I’m sad to see that Christopher Hitchens is no longer among us. On a trivial level, I’m sorry because reading him was such a guilty pleasure, as he sliced and diced viewpoints — and people — with whom he disagreed.
On a deeper level, I have the traditional regret, as a Catholic, for the loss of an unshriven soul. Not that I wanted to see Hitchens make a deathbed conversion. That would have seemed cheap theatrics, and it would have sent the wrong message — that our relationship with God should be based on existential terror. I just wish he’d changed his mind at some point, before now.
It was always impressive to see the way his mind worked, fairly crackling through any subject you may like, and totally unapologetic for opinions that were unpopular. And I don’t just say that because he agreed with me on Iraq, which probably distressed a lot of his free-thinking friends.
But I mourn the fact that his incisive, energetic mind always came up with the wrong answer when it ran the God equation. He would have been a good one to have on the other side. You know, the side of the angels, as they say.
As a believer, then, it falls to me to say, May God have mercy upon his soul. And I mean it. I wish him the best in the life he did not expect.
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Heard the news last night, very sad. Didn’t even know he had cancer.
I came across a set of videos where he talked about Orwell (didn’t even know he had written a book on him). It was genuinely nice to hear someone talk about him beyond the Big Brother tropes and Hitchens’s views from Marxism to War Hawk make a bit more sense when you realize that Eric Blair was one of his idols.
I’m not sure how they feel about him in the UK (I’d imagine there is a bit of class based disdain or at least criticism of being “uppity”), but for American ears he certainly tickled parts of the brain that we don’t have rubbed all that often in our culture. Even though there was a lot I disagreed with and even more that made little difference to me, it is always sad when we lose someone who prized debate over yelling (even if it was a bit self indulgent). We could use a few more Hitchens.
Brad, like the rest of your blog, this commentary on Hitchens is well written and interesting. I was amazed at the intellectual facility he brought to the widest range of subjects and for those of us who are not very religious, watching him take apart fundamentalists and those with shallow understandinga of things biblical was a breath of fresh air.
Even though I think Hitchens was wrong about Iraq, his unwavering support for that venture and his reasoning (while it may have alienated many of his former friends on the left) did have the salutary effect of making many of us who opposed the Iraq invasion examine our oppositional stance more rigorously. One had to make sure that opposition to the invasion wasn’t simply because so many of the key players seemed motivated by reasons that had nothing to do with the Iraqi people. It was possible for the invasion to be right, for the wrong reasons. By the same token, his insistence on the concept of Islamofascism helped remind many of us that though some leaders sought to tar all of Islam with the same brush and to give Osama exactly what he wanted (a holy war), that did not mean that there was NOT a substantial element within that religion that represented a threat to civil society, to “civilization and civilized values” as he put it in this defense of the term. Of course, in the end it seemed to me and millions of others (despite the Bush Administration’s best propaganda efforts) that Iraq had little or nothing to do with the Islamofascism issue, and our actions there were in fact creating more problems than they were solving, and certainly not helping the fight against Al Qaeda and the like.
Though I found the certitude of his atheism as impossible to embrace as others’ certitude of faith, I felt him to be almost a kind of personal champion of a certain set of “opinions that were unpopular,” especially in this country, namely his willingness to consistently take on organized religion as a net negative to the human condition, and especially to take on the hucksters and the haters who make a lavish living on “cheap theatrics” and prey on “existential terror” to use your terms, and to call those frauds out, unflinchingly. Today I’m enjoying YouTube clips of his appearance on Fox with Hatenity with the classic line about Falwell, “if you gave him an enema, you could have buried him in a matchbox” and this timely screed on Christmas, the time of year when the US “turns itself into the cultural and commercial equivalent of a one-party state,” as he put it.
It think it’s hard for people of faith, especially in the South, to put themselves in the shoes of nonbelievers in terms of how “other”-ish one feels within the society (almost makes me want to put on my Brokeback Mountain/Rick Perry jacket to proclaim, “I’m not ashamed etc…) and so hearing a very defiant voice like Hitchens provided such an inspiring (to me anyway) counternarrative to the omnipresence of banal expressions of faith, such as the “God Bless America” use in Presidential addresses that was recently discussed here.
