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Ch. 1: Putting It Mildly

#64: Mar. - May 2009 (Non-Fiction)
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Chris OConnor

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Ch. 1: Putting It Mildly

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God is Not Great

Ch. 1: Putting It Mildly
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Chris OConnor

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Please use this thread to discuss the first chapter.
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DWill

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I like Hitchens. He is a good literature man, which endears him to me right away. He is a top-notch essayist. It's hard to imagine a more eloquent, and at times wicked and wickedly funny, spokesman for atheism.

I have to say that I haven't been able to reconcile his attack on religion in Chapter 2 (I've read about a third of the book), with an attitude he shows in this first chapter. I noticed this, too, with Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion. And that is that he reveals a certain affection, respect, even love for some of the products of religion: his old teacher and churches, for example, and also art, music, and literature. This is not so surprising for a humanist, but thinking of the next chapter's refrain of "Religion poisons everything," I become a little puzzled. Maybe I'll work this difficulty or someone can help me.

But he hits all the points that he needs to in this introductory chapter. He has his objections neatly bundled into four. Religion:
1. "wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos
2. "that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism,:
3. "that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression"
4. "that it is ultimately grounded in wish-thinking."

Other statements he presents as basic are that atheists:

5. do not belong to a faith, "our belief is not a belief."
6. are a diverse bunch who freely disagree with each other
7. are as open to "wonder, mystery, and awe" as anyone (but are likely to seek it from more awe-inspiring sources than religion offers)
8. have no problem living ethically and may well be more successsful than those who follow religious precepts
9. need no "machinery of reinforcement" to get through the day--consisting of praise, prayer, pilgrimmage
10. believe that the consolation relgion offers is a false consolation

I like this:

"Past and present religious atrocities have occurred not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational. Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by a committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder."

This to me locates the problem accurately, not with religious beliefs that somehow corrupt our otherwise rational selves, but in our nervous and endocrine systems which influence us to concoct and latch onto relgious and other irrational beliefs. Nevertheless, I think that religious beliefs have had a role in maintaining homeostasis during what might be called the infancy of our species. That these same beliefs have disrupted homeostasis with harmful effects is also paradoxically true.
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Interbane

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Your last paragraph rings true for me. When you mention that religion had a role in maintaining homeostatis, I wonder what you envision the progress of humanity would be like without any religion. Perhaps homeostasis isn't really a beneficial trait, especially if the maintained condition includes harmful side effects.
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Interbane wrote:Your last paragraph rings true for me. When you mention that religion had a role in maintaining homeostatis, I wonder what you envision the progress of humanity would be like without any religion. Perhaps homeostasis isn't really a beneficial trait, especially if the maintained condition includes harmful side effects.
What I would hope is that the means of maintaining homeostasis with the aid of religion would be less necessary in an age where ignorance of our world, the universe, and our own bodies, and lack of freedom, doesn't need to impede us as it did when religions arose. I think it's true what you imply, that homeostasis is not necessarily an effect which, when translated from an individual level to the societal level, looks like a benefit.

Even though today we have the exception of Islam, in general the extreme devotion to religious ideas that has helped power all sorts of calamities in the past has weakened, and I think that even modern people who call themselves religious would, if being honest with themselves, admit that this is a good thing. Whether now, progress would be greater with [/i]no religion, I couldn't say. I don't see an immediate reason to be categorical about religion. It has its obnoxious manifestations but these do not necessarily fall under the category of harm. And it has manifestations that appear to be, socially, beneficial.
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Religion: Generally Good?

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Dwill -

I read this book some time past, and admit to being so eager to "join" this book club that feel compelled to write something quickly, so I hope I am not completely out of order in my response.
Paraphrasing you, you stated that "modern" religion, with the exception of Islam, has lost a great deal of the negative "energy" it has had in the past, and as a result, you put forward the idea that Hitchens is off the mark when he describes religion, generally, as a force for evil.
While it is true that Hitchens is pleasingly predispositioned to take such a position, (another book of self-discovery would be a bore,) I think he makes a fairly good case for his argument.
The basic premise he follows throughout the book, is that by dividing humanity into "us" and "them", religion predispositions people to commit all sorts of evil, and even allows them a certian leeway with themselves. (ex: Confession and absolution) Even those religions which profess to include all of mankind through some sort of theological slight-of-hand manage still to find, at the very least, a caste of "unbelievers" at least in the present...perhaps to be "saved" post-mortem by the "one true church" as the mormons do.
Despite all the good people attribute to religion, and even all the good it has done, Hitchens' makes a compelling case that these cannot make up for the fact that religion has caused unbelievable suffering and held man back, while all good qualities professed to be a result of religion are far better catagorized as a form of highjacked humanism, often bearing little resemblance to the tenents of the religion in whose name they were done.
Taking the bible, (sorry, cannot bring myself to capitalize it,) as an example: who can believe that the relgion based on this document can truely be a religion of compassion, forgivness and the brotherhood of mankind, expecially in light of the horrors of the old testament?
Hitchens takes the christian apologists to task, as well as all others, and shows how, when everything is going well, religion can be used for good, but when its tenents are endangered, or its power base in doubt, it routinely goes the route of separating the sheep from the goats.
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Thanks. Your memory must be very good to give this summary of the book. I haven't read the whole thing yet. The points you summarized are ones that I have to consider as I go along. I feel there is one main knot that needs to be undone, but I have great difficulty expressing what I see as the problem. Hitchens is telling us that he is a Protestant sort of atheist and that he has fond memories of and continuing affection for some of the products of religion. Yet in Chapter 2, it's all "religion poisons everything." To say, as you suggest he later says, that anything good from religion is actually hijacked humanism is an impossible separation for me to make. All our experience of the world comes in such a thoroughly mixed form, like a solution of elements whose individual properties cannot be sensed.

