1. Comment #64693 by maton100 on August 21, 2007 at 11:09 am

Reminds me of process reality. We are not nature's objective. In other words, as Chuck Palahniuk would say, you are not your khakis.
Well put.

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2. Comment #64694 by sane1 on August 21, 2007 at 11:16 am

go hitch go!

Hitch's immediate command of history, philosophy and politics is humbling and impressive.

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3. Comment #64699 by Wrought on August 21, 2007 at 11:20 am

One day... one day he won't need to write anymore. People will just know. Until then... Hitchens: build up that wall! :)

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4. Comment #64707 by Riley on August 21, 2007 at 12:04 pm

I think it's interesting to note that Dawkins and Hitchens have articulated different definitions for the term: "religion". Dawkins has insisted on numerous occasions that in order to avoid confusion, the term religion should be limited to supernatural beliefs. Hitchens however is explicitly promoting a definition of religion that does not include the supernatural (e.g. nationalism, and Stalinism).

I tend to agree that Stalinism and Maoism and the dictatorship of Kim Jong Il should all qualify as religions based on the devotional component that all those institutions demand. Point to Hitchens.

On the other hand, how do you (without confusing the issue) delineate institutions that are monastically devoted to science and exploration from institutions similarly devoted to mysticism? Point back to Dawkins.

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5. Comment #64712 by phil rimmer on August 21, 2007 at 12:30 pm

Riley,

For Hitch I'd like to see him use the term- Sacred Dogma

For RD I'd prefer- Supernatural Religion.

the terms dogma and religion being a little too general on their own.

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6. Comment #64720 by phil rimmer on August 21, 2007 at 12:53 pm

This article is rich stuff indeed. Its sent me off to read more of Lilla and thence to Isaiah Berlin. Professor Lilla, though thankfully not a post-modernist, (he seems to have trashed Derrida for deconstructing both baby and bathwater when tackling the issue of justice) is nevertheless infected by some of the same thinking.

What is it about people trained in the twentieth century in the social sciences and the Humanities? They all believe "we are what we are what we are" and we'd better not meddle with it.

We evolved to be racists, but we're dealing with it.

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7. Comment #64725 by sane1 on August 21, 2007 at 1:19 pm

Lilla's thesis includes a deconstruction of religious "belief". And it includes the following memorable phraseology (Part II of his NYT article (elsewhere on the RD site)):

"The debilitating dynamics of belief".

Words well chosen and described!

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8. Comment #64728 by mandelstam on August 21, 2007 at 1:22 pm

Again this point that keeps coming up, the point that atheistic dictarships are as bad or worse than theistic ones. And yet we can examine atheistic dictatorships and reach our conclusions. Nobody wants to be a nazi....


Except they do.

The single most important agreement between Hitchens and Dawkins is that religions, all of them, are untrue. Even the secular ones. An examination of what it is to be human, and what it is to be good can only start from there.

I don't think it's very hard, but I'm obviously wrong....

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9. Comment #64753 by 601 on August 21, 2007 at 4:13 pm

Shaking off the fantastic illusion... is something that any educated human can now do.

In the abstract maybe, but the mortal fear that is to be alive won't easily cooperate.

For "the least of us," the idea that this is all there is to life is unbearable. But educated and raised out of poverty and other insecurities, enlightenment has a chance to take hold. This is short lived however, because as conditions get better, and then boring, the search for "meaning" returns.

Not to mention, superstition and religion (of All forms) are such handy tools for marketing control, it's unlikely "leaders" could forego them.

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10. Comment #64755 by ronfac on August 21, 2007 at 4:34 pm

maton100
You are not your khakis?
I must be missing something, I don't get it.

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11. Comment #64829 by BT Murtagh on August 22, 2007 at 2:22 am

Perhaps a fuller quote will make it clearer:

"You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world." ~Fight Club movie, screenplay by Jim Uhls, from the novel by Chuck Palahniuk

Or maybe not.

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12. Comment #64877 by ronfac on August 22, 2007 at 7:12 am

Ahhh. Thank you for the edification and clarification.

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13. Comment #64911 by BicycleRepairMan on August 22, 2007 at 10:20 am

"God's Still Dead"

Is suddenly Nietzsche's choice of words not so histrionic and self-contradictory as Hitchens points out in God is Not Great?(an equally "fallicious" title,by the same standard)

I was shocked by Hitchens write-off and ridicule of Nietzsche's "God is dead":

The decay and collapse and discredit of god-worship does not begin at any dramatic moment, such as Nietzsche's histrionic and self-contradictory pronouncement that god was dead. Nietzche could no more have known this, or made the assumption that god had ever been alive, than a priest or a witch doctor could ever declare that he knew god's will.

In actual fact, Nietzsche put the words in the mouth of a MADMAN, running around screaming at science for having "killed God". What Nietzsche means, is of course that the idea of God is dead, and furthermore, he more than hints that only a madman will see this as a tragedy, thus placing himself as perhaps the closest ally Hitchens could ever hope to find in the history of philosophy, hell it could probably serve as an even better undertitle to his book than "How Religion Poisons Everything.

I also dislike how Hitchens consistently refers to God as god, it makes no sense to remove capital letters just because someone happens to be a fictional character.

These things, and the whole Iraq war thing, is my rant on Hitchens, other than that, he's really cool, IMO.

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14. Comment #65148 by irate_atheist on August 23, 2007 at 2:53 am

Dammit Hitch, you and I both know He was never alive in the first place. You pesky country swapping turncoat... ;-)

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15. Comment #65541 by HappyPrimate on August 24, 2007 at 4:50 pm

I am old enough to remember when, I think it was Life magazine published an issue with a cover that said God is dead. It was around 1964. My parents went nuts. How dare anybody say such a thing? It all died down and things went back to what I called normal. Point is - We can never take for granted that reason and critical thinking has been successful enough to stick. Bertrand Russell got fooled into thinking religion was on its way out - obviously it would be gone soon he thought. It is not so much that people are inclined to fall into supernatural belief as is that they are fed it constantly like candy instead of good wholesome real education and reason. That's why I am so supportive of Richard Dawkins and the other scientists who are willing to put the really good stuff on the public table for everyone's consumption. U.S. students get virtually no education in classical literature either. Maybe a Shakespeare play or two. At 55 I'm desparately trying to catch up. It is truly sad all the knowledge that is available is not being consumed by the masses.

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16. Comment #65684 by Martha on August 25, 2007 at 3:08 pm

Comment No. 65541 HAPPY PRIMATE wrote:
"That's why I am so supportive of Richard Dawkins and the other scientists who are willing to put the really good stuff on the public table for everyone's consumption."

Yes, but Richard Dawkins et al cannot undo the negative effects of childhood conditioning; that is up to each one of us to resolve.

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