The end of that Xmas column has one of my favorite Hitchens passages: “If all the official stories of monotheism, from Moses to Mormonism, were to be utterly and finally discredited, we would be exactly where we are now. All the agonizing questions that we face, from the idea of the good life and our duties to each other to the concept of justice and the enigma of existence itself, would be just as difficult and also just as fascinating. It takes a totalitarian mind-set to claim that only one Bronze Age Palestinian revelation or prophecy or text can be our guide through this labyrinth. If the totalitarians cannot bear to abandon their adoration of their various Dear Leaders, can they not at least arrange to hold their ceremonies in private? Either that or give up the tax-exempt status that must remind them so painfully of the things of this material world.”
So Hitchens would probably say, “Brad, you would be a good guy to have on the other side, too.”
A wicked wit and giant intellect who loved is cigarettes and single malt scotch. Yep only the good die young. Since he was comfortable in his unbelief I think he is doing just fine, not to worry Brad.
I was saddened to see him go. That said, would you have felt as sad had he converted to Islam, Mormonism or been dunked in a river in white robes? Is your sadness about his belief not believing what you believe or that he felt the whole notion of belief in anything like that was wrong? Now, before you say I am selecting out a small point in an otherwise laudatory mention, it is one that you pointedly brought up.
From Hitchens’ last interview – a reasoned take on everything political:
“CH I have one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously. The beginning of that is the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do.”
And that, to me, is one of the central fallacies in the Hitchens critique that religion is a net negative on society. He sees religion as somehow the wellspring of totalitarianism.
How anyone can do that after a century that gave us fascism and Marxism in all sorts of virulent, murderous forms, on the mass scale, is beyond me. It requires a certain willful blindness.
There’s also something that I’ve noted among some of trendier and more evangelical atheists in recent years — a sort of rigid fundamentalism in the way they define the God they don’t believe in. I’ve seen, particularly with the “Bright” philosopher Daniel Dennett, atheists go to great lengths to demolish God defined a certain way, and then to get greatly impatient with believers who dare to think of God some other way.
The same with religion as institution. Hitchens thinks in terms of down-from-above “adoration of their various Dear Leaders.” I’m assuming (and correct me if I’m wrong) that the Roman Catholic Church would be his archetype of this, seeing as how we’ve got a pope and all. He also speaks of belief that holds “that only one Bronze Age Palestinian revelation or prophecy or text can be our guide through this labyrinth,” which I suppose refers to any of the three great Abrahamic faiths.
When I hear things like that, I have to remind myself they’re coming from a very intelligent man, because they sound so simplistic, and dumb, based on my experience of religion.
I look at the same institution and see something entirely different. I see the Church’s definition of revelation as something that has developed over time, as a product of continued revelation (not just what one guy in the Bronze Age came up with, although I think it very cool that it reaches back that far) and the interpretation of many thinkers working individually and collectively. And I see the pope and the hierarchy as recipients and conservators and docents, if you will, of ALL of that received revelation and interpretation, which has been a vastly rich process with billions of inputs.
The pope didn’t get up one morning and make up this stuff. He, and parish priests, and laypeople, and any other category of members of the Body of Christ that you can think of, interact with something far bigger than themselves — and not just God, but this human enterprise that has had so many workers in its vineyard across the ages.
This, by the way, is one of the big reasons why I am Catholic rather than, say, Baptist. I am in communion (both literally through the Eucharist, and in a larger sense of participating in this whole thing together) with every Catholic who ever lived, lives now, or ever will live.
Outsiders seem to imagine that what the Church is about is a bully/Pope running about arbitrarily telling everybody what to do. That’s not been my experience at all, whether under a cool pope (John Paul the Great) or a not-so-cool pope, such as the present incumbent.
