Archive for the ‘Hitchens’ Category
Christopher Hitchens says vote for Obama
WIll the prodigal son be welcomed back to the fold of the left? The maverick writer supports Obama:
Vote for Obama
McCain lacks the character and temperament to be president. And Palin is simply a disgrace.
Posted Monday, Oct. 13, 2008, at 10:44 AM ET 
I used to nod wisely when people said: “Let’s discuss issues rather than personalities.” It seemed so obvious that in politics an issue was an issue and a personality was a personality, and that the more one could separate the two, the more serious one was. After all, in a debate on serious issues, any mention of the opponent’s personality would be ad hominem at best and at worst would stoop as low as ad feminam.
At my old English boarding school, we had a sporting saying that one should “tackle the ball and not the man.” I carried on echoing this sort of unexamined nonsense for quite some time—in fact, until the New Hampshire primary of 1992, when it hit me very forcibly that the “personality” of one of the candidates was itself an “issue.” In later years, I had little cause to revise my view that Bill Clinton’s abysmal character was such as to be a “game changer” in itself, at least as important as his claim to be a “new Democrat.” To summarize what little I learned from all this: A candidate may well change his or her position on, say, universal health care or Bosnia. But he or she cannot change the fact—if it happens to be a fact—that he or she is a pathological liar, or a dimwit, or a proud ignoramus. And even in the short run, this must and will tell.
On “the issues” in these closing weeks, there really isn’t a very sharp or highly noticeable distinction to be made between the two nominees, and their “debates” have been cramped and boring affairs as a result. But the difference in character and temperament has become plainer by the day, and there is no decent way of avoiding the fact. Last week’s so-called town-hall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience. McCain occasionally remembers to stress matters like honor and to disown innuendoes and slanders, but this only makes him look both more senile and more cynical, since it cannot (can it?) be other than his wish and design that he has engaged a deputy who does the innuendoes and slanders for him.
I suppose it could be said, as Michael Gerson has alleged, that the Obama campaign’s choice of the word erratic to describe McCain is also an insinuation. But really, it’s only a euphemism. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear had to feel sorry for the old lion on his last outing and wish that he could be taken somewhere soothing and restful before the night was out. The train-wreck sentences, the whistlings in the pipes, the alarming and bewildered handhold phrases—”My friends”—to get him through the next 10 seconds. I haven’t felt such pity for anyone since the late Adm. James Stockdale humiliated himself as Ross Perot’s running mate. And I am sorry to have to say it, but Stockdale had also distinguished himself in America’s most disastrous and shameful war, and it didn’t qualify him then and it doesn’t qualify McCain now.
The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: “What does he take me for?” Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party’s right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama’s position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.
It therefore seems to me that the Republican Party has invited not just defeat but discredit this year, and that both its nominees for the highest offices in the land should be decisively repudiated, along with any senators, congressmen, and governors who endorse them.
I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that “issue” I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity. Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience. With McCain, the “experience” is subject to sharply diminishing returns, as is the rest of him, and with Palin the very word itself is a sick joke. One only wishes that the election could be over now and a proper and dignified verdict rendered, so as to spare democracy and civility the degradation to which they look like being subjected in the remaining days of a low, dishonest campaign.
OTHER BLOGS:
Prelude to the Final Presidential Debate [Why I support Obama]
Corn and Hitchens argue over Niger
In the run up to war, much was made over Iraq’s attempt to get yellow cake uranium from Niger. David Corn writes about it being a hoax, and that Christopher Hitchens was wrong. Hitchens responds to that here. The photo of him in the shower I could not resist – which comes from Vanity Fair with Hitchens doing a story on being at a California Spa which separated him from booze and cigarettes.
Hitchens, a man who knows where his towel is ...
There’s only one reason to go to Niger.
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2006, at 5:20 PM ET
Click here to read David Corn’s critique.
Wissam al-Zahawie did indeed have “a simple explanation” for his 1999 trip: low-level sanctions-busting. He had another equally simple (and laughable) disclaimer: He did not even know that Niger produced uranium. But I repeat the question that Corn declines to ask himself: What is an ambassador to the Vatican, with a background in nuclear diplomacy, doing on such an out-of-the-way mission in the first place? It’s hardly my fault if the Senate intelligence committee and the ISG don’t ask themselves this: Ambassador Rolf Ekeus (who does ask it) outranks them in the sort of expertise that Corn selectively affects to value. Of course, one may always prefer to rely on the “excerpts of Zahawie’s travel report,” and the IAEA’s discovery that Saddam’s envoy—a former friend and colleague of theirs—did not choose to claim that he talked about uranium. This might be described as the Joseph Wilson standard of forensic investigation.
The related question—was Niger open for business?—is partly answered by the presence of A.Q. Khan on its territory in 1999 and again in 2000. Corn ignores this completely while making feeble jokes about an Austin Powers alliance between rogue states. Has he cared to look at the list of countries visited and armed by A.Q. Khan, from North Korea to Libya? Has he ever asked himself how our “intelligence” community missed all that, too? The supposed “box” that contained Saddam Hussein contained A.Q. Khan and the nuclear black market as well, not that the CIA had the vaguest idea of that fact or any other.
