Christopher Hitchens on Monotheism

[JRP1994]

-- PARAPHRASING Mr. Hitchens' argument:

Humans have been around for at least 100,000 years.  They were born and they died, living not much more than 25 years. Dying of their teeth, appendix, terrible diseases, misery, malnutrition and fear, earthquakes, human-sacrifice - struggling to make progress.

You have to believe this if you believe in mono-theism: For the first 97-98 thousand years, Heaven watches with indifference.  3,000 years ago at the most, it is decided that heaven must intervene now, but the revelation must be made to the most backward, barbaric, illiterate, superstitious and savage people in the most stony part of the world.

Not in China where they could already read.  Not in the Indus valley.

Force them to cut their way through all the neighbours with slaughter, genocide and racism and settle in the only part of the middle east where there is no oil.

And without this we wouldn't know right from wrong!

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Hitchens never did have a very good grasp of world history or different cultures, did he?

Or the fact that it's not as if he's the first person to notice this! Indeed, some of the earliest people to notice it were the members of the religions that were founded in the way he describes! Hint: the seemingly arbitrary, unearned nature of 'chosenness' is partially the point.

I understand why that may have been hard for somebody like Hitchens to accept. The sort of person who non-ironically uses the language of backwardness, barbarism, and savagery is clearly not the best sort to ask about these things.

The events of the Book of Joshua are troubling to deal with, yes.

[DC Al Fine]

-- PARAPHRASING Mr. Hitchens' argument:

Humans have been around for at least 100,000 years.  They were born and they died, living not much more than 25 years. Dying of their teeth, appendix, terrible diseases, misery, malnutrition and fear, earthquakes, human-sacrifice - struggling to make progress.

You have to believe this if you believe in mono-theism: For the first 97-98 thousand years, Heaven watches with indifference.  3,000 years ago at the most, it is decided that heaven must intervene now, but the revelation must be made to the most backward, barbaric, illiterate, superstitious and savage people in the most stony part of the world.

Not in China where they could already read.  Not in the Indus valley.

Force them to cut their way through all the neighbours with slaughter, genocide and racism and settle in the only part of the middle east where there is no oil.

And without this we wouldn't know right from wrong!

What this argument boils down to is a claim that one knows what an omnipotent, omniscient God would do. The problem is that the person doing the deciding is not omniscient or omnipotent. If we cannot logically prove or disprove the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient God, then we cannot know for sure in either direction.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

Hitchens is my hero, a brilliant orator, and this was just one of the arguments he used to demonstrate religious absurdity. 

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I'd hardly say that having petroleum has proven to be a blessing in the Middle East.  Indeed, it has proven to be quite the curse.

[Oswald Acted Alone, You Kook]

Fundie.

[DC Al Fine]

Hitchens is my hero, a brilliant orator, and this was just one of the arguments he used to demonstrate religious absurdity. 

He is a witty writer, but his logic leaves a lot to be desired.

From Theodore Beale's "The Irrational Atheist"

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Beale then provides a list of 51 assertions that Hitchens makes in "God is Not Great" without putting up any evidence to support them.  Here are some examples:

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Beale concludes

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You should also note that many of Hitchens assertions are not only made without any supporting evidence, but that they are simply wrong. (Ex: Religion & medicine, Slavery is a strictly Islamic phenomenon, Atheists are persecuted 100% of the time etc.)

[they don't love you like i love you]

The events of the Book of Joshua are troubling to deal with, yes.

Actually I once heard a sermon that was more of an interview between the pastor and a prominent Old Testament scholar who teaches at a seminary here, with at topic of basically "what violent and unsettling stories in the Bible really mean" with that book being the primary focus. The way she explained it is that it was more of a war story and allegorical to the ancient Israelites, and that archaeological evidence does not show anything for Jericho's walls crumbling. However there is some evidence that there was a group of slaves that may have escaped from the Canaanites and joined in with ancient Israel, and she later compared it to the Battle Hymn of the Republic and how it was used by slaves during the Civil War and their war anthems and all that. Interesting take.

And my views on Hitchens are very well known. Actually like most vocal atheists the worst thing about him wasn't so much that he was an asshole but that he was a boring asshole who did nothing but spew out hackneyed arguments that the "new atheism" brigade and their internet followers have spewed out hundreds of times already.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

The events of the Book of Joshua are troubling to deal with, yes.