And Tim, with regard to your question about whether I would have “felt as sad had he converted to Islam, Mormonism or been dunked in a river in white robes.” No, I don’t think I would. I think I’d feel better for him if he had found SOME way of getting outside of himself and relating to the divine, whether it was my way or not.
But I do feel more qualified to speak with some knowledge about my way.
And don’t let me give the impression that I think all religious experiences to be equally valid, because I don’t. I have no problem condemning, for instance, a radical imam who tells a desperate young man that he knows a quick shortcut to 72 virgins. Or a televangelist who seems to be about the cash contributions rolling in. Or that idiot who has his followers convinced they should picket military funerals.
But while I do not hesitate to make judgments, my sense of worthwhile religious experience is pretty broad.
My own religious experience has been FAIRLY broad, within a Western Christian framework. I started out at Thomas Memorial Baptist Church, spent a lot of my formative years going to nondenominational services on military bases, and did a good bit of church visiting and looking around before converting to Vatican II Catholicism (while at the same time, I think it would be cool to bring back the Latin Mass). I love the universality of the church, embracing many cultures. I dig that in one Mass we will celebrate in English, Spanish, Latin and Greek and occasionally another language or two. One of my favorite courses in college was a history course called “U.S. Social and Intellectual History Before 1865,” which was mostly about the ferment of religious thought in this country in its formative years.
Within my own family today, we have Baptists and Presbyterians and Anglicans and Jews and Catholics and some dabbling in Unitarian Universalism and yep, some avowed atheists, and a generous sprinkling of agnosticism.
So yeah, I like to think there’s a bit more in me than somebody who can’t imagine legitimacy in anything other than being Catholic.
Slate is offering a variety of views on Hitchens upon his passing, from his friends and others:
— June Thomas, his editor
— Andrew Sullivan, fellow transplanted Englishman
— Jacob Weisberg, Slate Group chairman
— Julian Barnes, novelist
— Anne Applebaum, journalist
— Victor Navasky of The Nation
— James Fenton, poet
— David Corn of Mother Jones
— Fred Kaplan, journalist, Slate contributor
— Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard
— Brian Palmer, Slate contributor
— Peter Florence, director of the Hay Festival of Literature and Art
— Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European Studies at Oxford
Holy cow thats a lot of writing. Maybe when I get an hour I’ll read it.
Interesting (to me): as I was typing that last comment, I was listening to a Paul Simon tune on Pandora:
“So I’ll continue to continue/ to pretend/ My life will never end,/ And flowers never bend/ With the rainfall.
“The mirror on my wall/ Casts an image dark and small/ But I’m not sure at all/ it’s my reflection./ I am blinded by the light/ Of God and truth and right/ And I wander in the night without direction.”
Not fair. There is a straw-man Protestantism here that is easy to put down, but we believe it is the other way around. It is we who go back to Christ and the early church, and all those, who like us, whether Baptist, Huguenot, Moravian, or whatever, have had to continually struggle our way back to a simple faith given to us, once for all.
Not that we haven’t done our own share of, to mention one big problem, seeking power and using it to our own ends–it is, as Christ showed by rebuking his disciples more than once–a typical human error, whether Protestant of Catholic. But we are pretty confident that the early church was not Roman Catholic in nature; it was, with all its faults, a house-church movement that transformed the society of the time. That transformation becomes all the more evident in reading some of the descriptions and history of the ancient world. It was not a nice time to live for most people. Most societies are not nice places for most people to live, when we get down to it.
Still, I very much appreciated your handling of this brilliant, but deeply flawed man. I very often have the sense that people, myself included, are busy bashing their straw-man-God, but I wonder if it isn’t often an excuse not to have to deal with the real thing.
Nor do I have the sense that most people really set themselves to work on biblical texts without pre-conceived notions of what they intend to find (and reject out of hand) there. What have they got that is better? Nothing that has convinced me as of yet. Sure, Christianity–whatever form–has had its ups and downs, but I am not convinced that atheism has transformed the world for the better.
