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Christopher Hitchens Is a Treasure
by Michael Novak, National Review Online
Thanks to Florian Widder for the link.
Reposted from:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDRhYTc4N2IxMDEwNTY2Zjc3Y2NlNDIxYTc4MWQ2MmI=
One of the writers whose courage and polemical force I highly admire is Christopher Hitchens. He gives frequent proof of a passionate honesty, which sometimes has obliged him to criticize ideological soul mates when he thinks they are wrong on some important matter. Many of our colleagues today pretend publicly to have no enemies on the Left out of a panicky fear that they might "help the wrong people" on the evil Right. Though always a man of the Left, Hitchens will have none of that.
Another thing: He does his homework and he thinks clearly. If you go to debate him, you had better think things through rather carefully and well, for his is a well-stocked, quick, and merciless mind. Withal, he is a brave and good man — and an excellent man (so others tell me) to have a drink with.
Normally, too, Hitchens is a fair man in debate — although employing often enough those wicked and withering rhetorical ploys that the British often display in verbal jousting. Agent Provocateur is Hitchens's chosen pose. But this time it is a bit disappointing to find so much hostility and so many — unusually many — intellectual missteps in his latest tirade (not his first) against religion, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
For something peculiar happens to Hitchens when he wrestles against God with murderous intent. Hitchens always loses (and may secretly suspect that). Preposterous as this seems, one senses he may fear that one day he will wake up and see it all plainly, right before his eyes. Otherwise, why year after year keep striking another stake in the heart of God?
Like many anti-religious polemicists, Hitchens in his new book suggests that believers in God believe in a Designer, whereas experience shows that this world is of inferior design. Indeed, he writes:
Thomas Jefferson in old age was fond of the analogy of the timepiece in his own case, and would write to friends who inquired after his health that the odd spring was breaking and the occasional wheel wearing out. This of course raises the uncomfortable (for believers) idea of the built-in fault that no repairman can fix. Should this be counted as part of the "design" as well? (As usual, those who take the credit for the one will fall silent and start shuffling when it comes to the other side of the ledger).
Hitchens seems to hold that believers think of the Creator as a simple-minded Geometer, a Rationalist Extraordinaire, a two-times-two-equals-four kind of god, a flawless Watchmaker, a bit of a Goody-goody, a cosmic Boy Scout. If that is so — Hitchens leaps for your throat — then evidence is overwhelming that this Creator botched things up, like a rank amateur. In short, evidence all around us shows there is no such god.
Let's be honest. The God who made this world is certainly no Rationalist, Utopian, or Perfectionist. We can see for ourselves that most acorns fall without ever generating a single oak tree. Some species die away — perhaps as many as 90 percent of all that have ever lived upon this earth have already perished. Infants are stillborn, others born deformed. Children are orphaned, and little girls, terrified, sob at night in their beds. Human sex seems almost a cosmic trick played upon us, a joke, a game that angels laugh at. 'Tis a most imperfect world that this Designer has designed.
But suppose God is not like the Hitchens model. Suppose that God is not a Rationalist, a Logician, a straight-line Geometer-of-the-skies. Suppose that the Creator God deliberately made a world of probabilities and failures, of waste and profusion, of suffering and hardships and frustrations. Suppose that He loved the idea of an unformed history, slowly developing (almost like an organism), nearly everything good won the hard way. Suppose that He loved chance, crossing chains of probabilities, freakish accidents, wild and unnecessary profusion, contingencies of every sort — to keep even angels guessing. Suppose He desired a world of indetermination, with all its blooming, buzzing confusion, so that within it freedom could spread out its wings, experiment, and find its own way.
Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings...
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
— Pied Beauty, Gerard Manley Hopkins
At one point, Hitchens proposes a thought experiment that goes like this: Practically everything in civilization is wiped out. The human race has to start all over again. "If we lost all our hard-won knowledge and all our archives, and all our ethics and all our morals...and had to reconstruct everything essential from scratch, it is difficult to imagine at what point we would need to remind or reassure ourselves that Jesus was born of a virgin."
But is this actually the way things have worked out? If there were no Annunciation of the angel to Mary of Nazareth, if there were no birth of the Son of God in a decrepit stable, if there were no passion, death, and resurrection — or even if all memory and record of such events had been erased — would the world have lost anything of permanent human value? There are, in fact, a number of points of great significance for human conscience and politics, and even science, that the human race might never have come to. As Jürgen Habermas points out, nearly all the basic ideals of the Enlightenment — such as fraternity, not to say, liberty and equality — derive from Christianity, not from Greece or Rome.
Set aside any religious significance to the birth and death of Jesus Christ. Set aside any hint of redemption and eternal life. Consider only its implications for politics and science. Only in the Jewish and Christian conception of God is God "Spirit and Truth," and more concerned about what goes on in individual conscience than in outward gesture. From this conception derives the argument for liberty of conscience in George Mason, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson.
In the moderating habits that Judaism and Christianity partly learned from pagan ethical systems, and considerably deepened with their own resources, Alfred North Whitehead saw the roots of the asceticism, self-denial, discipline, long years of study, dedication to honesty, and limpid transparency which are so necessary for sustained scientific work. Here he also found the conviction that everything in the universe, being the fruit of a single intelligence, is in principle understandable and to be worth all the arduous efforts to try to grasp it. Here other scholars (Boorstin, Landes) have found the conviction that it is the human vocation, in the image of the Creator, to be creative, inventive, and to help complete the evolving work of creation.
In our generation, Habermas has called for a greater tolerance on the part of atheists toward religious believers, and a kind of mutual human respect, which will demand from atheists an attempt to state honestly all their debts to the religious civilization of the West — the womb in which modern science gestated and received its dynamism.
