The God is Great Refutation of God is Not Great
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GOD IS GREAT
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS
I am not interested in theism or atheism. I certainly would not buy nor would I peruse a book about God at this stage in my life, even if the pagan word were not capitalized to signify the one-god. Indeed, whenever I am browsing in the library stacks and happen to open a book to a page wherein the word God appears, I immediately return it to its place on the shelf.
That is not to say that I believe God is worthless therefore theology has nothing valuable to teach us. Au contraire. Yes, I read a few books on the subject in university libraries. I even rued the day that Thomas Jefferson had Theology replaced with Ideology on the curriculum at his beloved university in Virginia, as well as the dismal day the United States government declined to fund degrees in theology. I had myself learned a great deal about my ignorance from divine logic, which is, before all, the ground of the secular logic that repudiates it; and it does so ever so vainly because it is the story of the universe of discourse.
What disappointed me about the God the self-appointed divines conjured up was their own hypocrisy. That Act had fallen far short of Word was evident to me, especially when the message embodied by the word was Love, presumably incarnate in Jesus Christ, the medium who was purportedly the message.
Indeed, when religious people looked down on me as a little child, and said “Jesus loves you,” I knew from their deeds that they did not really love me; or rather they loved me in theory and not in practice. I concluded after many years passed by that Jesus was the only one who might love me if only he were around, miserable worm that I am, but he could do nothing to help me here and now because he, the messenger, had been killed by the very ones who had created his father and professed love for themselves. Some felt guilty enough to revive him in theory, prophesying his return, while denying his mother, or referring to her as a ghost, or idolizing her in a side show at church.
Mind you that I always prayed to my mother, who died when I was an infant, because I was sure she loved me, and I attributed what success I have had to her. When living on the streets of Chicago, I tried praying to the Virgin Mother in vain.
I am saddened by the fact that Hitchens lost his mother to suicide, that she was the light of his life, and that he discovered she had tried to reach him beforehand. Although some religious would attribute such a tragic event to God’s will and rejoice in it, I believe it would suffice to make an atheist of many people if not an anti-theist if the killing of innocent babes were not enough to do so.
The loss of a mother is not the only thing I have in common with Hitchens. My second stepmother sat me down to tell me that my father was a Jew, and that I should have known that by his nose. Yet I am not a Jew, like Hitchens, because my mother was a gentile, nor am I a Christian or a member of any other religion although I have been accused of Buddhism, one form of which used to be denounced by Christians as atheism for lack of a personal one-god. I too have written caustic criticisms of religious texts and practices. I have always aspired to be an independent intellectual and radical thinker, which to me means doubting every ideology and taking it to task, including antitheism ideology. Ideologies are the obsessive-compulsive disorders of our time. So may Hitchens rest in peace; maybe we shall meet in Limbo.
Experience had made of me an atheist in the sense that I have no faith in God’s existence and therefore it follows that I cannot believe that a personal god intervenes in this world or has designed it in any way or gives a whit for a speck of dust like me. And I believe the tales of the afterlife are lies of the worst sort since they would make fools of us all. And I do not believe men and women have to believe in God to be good persons.
Nevertheless, I would give God the benefit of the doubt, because “God” implies “the greatest,” and a man who thinks there is nothing greater than his self is a god spelled backwards. Furthermore, to deny God’s existence is to somehow assert it, for what is being denied? An illusion, you say: but it is a real illusion, an interpretation of reality that may have numerous real effects for those who entertain them whether you like the consequences or not. Likewise do I believe in the reality of imagined ghosts and dragons that I go out of my way to avoid.
Yes, I confess that, despite my disappointments and my habit of uncovering hypocrisy everywhere, I am still a little “superstitious.” I know that “something strange is going on.” I believe I may find golden love under the next pile of metaphysical excrement. No matter how reasonable I want to be, no matter how apathetic, cynical and mean-minded I am, I cannot help being romantically inclined. In fine, I am a frustrated mystic. I harken to the Voice of the Silence: I no longer like to see the Word in print or hear it pronounced. But how can one avoid it at Christmas?
