Easy atheism

...It isn't enough to say that they learned all this from religious folk...

...The Enlightenment marked the end of the mix of religious and civic interests , which had ruled society in varying forms for centuries...

...This is like the skinny kid who tries to persuade the school bully that he can at least help him out with his math...

...by the philosophers as equally false...

...Reagan has made the same argument recently with regard to the arms race...

...Hitchens finds this form of religion harmful to society...

...It could take the form of a surrender to the experts, a faith in technology and the unchangeable sway of those who claim to have the facts-in other words, an abuse of the love of reason, a love which can become as idolatrous as any...

...It means a surrender of reason, a "foul squabble for primacy in Daddy's affections...

...This is historically a very foolish statement...

...Maybe both sense that neither will win...

...There is a totalitarian temptation which will use anything to achieve its ends, and its success is assured wherever there are enough people who yearn for systems or charismatic leaders who will offer us all the answers to all of our questions...

...Their passions seem to have less to do with religion than with the condition of the culture: both ask, who is to blame for the way we are...

...Christopher Hitchens, the author, finds atheism "morally superior, as well as intellectually superior, to religion...

...It is not easy to see from here what new form the totalitarian temptation will take...

...There is a similar scuffle here: Hitchens dashes past the fact that more people have been murdered in our century, at the hands of professed atheists, than ever before, for any reason, including religion...

...Modern society has been more murderous than any, and is professedly non-religious...

...If all Hitchens is saying is that popes who call for murder are doing something hideous and morally indefensible, he is saying nothing I didn't learn in Catholic schools, and he is saying it in a way which is so sloppy as to be dishonest...

...There are extreme fundamentalists who may claim something like this, but there are many more people who are impressed by the remarkable unanimity of the great religious traditions on a number of ethical issues and, perhaps more impressively, about the nature of religious experience, a phenomenon which precedes ethics...

...Like most atheists, he believes he knows what belief is all about (unlike believers, who don't presume to know those heights and depths...

...Lewis does a nice job of detailing some of this consensus in The Abolition of Man...

...are absolutely right is in their passionate belief that any system of thought which asks for unquestioning allegiance is dangerous, and it does not much matter whether it calls itself "religion" or not...

...Obedience, Simone Weil wrote, is a need of the soul...

...But people claiming religious warrant for their views were also to be found on the side of slavers and warriors, and they were usually allied with the powerful economic and political forces of their time...

...He opposes "the totalitarian temptation" and goes on to say that "the desire to worship and obey is the problem-the object of adoration is a secondary issue...

...Obedience is not a surrender of reason, but a surrender of self-interest and the protection of the ego, for the sake of a larger life...

...Where Hitchens and his ilk (how many people are there in an ilk...

...Most pre-modern cultures were religious, in some way, and most cultures in human history have been bloody on a great many occasions...

...Both find easy answers to the question, and bear a similar witness...

...Too many religious people have been pathetically eager to buy into this argument: see what we contribute to society as a whole, whether you agree with us or not...

...It is more comfortable to think that your enemy will win than to imagine that you might be faced with something genuinely new, something unknown...

...Hitchens quotes Gibbon: the religions of the declining Roman Empire" were all considered by the people as equally true...

...Stalinism, which was actually Stalin worship, could not have occurred in a country that had not endured several centuries of the divine right of kings...

...I find it harmful to religion...

...But they have not invented any that they did not learn from the religious, and so they find themselves heaping up new 'infallible' icons and idols...

...But this is plausible only if each religion claims that it alone has any truth, and that all other religions are absolutely false...

...Dogmatic atheists and strict fundamentalists work from opposite ends of the same wavelength...

...the pope allegedly replied, "Kill them all...

...During the war in Vietnam, when it became apparent that appeals to simple patriotism wouldn't work, our leaders were fond of saying that they had facts about the war and the enemy threat that the rest of us didn't have: this was a reason to trust them...

...Hitchens quotes Innocent Ill's advice to Simon de Montfort, when asked how he could distinguish between Albigen-sian heretics and Catholics...

...The charism of the state, the binding authority of the fatherland, won't work anymore...

...I don't think people are buying it, but this is not the sort of argument a Kaiser Wilhelm, or for that matter a Hitler or a Roosevelt, would have found it necessary to make...

...The questioning has become explicit: George Steiner has pointed out that the Enlightenment faith in the power of reason and education was dealt a fatal blow when the most educated and cultural civilization in history produced Auschwitz and Buchenwald...

...When George Orwell reviewed Karl Adam's The Spirit of Catholicism he said that Adam hurried by the problem of evil like a man hurrying past his creditor's doorway...