In a more limited sense, of course, Hitchens is correct. If all we had to depend upon were science, empiricism, and our own inquiring minds, we might still have discovered the existence of God (but not the God of Judaism and Christianity) — as did the ancient Greeks and Romans. Reason might well have shown us — did, in fact, show us — that there is a living intelligence deep down in everything on earth and in the skies above. All earthly things are alive with reasons, connections, and also with oddities yet to become better understood, puzzles yet to be solved. We learn by experiment that if we apply our minds to trying to understand how things truly are, how they work, how they are best used, there seems always to be some intelligible light within things that yields up precious satisfactions to the hungry mind. Everything that is seems understandable — in principle, if not just yet. This is the outer limit to his sense of the divine that Einstein confesses (as quoted by Hitchens):
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
Engaged in polemics, atheists like to do two things, which certainly Hitchens does. The first is to make fun of believers on every matter possible, even when that requires outrageous misstatements of fact and employs such clumsy logic as they would mock in others. The second is to generate as many incoherencies in the faith of believers as their fertile minds can make up. Hitchens is in our time one of the great masters of mockery and satire. He out-pains Tom Paine, the same Thomas Paine, mocker of the Bible-toting, who endured imprisonment in France after 1789, forewarning the Jacobins that their atheism would cut the ground out from under their declared human rights. In moral heroism, standing up against angry mobs, Hitchens is often Paine's equal, just as, like Paine, Hitchens seems quite annoyed by Him in Whom he does not believe.
One of the favorite objects of Hitchens's mockery is the Jewish and Christian belief in the omnipotence and omniscience of God, proud fortresses that once protected the claim that God is good against the maelstrom of evils that overcome the just and the unjust alike. Hitchens puts in mind Richard Dawkins, who quotes one rather amusing quatrain debunking omnipotence and omniscience:
Can omniscient God, who
Knows the future, find
The omnipotence to
Change His future mind?
A cute little quatrain. But it does have the defect of putting God in time as though He were just another schmuck like the rest of us. In the classic formulation, "omniscience" and "omnipotence" characterize a being outside of time, unchanging, unchanged. Thus, he has no "future" mind, but only a present mind, in which all Time is present to Him as if in simultaneity. The god presented us by atheists seems awfully anthropomorphic and fundamentalist. The eternalness of the mind and will of God, in the Judeo-Christian view, does not forbid his creation from taking a wild, unpredictable, highly contingent adventure through history. It holds that the Creator's relation to his creation is not at all what Dawkins and Hitchens project.
For the atheist — for Hitchens — though, does the problem of goodness create an intellectual problem? If everything is by chance and merely relative, why is it natural for so many to be good — if not all the time, at least so often as to be quite striking? Put another way: Isn't it unlikely that random chance alone has arranged the world so that many human qualities — the very ones that Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Jews and Christians find good on other grounds — should also work better for the survival of the human race? It is at least mildly interesting that philosophy, revealed religion, and random natural selection lead to many of the same moral principles. Perhaps that explains why some atheists are so nobly good (the "secular saints" of Albert Camus), and why some insist on being credited (by believers) with being good. Some do seem to hate it when believers borrow that awful line from Dostoevsky: "If there is no God, everything is permitted."
On the other hand, Judaism and Christianity do add insights and virtues that derive from other forms of intelligence than narrow reason. It was against common sense and practical reason for the Americans in 1776, without an army and without a navy, to make war on the greatest naval and military power in the world. But their Declaration did fit with the faith that the reason God created the world was to offer his friendship to every woman and every man; and as Thomas Jefferson put it, "The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time." (Or in the words of William Penn: If God gave us friendship, then also freedom.) Our Founders concluded that even when they prayed to the same Providence as the British, those who fight for freedom are better in tune with God's ultimate purposes than those who, though apparently stronger, fight to repress it.
Hitchens himself is a public protagonist of compassion and solidarity. But these come, don't they, from the same Creator to whom Judaism and Christianity, as well as the Declaration of Independence, point.
Hitchens, in sum, sets for himself moral limits that in his view come from reason. And the standards Hitchens sets are normally quite high. Except when, contrary to the American founding, he is venting his bile against God, who, he says, does not exist. Still, even for believers Hitchens is useful. One can take the rake of his arguments to pull out dead grass in one's own sloppy thinking about God.
Reposted from:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDRhYTc4N2IxMDEwNTY2Zjc3Y2NlNDIxYTc4MWQ2MmI=
One of the writers whose courage and polemical force I highly admire is Christopher Hitchens. He gives frequent proof of a passionate honesty, which sometimes has obliged him to criticize ideological soul mates when he thinks they are wrong on some important matter. Many of our colleagues today pretend publicly to have no enemies on the Left out of a panicky fear that they might "help the wrong people" on the evil Right. Though always a man of the Left, Hitchens will have none of that.
Another thing: He does his homework and he thinks clearly. If you go to debate him, you had better think things through rather carefully and well, for his is a well-stocked, quick, and merciless mind. Withal, he is a brave and good man — and an excellent man (so others tell me) to have a drink with.
Normally, too, Hitchens is a fair man in debate — although employing often enough those wicked and withering rhetorical ploys that the British often display in verbal jousting. Agent Provocateur is Hitchens's chosen pose. But this time it is a bit disappointing to find so much hostility and so many — unusually many — intellectual missteps in his latest tirade (not his first) against religion, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
For something peculiar happens to Hitchens when he wrestles against God with murderous intent. Hitchens always loses (and may secretly suspect that). Preposterous as this seems, one senses he may fear that one day he will wake up and see it all plainly, right before his eyes. Otherwise, why year after year keep striking another stake in the heart of God?
Like many anti-religious polemicists, Hitchens in his new book suggests that believers in God believe in a Designer, whereas experience shows that this world is of inferior design. Indeed, he writes:
Thomas Jefferson in old age was fond of the analogy of the timepiece in his own case, and would write to friends who inquired after his health that the odd spring was breaking and the occasional wheel wearing out. This of course raises the uncomfortable (for believers) idea of the built-in fault that no repairman can fix. Should this be counted as part of the "design" as well? (As usual, those who take the credit for the one will fall silent and start shuffling when it comes to the other side of the ledger).
Hitchens seems to hold that believers think of the Creator as a simple-minded Geometer, a Rationalist Extraordinaire, a two-times-two-equals-four kind of god, a flawless Watchmaker, a bit of a Goody-goody, a cosmic Boy Scout. If that is so — Hitchens leaps for your throat — then evidence is overwhelming that this Creator botched things up, like a rank amateur. In short, evidence all around us shows there is no such god.
Let's be honest. The God who made this world is certainly no Rationalist, Utopian, or Perfectionist. We can see for ourselves that most acorns fall without ever generating a single oak tree. Some species die away — perhaps as many as 90 percent of all that have ever lived upon this earth have already perished. Infants are stillborn, others born deformed. Children are orphaned, and little girls, terrified, sob at night in their beds. Human sex seems almost a cosmic trick played upon us, a joke, a game that angels laugh at. 'Tis a most imperfect world that this Designer has designed.