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| Christopher Hitchens / Titian’s Christopher, carrying Christ across the river. |
So there it was, on the shelf of a little bookcase in my study, a bestselling book written by Christopher Hitchens, the leader of the New Atheism and New Enlightenment movements. Christopher means “Christ bearer” or “he who carries Christ in his heart.” This Christopher, deemed an intellectual giant by ‘Prospect’ and ‘Foreign Policy’ magazines, preferred to be called an antitheist instead of an atheist because he would not be done with God by simply denying God’s existence; he must be known as anti-god or ungodly in his fight against faith in the nonexistent god, do everything possible to destroy religions. No doubt he would have drowned Jesus rather than carry him across the river. We are reminded of the jealous fallen angel, the only genuine monotheist, who loved the god so much that he hated man.
Again, I know not how the blasphemous book got on my shelf. Perhaps it was planted by a practical jokester, maybe by my shadow, or God himself though as a frustrated atheist I doubt it. I took it from the shelf and was about to toss it into the trash, but was first moved to thumb through it. After all, it was written by at least the fifth greatest intellectual author in the world, and was a New York Times Bestseller. I am a budding intellectual myself, so this just had to be an example that I should look into, asking myself why he wrote such a book, and why his reemphasis of reason over god was so popular in this purportedly God-fearing nation.
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| Reason by Darwin Leon |
If he did not believe there is a one-god, then why did he bother to dwell at such length on the one-god? Did he and his publisher want to insult the intuition of the faithful, and profit by scandalizing religion while hawking the secular principles of the Enlightenment? Perhaps he thought that he, an advocate of historical materialism i.e. the doctrine that historical developments are due to material conditions, had a duty to contribute to the further advancement of humankind by further liberating it from the tyranny of religion, especially the Catholic religion and its priestcraft.
In his Afterward, he posits that people are lying in opinion polls about attending church. He supposes it possible that “a change in the Zeitgeist is coming on,” citing a 2001 study that the irreligious are the fastest growing minority in the United States.
OMG-d! Academics have thanked him for “taking on the theocrats.” Why, he would debate anyone, and at least he is honest; he reportedly conceded to Nathan Katz, a most distinguished professor of comparative religion, that Orthodox Jews do not really have sex through holes in sheets. The Wall Street Journal said his book was doing very well in the Bible Belt, where it was being purchased in obedience to the injunction to “know thine enemy.” They should love him too, perhaps for freeing them from tyranny.
Thomas Paine, whom Hitchens greatly admired, complained bitterly of the tyranny of kings and of scripture used to justify tyranny. But Hitchens says little about Paine in this book, perhaps because Paine’s criticism of religion left Deus and the fundamental principles of religion intact in Deism, whereas Hitchens would toss out the baby with the bathwater. Hitchens worships Reason in his bestseller; Reason and Nature were idolized in French churches during the Revolution, and priests who dared pronounce the proper noun, God, were laughed at. Paine said the real rebels against the tyranny of reason, but whoever rebels against the king in defense of reason is a better defender of faith.
Radical intellectuals of all hues would liberate us from tyranny of one kind or another; true intellectuals would not sell out and become mere bureaucratic intelligentsia for the powers that be. Alas, however, for while the radicals extirpate the radical roots of one tyranny, they set themselves up as tyrants over another “new” system, which is really nothing that new given human nature; such is the nature of revolution as the great wheel revolves, crushing those who exalt themselves and raising those who were crushed—to be crushed, it was said by the Jews, was to know YHWH, wherefore the Judeo-Christians humbled themselves.
