Religion and atheism: How deadly are they, if at all?

[DigitaLVampirE]

The excitement of the moment in the nonfiction publishing industry is the cause of atheism.

Because public appearances sell books, the authors - including scientist Richard Dawkins and essayist Christopher Hitchens - go on the road to deliver talks and speeches to support their points of view, which, in turn, support book sales.

Christians always should pay attention when atheists speak, and especially when they take the lectern in the public square. They bring up a lot of important points that believers should think about.

For one example, Dawkins' strong suit is his argument against the rationality of belief in God.

Christians - and not just their opinion leaders - need to check out what he has to say, objectively, and not merely to line up opposing arguments. They need to pay attention to what they fail to explain, and prepare themselves to discuss it intelligently.

For another, it helps to know what they have to say even if it doesn't sound too honest. Take Hitchens' grave warning: "Religion kills."

Well, yes. Religion kills, all right. So we've seen, in the Crusades, the pogroms, the Inquisition, the modern Sunni-versus-Shiite violence. And that's bad, as reasonable, peace-loving people should agree.

But it is not the only reason why people kill other people - and may play no greater part in social or cultural decisions to declare war, or attack without warning, than other reasons.

"If it was not for God, we would have nothing to war over" and "Religion is genocide," a vandal scrawled on a church door Downtown, three years ago. We pointed out then how that was only half true, if that.

Russian dictator Josef Stalin, an atheist, starved 10 million people to death in the Ukraine, and Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, also an atheist, sowed more than 1 million bodies onto Cambodia's killing fields.

Pot's atheism was in the mold of Mao Zedong, under whom the body count of the Cultural Revolution is only guessed at, often conservatively, somewhere in the hundreds of thousands.

But does that mean atheism kills? It may be argued that the influence of atheism, which eliminates practical faith in God, allows a culture to place a lower value on human life. But the same can be said about religion, in several circumstances.

Read the words uttered early last week by Abu Jandal al-Dimashqi, who advertises himself as the leader of an Islamic group called Tawhid and Jihad: "Our people in Syria, how do you accept to be ruled by the vulgar Nassiries? . . . (R)ise up as one man to chop their legs and heads." "Nassiries" is a Sunni term for the Alawites, Shiite Muslim subset to which Syrian leader Bashar Assad belongs.

That sounds like a direct suggestion to commit genocide for reasons connected to religion - at least, to us. Still, the condemnation of opposition is the central theme, and not necessarily religion.

The consideration of religion would be the only difference between al-Dimashqi's call and the orders Mao sent down to the Red Guard to find certain types of people and arrest, torture, imprison and, if necessary, kill them. In the hands of someone determined to eliminate opposition, one difference is as good as another.

The truth is that atheism and religion stand on the same, blood-soaked level, one as culpable as the other. But the reason for that is atheism and religion are not strict opposites.

Atheism is not the opposite of religion, but of faith, specifically in God or, for that matter, any god or gods. Religion is the demonstration of faith, defined in prosaic terms in James' epistle: "To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world."

Faith is the basic idea of belief - "the substance of things hoped for," as the writer of Hebrews put it.

Does faith kill? Well, we can say that people have been killed because of their faith. Often, those people accepted their beliefs despite the threat of death.

Why? Because their faith redefined the way they looked at life, to the point that the God it connected them to was more important than self-preservation - or political or cultural dominance.

In those cases, the believers were given their lives back, in fuller measure - saved, some people say, to a calling beyond whatever surrounded them and bound them to Earth.

So we're left with the dismal fact that religion and atheism can kill, because as practical belief systems, they allow such abuse, even if they should not.

Investigation and experience tell us, however, that faith can and does save life, sometimes in a quite practical sense, in too many examples to list here.

Does atheism do that?

Stan Nelson column

[DigitaLVampirE]

Christopher and Peter Hitchens are two of Britain's most famous scribes, but they appear to agree on nothing. After their latest public spat, James Macintyre, who has known both brothers for many years, dissects their very odd relationship

As individuals, they could hardly seem more different: one a conservative, traditionalist, church-going Anglican; the other a liberal, louche, drinking-and-smoking atheist. So when the self-styled reactionary right winger tackled the fellow-controversialist with diametrically opposed views, opening up a dormant feud that goes back decades, it was always going to get heated.

That the pair in question are bitterly divided brothers only served to raise the temperature last week when Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens went on the attack in a review of his elder sibling Christopher's new anti-religion book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything .

"People sometimes ask how two brothers, born less than three years apart, should have come to such different conclusions," wrote Peter, adding enigmatically: "To which I'd answer that I'm not sure they're as different as they look, and that it's not over yet."

Other than an acknowledg-ment that, "[Like] everything Christopher writes, it is often elegant, frequently witty and never stupid or boring" , Peter's review was damning, and even questioned whether Christopher truly believed his own assertion that there isn't a God.