But suppose God is not like the Hitchens model. Suppose that God is not a Rationalist, a Logician, a straight-line Geometer-of-the-skies. Suppose that the Creator God deliberately made a world of probabilities and failures, of waste and profusion, of suffering and hardships and frustrations. Suppose that He loved the idea of an unformed history, slowly developing (almost like an organism), nearly everything good won the hard way. Suppose that He loved chance, crossing chains of probabilities, freakish accidents, wild and unnecessary profusion, contingencies of every sort — to keep even angels guessing. Suppose He desired a world of indetermination, with all its blooming, buzzing confusion, so that within it freedom could spread out its wings, experiment, and find its own way.
Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings...
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
— Pied Beauty, Gerard Manley Hopkins
At one point, Hitchens proposes a thought experiment that goes like this: Practically everything in civilization is wiped out. The human race has to start all over again. "If we lost all our hard-won knowledge and all our archives, and all our ethics and all our morals...and had to reconstruct everything essential from scratch, it is difficult to imagine at what point we would need to remind or reassure ourselves that Jesus was born of a virgin."
But is this actually the way things have worked out? If there were no Annunciation of the angel to Mary of Nazareth, if there were no birth of the Son of God in a decrepit stable, if there were no passion, death, and resurrection — or even if all memory and record of such events had been erased — would the world have lost anything of permanent human value? There are, in fact, a number of points of great significance for human conscience and politics, and even science, that the human race might never have come to. As Jürgen Habermas points out, nearly all the basic ideals of the Enlightenment — such as fraternity, not to say, liberty and equality — derive from Christianity, not from Greece or Rome.
Set aside any religious significance to the birth and death of Jesus Christ. Set aside any hint of redemption and eternal life. Consider only its implications for politics and science. Only in the Jewish and Christian conception of God is God "Spirit and Truth," and more concerned about what goes on in individual conscience than in outward gesture. From this conception derives the argument for liberty of conscience in George Mason, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson.
In the moderating habits that Judaism and Christianity partly learned from pagan ethical systems, and considerably deepened with their own resources, Alfred North Whitehead saw the roots of the asceticism, self-denial, discipline, long years of study, dedication to honesty, and limpid transparency which are so necessary for sustained scientific work. Here he also found the conviction that everything in the universe, being the fruit of a single intelligence, is in principle understandable and to be worth all the arduous efforts to try to grasp it. Here other scholars (Boorstin, Landes) have found the conviction that it is the human vocation, in the image of the Creator, to be creative, inventive, and to help complete the evolving work of creation.
In our generation, Habermas has called for a greater tolerance on the part of atheists toward religious believers, and a kind of mutual human respect, which will demand from atheists an attempt to state honestly all their debts to the religious civilization of the West — the womb in which modern science gestated and received its dynamism.
In a more limited sense, of course, Hitchens is correct. If all we had to depend upon were science, empiricism, and our own inquiring minds, we might still have discovered the existence of God (but not the God of Judaism and Christianity) — as did the ancient Greeks and Romans. Reason might well have shown us — did, in fact, show us — that there is a living intelligence deep down in everything on earth and in the skies above. All earthly things are alive with reasons, connections, and also with oddities yet to become better understood, puzzles yet to be solved. We learn by experiment that if we apply our minds to trying to understand how things truly are, how they work, how they are best used, there seems always to be some intelligible light within things that yields up precious satisfactions to the hungry mind. Everything that is seems understandable — in principle, if not just yet. This is the outer limit to his sense of the divine that Einstein confesses (as quoted by Hitchens):
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
Engaged in polemics, atheists like to do two things, which certainly Hitchens does. The first is to make fun of believers on every matter possible, even when that requires outrageous misstatements of fact and employs such clumsy logic as they would mock in others. The second is to generate as many incoherencies in the faith of believers as their fertile minds can make up. Hitchens is in our time one of the great masters of mockery and satire. He out-pains Tom Paine, the same Thomas Paine, mocker of the Bible-toting, who endured imprisonment in France after 1789, forewarning the Jacobins that their atheism would cut the ground out from under their declared human rights. In moral heroism, standing up against angry mobs, Hitchens is often Paine's equal, just as, like Paine, Hitchens seems quite annoyed by Him in Whom he does not believe.
One of the favorite objects of Hitchens's mockery is the Jewish and Christian belief in the omnipotence and omniscience of God, proud fortresses that once protected the claim that God is good against the maelstrom of evils that overcome the just and the unjust alike. Hitchens puts in mind Richard Dawkins, who quotes one rather amusing quatrain debunking omnipotence and omniscience:
Can omniscient God, who
Knows the future, find
The omnipotence to
Change His future mind?
A cute little quatrain. But it does have the defect of putting God in time as though He were just another schmuck like the rest of us. In the classic formulation, "omniscience" and "omnipotence" characterize a being outside of time, unchanging, unchanged. Thus, he has no "future" mind, but only a present mind, in which all Time is present to Him as if in simultaneity. The god presented us by atheists seems awfully anthropomorphic and fundamentalist. The eternalness of the mind and will of God, in the Judeo-Christian view, does not forbid his creation from taking a wild, unpredictable, highly contingent adventure through history. It holds that the Creator's relation to his creation is not at all what Dawkins and Hitchens project.
For the atheist — for Hitchens — though, does the problem of goodness create an intellectual problem? If everything is by chance and merely relative, why is it natural for so many to be good — if not all the time, at least so often as to be quite striking? Put another way: Isn't it unlikely that random chance alone has arranged the world so that many human qualities — the very ones that Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Jews and Christians find good on other grounds — should also work better for the survival of the human race? It is at least mildly interesting that philosophy, revealed religion, and random natural selection lead to many of the same moral principles. Perhaps that explains why some atheists are so nobly good (the "secular saints" of Albert Camus), and why some insist on being credited (by believers) with being good. Some do seem to hate it when believers borrow that awful line from Dostoevsky: "If there is no God, everything is permitted."
