets pretty long, but you have to admire a trier. Did not Stalin train in a Russian Orthodox seminary? Did not Hitler reflect in certain ways his Catholic upbringing? Sure, it's hard to find a religious connection in the case of Mao Tse Tung. But Pol Pot--well, Cambodia was a French colony, so we should assume the Jesuits had some influence over PP.
But one thing we can be definitive about, we are told, is that the atheism they all shared in common to one degree or another was in no way connected with their mass murders of multitudes of human beings. As David Berlinski writes:
Thursday, 21 January 2016
New Atheism's Pre-occupations
Weird
New Age atheists like to champion the Enlightenment. They want to see it dominant. Away with all mysticism and superstition and priestcraft. Let the benefice of pure reason be established on the highest.
Why the hostility towards religion? Well, there is the old chestnut that it represents superstition on steroids. After all, you can't put God in a test-tube. And what you can't put in a test-tube just ain't so.
But there is something else even more weird. With a kind of Freudian overlay, New Age atheists connect religion with sexual repression. David Berlinski points out that Christopher Hitchens has made this extraordinary assertion:
In this high faluting sentiment, Hitchens is joined by fellow idealogue, Richard Dawkins.
Yup, Christianity and its commandments are positively dangerous for the human race. You know the chorus: more evil has been done in the name of religion than any other name. We atheists are the good guys. We are of the Enlightenment Party--our creed is simple. Men and women (oops, sorry) ought to be allowed to regulate their own conduct, guided solely by reason and experience. What a glorious society that would be.
Glorious, it would seem, only if you like seeing blood flow.
New Age atheists like to champion the Enlightenment. They want to see it dominant. Away with all mysticism and superstition and priestcraft. Let the benefice of pure reason be established on the highest.
Why the hostility towards religion? Well, there is the old chestnut that it represents superstition on steroids. After all, you can't put God in a test-tube. And what you can't put in a test-tube just ain't so.
But there is something else even more weird. With a kind of Freudian overlay, New Age atheists connect religion with sexual repression. David Berlinski points out that Christopher Hitchens has made this extraordinary assertion:
. . . Christopher Hitchens claims that (religion) is dangerous because it is "the cause of dangerous sexual repression." Short of gender insensitivity, what could be more dangerous than dangerous sexual repression? [David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p 18.]We suppose that Hitchens is making an oblique reference to the fact that Christians believe sex must be exclusively restricted to consenting adults bound in a holy oath of mutually exclusive fidelity. Yup. That's dangerous sexual repression. Presumably Hitchens wants us to join him in thinking that sexual libertinism is safe, upbuilding, and mutually supportive, particularly for the children being conceived and, if allowed to live, brought up in its serendipitous embrace. Not dangerous at all.
In this high faluting sentiment, Hitchens is joined by fellow idealogue, Richard Dawkins.
Among the commandments that Richard Dawkins proposes as replacement for the original ten, the first encourages men and women "to enjoy [their] own sex lives so long as it damages nobody else." [Ibid.]Well, silly old Richie Rich. Of course it is damaging--this libertine sexuality--if it represses people into a binary gender prison of having to be either male or female. Get with the programme. Shed that Oxford priggery.
Yup, Christianity and its commandments are positively dangerous for the human race. You know the chorus: more evil has been done in the name of religion than any other name. We atheists are the good guys. We are of the Enlightenment Party--our creed is simple. Men and women (oops, sorry) ought to be allowed to regulate their own conduct, guided solely by reason and experience. What a glorious society that would be.
Glorious, it would seem, only if you like seeing blood flow.
Children of the Enlightenment do not, of course, dwell overly on the dreadful acts undertaken in its name when the Enlightenment first became a living historical force in France:
all perished, all--[Berlinski, ibid.]
Friends, enemies, of all parties, ages, ranks,
Head after head, and never heads enough
For those that bade them fall.