After nearly 40 years of trying to practice a marriage and family based on biblical ideals, I fall miserably short, but I can’t help but think that Christian ideals as taught in the NT are a superb moral guide, and make a huge difference in human relationships. Of course there is a lot more to Christianity than just ideals, but it is a good place to start. I have seen no other philosophy that can hold a candle to Jesus, not by a long shot.
Herb, I don’t think any of looked like the early church did, or believe quite the same things they did. We can’t. Our world view and culture have changed too much.
Brad, You were raised in the faith. But if you had not been, and were looking at it from the outside you’d see it differently. Given how we Christians pick at each other (consider your’s and Herb’s comments) and how believers in various faiths actually attack each other, faith doesn’t look too pretty from the outside. Nor does it look reasonable. Then factor in the sorry history of faith (anyone got a torch?), and it becomes very hard for anyone outside to become interested in belief. You and I know that there is a lot of wonderful history as well. We have experienced God in some way. But those outside–well all of us need to work harder at being better if we are to make our faith more believable.
Also, I suspect that even the ones who cannot bring themselves to identify the Great Mystery with God still experience and trust. They simply may not be able accept our expressions of that.
@ Herb — I find the Jesus story very compelling and the world would be a lot nicer if more people truly tried to emulate Christ, but I think you are selling Buddhism short. Certainly its ideals have been very useful to me in dealing with my chronic anxiety far more than the many flavors of Christianity I have experienced.
Karen, I didn’t “pick at” anybody. There are significant differences between being Baptist (which was the faith I was more or less “raised in,” as you say) and being Catholic, and it’s not derogatory to point them out. For Catholics, there is one catholic and apostolic church, and we are all in it (as are Anglicans, Lutherans and some others). For Baptists, each congregation is a separate church, unconnected even to the Baptist church down the street.
What I was saying was that I chose the former. That’s all.
Brad, I did not intend to accuse you of “picking.” What you said tho’ caused Herb to respond somewhat defensively (in my opinion). When something like that leads to a defensive response, think of how that looks to someone on the outside, who is not familiar with the historic differences. They, I think, see it as internecine squabbling, and further proof that there is no objective truth to be found.
Marxism and Fascism have many complex relationships with intertwined with history and nationalism, all of which bear little relationship to the kind of rational humanism that Hitch represented. Secular religious movements were just as dangerous to him as theological religous movements. I think you owe Hitch better service than to call him “simplistic” and “dumb”. I am fairly certain you know he had more than a cursory acquaintance with the irrational fanaticisms of the past century, as much as he was familiar with all the irrational fanaticisms of all the previous centuries.
Well, I’ll tell you this, if Tim Tebow pulls out another miracle win against the Patriots today I am going to have to seriously reconsider my agnosticism.
Karen, it’s always hard with this medium to express ourselves with conviction (and when we’re dealing with the afterlife, the last judgment, etc.–well, these are pretty weighty things) and yet convey in writing the proper emotions and sense of comradeship (for lack of a better word at the moment) that most of us have on this blog. So I didn’t feel like I was ‘picking’ — nor did Brad. I think I get his ‘irony’ or tongue-in cheek- most of the time, and appreciate his humor and candidness.
But I still had to say that we evangelical Protestants, including Baptists, are not excluded from the communion on all the saints. Brad confuses the expression of the local church with the biblical view of the universal church. All Christians are in communion with all Christians of all time through faith in Christ. Not faith in the communion of Christ, nor the sacraments of Christ, but rather the Christ of communion. That means that all who trust Christ, whether Catholic, Baptist, Wesleyan, or whatever, are one together in Him.
The Protestant Reformation was , in spite of its short-comings, a struggle back to Christ. Rejecting a Church that had made itself the sole dispenser of grace, the Reformers called Christians back to trust Christ. He alone is the source of Grace, not the church, and not the ‘sacraments’.
I just wanted to take issue with Brad’s portrayal of Protestant (and Baptist) theology.
Kathryn, I can and should always learn from other worldviews, cultures, and religions. They always have things to teach me.