Actually I once heard a sermon that was more of an interview between the pastor and a prominent Old Testament scholar who teaches at a seminary here, with at topic of basically "what violent and unsettling stories in the Bible really mean" with that book being the primary focus. The way she explained it is that it was more of a war story and allegorical to the ancient Israelites, and that archaeological evidence does not show anything for Jericho's walls crumbling. However there is some evidence that there was a group of slaves that may have escaped from the Canaanites and joined in with ancient Israel, and she later compared it to the Battle Hymn of the Republic and how it was used by slaves during the Civil War and their war anthems and all that. Interesting take.

The divine liberation/human war theme is how I've always been most comfortable dealing with that part of the Bible too.

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The worst thing about Hitchens was his collocation of political and cultural views, some of which were related to his atheism, some of which weren't.

[they don't love you like i love you]

Hitchens in a nutshell:

HAR HAR CHRISTIANS SUCK THERE IS NO GOD LOLZ!

BOMB IRAQ BOMB IRAQ, INVADE AND SLAUGHTER PEOPLE!

HAR HAR TORTURE IS AWESOME!

HA HA BUSH RULES, LIBERALS WHO TRASH HIM SUCK, LIBERALS LOVE TERRORISTS!

There I completely summarized that idiot's "contribution" to public discourse.

[DemPGH]

-- PARAPHRASING Mr. Hitchens' argument:

3,000 years ago at the most, it is decided that heaven must intervene now, but the revelation must be made to the most backward, barbaric, illiterate, superstitious and savage people in the most stony part of the world.

Not in China where they could already read.  Not in the Indus valley. 

And later on not to the Greeks either, around the time of Christ, whose inventors were building rudimentary steam engines. If God had some instructions to pass along, they would have made good candidates too. And you know what else? No updates from "God" either since the Ten Commandments and other things are clearly crafted by a barbaric culture for a barbaric culture. Maybe when God saw what the Medieval Church and the Muslims did after sending Christ to "update" humanity, God just gave up.

Hitchens' point is entirely logical, and what tends to happen is when religion does not hold up under the most basic scrutiny, you see many theists attack the very process of applying logic. Ah well.

Hitchens and so on do a good job just normalizing and promoting atheism / critical thought, which is sorely needed in American culture today.

[John Dibble]

HAR HAR TORTURE IS AWESOME!

Hitchens's position was not that torture is awesome. He was as far as I can tell against torture. His position was that waterboarding isn't torture, but he changed his mind after agreeing to be waterboarded and experiencing it.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/08/hitchens200808

[Lief 🗽]

I'd hardly say that having petroleum has proven to be a blessing in the Middle East.  Indeed, it has proven to be quite the curse.

What? No.... no one would care about the Middle-East if not for oil. Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran (to an extent) would all be poor, isolated countries that no one but the most esoteric humanitarians or international relations majors would care about.

[King]

I enjoyed Hitchens as an Archie Bunker type comedian.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I'd hardly say that having petroleum has proven to be a blessing in the Middle East.  Indeed, it has proven to be quite the curse.

What? No.... no one would care about the Middle-East if not for oil. Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran (to an extent) would all be poor, isolated countries that no one but the most esoteric humanitarians or international relations majors would care about.

Exactly.  The rest of the world would largely be ignoring it and not propping up their dictators and tyrants.  Also, said tyrants wouldn't have petrofunds with which to buy the goodies used to oppress the people under their thumbs. Yeah, their elites would be worse off without petroleum, but the common folk would be at least as well off economically, and there is a good chance they'd be better off politically.

[Torie]

Speaking of monotheism, I remember my 7th grade Social Studies teacher saying that the great contribution of Judaism to this planet was monotheism. Putting aside the accuracy of that, I inquired as to just why the belief in one God was superior to the belief in many Gods. She just restated her opinion. I told her that I thanked her for her opinion, but that she failed to answer my question. I told her that I did not find her opinion to be intuitively obviously true at all.