Tuesday, 15 April 2014
Lenten Meditation
Grinding Axes in the Dark
The late Christopher Hitchens liked to frighten little children with horror stories about the evils of religion. Often times he was more narrowly referring to the religion of Islam, but he did not hold back from the "evils" of Christianity, either. Of all the things that offended him, the offence of the Cross of Christ was the most acute. He wrote:
The late Christopher Hitchens liked to frighten little children with horror stories about the evils of religion. Often times he was more narrowly referring to the religion of Islam, but he did not hold back from the "evils" of Christianity, either. Of all the things that offended him, the offence of the Cross of Christ was the most acute. He wrote:
The idea of a vicarious atonement, of the sort that so much troubled even C.S. Lewis, is a further refinement of the ancient superstition [of atoning sacrifice]. Once again we have a father demonstrating love by subjecting a son to death by torture, but this time the father is not trying to impress god. He is god, and he is trying to impress humans. Ask yourself the question: how moral is the following? I am told of a human sacrifice that took place two thousand years ago, without my wishing it and in circumstances so ghastly that, had I been present and in possession of any influence, I would have been duty-bound to try and stop it. In consequence of this murder, my own manifold sins are forgiven me, and I may hope to enjoy everlasting life. [Cited by Tim Challies, quoting from Hitchen's God Is Not Great.]Against this, the Apostle Paul provides the counterpoint:
Wednesday, 2 January 2013
Secular Achievements
A Better Place in Which to Live
Here is a howler from David Farrar of Kiwiblog--betraying his ignorance of recent history. He writes:
Whatever planet Mr Farrar lives on, clearly it is not the third rock from the sun.
To be fair, Mr Farrar was endeavouring to persuade us that the recently adopted Egyptian constitution was a bad deal. In this we agree.
Here is a howler from David Farrar of Kiwiblog--betraying his ignorance of recent history. He writes:
Countries that don’t separate religion and state almost always are worse places to live than those countries which do.So those countries which made a great virtue out of being a-religious such as the Soviet Union, East Germany, the entire Eastern European bloc, and Pol Pot's Cambodia (which modelled its ideology upon the doctrines of leading French Communists) were great places to live. How anyone could suggest that anyone struggling to survive in the Killing Fields was living in one of the better places in the world beggars belief. And in the present, those nations which still make a virtue out of secularism such as North Korea, Communist China, Myanmar, and Castro's Cuba remain great places to live? Try telling that to the thousands in North Korea's concentration camps.
Whatever planet Mr Farrar lives on, clearly it is not the third rock from the sun.
To be fair, Mr Farrar was endeavouring to persuade us that the recently adopted Egyptian constitution was a bad deal. In this we agree.
Saturday, 17 November 2012
Atheists and Your Children, Part III
Propaganda, Child Abuse and the Gun
We have been considering a "reasonable proposition" put forward by distinguished psychologist, Nicholas Humphrey--to the effect that Christian parents who raise their children to know, understand, and believe the Christian faith are committing a form of child abuse. He puts it in the same category as parents performing clitorectomy upon daughters.
Children have a right not to be taught myths and lies, he averred to his audience at Amnesty International. The right to the truth overrides all parental and child rights. It overrides all free speech rights. He will defend free speech rights strenuously, but not in the home, unless children are being taught his particular world-view--which happens to be the dominant world view of our age. Children must be taught and trained in the world-view of scientism, which to materialist and atheist Humphrey is the only truth.
We can see how purblind he has become in his own ideology and secular religion in the following quotation:
We have been considering a "reasonable proposition" put forward by distinguished psychologist, Nicholas Humphrey--to the effect that Christian parents who raise their children to know, understand, and believe the Christian faith are committing a form of child abuse. He puts it in the same category as parents performing clitorectomy upon daughters.
Children have a right not to be taught myths and lies, he averred to his audience at Amnesty International. The right to the truth overrides all parental and child rights. It overrides all free speech rights. He will defend free speech rights strenuously, but not in the home, unless children are being taught his particular world-view--which happens to be the dominant world view of our age. Children must be taught and trained in the world-view of scientism, which to materialist and atheist Humphrey is the only truth.