Peter, 55, confirms to me that he was implying in his review that Christopher, 58, was closer to religious belief than he had ever accepted. " There is always, in the atheistical struggle with God, the fight against temptation. If it didn't matter to you, why write a book about how wrong it is? The first person you have to convince with any book you write, is yourself. If you didn't need convincing... why go to all those lengths?"

On a book tour in Los Angeles, Christopher agrees to read the review by email and then flatly rejects the idea that he is, as he put it, a " repressed seeker". Prefacing his response to his brother's review with faint praise - "a quite stirring and eloquent piece" - Christopher says: "The sickly idea that this interest is a disguised cry for help... only demonstrates the insecurity and the bad faith of the godly." The elder brother then adds: "Though I slightly dislike to say this, [Peter] offers himself as yet another example of how the religious mentality forces honest and reasonable people to say dishonest and irrational things."

This exchange is merely the most recent of a long line of clashes between two brothers who make up a unique phenomenon in the world of journalism. Normally, they tend to pass each other by, partly because they operate on different sides of the Atlantic, with Christopher based in Washington. " Quite a lot of people who read Christopher don't know that I exist; and quite a lot of people who read me don't know he exists," Peter says. " We live in different worlds."

Once, however, they were something close to brothers in arms. They grew up in boarding schools around England and Scotland, constantly on the move thanks to their father's postings as an officer in the Navy. In their early teens Christopher led Peter into an interest in radical politics, and both spent their university years (Christopher at Oxford, Peter at York) fighting for the International Socialists, something of a minority within a minority: a Trotskyist faction.

As well as fellow Trots, they both became journalists (and later polemicists), with Christopher doing a stint at the New Statesman with friend Martin Amis, and Peter joining the Daily Express as what he describes as "the world's worst general reporter". At one point, Christopher went to write leaders for the Express, where the brothers were occasionally mistaken for one another.

But Christopher soon moved to America to cultivate his status as the quintessential Englishman abroad, writing prolifically for a wide range of publications including left wing journal The Nation, and gradually beginning a side-career of controversial television appearances. As an opponent of the previous Gulf War, he shocked viewers by challenging right-wing actor Charlton Heston to name the countries surrounding Iraq (Heston could not) before telling him to "keep your toupee on".

Peter stayed at the Express, where he was education correspondent before becoming an industrial correspondent, in the days when union stories were dominating the front pages, and then deputy political editor. Moving abroad, like his brother, he reported from Moscow during the end of the Cold War, then Washington, before finally returning to become the paper's star columnist. When the paper was bought in 2000 by Richard Desmond, who published a raft of pornographic magazines, Peter left for the Mail on Sunday, where he has further established himself as one of Britain's best-known columnists on the political right.

Christopher, meanwhile, always knew he wanted to emigrate to the States – as much as he always knew he wanted to write – and has recently been made a US citizen at a time when he says he feels more comfortable politically as well as culturally in his adopted country. Christopher believes that the US is " on the right side of history" these days – having clamoured for the invasion of Iraq – unlike during the Vietnam war, which he still opposes.

While Christopher was for decades to remain on the radical end of the spectrum, his brother moved to the opposite extreme. Peter's "conversion " is believed by Fleet Street myth to have come on a cold night in 1975. Legend has it that he underwent a "religious experience". But the truth is less simple. What is known of that evening is that Peter was selling Socialist Worker on a very wet train platform in Swindon when he finally decided to turn his back on the left. He says now that it was, ultimately, a choice that had to be made "between socialism and liberty" . But it was a more gradual process than some think, and he himself invented the sudden conversion story as a cover to fend off constant questions on the subject.

There is a similar, more recent, and perhaps too-simplistic "conversion" narrative concerning Christopher, who was once the toast of America's liberal elite and now the scourge of what he calls the "status quo" left, whom he moved away from after September 11th. He has plunged his energies into supporting the coalition's "war on terrorism".

As late as September 2003 Christopher was still describing himself as a " Marxist". He has now emerged as a leading "neo-con" hawk, having famously resigned from The Nation in disgust that, as he claimed, its writers and readers saw George W Bush as a greater threat than Osama bin Laden.

Unlike Peter, Christopher denies any talk of a "conversion", pointing out a consistency in his thought, especially his hatred of religious fanaticism. In his new book, though, he does say: "Sometimes I miss my old convictions like an amputated limb."

[DigitaLVampirE]

Peter, having long urged his readers to oppose ID cards if they don't want to be "registered like a child molester or a cow", also opposed the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, siding with small-c conservatives such as Matthew Parris and Kenneth Clarke, who feared for the danger to and lack of self-interest for Britain.

With characteristic eccentricity, Peter even once described the Iraq invasion as "a left-wing war". For Christopher, "It was classic Peter – mad, but with a logic to the madness". In response to this, completing one of their most fraternal exchanges, Peter said: "Classic Christopher – spiteful, but with a logic to the spite ".

Now Christopher's friendship with and defence of the former World Bank boss Paul Wolfowitz, and his disdain for what he termed "Islamic-fascism" – a phrase later used by President Bush – has won him new friends on America's right, and caused many bitter rows with old comrades on the left.