I wonder if a case can be made that the rise of monotheism also gave rise to more religious intolerance. I mean, if there is but one God, and you know who it is, and the other guy's God is an impostor, and heretical, there doesn't seem much room for compromise, and live and let live, now does there?  It seemed that the only way out of the box was the rise of secularism (at least then you killed for non-religious reasons). But I did not say that to the 7th grade teacher alas. I only thought of that this minute in fact.

[Insula Dei]

Speaking of monotheism, I remember my 7th grade Social Studies teacher saying that the great contribution of Judaism to this planet was monotheism. Putting aside the accuracy of that, I inquired as to just why the belief in one God was superior to the belief in many Gods. She just restated her opinion. I told her that I thanked her for her opinion, but that she failed to answer my question. I told her that I did not find her opinion to be intuitively obviously true at all.

I wonder if a case can be made that the rise of monotheism also gave rise to more religious intolerance. I mean, if there is but one God, and you know who it is, and the other guy's God is an impostor, and heretical, there doesn't seem much room for compromise, and live and let live, now does there?  It seemed that the only way out of the box was the rise of secularism (at least then you killed for non-religious reasons). But I did not say that to the 7th grade teacher alas. I only thought of that this minute in fact.

I believe the common analysis of early judaism these days is that it propagated the exclusive worship of one God, but that it was still pretty far from being what we would call 'monotheistic'. Just have a look at the etymology of the very name 'Israel'.

But then the thing about early judaism seems to be that we know so very, very little about it.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

The genius of monotheism is its ability to focus on both the necessary cultural framework for a society and an ethical philosophy for that society.  That isn't to say that other belief systems don't have both those aspects as well, but they rarely emphasize both to the same degree as monotheism does.

[Torie]

The genius of monotheism is its ability to focus on both the necessary cultural framework for a society and an ethical philosophy for that society.  That isn't to say that other belief systems don't have both those aspects as well, but they rarely emphasize both to the same degree as monotheism does.

I don't quite get the link between one God and it's efficacy in the building of cultural and ethical edifices for a society. Would you care to elaborate? What having the one all powerful God out there may facilitate is a certain militancy about cultural and ethical edifices perhaps, as opposed to it being particularly more facile as to their creation. Just musing here. I am not in my comfort zone on this one.

[ingemann]

Canaan lay right in the centre of the region where writing was first developed, at the time when these thing should have happen, China and Greece was quite backward compared to the Middle East. The Indus Civilisation the only culture at the same "tech level" was collapsing thanks to barbarian invasion and left no literature behind, while a millenium later China saw the destruction of most of their literary tradition (which is why Confucius saw such popularity, because his writings was one of the few which survived). So honestly not only are this a counter productive argument, it's also quite stupid as the oral and written stories and myths which became the Bible are among oldest if not the oldest retold stories in the world. Yes we have older myths, but those are ones found from ruins, not some told and retold for the last 3 milleniums.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

The genius of monotheism is its ability to focus on both the necessary cultural framework for a society and an ethical philosophy for that society.  That isn't to say that other belief systems don't have both those aspects as well, but they rarely emphasize both to the same degree as monotheism does.

I don't quite get the link between one God and it's efficacy in the building of cultural and ethical edifices for a society. Would you care to elaborate? What having the one all powerful God out there may facilitate is a certain militancy about cultural and ethical edifices perhaps, as opposed to it being particularly more facile as to their creation. Just musing here. I am not in my comfort zone on this one.

Without multiple gods, you need something other than one or more of them is bad to explain the presence of evil, and that explanation inherently leads to the incorporation of ethics into the belief system.  In theory, one could start with an ethical system as in Confucianism and incorporate mythic elements into it, but that mixture has never worked all that well as humans are more willing to adapt their ethics than their myths.

But what if a monotheism loses its myth?  We're seeing the result of that now with Christianity in the materialistic West.  In Europe, large segments of the populace no longer subscribe to the myth in any form, literal or figurative. Conversely, here in America, in an effort to defend that same faith, large segments of the populace cling to the idea of the myth as literal truth despite the evidence of science to the contrary.

So compared to other belief systems, monotheism requires both an origin myth and an ethical system to function.  A stable society needs a common mythos and a common ethos.  So you get a virtuous cycle in which monotheism helps create a stable society and that society in turn supports the monotheism.

The crisis that Christianity faces now is how to refashion its mythos to be compatible with what modern science has revealed of the universe.  I've found an approach, Christian Universalism, that works for me.  In the long run, I fail to see how the Fundamentalist approach of worshiping the Bible will work.