But Brad’s post is ultimately about the fact that every person is accountable to a personal, eternal God. (Why else the words, ‘may God have mercy on his soul’?) At this point Buddhism, with its impersonal God and circular view of history, cannot help me any further. Just about every Muslim has this in common–terror in the face of that accountability. Atheism ignores that accountability, and thus ignores ultimate reality.
Christ is Lord and at the same time, Advocate and Comforter for the Christian.
Karen, I fail to make the logical connection between a contention over absolute truth and the deduction that there is therefore none.
Does the fact that a subject provokes different viewpoints–and even conflict–prove it is illegitimate?
Herb, if something is scientifically true, then one can devise tests/means of observing it, and discovering it’s characteristics. Any discrepancies get corrected by further tests and analysis of conflicting reports. For those who cannot recognize any other type of truth, any ongoing disagreement is an indication that whatever one is talking about is either not factual, or that one’s observations about it are invalid, thereby rendering one’s understanding incorrect (ie. not scientifically truthful).
If one limits “truth” to this understanding, one finds out a lot about created things, and nothing about the Creator of them. I apologize to both you and Brad for using the word “picking.” I did not mean it perjoritively. I meant only to indicate that to those with such a narrow view of “truth” it appears that you have done insufficient observation or analysis. That is not how it appears to me, but to people trapped in the belief that there is only one way to understand “truth.”
And that is indeed, as you suggest, a limited understanding of “truth.” It’s like walking around with a hammer and saying that anything that isn’t a nail is unreal.
@ Herb– What about those of us who, despite our best efforts, fail to perceive this personal, eternal God?
Sorry, down with a stomach virus, and unable to do anything the last 36 hours.
Brad is correct, limiting truth to what is scientifically observable does not serve us well, especially in light of the fact that Holy Scripture tells us–and science indicates as well–these things are temporary and will ultimately fade out. What is eternal must be ascertained another way.
I have never quite understood the ‘hidden nature of God,’ but Jesus did say that ‘he who seeks will find.’ Seeing as how Jesus leaned upon OT Scripture as his starting point, I also find it intriguing that, in say a prophet like Amos (there are many other examples), ‘seeking God’ means, among other things, coming to him in the way he prescribes. The idea that ‘there are many ways to God’ was not popular with OT prophets, nor with Jesus, either.
‘Despite our best efforts’ can mean many things, so it is difficult to say. But overall Scriptural testimony is that we do not get to God by our efforts, and to try and do so is calculated to only produce frustration. It is through faith in the Word of Christ, and faith is not a work. It is receiving something, or rather someone, I cannot see.
He who seeks will find.
If I seek, then I shall find.
If I seek and do not find, then that statement is false. Either Jesus was wrong or he did not say it.
If we do not get to God by our own efforts, yet we are to seek in order to find, I give up.
No one who ever ‘finds’ God even wants to use that terminology. It is God who finds her/him, not the other way around. Nor would they say, ‘my efforts to seek God were rewarded,’ or ‘I found Him because of my great efforts, and He rewarded me for my efforts’ All nonsense. No passenger who gets into an airliner says that they are the ones doing the flying by their own efforts, flapping their arms or something.
As Jesus also said, ‘no one can come to me except the Father who sent Me, draws him. (John 6:44). Preceding that (v. 37) is the statement, ‘ All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out.’
Of course if one doesn’t want that to be true, the easy way out is to say it doesn’t work.
Yeah, but all that stuff seems fuzzy to me. If faith is a gift no one earns, how come some people get it and others don’t?
When I was young, I always thought it essential to try to work out ultimate questions to the best of my ability, to try to find a way to relate to God. I see others, people very dear and close to me, who (at least outwardly) don’t seem as compelled to seek, and I have to wonder why.
Some atheists would say there’s some hereditary glitch in my brain that caused me to seek answers to such questions. (Daniel Dennett sets out a particularly cute analogy for this in the opening to his book, Breaking the Spell — an ant climbs to the very top of a blade of grass, and is eaten by a cow, not because climbing there did the ant any good, but because a lancet fluke in its brain needs to get into the cow’s stomach in order to reproduce.) And would probably add that those who lack that glitch are more evolutionarily advanced. Well, that’s one answer, but it’s not mine.