We can see how purblind he has become in his own ideology and secular religion in the following quotation:
Thursday, 15 November 2012
Atheists and Your Children, Part I
No Rhetorical Devices Here
It is no surprise to learn that militant atheists hate the Christian faith. And hate is not too strong a word. What else can be made of the assertions by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens that the act of parents teaching their own children about God and the Christ and the redemption of the world and the judgment to come is an act of child abuse?
Maybe, one wonders, this indictment should be regarded as rhetorical flourish or vivid hyperbole. Dawkins, however, is firmly insistent that his words on this subject are neither hyperbolic nor a literary device in general. He means them in a literal sense. Here is Dawkins's gloss on his indictment of parents who teach their children the Christian faith:
It is no surprise to learn that militant atheists hate the Christian faith. And hate is not too strong a word. What else can be made of the assertions by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens that the act of parents teaching their own children about God and the Christ and the redemption of the world and the judgment to come is an act of child abuse?
Maybe, one wonders, this indictment should be regarded as rhetorical flourish or vivid hyperbole. Dawkins, however, is firmly insistent that his words on this subject are neither hyperbolic nor a literary device in general. He means them in a literal sense. Here is Dawkins's gloss on his indictment of parents who teach their children the Christian faith:
Tuesday, 13 November 2012
Empty Chair and Tables in the House of the Lord
Baalism, Britain, and the Cult of the Holy Nation
When once-Christian cultures turn away from the God of our fathers usually a substitute deity occupies the vacuum. This new god is supposed to function as the Living God had in the culture of former generations. People need to believe in something or someone--particularly when former generations professed a living faith in the true God.
The experience of our ancient fathers has been an apt teacher. When the northern kingdom split away from Judea at the passing of King Solomon the northern king deliberately sought to set up a false cult to fill the vacuum created, by throwing off loyalty to God. Baal was the choice. Baal was an idol of power, ministered and institutionalised and made visible through the State.
Similarly in our post-Christian, post-modern world, amidst all the nihilism and dissolution there is one authority, one locus of unity to which the people have repeatedly and persistently turned
--Baal, the god and religion of the state.
When once-Christian cultures turn away from the God of our fathers usually a substitute deity occupies the vacuum. This new god is supposed to function as the Living God had in the culture of former generations. People need to believe in something or someone--particularly when former generations professed a living faith in the true God.
The experience of our ancient fathers has been an apt teacher. When the northern kingdom split away from Judea at the passing of King Solomon the northern king deliberately sought to set up a false cult to fill the vacuum created, by throwing off loyalty to God. Baal was the choice. Baal was an idol of power, ministered and institutionalised and made visible through the State.
Similarly in our post-Christian, post-modern world, amidst all the nihilism and dissolution there is one authority, one locus of unity to which the people have repeatedly and persistently turned
--Baal, the god and religion of the state.
Saturday, 3 November 2012
Oxymorons Aplenty
Private Religion Only Need Apply
One potent component of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is the author's ability to describe and convey the slime, the decay, the degradation of Mordor and its works. It befouled everything it touched.
We have seen Mordoresque societies in recent history. These have not been fictional representations. They are the real article. Peter Hitchens reflects upon life in the Soviet Union as he experienced it for years as a foreign correspondent. Reading these words makes Reagan's "honorific", the Evil Empire appear apt. But we must bear in mind that the Soviet Union was overtly created to be the first atheist civilization--the first self-conscious civilization of Unbelief.
One potent component of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is the author's ability to describe and convey the slime, the decay, the degradation of Mordor and its works. It befouled everything it touched.
We have seen Mordoresque societies in recent history. These have not been fictional representations. They are the real article. Peter Hitchens reflects upon life in the Soviet Union as he experienced it for years as a foreign correspondent. Reading these words makes Reagan's "honorific", the Evil Empire appear apt. But we must bear in mind that the Soviet Union was overtly created to be the first atheist civilization--the first self-conscious civilization of Unbelief.
Tuesday, 23 October 2012
High Opinions of One's Own Virtue
Personal Reasons for Unbelief
Peter Hitchens spent about fifteen years of his adult life in open sneering rebellion against God. Then gradually and gently the Hound of Heaven first tracked, then ran him down. His is a wonderful story of the grace and goodness of the Almighty God to a terribly lost man.
Hitchens describes his rebellion against God in the following terms:
Peter Hitchens spent about fifteen years of his adult life in open sneering rebellion against God. Then gradually and gently the Hound of Heaven first tracked, then ran him down. His is a wonderful story of the grace and goodness of the Almighty God to a terribly lost man.
Hitchens describes his rebellion against God in the following terms:
The fury and almost physical disgust of the Bloomsbury novelist Virginia Woolf at T. S. Eliot's conversion to Christianity is an open expression of the private feelings of the educated British middle class, normally left unspoken but conveyed by body language or facial expression when the subject of religion cannot be avoided. Mrs Woolf wrote to her sister in 1928, in terms that perfectly epitomize the enlightened English person's scorn for faith and those who hold it.
Saturday, 6 October 2012
You Shall Not Pass!
Only Force Standing in the Gap
Being Christian is one thing. Fighting for a cause is another, and much easier to acknowledge - for in recent times it has grown clear that the Christian religion is threatened with a dangerous defeat by secular forces which have never been so confident.
Why is there such a fury against religion now? Because religion is the one reliable force that stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. The one reliable force that forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law.
The one reliable force that restrains the hand of the man of power. In an age of powerworship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power. [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith]
Wednesday, 2 May 2012
Christopher Hitchen's Legacy
Futile in Their Speculations . . .
Christopher Hitchens is well on his way to canonisation amongst the high priests of Unbelief. That's expected. There is nothing untoward in honouring those who have gone before, particularly those one regards as exemplars of one's faith.
He will no doubt enter the secular atheist pantheon as one who kept the faith, stayed true to the end, and who proved up his beliefs with a holy life. (We use "holy" in the root sense of the word--set apart as a servant to one's truth.) He died a particularly difficult and painful death. We honour him for his courage. But not his stubborn foolishness.
Christopher Hitchens is well on his way to canonisation amongst the high priests of Unbelief. That's expected. There is nothing untoward in honouring those who have gone before, particularly those one regards as exemplars of one's faith.
He will no doubt enter the secular atheist pantheon as one who kept the faith, stayed true to the end, and who proved up his beliefs with a holy life. (We use "holy" in the root sense of the word--set apart as a servant to one's truth.) He died a particularly difficult and painful death. We honour him for his courage. But not his stubborn foolishness.
Tuesday, 27 March 2012
Douglas Wilson's Letter From America
Sam Harris, Moist Robot
Atheism and Apologetics - Moist Robots
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, 19 March 2012
So then, Sam Harris has a new little book out, and for such a small book (66 pages), it promises to be a lot of fun. I say this because the book appears to be filled with epistemological obliviousness, cover to cover. The name of the book is Free Will, released by Free Press (heh) in 2012.
Ooo! That was naughty. Shall we tell teacher? No, let's see if we can handle this ourselves.
Atheism and Apologetics - Moist Robots
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, 19 March 2012
So then, Sam Harris has a new little book out, and for such a small book (66 pages), it promises to be a lot of fun. I say this because the book appears to be filled with epistemological obliviousness, cover to cover. The name of the book is Free Will, released by Free Press (heh) in 2012.
"Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have" (p. 5).
Tuesday, 13 March 2012
Sloppy, Vacuous Darwinists
Uneasy Atheists
The following article appeared in the New Statesman. The primer reads: "To hardline atheists, it is now unreasonable and “dramatically peculiar” to argue that religion is not altogether evil. How did such intolerance become acceptable to rational minds?" How indeed?
