Now back in Singapore after the first day of the fast that's really gone smoothly. I seem to have adjusted to the demands of the month, but tomorrow will mark my first day of fasting at work this year and that's a whole new ballgame and kettle of fish to boot.
Read Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great yesterday and was generally disappointed. The back cover blurb gushes about 'erudition and wit', 'eloquent argument' and a 'close and learned reading of the major theological texts' but I seemed to miss most of that, other than one or two quite good jokes. Of course this might be put down to my inherent bias as a theist but I suspect I'd have felt much the same in my agnostic phase.
I'll give one example of what I mean. The fairly obvious rejoinder to the argument that the fanatical excesses committed in the names of various faiths over the centuries prove the inherent danger of (any) religious faith is that whilst it might have been possible to lend credence to that position circa 1900 (assuming you ignored the excesses of revolutionary France and other odd bits and pieces of strictly secular inhumanity along the way) the ghastly spectacle of the twentieth century and the track record of the various secular/humanist faiths therein clearly make the argument untenable. We have usefully discovered that our species is pretty horrible regardless of possession of religious faith.
But not so for Mr Hitchens. He deals with the 'objection anticipated' in Chapter 17. And his argument, as far as I can work it out (it really is that slippery) goes like this: religions are totalitarian in nature; the dreadful things done in the twentieth century were done by totalitarian regimes; therefore they were religious in nature - which is why the major faiths (represented almost entirely by Roman Catholicism for some reason I can't quite figure) didn't do much about them or were happily complicit in them.
I mean, really!
Throughout my reading of the book I was wondering for whom he was writing. I felt as if I being dragged into one of those discussions that's so fascinating when you are in your early teens and it feels really, really important to question everything. Is this stuff meant for grown-ups?
1 comment:
The problem with Hitchens and his ilk is that they have broken the seal of Solomon, think they have all wisdom and power, but cannot see that it is all delusion.
They mock the religious as children who start at shadows, when they themselves are mushrooms who start at the light.
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