On the other hand, Judaism and Christianity do add insights and virtues that derive from other forms of intelligence than narrow reason. It was against common sense and practical reason for the Americans in 1776, without an army and without a navy, to make war on the greatest naval and military power in the world. But their Declaration did fit with the faith that the reason God created the world was to offer his friendship to every woman and every man; and as Thomas Jefferson put it, "The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time." (Or in the words of William Penn: If God gave us friendship, then also freedom.) Our Founders concluded that even when they prayed to the same Providence as the British, those who fight for freedom are better in tune with God's ultimate purposes than those who, though apparently stronger, fight to repress it.
Hitchens himself is a public protagonist of compassion and solidarity. But these come, don't they, from the same Creator to whom Judaism and Christianity, as well as the Declaration of Independence, point.
Hitchens, in sum, sets for himself moral limits that in his view come from reason. And the standards Hitchens sets are normally quite high. Except when, contrary to the American founding, he is venting his bile against God, who, he says, does not exist. Still, even for believers Hitchens is useful. One can take the rake of his arguments to pull out dead grass in one's own sloppy thinking about God.
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Posted: Monday, May 21, 2007 | PermalinkComments 1 - 50 of 51 |
Reload Comments | Back to Top | Page Numbers2. Comment #43236 by BT Murtagh on May 21, 2007 at 2:07 am
But suppose God is not like the Hitchens model. Suppose that God is not a Rationalist, a Logician, a straight-line Geometer-of-the-skies. Suppose that the Creator God deliberately made a world of probabilities and failures, of waste and profusion, of suffering and hardships and frustrations. Suppose that He loved the idea of an unformed history, slowly developing (almost like an organism), nearly everything good won the hard way. Suppose that He loved chance, crossing chains of probabilities, freakish accidents, wild and unnecessary profusion, contingencies of every sort — to keep even angels guessing. Suppose He desired a world of indetermination, with all its blooming, buzzing confusion, so that within it freedom could spread out its wings, experiment, and find its own way.
Suppose, in short, that the Creator God chose to make a Universe that looks exactly like the Universe that would have existed without Him in it at all. Such a God, if He desires to be believed in, has just cut His metaphorical throat with William of Occam's razor.
Other Comments by BT Murtagh
3. Comment #43237 by Logicel on May 21, 2007 at 2:08 am
Still, even for believers Hitchens is useful. One can take the rake of his arguments to pull out dead grass in one's own sloppy thinking about God._____
Novak, be an angelic dear, and follow your own advice.
Other Comments by Logicel
4. Comment #43238 by Jeff D on May 21, 2007 at 2:09 am
What comes shining through clearly in Novak's article/review are Novak's own muddled thinking, which seems to have its origin in the official muddled thinking of Christian apologetics."In our generation, Habermas has called for a greater tolerance on the part of atheists toward religious believers, and a kind of mutual human respect, which will demand from atheists an attempt to state honestly all their debts to the religious civilization of the West — the womb in which modern science gestated and received its dynamism."
Say what? Who among believers is calling for tolerance, let alone "greater tolerance," on the part of religious believers toward atheists and other non-believers? Yes, modern science gestated and received its dynamism in the womb of the civilization of the West. It's gross hyperbole to call it "religious civilization" in light of official religious opposition to just about every significant advance in science.
Other Comments by Jeff D
5. Comment #43239 by AndyD on May 21, 2007 at 2:15 am
I was going to copy in that exact same segment, BT Murtagh, and say the exact same thing. Beat me to the punch.He seems to call out universals and somehow assume that just because it is desirable to have widespread solidarity and compassion, it necessarily must come from the supernatural and not the natural. As usual, I think a Sam Harris paraphrase fits best: all of this is unnecessary! The feelings of love and beauty and compassion come from within humans, not from without.
Other Comments by AndyD
6. Comment #43243 by Peacebeuponme on May 21, 2007 at 2:22 am
Another apologist who thinks religion has to get special treatment. Hitchens is fine to write barbs on everything else, and gets it right every time, but seems to descend into rudeness and fallacy when it comes to religion. Strange.Other Comments by Peacebeuponme
7. Comment #43244 by steve99 on May 21, 2007 at 2:26 am
Reason might well have shown us — did, in fact, show us — that there is a living intelligence deep down in everything on earth and in the skies above.
No, that was ignorance not reason. It only seemed so before we understood that complexity can arise spontaneously.
Other Comments by steve99
8. Comment #43250 by mmurray on May 21, 2007 at 2:40 am
Put another way: Isn't it unlikely that random chance alone has arranged the world so that many human qualities — the very ones that Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Jews and Christians find good on other grounds — should also work better for the survival of the human race?
This reminds me of a great quote in, I think, one of Stephen J Goulds books. It is credited to Mark Twain (again I think - if anyone could tell me the source I would be grateful). Anyway it goes something like: `how amazing it is that the Mississippi River manages to meet every tributary, go under every bridge, past every boat ramp and past every fishing pole. Surely this couldn't be random it must be the work of a divine intelligence'.
On the other hand, Judaism and Christianity do add insights and virtues that derive from other forms of intelligence than narrow reason.
This seems to confuse using reason with being Spock.
Michael
Other Comments by mmurray
9. Comment #43251 by ricey on May 21, 2007 at 2:43 am
Quote JeffD:"Who among believers is calling for tolerance, let alone "greater tolerance," on the part of religious believers toward atheists and other non-believers? Yes, modern science gestated and received its dynamism in the womb of the civilization of the West. It's gross hyperbole to call it "religious civilization" in light of official religious opposition to just about every significant advance in science."
Indeed. Copernicus among countless others could testify to the scientific contribution of "religious civilization". What a cheek to laud religion as the benefactor of science! Religion, particularly Judeo-Christain religion, has always intimidated and obstructed genuine scientific advancement for fear that uncomfortable truths will enter the public arena.
Other Comments by ricey
10. Comment #43255 by John Phillips on May 21, 2007 at 2:53 am
Reason might well have shown us — did, in fact, show us — that there is a living intelligence deep down in everything on earth and in the skies above.
This is completely the wrong way round. The need for a reason made early humans posit many causes and possible intelligence behind the world they saw and experienced in the early days of humanities existence on this planet. But now, reason itself, through the scientific method, shows us that everything that was then attributed to a possible intelligence, is at the very least unfounded, as the only evidence for this 'intelligence' exists only in the minds of the deluded religites.