[anvi]

Canaan lay right in the centre of the region where writing was first developed, at the time when these thing should have happen, China and Greece was quite backward compared to the Middle East. The Indus Civilisation the only culture at the same "tech level" was collapsing thanks to barbarian invasion and left no literature behind, while a millenium later China saw the destruction of most of their literary tradition (which is why Confucius saw such popularity, because his writings was one of the few which survived). So honestly not only are this a counter productive argument, it's also quite stupid as the oral and written stories and myths which became the Bible are among oldest if not the oldest retold stories in the world. Yes we have older myths, but those are ones found from ruins, not some told and retold for the last 3 milleniums.

I'm afraid I have to disagree with some of this.  It's certainly the case, as far as I know, that writing, strong forms of political organization and sophisticated religious institutions seem to have existed in the "middle-east," and then Egypt, before they arose around the Indus Valley and China.  Biblical mythology inherited lots of things from this long-standing cultural background, surely.  But the Indus Valley civilization seems not to have been wiped out by military invasions but instead by devastating recurrent floods of the major rivers where its cities lay.  And we do have lots of little ornaments with writing on them from Harappa and Mohenjo-daro and environs, but we haven't yet been able to decipher the script, though probably none of it amounts to literature.  And the Zhou Dynasty in ancient China had a very robust and continuous literary tradition which Confucius wanted to preserve, and that even survived and blossomed during the Warring States period after him.  There was some literary suppression under the short-lived Qin Dynasty of the third century BCE, but the extent of it was probably greatly overstated by later Confucian literati.  I think the original point about India and China was that, by the time that the context for the Biblical stories of Abraham and the patriarchs was a historical reality, the second millennia BCE, India and China were the sites of literate and religiously institutionalized civilizations, and that part, I think, is true.

[DC Al Fine]

But what if a monotheism loses its myth?  We're seeing the result of that now with Christianity in the materialistic West.  In Europe, large segments of the populace no longer subscribe to the myth in any form, literal or figurative. Conversely, here in America, in an effort to defend that same faith, large segments of the populace cling to the idea of the myth as literal truth despite the evidence of science to the contrary.

The crisis that Christianity faces now is how to refashion its mythos to be compatible with what modern science has revealed of the universe.  I've found an approach, Christian Universalism, that works for me.  In the long run, I fail to see how the Fundamentalist approach of worshiping the Bible will work.

Ernest why do you think that is a good reason for not holding up in the long run? People believe all sorts of things in the face of contradictory evidence. I'd put science/evidence well behind cultural and social norms as reasons why people keep/leave a faith.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

-- PARAPHRASING Mr. Hitchens' argument:

Humans have been around for at least 100,000 years.  They were born and they died, living not much more than 25 years. Dying of their teeth, appendix, terrible diseases, misery, malnutrition and fear, earthquakes, human-sacrifice - struggling to make progress.

You have to believe this if you believe in mono-theism: For the first 97-98 thousand years, Heaven watches with indifference.  3,000 years ago at the most, it is decided that heaven must intervene now, but the revelation must be made to the most backward, barbaric, illiterate, superstitious and savage people in the most stony part of the world.

Not in China where they could already read.  Not in the Indus valley.

Force them to cut their way through all the neighbours with slaughter, genocide and racism and settle in the only part of the middle east where there is no oil.

And without this we wouldn't know right from wrong!

Historically and Anthropologically speaking: Complete and Utter Rubbish.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Ernest why do you think that is a good reason for not holding up in the long run? People believe all sorts of things in the face of contradictory evidence. I'd put science/evidence well behind cultural and social norms as reasons why people keep/leave a faith.

Because societies that turn their back on technology and science are ultimately going to be outcompeted by those that do embrace them.  We now know enough about natural and archaeological record to be able to say that everything in the Bible before Abraham is pure myth without any grounding in historical events.  (At most Noah's flood may be a garbled memory of an inundation of the Black Lake c. 5600 BC to become the Black Sea once more and the tower of Babel may have been a mythological explanation for any of several large ruined ziggurats.)  Holding on to Genesis as literal fact requires a mindset that will place those who hold it at a disadvantage.