No credit (or blame) can accrue to me for having been a seeker, though, it was just something that was in me.
Actually, “seeker” isn’t the word exactly. God was God, and always there. My search had to do with HOW I would relate to God — as in, through which faith tradition. It’s like, I never doubted the Internet was there, but had to decide whether I was going to connect to it via laptop, smartphone or iPad.
Either I must be one of those not chosen, or there is no God and I don’t have the “God gene” y’all have. I have logged plenty of time in pews, especially choir pews, Bible studies, prayer groups, good works, and I have done nothing at all spiritual..and yet….the best spiritual comfort I can seem to find, outside of an SSRI, is in Buddhist teachings.
Not sure we are talking about the same thing now. We were talking about absolutes, not spiritual comfort–not sure what that is. I don’t have much spiritual or physical comfort today, anyway. Just now getting over a stomach flu virus morphed into maddening cold.
I don’t know about ‘God gene’ but I suspect that every human being has an anti-God gene, at least we seem to have a problem with accountability.
Herb is saying something I was about to say, but held back.
When people — including good friends and loved ones, people I care about — talk about “comfort,” or say “I don’t get anything out of” church… I want to say, “Is that what you think it’s about? Therapy? Some sort of spiritual analgesic, perhaps, that you buy over the counter?
It’s not a transaction. It’s about what IS, and (based on thousands of years of contemplation and other forms of revelation) what we believe we should do in light of our limited knowledge of what is.
The existence of God is not automatically a comforting phenomenon. The presence of God can be consistent with considerable DIScomfort.
I’m reminded of an episode of “Cheers.” Sam was feeling guilty about something, and the tough waitress Carla, who was Catholic, suggested he go see her priest. He did, and the priest laid a penance on Sam that he thought was harsh, and he confided that to Carla. She said of course it was: “It’s not a wimp religion.”
Peace and joy are key elements in the package. But I’m not sure that one’s comfort level is necessarily an element in determining whether you’re supposed to be there or not.
Oops, I got that wrong. What Carla said was, “It’s not a religion for wusses.”
I do not perceive the presence of a personal God, or even any God, is what I was saying, not some sort of “God as blankie”–y’all seem to perceive the presence of God, a “personal God” per Herb. To the extent I have actually experienced something of a “spiritual” nature, it is the balm of Buddhist thought that eases my congenital Sturm und Drang interior monologue. Sorry if I was unclear.
Scientists believe they have identified a gene that correlates with religious belief. If you have it, you believe. If you don’t….I wonder if that’s the issue.
Brad, you say God IS. Great, and I’m glad you have found Him. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…
[Like] What Brad said.
[Appreciate very much] What Kathryn said.
Learning through this whole conversation, and appreciate the dialogue.
I still have this sense that there is the little child in all of us who desperately needs to have that ‘snuggle’ with the ultimate Father/Mother. (My evangelical friends would not like that expression, but how to express the ultimate Authority and Caregiver? A lot of us have not experienced fathers, and sometimes mothers, in a positive way.) Biblically, He has all the attributes of both, and much more.
I need to know that someone else is in charge, and that ultimately it will all make sense. Not because I found inner meaning within myself, but because He’s big, He’s awesome, He knows, He cares.
This probably sounds fuzzy-wuzzy again, but this does come out of a context. I just spent the last week on vacation with some of our grandkids and their parents, and 7 out of the total of 11 of us got the stomach flu. Since I have RLS, and couldn’t take my medicine, I was up the better part of one night, walking around with one limp 2-year old whimpering on my shoulder. (Told the parents to try and sleep–I might as well do the walking, since I couldn’t sit down.) Dead tired–sick and dizzy, but still I’ll never forget how meaningful that experience was for me. There are times that God is like that for me–someone to lean on, but not too often. Usually the context is a pretty painful experience.
Call it sentimentality if you will. I think that is ultimately mankind’s problem. We are too proud to be little kids, dependent on Another.
Oh, and these words I think are also relevant to the topic.