Isn't it amazing how many different kinds of gods these religites have and each one never the one any particular writer is criticising. Their definitions of their gods are even more varied and fluid than their morality.
Other Comments by John Phillips
11. Comment #43259 by scooternyc on May 21, 2007 at 3:01 am
I find it most interesting that when one sees the world only through a "religous" eye or a "democractic eye" or a "republican eye" virtually everything is distorted to the extent that one cannot see anything else. This is a fatal flaw of these people who are so polarized in their views and lack the ability to understand science, rooted in facts, not opinion.
Any time your humanity distorts a universal truth this is a limitation and thus a distortion of life.
Other Comments by scooternyc
12. Comment #43267 by Eratosthenes on May 21, 2007 at 3:16 am
Robert Maynard -That passage was indeed borrowed from Sam Harris, and was duely cited by Hitchens in GING.
Other Comments by Eratosthenes
13. Comment #43271 by BMMcArdle on May 21, 2007 at 3:22 am
More Einstein quotes;What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of "humility." This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.
The mystical trend of our time, which shows itself particularly in the rampant growth of the so-called Theosophy and Spiritualism, is for me no more than a symptom of weakness and confusion.
Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seems to me to be empty and devoid of meaning.
Other Comments by BMMcArdle
14. Comment #43280 by pewkatchoo on May 21, 2007 at 3:48 am
Ah well, give him a 6 for effort. Other Comments by pewkatchoo
15. Comment #43287 by Chris Davis on May 21, 2007 at 4:14 am
Hmm - nice goalposts, Michael. What's their top speed?CD
Other Comments by Chris Davis
16. Comment #43289 by RascoHeldall on May 21, 2007 at 4:16 am
Suppose that the Creator God deliberately made a world of probabilities and failures, of waste and profusion, of suffering and hardships and frustrations. Suppose that He loved the idea of an unformed history, slowly developing (almost like an organism), nearly everything good won the hard way. Suppose that He loved chance, crossing chains of probabilities, freakish accidents, wild and unnecessary profusion, contingencies of every sort — to keep even angels guessing.
What frustrates me about such obvious apologism is that the line of reasoning so obviously fails when applied to anything else. Would Novak be so willing to defend, say, a Government that desired a "world of probabilities and failures, of waste and profusion, of suffering and hardships and frustrations"?
If such a warped being exists in the way Novak apparently believes, why on earth does he think anyone should want to worship it? Why isn't he appalled that so many millions of people complacently worship a creature that treats them with, at best, indifference, and worst, downright cruelty?
Why don't these people see what they are saying? If I genuinely thought that a God was responsible for the world as it is, I would be forced to conclude he was a misanthropic psychopath. (At least would be consistent with the God of the Old Testament, I suppose!)
Other Comments by RascoHeldall
17. Comment #43292 by Russell Blackford on May 21, 2007 at 4:27 am
Well, this is certainly not a beneficent deity that's being described by Novak. If its values are the ones described, I'm more inclined to say that it's an infinitely powerful monster.Other Comments by Russell Blackford
18. Comment #43294 by Russell Blackford on May 21, 2007 at 4:30 am
As for Habermas, don't even start me. He's the ultimate traitor to the cause of reason.Other Comments by Russell Blackford
19. Comment #43302 by Logicel on May 21, 2007 at 4:52 am
Put another way: Isn't it unlikely that random chance alone has arranged the world so that many human qualities — the very ones that Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Jews and Christians find good on other grounds — should also work better for the survival of the human race?______
This sentence is pathetically twisted into illogical knots.
Natural selection is not random, but as someone else has pointed out on another thread, religites regard anything that is not divinely designed as being random. Religites refuse to accept that the purpose of life is to propagate genes, and that the selfish gene leads to the altruistic society (paraphrasing Dawkins). No divine designer--no matter how nebulous it is painted to be--is required.
Other Comments by Logicel
20. Comment #43310 by BaronOchs on May 21, 2007 at 5:07 am
18. Comment #43294 by Russell Blackford on May 21, 2007 at 4:30 am
As for Habermas, don't even start me. He's the ultimate traitor to the cause of reason.
Russell Blackford I don't know anything about him so I would be grateful if you'd explain a little. Not least since michael novak keeps going on about him.
Other Comments by BaronOchs
21. Comment #43311 by phasmagigas on May 21, 2007 at 5:11 am
quote:But suppose God is not like the Hitchens model. Suppose that God is not a Rationalist, a Logician, a straight-line Geometer-of-the-skies. Suppose that the Creator God deliberately made a world of probabilities and failures, of waste and profusion, of suffering and hardships and frustrations. unquote.
pathetic reasoning.
a beautiful sunset:god
speed of light:god
child starves down a well:god
earthquake:god
lost my wedding ring:god
parasite upon a parasite:god
fell under a truck:god
all my seedlings died:god
no rain for weeks:god
flooding:god.
a 4 year old child would be an expert at these explanations.
Other Comments by phasmagigas
22. Comment #43312 by Thanny on May 21, 2007 at 5:17 am
At one point, Hitchens proposes a thought experiment...
Is that really true? I hope it's cited, because that line is an almost verbatim lift from a practically identical thought experiment in Sam Harris' The End of Faith.
Here's the exact bit from the book (it's half a paragraph):
But as Sam Harris states rather pointedly in The End of Faith, if we lost all our hard-won knowledge and all our archives, and all our ethics and morals, in some Márquez-like fit of collective amnesia, and had to reconstruct everything essential from scratch, it is difficult to imagine at what point we would need to remind or reassure ourselves that Jesus was born of a virgin.
So not only is Novak doing some mushy thinking of his own, but making it appear as if Hitchens is stealing rather specific ideas from other authors.
Other Comments by Thanny
23. Comment #43314 by Azven on May 21, 2007 at 5:21 am
— that there is a living intelligence deep down in everything on earth and in the skies above. All earthly things are alive with reasons, connections, and also with oddities yet to become better understood, puzzles yet to be solved.
Novak is using the worf 'alive' in the sense of abundant, but in this context (after using the expression 'living intelligence') he is [purposely?] mixing the meanings.
He starts off with a living God and ends up with an Einstienian God. As others have commented here, he is getting his Gods mixed up.
