Barry's Blog

In one of Woody Allen's most memorable dialogues from his film, Love and Death, Boris Demetrovich, played by Allen, is talking to his beautiful cousin Sonia, played by Diane Keaton. Sonia has just mentioned God. Boris: "Sonia, what if there is no God?" Sonia: "Boris Demetrovich, are you joking?" Boris: "What if we're just a bunch of absurd people who are running around with no rhyme or reason?" Sonia: "But if there is no God, then life has no meaning. Why go on living? Why not just commit suicide?" Boris: "Well, let's not get hysterical. I could be wrong. I'd hate to blow my brains out and then read in the papers they'd found something!"

While Allen has employed humor in film over the years to explore ultimate issues like God, death, and reality ("What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case I definitely overpaid for my carpet."), we have witnessed a new spate of militant atheism that has reared its ugly head in recent days. Today's crop of professional atheists urge us to mistrust all religions, in whatever guise. and include such writers as Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon), and Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation). But Christopher Hitchens's book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, which I recently finished reading, is perhaps the most critically acclaimed of the offerings, although his angry, evangelistic fervor against all religions is as off-putting as the fundamentalist preacher on TV.

Hitchens essentially finds all religious claims to be contemptible, especially since in his view, they are nothing more than a man-made invention, a subjective "crutch" to help us cope with life. He holds great contempt for Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, referring to the Old Testament  derisively as "Revelation: The Nightmare of the 'Old' Testament," and finds the New Testament ("The 'New' Testament Exceeds the Evil of the 'Old' One") equally appalling. This is especially true concerning the arguments for the deity  of Jesus. Concerning the claims of Jesus' deity, and His historical uniqueness, Hitchens has severe doubts: "There were many deranged prophets roaming Palestine at the time, but this one reportedly believed himself, at least some of the time, to be God or the son of God."

At this juncture Hitchens takes on Oxford don C.S. Lewis, who he notes, "has recently reemerged as the most popular Christian apologist in his Mere Christianity." It was Lewis who posited in Mere Christianity (1943) that Jesus must have been either the Son of God, or a complete lunatic, or the Devil of Hell. Hitchens writes: "I am not choosing a straw man here: Lewis is the main chosen propaganda vehicle for Christianity in our time...However, I do credit him with honesty and with some courage. Either the Gospels are in some sense literal truth, or the whole thing is essentially a fraud and perhaps an immoral one at that."

Hitchens then summarily dismisses Lewis' contention with this amazing statement: "Well, it can be stated with certainty, and on their own evidence, that the Gospels are most certainly not literal truth. This means that many of the 'sayings' and teachings of Jesus are hearsay upon hearsay upon hearsay, which helps explain their garbled and contradictory nature." Say what? Evidently, Hitchens's theological bias lies with those who have little confidence in the Bible's authority. He clearly has cast his lot with those like the "serious" New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, religion professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who he cites regularly in this section. In recent years Ehrman has jettisoned his conservative, evangelical beliefs, and now considers himself nothing more than an agnostic. Will those who read Hitchens's book really consider it to be solid, unbiased scholarship? I sure hope not.

In this and other passages, Hitchens in cavalier fashion dismisses any possibility of the Biblical documents being reliable. To him, no educated person could possibly believe in the reliability of the Biblical documents. Hitchens evidently wasn't familiar (or chose not to report it) that Lewis himself was not attracted to Christianity for any emotional or "sentimental" reasons. Rather, as he recounts in his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, as he sat in his rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford, his view of the Gospels would be radically challenged from a very unlikely source:

"Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good, 'Rum thing...It almost looks as if it had really happened once.' To understand the shattering impact of it, you would need to know the man (who has certainly never since shown any interest in Christianity). If he, the cynic of cynics, the toughest of the toughs, were not - as I would still have put it - 'safe,' where could I turn? Was there then no escape?" 

In summary, Hitchens clearly is a hater of all religious faiths, attempting to label them all as based on superstition, and the cause of all the evil and wickedness in our world. And while he believes all religions are ultimately grounded on "wish-thinking," I would prefer to say that the Christian faith is more akin to "thoughtful hoping."

Mark Warren, who reviewed Hitchens's book in the April issue of Esquire Magazine ("Thank God for Christopher Hitchens") made a telling observation at the conclusion of his review. After encouraging readers to skip the books by Dawkins and Harris, as they are "smug, turgid, and boring, with all the human feeling of a tax return," he suggests, "Read Hitchens instead...It's a tendentious delight, a caustic and even brilliant book. And with the title alone, he takes his life in his hands..."

Warren then observes: "But yet, there's something all these utterly rational missalettes miss. The hunger. The need. And for all the bad things it has wrought, the profound and revolutionary social force that religion has been in the life of man. Because we need Him, He persists. No matter how big the book thrown at Him, His book is always bigger. No matter how much closer we get to finding God's face through a telescope, many more of us will still be baying, or praying, at the moon."

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow