Today
I listened to a presentation by Christopher Hitchens, the renown
atheist, given during an Authors@Google
lecture followed by a question and answer session (found here).
He reminds me of a David who would kill the Goliath of religion, but
rather than directing a lethal blow by a carefully directed stone, he
rather throws at Goliath a handful of sand. The sand included the
tired old ineffective arguments such as how ridiculous it is to
worship a grandfather in the sky, that religion is antithetical to
freedom, that atrocities have been done under the name of religion,
that mankind is inherently good, that it is ridiculous to posit a
creator, that science and religion are incompatible enemies, that
truly smart and cool people are not religious, that religion is on an
inevitable decline. As I say, this does not come close to slaying
his Goliath.
Let
me, as a believer, disclose the blow that is needed to accomplish
such a feat. You will kill my Goliath of religion when you first
of all show that my religious experience and my introduction to the
transcendence of God during my (born again) salvation was merely random firings in
the brain. This will not be an easy task. You may have taken images
of brain activity during this embedding of irrevocable
belief and no doubt it would have shown interesting perhaps unusual
patterns. As a believer, I must warn you that this would not
indicate to me that indications of unusual brain activity were merely
internal within the skull and not caused by the transcendent reality
of God. Exactly how do you plan to prove the contrary. You see, we
are inherently both up against the currently unprovable, we are both
in the realm of faith.
That's
just for starters. Next I will have to warn you that not one of your
arguments came anywhere close to encroaching upon the actual
experience of my faith. It has never occurred to me to dwell on any
of what you take to be lethal stones but what I see as an ineffective
spray of sand. My father, who was a Methodist minister, would find
your arguments unrelated to his experience as a pastor. I can't
stress this enough, none of your “lethal arguments” against
religion came close to experiential religion. What daddy was
concerned about was nurturing the communities in which he
lived, and for him personally, and living the disciplines of love.
The rigors of the disciplines of love are simply unattainable by human effort alone but are sourced and supported by the Godhead. Anyone who
doesn't understand this doesn't understand the seductive power of
sin to commandeer man's perception and the steady need for grace nor the involuted ethical challenges within
which man must operate.
Next,
I'm sorry but you will have to deal effectively with several facts.
Belief is not a respecter of persons. Name any and every line of
work, and you will find believers among them. Belief is not the
enemy of freedom and equality but underwrites them with empathy,
compassion, and love. An essential condition of belief is humility
before God and man.
Now
as for the imperfection of the Bible with its occasional God directed
genocide, I will have to agree that mankind is sometimes selective it
what it seeks to revere in its pages. Jesus came to fulfill the
Scripture with a practicum of love. But believers seldom take up the
practice of redacting Scripture in any formal sense for the lessons
learned from even “hard passages” of Scripture are left to simmer
subliminally within the mind. For example, when I read of genocide
in the Bible I am repulsed by it not inspired to do it. It is best
to leave Scripture whole as is since any of my bowdlerized revisions
of it based upon my taste and proclivities are sure to emasculate it
in the end and produce a work simply reflecting my own arrogant
prejudices—a perfect image of who I am, not of who I should be.
Finally,
as an American who thinks we will be in deep shit if we ever decide
that we don't need God nor to trust in him, it is worth remembering
that in respect of individual conscience we stop short of making
anyone bow down to anything—even an idol of bald materialism.
Thus, under the freedom that characterizes America, you are totally
free to throw sand as much as you like. But I must remind you (and me) against
the perils of arrogant certitude and blind belief especially as they
are manifest in practical (especially political) affairs.
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