Other Comments by Azven
24. Comment #43315 by jonecc on May 21, 2007 at 5:26 am
Michael Novak writes about Christianity as a force for equality, freedom and science, yet he is a Catholic, and works for the American Enterprise Institute.Does he believe in the virgin birth? Does he support the Pope's attacks on liberation theology? Where does he stand on babies in Limbo?
They act like they're modern folks when they're in the media, but scratch the surface and it's the same old Iron Age freak show.
Also, his history is cock-eyed. When Christianity took over the Roman Empire, it did not come as a force for peace. More Christians died after the change than before, as the wrong kind of Christian was labelled a heretic.
From Poland to South America to the Philippines, Christianity arrived at the point of a sword. Neither was it the main source of scientific research, much of which came from Hindu India, via the Muslim Mediterranean. When the West took over, it was not religion that forced the pace but the Industrial Revolution.
There was good work done by monks and clerics in the medieval west, but that was because they were the only people who had the time and resources. If society had created a secular priesthood rather than a religious one, who knows what they might have achieved?
The Church frequently tried to interfere. From 1270 to 1284, for instance, they issued a series of decrees which explained exactly what propositions philosophers were to find to be true. This is not how it's done.
From the Renaissance on, the focus of scientific progress shifted away from Catholic and Muslim lands, and into Protestant northern Europe. This was because scientists and philosophers enjoyed greater freedom, away from meddling Popes and mullahs. Of the great figures of modern science and philosophy - Newton, Darwin, Leibniz, Lavoisier, etc - very few were clerics.
Other Comments by jonecc
25. Comment #43319 by alfonso on May 21, 2007 at 5:46 am
This was all well until...But suppose God is not like the Hitchens model. Suppose that God is not a Rationalist, a Logician, a straight-line Geometer-of-the-skies. Suppose that the Creator God deliberately made a world of probabilities and failures, of waste and profusion, of suffering and hardships and frustrations. Suppose that He loved the idea of an unformed history, slowly developing (almost like an organism), nearly everything good won the hard way. Suppose that He loved chance, crossing chains of probabilities, freakish accidents, wild and unnecessary profusion, contingencies of every sort — to keep even angels guessing. Suppose He desired a world of indetermination, with all its blooming, buzzing confusion, so that within it freedom could spread out its wings, experiment, and find its own way.
That god is not the god of any religion that I know of. Certainly not of any of the mainstream monotheistic religions or variations.
Other Comments by alfonso
26. Comment #43320 by phasmagigas on May 21, 2007 at 5:47 am
Quote: A cute little quatrain. But it does have the defect of putting God in time as though He were just another schmuck like the rest of us. In the classic formulation, "omniscience" and "omnipotence" characterize a being outside of time, unchanging, unchanged. Thus, he has no "future" mind, but only a present mind, in which all Time is present to Him as if in simultaneity. The god presented us by atheists seems awfully anthropomorphic and fundamentalist. The eternalness of the mind and will of God, in the Judeo-Christian view, does not forbid his creation from taking a wild, unpredictable, highly contingent adventure through history. It holds that the Creator's relation to his creation is not at all what Dawkins and Hitchens project. Unquote.so the author is saying 'no matter what argument you have or what evidence you have for a non created universe, it appears that way because god made it so' ??????? again, that is just way to easy.
Other Comments by phasmagigas
27. Comment #43323 by Dr Benway on May 21, 2007 at 5:50 am
Michael Novak:Otherwise, why year after year keep striking another stake in the heart of God?Two words: Salman Rushdie. It can be quite affecting, knowing a friend is under threat of murder.
Prior to 9-11, I became friends with an older gentleman who worked as an Indonesian and Arabic translator in the Boston area. A kindly, bookish, overweight bachelor who converted to Islam while living in Indonesia many years ago. I'll call him Halim, although that's not his name.
In his youth he was an idealist after purity. Time slowly stripped away his naivete. Lacking a science background, he had a number of mystical ideas that he assumed were consonant with naturalism. But by the time I got to know him he was essentially an atheist. Nonetheless, he continued going to Friday prayers. He explained to me that apostasy is a capital crime in Islam.
I said, I see how that would be a problem for you in Saudi Arabia. But you live in Boston.
He said, but the nutters don't respect man's law, only God's law, and I know two crazy enough to do it.
I didn't quite believe him initially. But over several months he shared other stories that painted a disturbing picture of this subculture. He asked me, what might happen to a kid growing up in a pleasant Boston suburb, a child of upper middle class, intelligent, rational parents, to make him convert to Islam? He described a couple of young men in their 20s who just returned from the Haj. They affected that annoying brand of enlightenment similar to someone in love. "They're wearing leather socks, and it's 80 degrees out."
A man had put up a blanket down the middle of the mosque to separate the women from the men. Halim said, "I said to the guy, 'you need to be in a CLINIC!' But the blanket stays, because the zealots always win."
He told me about some grad students at a respected university, just back from a visit home to family in Pakistan. These boys bragged about taking pot shots at Hindus across the border using high-powered rifles.
Then 9-11 happened, and I no longer doubted my friend's apostasy worries. I talked about this to a few mutual friends, Muslim sympathizers, and didn't get much response. Made me feel I was surrounded by somnambulists. Then the television was filled with people saying, "Islam is a religion of peace."
To this day, I can't hear the name "Karen Anderson" without reflexively ranting and cursing.
Other Comments by Dr Benway
28. Comment #43331 by NormanDoering on May 21, 2007 at 6:08 am
I've got a-want-to-be Christian writer who wants me to look over his book for error reports and opinions from an atheist perspective.I was going to tell him I thought it was terrible and wouldn't sell, but then I read stuff like this and realize -- maybe he can sell.
Here's a sampling of the arguments He makes against Sam Harris:
3) Logical error. Harris says that certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one. But since Sam Harris is tolerated and left unmolested in a nation where 150 million people, by his account, possess such certainty, this is obviously wrong. This statement is particularly ironic given how he argues explicitly against tolerance for the religious faithful. It seems that it is certainty about the nonexistence of the next life that is incompatible with tolerance.
4) Factual error. Harris claims that human standards of morality are what Christians use to establish God's goodness. This is incorrect. Christians do not believe that God is subject to human morality. This should be obvious from simply considering the 10 Commandments. Is God prone to have another god before Himself? Does God have a neighbor whose wife he might covet? Who is God's father and how might He fail to honor him?