...Religion can claim some moral successes in the social realm, ranging from the foundation of the first hospitals to the earliest opposition to slavery, opposition to the most cruel forms of punishment, and opposition to the scourge of modern warfare with its slaughter of civilian populations...

...It is the religious mentality that has to be combatted...

...Hitchens is not quite negative enough...

...But Hitchens makes some good points...

...The lesson to be learned is even more depressing than the one Hitchens wants to teach us...

...There is very little difference between the passionate socialist and the fundamentalist, the people who mourn Kennedy's Camelot and the followers of Jim Jones...

...He finds it funny that columnist George Will, philosopher William Barrett, and Washington Monthly editor Charles Peters, among others, all have sympathetic views of religion but seem unwilling to buy into any orthodox religious view or, indeed, any coherent one...

...The depressing fact is that there will be religious people and atheists who will try to appropriate the next form of authority, whatever it is...

...no historian has argued that the papacy turned on that moment in medieval history, and would not have survived without the massacre of the Cathars...

...Of several minds: John Garvey EASY ATHEISM MIXING GOOD POINTS & SILLY ONES THERE IS an article in the July Harper's called "The Lord and the Intellectuals" which mixes some good points with some silly ones...

...Where religious leaders have grown comfortable with power or, worse, have come to pursue it, terrible things have resulted-precisely the things which opponents of religion are able to point to as the results of religion itself...

...it is a pursuit worthy of a well-rounded citizen...

...Some supporters of Aciton Frangaise pushed its Catholic variety of fascism not because they believed in Catholic doctrine-they didn't-but because this program seemed the best way to assure the survival of what they regarded as the best European values...

...Hitchens goes on to say, "Whether the liberated Catholics of today, and the non-Catholic admirers of the present pope, like it or not, there would have been no papacy without that directive...

...Religion is good for the masses because it firms up their commitment to important values, values which are good for the body politic...

...Atheists fear that there will be a resurgence of the sort of religious power which died with the Enlightenment, and fundamentalists fear the triumph of the secular humanism which was born there...

...God will know his own...

...Given the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam it could be argued that following Jim Jones was less lethal...

...C.S...

...and the need to be led is neurotic...

...If religion was the opium of the people, nationalism replaced it, and then ideology...

...To love anyone obliges us, and self-sacrifice and obedience follow from love...

...The state is able to pretend that it has a divine sanction, and religion becomes a means to what is tacitly admitted to be a larger end: the success of the state...

...His atheism is an easily-won variety: "Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong...

...and by the magistrates as equally useful...

...Both camps are a little desperate right now, and their rhetoric shows it...

...Religion is acknowledged by our leaders as something which contributes its little bit to society, a facet of life just as important as business, education, or athletics...

...Any coziness between religion and power is dangerous...

...Anyone who claims infallibility ought to be distrusted...

...JOHN GARVEY...

...I said that the Harper's article reveals something important about this time...

...and it doesn't do to argue too easily that this is simply the corruption of real religion...

...now the secular consensus which began with the Enlightenment is itself coming to an end...

...atheists fail to see that profound reverence-the emotion a person experiences before the unknown, a prelude to investigation as well as worship-and the need to seek the will of God are not the same as a refusal to reason and a need to be led...

...The phenomenon is not new...

...Mur-derousness can't be blamed as much on religion or irreligion (though with as little evidence as Hitchens has I could point to the greater number of dead and blame the latter) as on something constant and ugly in humanity, which uses whatever excuses it can come up with to justify any atrocity...

...The use of religion for reasons of state goes back to Julian the Apostate's attempt to revive paganism for the sake of the Empire, and probably goes back even farther than that...

...Professedly godless men have shown themselves capable of great crimes...

...What I mean is that it comes at a time when the heritage of the Enlightenment is as questioned as the ancien regime ever was...

...But this is not the same thing as a need to be led...

...When religion becomes a part of life, separate from other parts, it becomes false, and the God the religious person says that he reverences becomes a godling, something safe and malleable...

...For atheism worth getting your teeth into, you'll have to turn to someone like Jacques Monod, whose Chance and Necessity is interesting...

...Its appearance reveals something important about this moment in cultural history...

...I am not sure that all of the people quoted have quite the arms-length view of religion which is attributed to them, but the point is a good one...

...Its recent, more banal incarnation is found in such horrors as presidential and gubernatorial prayer breakfasts and senate chaplains...

...According to Hitchens, "today's policy intellectuals, or philosopher-magistrates, hold the last two views simultaneously...

...There is something about human beings which will use anything at all - religion, politics, or a disagreement over interior decoration-as an excuse to dominate, and if dominance must be forced to the point of murder any and all reasons will be pressed into service to justify it...