We also have a severe problem to deal with that might be called....I don't know, metaphysical? All this business of what might have happened without religion, what religion prevented from happening....as if there could have been, within the confines of the times, something else to take its place? What knowledge do we have of this postulated alternate world? Would a do-over be possible at all? Questions about the nature of time and of determinism hover over this topic. I don't pretend to understand them.

What I think, provisionally, is that we arrive at places through means that we may later look back at with abhorrence. This may be the case with religion. We want to repudiate it as we contemplate the ills we can attribute to its past, not realizing that, nevertheless, it had a large part in carrying us here. I may be confused, but I have a large amount of skepticism in our ability at post-mortems dissections of history, skeptical that we can in any but the crudest way distill out the elements of the solution.
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Wookie1974
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Protestant Atheism...like that

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your mention of the idea of a protestant atheism is interesting and not too far off. Hitchens makes some allusion to the idea that christian religion, at least, has "progressed" from its dark ages, in the form of structural and popular re-inventions of its code of beliefs. He returns again and again to the idea, however, that despite all these improvments, religion is a flawed creation....more like its creator than it would sometimes liek to imagine.
He touches on the idea that the reformation, deaism and all those "questioning" movments of christian religous reform all moved christianity towards freethinking, atheist thought...in a way. I think an examination of modern western civilization supports this idea, at least superficially.
I can't imagine a French Revolution, or Bill of Rights, or the unwritten English Constitution without the freedom of thought that first stretched its legs within the confines of the church. That the Renaissance and the decline of the Church coincided was more than just chance....the former was dependant on the latter.
Even so - Hitchens contends that the stain of religion is somehow integral to human nature....a product of our animal condition. He seems to envision not a world without relgion, but rather a class of people, whom, by virtue of freethinking and science, are able to throw off it's chains. (At other times, however, hs seems to suggest that religion is a product of society, and not present in small children, people locked up in attics, internet addics, or anyone else removed from societal contact. I never got around that conflict.)
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I have read some terrible books, but this is the topper of them all. I was VERY interested in reading what Hitchens had to say. I love to read opposing views simultaneously. I have to be honest- I could only get through 193 of the 286 pages and that was probably 100 pages of pushing myself. I have NEVER given up on a book no matter how much of a blowhard I think the author is.
But, reading this book was like reading a middle schooler's never-ending attempt at debate. This book would've been better properly titled "People are Not Great" considering that seems to be the bulk of Hitchens' argument. Basically, by showing how horrible people are that believe there is a God, in turn, God must be horrible as well. If anything, perhaps an argument could be made that people are so horrible- it is why God's mercy is so GREAT! He completely forgets the most famous atheists who have decimated millions of horrible God-Believers- Stalin, Hitler, Polpot, etc.

Hitchens comes across as angry, bitter, juvenile, and vapid. The only conclusion you can come to reading this book is that its totally irrational.
Random examples and lots of nasty words do NOT make a rational case. critic of religion who fails to accept anything good about it - anything at all - is just not living in the real world.
"A good friend can tell you what is the matter with you in a minute. He may not seem such a good friend after telling." - Arthur Brisbane
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Thrillwriter
He completely forgets the most famous atheists who have decimated millions of horrible God-Believers- Stalin, Hitler, Polpot, etc.
First off… You added a person here that does not belong… Hitler was no atheist; in fact part of his great popularity was due to his religion and how he could relate it to the masses. Anti-Semitism is a purely religious belief, Look into Hitler’s speeches he continuously draws from biblical scripture.
http://nobeliefs.com/hitler.htm
Although Hitler did not practice religion in a churchly sense, he certainly believed in the Bible's God. Raised as Catholic he went to a monastery school and, interestingly, walked everyday past a stone arch which was carved the monastery's coat of arms which included a swastika. As a young boy, Hitler's most ardent goal was to become a priest. Much of his philosophy came from the Bible, and more influentially, from the Christian Social movement. (The German Christian Social movement, remarkably, resembles the Christian Right movement in America today.) Many have questioned Hitler's stand on Christianity. Although he fought against certain Catholic priests who opposed him for political reasons, his belief in God and country never left him. Many Christians throughout history have opposed Christian priests for various reasons; this does not necessarily make one against one's own Christian beliefs. Nor did the Vatican's Pope & bishops ever disown him; in fact they blessed him! As evidence to his claimed Christianity, he said:

"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.

-Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20, Oxford University Press, 1942)

At any rate the scrutiny you level at those other nations is also one with a weak foundation, Polpot and Stalin both held irrational beliefs as dogmatic as any religion… the problems with those regimes was not too much rational skepticism.

Later
That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
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