--skip 5--
6) Logical error. Harris claims religious moderates are responsible for the actions of religious extremists. But no individual can possibly be held responsible for the actions of another individual over whom he has no authority or influence and has never even met.
7) Logical error. Harris asserts that competing religious doctrines have shattered the world into separate moral communities. He also claims that the objective source of moral order is distinguishing between better and worse ways of seeking happiness. But is there any evidence that Christians seek happiness any differently than Hindus? How, precisely, do Jews seek happiness differently than Muslims? It's worth noting that Harris has probably caused greater human unhappiness with his books then Jeffrey Dahmer ever did with his unusual diet, so by his own reckoning, Harris is less moral than Dahmer.
8) Factual error. Harris claims that religious prudery contributes daily to the surplus of human misery while bemoaning the existence of AIDS in Africa and other sexually transmitted diseases in the United States. But this widespread disease is the direct result of the sexual promiscuity that Christians condemn as immoral and which Harris praises as the pursuit of happiness. More to the point, scientific research shows that religious individuals are both happier and more sexually satisfied than non-religious individuals.
Other Comments by NormanDoering
29. Comment #43335 by Russell Blackford on May 21, 2007 at 6:16 am
BaronOchs: I'm not sure I could sum up Habermas concisely and accurately, but one way to get an idea of how he thinks, fairly quickly, is to read his little book called something like The Future of Human Nature. You need to read the whole thing, but it's quite short.The thing is, there are some genuine concerns about genetic engineering, which this whole book is attacking. But the kind of noble-sounding rhetoric he uses to argue his neo-Luddite position, the solicitude to irrational systems of thought, even though he's supposed to be a major philosopher in the rationalist tradition of Kant, blah blah, and is hugely influential in that role ... well, it's just, to me, how you don't do philosophy. (I'm more open to arguments about the same topic on different grounds.)
I think you'll get the impression of how this is the kind of person who "believes in belief" and is prepared to pander to misery and superstition.
Other Comments by Russell Blackford
30. Comment #43338 by ricey on May 21, 2007 at 6:27 am
NormanDoering;By all means encourage the boy to publish! He is too dumb to reach - he may as well earn a few bucks from Liberty University who would use this as a textbook.
Other Comments by ricey
31. Comment #43341 by BaronOchs on May 21, 2007 at 6:29 am
Cheers Russell I'll take a look at that.Hopefully it'll go better than my attempt to read Jacques Derrida :-)
Other Comments by BaronOchs
32. Comment #43345 by Dr Benway on May 21, 2007 at 6:38 am
As Jürgen Habermas points out, nearly all the basic ideals of the Enlightenment – such as fraternity, not to say, liberty and equality — derive from Christianity, not from Greece or Rome.The anchovy fallacy.
Friend: Have a piece of pizza.
Me: No thanks. It's got anchovies.
Friend: It's got pepperonis and mushrooms also. You love those. You told me just the other day, the best pizza is one with pepperonis and mushrooms. I don't understand your inconsistency. You're not being entirely honest with yourself. In your heart of hearts, you know you want this pizza.
Other Comments by Dr Benway
33. Comment #43354 by phasmagigas on May 21, 2007 at 6:56 am
norman doering:quote:6) Logical error. Harris claims religious moderates are responsible for the actions of religious extremists. But no individual can possibly be held responsible for the actions of another individual over whom he has no authority or influence and has never even met. unquote.
ive not got the book at hand but im not sure that sam meant this literally, he suggests they are more bystanders and let things happen that maybe they shouldnt. Would a person be responsible for a childs death if they saw her crossing the road and didnt bother to run out and grab them before the car hit?? same idea perhaps.
oh and the sex on, i think all sam is suggesting that condom use if a good idea.
Other Comments by phasmagigas
34. Comment #43360 by Dr Benway on May 21, 2007 at 7:12 am
phasmagigas, I believe Harris' criticism of the moderate is even stronger than the bystander argument.The fundamentalist appeals to faith as a justification for violence. The rationalist says faith, or belief without evidence, isn't a valid justification.
The moderate religionist calls the rationalist a bigot and describes critical arguments against faith as "angry diatribes."
The rationalist is like a cop disarming a lunatic with a gun. The moderate religionist shoots the cop, then hands the gun back to the lunatic.
Other Comments by Dr Benway
35. Comment #43362 by Dr Benway on May 21, 2007 at 7:21 am
3) Logical error. Harris says that certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one. But since Sam Harris is tolerated and left unmolested in a nation where 150 million people, by his account, possess such certainty, this is obviously wrong.
Only in secular societies are unbelievers granted equality before the law. It's American secularism that protects Sam Harris, not American Christianity or American Islam. Were either religion truly interested in the rights of the faithless, we'd read about these rights in the scriptures. In fact, we read just the opposite.
Other Comments by Dr Benway
36. Comment #43364 by BeyondBelief on May 21, 2007 at 7:24 am
Let me get this straight... Hitchens is derided for making multiple intellectual faux pas(ses? What is the plural?) and yet this ninny proceeds to argue by assuming the existence of the thing in question, and jacking up his defense by its own bootstraps? Good gravy!
Other Comments by BeyondBelief
37. Comment #43372 by Mr. Mark on May 21, 2007 at 7:47 am
Re: Comment #43235 by Robert Maynard on May 21, 2007 at 2:06 amBob - Hitchens is quoting Harris, and he gives the attribution for the quote right there with the quote. The fact that the reviewer doesn't realize this - and believes that this quote originated with Hitch, not Harris - shows a surface knowledge of Hitchens' book. Extremely sloppy reporting.
Other Comments by Mr. Mark
38. Comment #43380 by GBile on May 21, 2007 at 8:06 am
Gee,An other believer, an other God. This time :
Suppose that God is not a Rationalist, a Logician, a straight-line Geometer-of-the-skies
A clumsy God, a Pot-head God, an omni-obfuscating God, an omni-conjuring God, an omni-prankerish God, a school-dropout God, a f-level God ??
An other try to construct 'something' that can't be attacked by the unbelievers.
An other failure ...
Other Comments by GBile
39. Comment #43386 by squinky on May 21, 2007 at 8:31 am
"But suppose God is not like the Hitchens model. Suppose that God is not a Rationalist, a Logician, a straight-line Geometer-of-the-skies. Suppose that the Creator God deliberately made a world of probabilities and failures, of waste and profusion, of suffering and hardships and frustrations."It's arguments like this that snatch the Ace of Spades from under the house of cards such that religion comes tumbling down like the walls of Jericho. NONE of the fundies can seem to agree on a single attribute of God (aside from love). So what is he? Omniscient, omnipotent? He is all things but not one thing? He loves entropy but orders our lives? He creates life on Earth but gets off on supernovae that preclude it?
The Final Definition of God: The supreme being that possesses an obsessive infatuation with human self-lubricating tissues.
Other Comments by squinky
40. Comment #43392 by Duff on May 21, 2007 at 9:01 am
Nice try, Novak. A little rhetorical cleverness to claim Hitchens is angry at the god he doesn't even believe exists. If you ever debate Hitchens, I would suggest you not use a ridiculous argument like that. He will wipe the metaphorical floor with your triteness.Now, on the other hand, were you to suggest he is angry at the stupid theists, whom we all know are everywhere, he would probably accede that point.
Other Comments by Duff
41. Comment #43394 by Phaeonix on May 21, 2007 at 9:02 am
Another "Well, the GOD I know is BETTER.." polemic.Another there is a GOD, and his name is Yahweh leap...
and most disconcerting, another attempt to portray this GOD as outside the understanding of humanity, yet perfectly revealed to certain people...
Stenger had this nailed on the head... this is a frustrating article, the language is meant for the intelligent theist and common atheist, but the undertones further enhance irrational mindsets... this piece is a anti-conscience raising one.
sigh.
Other Comments by Phaeonix
42. Comment #43425 by PaulJ on May 21, 2007 at 11:05 am
Hitchens himself is a public protagonist of compassion and solidarity. But these come, don't they, from the same Creator to whom Judaism and Christianity, as well as the Declaration of Independence, point.(my emphasis)
Actually, no they don't. Isn't this what's called begging the question? This article seems to be riddled with the prior assumption that God exists, and that therefore Hitchens is wrong.
Other Comments by PaulJ
43. Comment #43442 by 3legcat on May 21, 2007 at 12:57 pm
the Hitchens v. Olasky debate held at the LBJ library is now availablehere, pictures, podcast and ms media player video. it is a pretty good debate.
new thread?
Other Comments by 3legcat
44. Comment #43462 by mjwemdee on May 21, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Comment #43364Pedants' corner:
The plural of faux pas is faux pas
Other Comments by mjwemdee
45. Comment #43527 by MarcCountry on May 21, 2007 at 10:59 pm
"But suppose God is not like the Hitchens model. Suppose that God is not a Rationalist, a Logician, a straight-line Geometer-of-the-skies. Suppose that the Creator God deliberately made a world of probabilities and failures, of waste and profusion, of suffering and hardships and frustrations...."
Ooh! Ooh! I've got one: Suppose God is actually a pair of Siamese Twins! You must admit, it's just as plausible as the rest of it, after all. Then 'They' would be, like, TWICE as powerful!
"If there were no Annunciation of the angel to Mary of Nazareth, if there were no birth of the Son of God in a decrepit stable, if there were no passion, death, and resurrection — or even if all memory and record of such events had been erased — would the world have lost anything of permanent human value?"
Well, since none of those events (except the death, I suppose) ever happened, we can confidently answer that all world has of permanent value is ours depsite the fact that there is NO GOD!
WE DID IT!
Really, this writer needs to develop a little respect for his own species, already!
Other Comments by MarcCountry
46. Comment #43548 by elfinabout on May 22, 2007 at 1:27 am
*yawn* - the usual, rambling nonsensical ad hominem. Filed under "b1n".Next?
Other Comments by elfinabout
47. Comment #43687 by franciebrady on May 22, 2007 at 9:45 am
Re: Comment #1 from Robert Maynard.In "God is Not Great", Hitchens does summarize an argument made by Sam Harris, but he properly cites it, and includes it in his endnotes.
Other Comments by franciebrady
48. Comment #43841 by JDAM on May 23, 2007 at 12:28 am
"But suppose God is not like the Hitchens model..."Well, folks, there you have it! What passes for devastating logic among the fundies. Start off with the assumption of the existence of that which you are trying to prove exists. It's all in the "Buy-Bull", including an extensive and utterly evil definition of what and who the Abrahamic God is. When such a definition is regularly and completely shot down in flames, no problem! One merely "supposes" another definition of God and then proceeds to create a Gerry-rigged intellectual structure to prop that one up. It is then torn down but phoenixes its way back with another set of suppositions which then get torn down again whence new suppositions are posited, and on and on ad nauseum. It's God as a Clockwork Orange, infinitely repairable no matter what damage is done to the concept. In his pathetic and convoluted attempt to make his piece sound "really logical" he ultimately makes a mockery of that which he is attempting to support.
For that effort I suppose we should be thankful.
What really bothers me is that people like Novak actually get paid for this drivel, made all the worse by the obvious fact that the man hasn't even critically read what he is criticizing...
Amazing how some people make a living...
Other Comments by JDAM
49. Comment #44027 by LookToWindward on May 23, 2007 at 7:41 am
RRRRRRRR! Why won't Amazon send me God Is Not Great? I've been waiting for months now! Why on earth couldn't he just publish in the UK at the same time as the US? I could have ordered from Amazon.com instead of .co.uk and had it shipped by now!By the way, I accidentally clicked on 'offensive' on somebody's post above, sorry about that - hope it doesn't get removed!
Other Comments by LookToWindward
50. Comment #44476 by Veronique on May 24, 2007 at 10:48 pm
LookToWindwardI ordered mine from Amazon.com; it arrived within ten days. I have said before that the arcane world of publishing is more fraught with unknowns than the bible.
I have decided to get all books from Amazon.com. I have only ever used Amazon.co.uk once and that was because it wasn't available in the US.
All that happens is that you end up with two different accounts. That is manageable.
Cheers
V
Other Comments by Veronique
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1. Comment #43235 by Robert Maynard on May 21, 2007 at 2:06 am
I wish the author would at least acknowledge that this is not the god found in the first verses of Genesis.
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