Christopher Hitchens on Monotheism

[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.

[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.)

[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.