For example, materialism taken to its extreme by fanatics is just as tyrannical as spiritualism. Indeed, spirituals the world over find their liberation, from crushing materialism and its dog-eat-dog, apish amorality, within a cipher that means absolute freedom: the Infinite. French Ideologie, which is the tailcoat of the French Enlightenment, is the materialistic revolution within the American Revolution. Catholics have never much liked the godless version of the Enlightenment, which stood for the degeneration of humankind to intelligent apes as every technological advance resulted in a lower level of morality.
A century and a half ago, a Catholic author by the name of William Samuel Lilly, who identified God with Justice, wrote disgustedly of the prurient, simian countenance and shrill voices of the rising French bourgeoisie; have Americans following suit? Do we behave like baboons? Is s/he who ignores evil good for nothing? Have we established a Planet of the Apes?
TO BE CONTINUED AT LENGTH
OMG-d! Academics have thanked him for “taking on the theocrats.” Why, he would debate anyone, and at least he is honest; he reportedly conceded to Nathan Katz, a most distinguished professor of comparative religion, that Orthodox Jews do not really have sex through holes in sheets. The Wall Street Journal said his book was doing very well in the Bible Belt, where it was being purchased in obedience to the injunction to “know thine enemy.” They should love him too, perhaps for freeing them from tyranny.
Thomas Paine, whom Hitchens greatly admired, complained bitterly of the tyranny of kings and of scripture used to justify tyranny. But Hitchens says little about Paine in this book, perhaps because Paine’s criticism of religion left Deus and the fundamental principles of religion intact in Deism, whereas Hitchens would toss out the baby with the bathwater. Hitchens worships Reason in his bestseller; Reason and Nature were idolized in French churches during the Revolution, and priests who dared pronounce the proper noun, God, were laughed at. Paine said the real rebels against the tyranny of reason, but whoever rebels against the king in defense of reason is a better defender of faith.
Radical intellectuals of all hues would liberate us from tyranny of one kind or another; true intellectuals would not sell out and become mere bureaucratic intelligentsia for the powers that be. Alas, however, for while the radicals extirpate the radical roots of one tyranny, they set themselves up as tyrants over another “new” system, which is really nothing that new given human nature; such is the nature of revolution as the great wheel revolves, crushing those who exalt themselves and raising those who were crushed—to be crushed, it was said by the Jews, was to know YHWH, wherefore the Judeo-Christians humbled themselves.
For example, materialism taken to its extreme by fanatics is just as tyrannical as spiritualism. Indeed, spirituals the world over find their liberation, from crushing materialism and its dog-eat-dog, apish amorality, within a cipher that means absolute freedom: the Infinite. French Ideologie, which is the tailcoat of the French Enlightenment, is the materialistic revolution within the American Revolution. Catholics have never much liked the godless version of the Enlightenment, which stood for the degeneration of humankind to intelligent apes as every technological advance resulted in a lower level of morality.
A century and a half ago, a Catholic author by the name of William Samuel Lilly, who identified God with Justice, wrote disgustedly of the prurient, simian countenance and shrill voices of the rising French bourgeoisie; have Americans following suit? Do we behave like baboons? Is s/he who ignores evil good for nothing? Have we established a Planet of the Apes?
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| Scene for Planet of the Apes |
Has not the principle motive of religion always been freedom, hopefully after life if not before death? And is not everyone a liberal inasmuch as s/he would be liberated from something or another? Naturally there is a crisis in the principle of life that it shall progress. Hypocrisy, after all, is the underlying crisis, the cross drawn on the human cosmos that it might move.
Yet here we have a radical who would use the word against the Word to set us free; I had by mysterious means his book in my hands, and wondered what if anything was “new” to his “anti-theistic” enlightenment, a book that is, ironically, filled with the ineluctable god against whom man consistently sins. He could have very well preached that god against those sins, pointing out man’s faults instead of attributing them to a god that should be inherently faultless if existence. Instead, we find in god is not Great—How Religion Poisons Everything (sic) what the ancient divines called the ultimate blasphemy: the employment of the word, the gift of thought and speech, against the Word.
We find little that is new in Hitchen’s popular assault on religion. Religion is hazardous to your health, especially if you are a Christian Scientist, and a recent study proves prayer absolutely useless as an aid to medicine—in fact, there is a more recent study to the contrary. Magic simply does not work; at least it is unreliable because the means to ends are unknown. Faith is better placed in Reason, reasons being causes with definite effects, so we believe in empirical science alone. No thanks: we will not leave magic, the inspiration of science, completely behind for we may salvage something more from it; the magic of belief works wonders, incidentally: “Believe well and have well,” sayeth the old adage.
Religion kills, sayeth our leading intellectual, especially when we join crusades or jihads in God’s or Allah’s name. But of course it is quite all right for antitheists to join born-again Christian George W. Bush’s “crusade” against so-called Islamo-fascism and kill or be killed accordingly—positive scientific results are in question now in both Iraq and Afghanistan where the collateral damage due to sanctions and war now runs into to hundreds of thousands of lives lost. We find no mention here of Christ’s original command to sheath the sword; Romans believed early Christian pacifists were sociopaths for refusing inscription; Augustine handed the sword to the political authority, wherefore fighting for political causes was justified and even instigated thereafter by priests.
Yes, millions have murdered each other in the name of the same god. Need we mention that there is a marked difference here between the name and the god, or at least between the god of love and the god of war? Furthermore, why blame God for war when men and their political concerns are to blame? And politics are not even required; the best students including atheists do not really know why humankind seems predisposed to make war on itself, although there are several leading reasons, religion being secondary.
Hitchens reveals that the Old Testament is a “nightmare”; the arguments from design are sheer bunk; the Koran is borrowed from Jewish and Christian myths; the New Testament is more evil than the Old Testament; miracles are tawdry; the vulgar origin of religion is corrupt; religion is an original sin; religion does not make people behave better; Eastern religions are no better. There is no end to the slander from this devil’s tongue; much of it I would agree with were I not playing the part of the Devil’s Advocate here lest the devil be canonized by the anti-god party. More importantly, I swear, on the risk of being struck down by lightning, that our faults are neither the faults of the ambivalent gods we project nor the faults of the ideal, loving god so many suffering people, who are crying to be picked up and embraced, so fervently wish for.
After Aristotle’s student studied the physical sciences, they discussed useless subjects: general theories of the cosmos, certain first causes and principles the knowledge of which was called wisdom, and these afterthoughts were eventually dubbed metaphysics, or “after the physics.” For once the belly is filled, the mind tends to speculate and myths are tailor-made to suit the questions asked. And even starving children wonder and play. Without wonderment, the motive of philosophy, the pursuit of wisdom for its own sake, there would be no science of any sort today. Yet now we hear from Hitchens that all the metaphysical claims posited by religion are spurious; only the doubting metaphysics of experimental science will do.
The religious have always been well aware of the rational grounds against faith. Indeed, Christians have gladly admitted since ancient times that their logically absurd arguments, rationalizations excused as “God’s mysteries,” made them God’s fools. Nonetheless, Hitchens, a bright light of the so-called New Enlightenment, having consigned the un-capitalized god from Eden to eternal literary hell as if he were the great diabolical patriarch, castigated the moronic spirituals at great length for the awful consequences of their foolishness.
To be fair, he made a few token exceptions: the few valiant, independent souls who just happened to be religious and who saved fellow human beings from mass murder despite the natural cooperation of church authorities with totalitarian regimes—the theoretical separation of church and state did not do a damn bit of good.
Ever the radical intellectual, Hitchens naturally took pride in independent thinking, refusing to prostitute himself to any power elite even though he was a confessed Marxist and “antitheist” who admired great leaders such as Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. He was an anti-Zionist secular Jew by matrilineal descent. He would eventually foreswear socialism for the sake of his independence. A Clinton-hater who despised Mother Teresa, he endorsed President Bush’s crusade against Islamism, not out of love for the Christ whom Mr. Bush said was his “political hero,” but because he likened Islamism to fascism for its totalitarian tendency—he especially hated the Catholic Church for the same reason.
We vehemently object to his self-contradictory embrasure of the politically right’s Wolfowitz Doctrine, which is fundamentally imperialistic and unilateral, and not surprisingly, since Paul Wolfowitz, who get himself an academic exemption from the draft, as well as Condoleezza Rice, were enamored of a strain of Germany’s New Conservative thinking hailing back to Carl Schmidt, an apologist for Hitler’s dictatorial emergency powers including suspension of the Weimar constitution. Schmidt advocated the alleged necessity of lying to get things done in a democracy, said that the purpose of politics was to find out who your enemies are in order to eliminate them. It was he that set forth a coherent doctrine of the Total—though he did not dare to advocate it. Hitchens, however, professedly despises whatever smacks of the Total, whether it is a political or religious form of absolutism. Now it is difficult to distinguish ideological fanaticism from the theological, especially in the devastating result. Both are rationalizations of power. Religion worships power while politics distributes it in one way or another; yet church has its politics while politics has its religion. Whether or not the Word is pronounced seems to make little or no difference wherever might or the Almighty would make right or Righteousness.
Political monism and religious monotheism are identical in the tendency towards singular tyranny over thought and action. Hitchens, a historical materialist who lauded ancient atomism because it was godless or had no first cause, espoused pluralism as an antidote to monism. But pluralism may be blamed for the violence that monism would supposedly solve. Indeed, the various political and religious solutions to the problem of death, not to mention the tobacco and alcohol that scientific Hitchens unscientifically loved unto his premature death by esophageal cancer, only aggravate the disease, and may turn out in the long run to be greater evils than death itself, although they may break the boredom for the time being.
In a chapter entitled “An Objection Anticipated: The Last-Ditch ‘Case’ Against Secularism,” Hitchens deprived religion of its claim that, despite its inexcusable historical faults, it is morally or effectually superior to secularism. The reason that religion may make this false claim is that the secularism referred to is not absolutely secular; that is, secularism thus far has been corrupted by religion if it has not replaced it; wherefore its totalitarian offenses against humane individualism only appear to be greater than the horrors perpetrated by religion.
December 24, 2011 Miami Beach
NOTES:
1) “UNIVERSAL empire is the prerogative of a writer. His concerns are with all mankind, and though he cannot command their obedience, he can assign them their duty. The republic of letters is more ancient than monarchy, and of far higher character in the world than the vassal court or Britain. He that rebels against reason is a real rebel, but he that in defense of reason, rebels against tyranny, has a better title to “defender of the faith" than George the Third. As a military man, your lordship may hold out the sword of war, and call it the ‘ultima ratio regum,’—the last reason of Kings; we in return can show you the sword of justice, and call it, "the best scourge of tyrants." The first of these two may threaten, or even frighten, for a while, and cast a sickly languor· over an insulted people, but reason will soon recover the debauch, and restore them again to tranquil fortitude.” Thomas Paine, The American Crisis
2) “God is primarily revealed under the attribute of Retributive Justice. The first fact about man is his concept of duty: "Thou Oughtest: it is thy supreme good to follow that Categorical Imperative: thy supreme loss to disobey it." And this is the first fact, too, about the aggregation of men which we call a people. In loyalty to truth, to right, to justice-all summed up in the old phrase of fearing God-is the highest law of collective human life, and it is fenced round with terrible penalties which are the natural sequence of its violation. The root of all greatness, national or individual, is a great thought: or a great action, which is merely a great thought actualized. The ideal is the moral life of the world. But the highest of all ideas is the Divine. And it is precisely as that idea has lived in the minds of peoples that they have been truly great. Piety towards the gods was the very root of Roman greatness. No truer word was ever said than Horace's, "Dis te minorem quod geris, imperas” (“You rule because you carry yourself lower than the gods.” Ed.): read Fustel de Coulanges' chapter Le Romain if you would know how true it is. Consider the medieval period, rude in physical comfort and the mechanic arts, but how great in individualities, in men: think of its monuments which still remain to us: cathedrals, such as those of Siena, Amiens, Canterbury; the pictures of Giotto, Orcagna, Fra Angelico:the song of Dante: the philosophy of Aquinas. All that was great in those ages sprang from their faith: from the divine ideal on which they lived. Or look at England or the United States in this nineteenth century. In the old Puritan beliefs which still maintain their hold over the popular mind is the salt which keeps society from dissolution. And then turn your eyes on France, which a century ago solemnly installed concupiscence—aptly typified by the Goddess of Reason—in the place of conscience, and elevated the dumb buzzard idol, Man in the abstract, and his fictitious right , in the place of the living God, and the duties binding upon us because He is what He is: look at France, I say, if you would see an example of the hell which a people prepares for itself when it maketh and loveth a lie. I know the country well: and every time I visit it I discern terrible evidence of ever-increasing degeneracy. The man seems to be disappearing. There is a return to the simious type. The eye speaks of nothing- but dull esuriency. The whole face is prurient. The voice has lost the virile ring and has become shrill, gibberish, baboon-like. Go into the Chamber of Deputies, the chosen and too true representatives of the people. The looks, the gestures, the cries, remind you irresistibly of the monkey-house in Regent's Park. The nation—f or it must be judged by its public acts—has for a hundred years been trying to rid itself of the perception which is the proper attribute of man: to cast out the idea of God, which Michelet has well called the progressive and conservative principle of civilization: to live on a philosophy of animalism: and it is rapidly losing all that is distinctively human, and is sinking below the level of the animals.
"Stern and imperious Nemesis,
Daughter of Justice, most severe
Thou art the world's great arbitress
And Queen of causes reigning here,
Whose swift-sure hand is ever near."
William Samuel Lilly’s An Introductory Dialogue on the Philosophy of History (1886)
3) “And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders); therefore since they philosophized in order to escape from ignorance, evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end. And this is confirmed by the facts; for it was when almost all the necessities of life and the things that make for comfort and recreation were present, that such knowledge began to be sought. Evidently then we do not seek it for the sake of any other advantage; but as man is free, we say, who exists for himself and not for another, so we pursue this as the only free science, for it alone exists for itself. Hence the possession of it might be justly regarded as beyond human power; for in many ways human nature is in bondage, so that according to Simonides ‘God alone can have this privilege’, and it is unfitting that man should not be content to seek the knowledge that is suited to him. If, then, there is something in what the poets say, and jealousy is natural to the divine power, it would probably occur in this case above all, and all who excelled in this knowledge would be unfortunate. But the divine power cannot be jealous (nay, according to the proverb, ‘bards tell many a lie’), nor should any science be thought more honorable than one of this sort. For the most divine science is also most honorable; and this science is, in two ways, most divine. For the science which it would be most meet for God to have is a divine science, and so is any science that deals with divine objects; for (1) God is thought to be among the causes of all things and to be a first principle, and (2) such a science either God alone can have, or God above all others. All the sciences, indeed, are more necessary than this, but none are better.” Aristotle, Metaphysics
4) “If I cannot definitively prove that the usefulness of religion is in the past, and that it is a man-made imposition, and that it has been an enemy of science and inquiry, and that it has subsisted largely on lies and fears, and has been the accomplice of ignorance and guilt as well as slavery, genocide, racism, and tyranny, I can almost certainly claim that religion is now fully aware of these criticisms.... When the worst has been said about the Inquisition and the witch trials and the Crusades and the Islamic imperial conquests and the horrors of the Old Testament, is it not true that secular and atheist regimes have committed crimes and massacres that are, in the scale of things, at least as bad if not worse?” Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great
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