The Cultural Illiteracy of the Easy Atheists
A pretty good review
By Mary Grabar : BIO| 21 Jun 2007
Best-selling atheist authors are capitalizing on a wave of ignorance and stupidity. The latest offering, God Is Not Great, comes from a bon vivant with a British accent.
To be sure, Christian fundamentalists and literalists have given Christopher Hitchens much to work with. For example, Memorial Day saw the opening of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where Genesis comes alive with Adam and Eve alongside animatronic dinosaurs 6,000 years ago. More of God's country in Tennessee is slated for despoliation with a theme park to be called Bible Park USA.
While the theme park and museum builders have sincere intentions, I wish they'd read some books. And I'm talking about more than the Bible.
Consider the great works of literature written by Christian authors. Though I saw these authors mocked in graduate school, the force of their ideas prevails. Their wisdom and humanity contrasted sharply with the nonsensical nihilism put out by trendy authors.
Reading Milton led me back to the Bible. Shakespeare revealed the evil of atheism through characters like Iago. Dostoyevsky exposed the evils of pride and self-devised "justice."
How odd, then, for Hitchens to invoke literature as he does:
"We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books."
But Hitchens must be banking on a readership that has not read Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. These Christian authors dramatized the themes and stories of the holy book that Hitchens disparages. Shakespeare has Iago explain the materialist origins of his wickedness:
"Virtue? A fig! 'tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens."
For Shakespeare, the sociopath emerges from a materialist conception of the self, from the rejection of the spiritual -- specifically, Christianity.
Hitchens's dismissal of religious faith as something that arises from primitive fear and ignorance of the workings of nature is not clever or new. He only needs to go to one of his referenced authors, to whom he purportedly searches for an ethical model, and read in The Brothers Karamazov:
"socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question."
In Devils, Dostoyevsky exposes the self-delusion of the atheistic revolutionaries who presume themselves bold and more intelligent that the God-fearing around them. In a send-up of "free-thinkers" meetings, Dostoyevsky has a female student say:
"I mean, we know, for example, the superstition about God derived from thunder and lightning . . . It's only too well known that primitive man, terrified by thunder and lightning, deified his invisible enemy, conscious of his own weakness with regard to them."
In another one of the strategy sessions on remaking the world, another of Dostoyevsky's atheist characters in Devils refers to pamphlets that urge "total destruction, on the pretext that however much you try to cure the world, you won't be able to do so entirely, but if you take radical steps and cut off one hundred million heads, thus easing the burden, it'll be much easier to leap over the ditch." One hundred million, of course, is the death toll of the atheistic communist regimes in the century following Dostoyevsky's.
I am sad to say that if you go into a Christian bookstore you will not see Dostoyevsky on the shelf. Instead, you'll find pastel-covered saccharine tomes, the pious stories of easy Christianity that the devout Catholic Flannery O'Connor disparaged.
Of course, easy Christianity is vulnerable to easy atheism, which is what is offered in Hitchens' tome. It's a shame the great works of Christian literature are not to be found on the shelves of Christian bookstores. It's a bigger shame that they haven't done any good on Christopher Hitchens' bookshelf either.
The author is a writer living in Georgia.
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