Peter, who knows a bit about shifting one's politics, said recently of his brother: "He may have entered the really wobbly phase of mind-changing, where the floor suddenly gives way beneath you without warning and you either have to deceive yourself – the safer thing – or acknowledge that you have been wrong and – worse – wrong in public".

However, it doesn't appear that Christopher will be changing his mind any time soon on religion – the brothers' biggest public dividing point.

Peter had never previously reviewed any of Christopher's work, but, he tells The Independent after his scathing piece is published, he chose to intervene on this subject because Christopher has repeatedly identified it as the issue on which they most disagree.

That is putting it mildly. In a 2002 interview Christopher made the extraordinary – now withdrawn – announcement that he would not look after Peter's children if something happened to his younger brother and, citing religion, as opposed to politics, as the key difference between them.

He said: "I can't be hypocritical about it. I'm sure he would, but I wouldn't. And anyway, Peter would want his children to be brought up as Christians... Politically the differences are trivial, but I have a bigger difference between myself and anyone who believes in religion than I do in any other subject. I don't trust anyone who believes in religion. So we don't agree".

During the same frank interview, Christopher revealed that after he discovered his mother died in mysterious circumstances – apparently a suicide pact with a boyfriend in Athens – he found a note his mother had dressed only to "Christopher". He has since been quoted as saying, "If you were the mother of Christopher and Peter, who would be your secret favourite?"

The divide, then, is real, and it is fuelled by lasting, deep disagreements over matters on which it is in their nature to disagree. But it is also in their blood to turn on their own "sides". When Peter recently attacked the Tory party, and David Cameron's leadership in particular, he shocked – and offended – many of his own cult of fans and followers.

Those who knew Peter however, were unsurprised. A former leftist, Peter was never comfortable with some of his new allies on the right. He had frequently told friends he preferred Labour conferences to Tory ones, partly at least because the people were nicer and better company. But there was another, deeper factor, which provides context for Peter's antagonism towards the Conservatives: it fits into a life-long Hitchens-esque pattern, pioneered by his older brother, of fierce independence.
There are similarities that go beyond looks, voice, and even their mutual use of controversialist stunts to sustain their profiles. They share, for example, a love of argument, and a disdain for mainstream partisan politics and conventional wisdom. "You won't find either of us careerist boot-lickers or attached to any political party", Peter says. " Neither of us is in the mainstream or ever will be".

But if the brothers are similar in tactics and style, they certainly differ in person as in politics. Peter's highly intelligent wife, Eve, stays at home to perform what Peter describes as "the most honourable job in the world" – bringing up her side of the next generation of Hitchenses (they have three children, all of whom were brought up with strict anti-TV guidelines).

Christopher – whose lifestyle with second wife Carol Blue was recently described in a recent profile in The New Yorker as that which "a spirited thirteen-year-old boy might hope adulthood to be"– has, until recently at least, been considered in bien-pensant circles as the more fashionable Hitchens brother.

Peter is dubbed "Bonkers" in opinion columns by his colleagues in the British press. This tactic, he says, is the old Soviet trick of dismissing outsiders as madmen. He has long been viewed as a right-wing monster, the kind you'd never have round the house, for fear of him saying something offensive. Like many assumptions about the Hitchens brothers, it is false. He is a loner, but the fact that Peter may actually be likeable is one of Fleet Street's best kept secrets.

Similarly, myths surround Christopher, chief among them that he's a hopeless drunk. While he has admitted that he regularly drinks enough to "stun or kill a mule", he defends his professionalism fiercely, pointing out that he has "never missed a deadline".

In so many ways, politically, literally, religiously, the Hitchens brothers are miles apart. Occasionally they come together and clash in public. But whichever way the ever-changing, unpredictable new world order spins, it's a safe bet that they at least, will remain permanently in opposition.

Independent Online Edition
Published: 11 June 2007

[ANDY-J3]

In reference to the first post history has shown us that blind faith breeds inquisitions, conquistadors who perpetrate genocide in the name of religion and centuries of civil strife, anti-semitism and persecution of "heretics". It has also shown us that certain secular political leaders who happen to be atheists are often no better than the religionists in their zealous promotion of their political ideology. The key point is no one has died at the hands of anyone seeking to spread the idea of disbelief in God whereas countless millions have died and continue to die at the hands of those seeking to spread their religious ideology.

[aNonnyMoose]

And "Amen" to that Andy haw haw haw!

I note that the vampire lost the argument on another thread so resorted to petulantly locking it. Is that the standard of debate in religious circles these days? A bit reminiscent of "oh, a heretic - quick, burn him!"...

[oneofthefew]

Originally Posted by aNonnyMoose

I note that the vampire lost the argument on another thread so resorted to petulantly locking it.

The advantage of being a moderator I guess

[aNonnyMoose]

No.

More the actions of a closed mind.