Bryan Appelyard reflects upon the strange Islamic-like fundamentalism of the neo-atheists, whom he charges with having all the behaviours of a tyrannical sect. [For our part, we love these militant neo-atheists. They are perfect poster-boys for what happens when men deny God and try to mean it. They are thus "useful idiots", to employ Lenin's phrase, because they offer many teaching moments.
The following article appeared in the New Statesman. The primer reads: "To hardline atheists, it is now unreasonable and “dramatically peculiar” to argue that religion is not altogether evil. How did such intolerance become acceptable to rational minds?" How indeed?
Bryan Appelyard reflects upon the strange Islamic-like fundamentalism of the neo-atheists, whom he charges with having all the behaviours of a tyrannical sect. [For our part, we love these militant neo-atheists. They are perfect poster-boys for what happens when men deny God and try to mean it. They are thus "useful idiots", to employ Lenin's phrase, because they offer many teaching moments.
Friday, 10 February 2012
Militant Atheism and Nietzsche
Intellectual Gadflies
David Bentley Hart has an engaging piece on modern militant atheists (whom he dubs "fashionable enemies") describing them as "gadflies".
He laments the good old days when the enemies of the Christian faith in the West had intellectual muscle. He is impatient with the mental laziness and sloppiness on display with folk like Hitchens and Harris and the like.
In the nineteenth century we come to the greatest and the fiercest critic of Christianity--one with an intellectual rigour and emotional force that still leaves one breathless today. Nietzsche's hatred of Christianity and Christians had about it an intellectual rigour and consistency and compelling force that is completely absent from effete gadflies such as Richard Dawkins.
David Bentley Hart has an engaging piece on modern militant atheists (whom he dubs "fashionable enemies") describing them as "gadflies".
He laments the good old days when the enemies of the Christian faith in the West had intellectual muscle. He is impatient with the mental laziness and sloppiness on display with folk like Hitchens and Harris and the like.
My own impatience with (their) remarks, I should confess, would probably be far smaller if I did not suffer from a melancholy sense that, among Christianity's most fervent detractors, there has been a considerable decline in standards in recent years. . . . (A)t the end of Europe's Christian centuries, the church could still boast antagonists of real stature. In the eighteenth century, David Hume was unrivaled in his power to sow doubt where certainty once had flourished. And while the diatribes of Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and other Enlightenment philosophes were, on the whole, insubstantial, there were at least marked by a certain fierce elegance and occasional moral acuity. Edward Gibbon, for all the temporal parochialism and frequent inaccuracy of his account of Christianity's rise, was nevertheless a scholar and writer of positively titanic gifts . . . (D. B. Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009], p.5f.)
In the nineteenth century we come to the greatest and the fiercest critic of Christianity--one with an intellectual rigour and emotional force that still leaves one breathless today. Nietzsche's hatred of Christianity and Christians had about it an intellectual rigour and consistency and compelling force that is completely absent from effete gadflies such as Richard Dawkins.
Saturday, 24 December 2011
Douglas Wilson's Letter From America
Reflections on Christopher Hitchens
Occasional Services - Memorial Homilies
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, December 16, 2011
Scripture says that it is better to go down to the house of mourning than to the house of laughter (Ecc. 7:2). The reason given in that passage is that this enables the living to "lay it to heart." The death of Christopher Hitchens should in the first place remind us of our own mortality. We should lay it to heart. As Donne so memorably put it, "ask not for whom the bell tolls." Every funeral is our own. These are issues that affect every last one of us.
Those who hold to the gospel of Jesus Christ must always remember that the good news of Christ is set against the backdrop of the bad news -- we are all of us sinners, and we all need cleansing and forgiveness. Christopher Hitchens did not need to come to Christ to have his arguments refuted (although that would have happened). He needed to come to Christ to have his sins forgiven.
Occasional Services - Memorial Homilies
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, December 16, 2011
Scripture says that it is better to go down to the house of mourning than to the house of laughter (Ecc. 7:2). The reason given in that passage is that this enables the living to "lay it to heart." The death of Christopher Hitchens should in the first place remind us of our own mortality. We should lay it to heart. As Donne so memorably put it, "ask not for whom the bell tolls." Every funeral is our own. These are issues that affect every last one of us.
Those who hold to the gospel of Jesus Christ must always remember that the good news of Christ is set against the backdrop of the bad news -- we are all of us sinners, and we all need cleansing and forgiveness. Christopher Hitchens did not need to come to Christ to have his arguments refuted (although that would have happened). He needed to come to Christ to have his sins forgiven.
Saturday, 17 December 2011
Christopher Hitchens
Obituaries
This from Justin Taylor.
Christopher Hitchens died on Thursday night at the age of 62, after a 18-month battle with esophageal cancer. He was a brilliant and entertaining man. He was enormously gifted, and in his final years he took those gifts and used them to mock God, using his considerable wit and sharp tongue to convince as many people as possible to do the same.
When I had a crisis of faith my freshman year at a secular university studying religion, I was deeply convinced that there were only two options: full-blown Christian orthodoxy or atheism. Liberal theology—with its fantasy of rescuing the “kernel” (or essence) of Christianity from the (disposable) “husk” of dogma—had no appeal to me. And this is one of the things I appreciated about Hitchens.
This from Justin Taylor.
Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)
Christopher Hitchens died on Thursday night at the age of 62, after a 18-month battle with esophageal cancer. He was a brilliant and entertaining man. He was enormously gifted, and in his final years he took those gifts and used them to mock God, using his considerable wit and sharp tongue to convince as many people as possible to do the same.
When I had a crisis of faith my freshman year at a secular university studying religion, I was deeply convinced that there were only two options: full-blown Christian orthodoxy or atheism. Liberal theology—with its fantasy of rescuing the “kernel” (or essence) of Christianity from the (disposable) “husk” of dogma—had no appeal to me. And this is one of the things I appreciated about Hitchens.
Friday, 9 September 2011
The Big Lie
Simply Incoherent
Maybe it is just me, but Christopher Hitchens is at his very best when he is making sense. This is something he does, with his usual vim, in a recent article for Slate entitled “Simply Evil.” In it, he makes short work of the kind of anti-Americanism that tried to turn 9/11 into something complex enough for an obfuscating intellectual to puzzle over. He nails those who tried to blame the attacks on “the Bush administration or the Jews.” And for those who held up a simplistic tit-for-tat blowback explanation, Hitchens dutifully pulls their shirts over their heads and rolls down their socks.
Tuesday, 26 July 2011
A Darwinist Uberman
Zarathustra Has Spoken in Norway
When news of the Norwegian mass murderer surfaced, the chattering classes, the media, and the Commentariat were quick to react. Able quickly to dismiss the canard of Islamic terrorism, the narrative changed. Suddenly, Anders Behring Breivik was a right wing fundamentalist Christian. That has had more sticking traction. At least thirty-six hours. So it will now inevitably go down as cold hard fact.
Would that the truth were so congenial. Sufficient time has elapsed to discover and read Breivik's Manifesto. The Commentariat and its supine media have gone strangely silent. Having framed the narrative, it is now time to move on to other matters it would seem.
It turns out, however, that Breivik--far from being a Christian--is a self-confessed apostate.
When news of the Norwegian mass murderer surfaced, the chattering classes, the media, and the Commentariat were quick to react. Able quickly to dismiss the canard of Islamic terrorism, the narrative changed. Suddenly, Anders Behring Breivik was a right wing fundamentalist Christian. That has had more sticking traction. At least thirty-six hours. So it will now inevitably go down as cold hard fact.
Would that the truth were so congenial. Sufficient time has elapsed to discover and read Breivik's Manifesto. The Commentariat and its supine media have gone strangely silent. Having framed the narrative, it is now time to move on to other matters it would seem.
It turns out, however, that Breivik--far from being a Christian--is a self-confessed apostate.
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