From the simple-minded presumption of Iraqi innocence to the conspiratorial assumption of American guilt: Corn’s original charge was that the administration broke the law in an attempt to expose Wilson’s wife. Now that we know that this is false he falls back on the discovery that there were people in the administration who didn’t like Wilson and wanted to explode his claims. Well, fine. But how does that become the business of a prosecutor who sends one of our fellow journalists to jail? Meanwhile, for Corn to say that Richard Armitage was “most likely not part of a White House campaign” is to invite and deserve utter ridicule.
This leaves us only with two remaining questions: the forgery, and the rationality of Saddam Hussein as an actor. On the first point, Corn presumably knows that a forgery is not a hoax but an attempted copy of a true bill. The people who attempted to pass off a fake version of Zahawie’s visit may have been interested only in money, or they may have been attempting disinformation. Or both. I have canvassed all three propositions, and am relatively neutral as among them. However, any reader of Slate can look up the two independent British commissions of inquiry, both conducted at a time of hysterical accusations against Prime Minister Blair, both of which found that the original intelligence on Niger was well-founded, and that it predated any funny business with the Zahawie seal, or stamp.
It’s wearisome at this late date to read again the bland assertion that Saddam Hussein did not do things because it would have been unwise or irrational for him to do so. On that very basis, our intelligence establishment concluded that he would not invade Kuwait, would not set fire to the oil fields, and would not perform any number of other insane actions. His megalomania and volatility were consistently underestimated, with real consequences in the real world. No policy based on the assumption of his rational conduct ever worked. Now, the passage of time has allowed some glib people to represent him as the victim of a frame-up. What an offense to the historical record that is.
I have other reasons, which have been well-enough exposed in Slate and elsewhere, to think that Saddam Hussein’s name may indeed be uttered in the same breath as the ambition to recover WMD. Corn seems to believe that the dictator who not only acquired and concealed them, but who actually used them, must be granted the benefit of the doubt. I differ, and yes I do think that post-invasion Iraq was unusually “clean.” Even Hans Blix and Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröeder thought that some weaponry would be found, and the list of stocks that Iraq last handed to the United Nations has never been accounted for. Other evidence—such as the centrifuge buried by Saddam Hussein’s chief scientist and the Baathist negotiations to buy missiles off the shelf from North Korea—was uncovered only by the invasion itself. So, this is not an induction from no evidence to evidence, but the result of a long experience with a regime highly skilled in concealment and deception. Were it not for his defeat in 1991, and the resulting UNSCOM discoveries, we would not have known the extent of Saddam Hussein’s previous nuclear capacities, either. So, even if it is true that he had been wholly or partially disarmed before 2003, that outcome was only the result of sternly refusing to take his word for it, and of the application of a policy of sanctions-plus-force that was opposed by David Corn’s magazine at every single step.
This difference among others led me to separate myself from The Nation, where neither my prose nor my socializing were as stellar as Corn recalls. Incidentally, I begin to tire of this sickly idea that I used to be a great guy until I became fed up with excuses for dictators and psychopathic murderers (let alone for mediocre CIA fantasists). Alexander Cockburn is surely nearer the mark when he says that I was a complete shit and traitor all along.
Click here to read David Corn’s critique.
Christopher Hitchens on Palin
Reposted from Slate:
The Best Woman?Don’t patronize Sarah Palin.
From this blogger's view, she helps McCain
Vidal’s Cantwell family was a nightmarish cross between the Nixon and McCarthy strains. I partly sympathize with all those who have been trying for a week to paint the former Miss Wasilla as a candidate from (fairly nearby, in Anchorage terms) Manchuria. However, as often as I have forwarded some alarming e-mail about her from a beavering comrade, I have afterward found myself having the sensation of putting my foot where the last stair ought to have been and wasn’t. Was she in the Alaska Independence Party? Not really. Did she campaign for Pat Buchanan in 2000? The AP report from 1999 appears to be contradicted by her endorsement of Steve Forbes. (Not great, I agree, but not Buchanan, either.) The most appalling thing I have unearthed so far is the answer that she gave to a questionnaire when she ran for governor in 2006. All candidates were asked “Are you offended by the phrase ‘Under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?” Her response was:
Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers [it's] good enough for me, and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.
The very slight problem with this—because it would truly be awful if Gov. Palin didn’t know that the pledge itself dates from only the late 19th century and that the unwonted insertion of the words “under God” was made in the mid-1950s—is that it is somehow funny. And it’s also the sort of mistake that many people can imagine themselves making and thus forgive someone else for making.
I could well be wrong, but I think something similar is involved in the attempt to paint the Palin family as if it were Arkansas on ice or Tobacco Road with igloos and Inuit. Very well, she possibly has had her Troopergate and even trailer-park moments. But whom exactly did the Democrats drown in moist applause, for two nights running, in Denver? The most dysfunctional family ever to occupy not the vice-presidential mansion but the executive one. It’s hard to imagine that there will be any more unwanted pregnancies or shotgun weddings when or if the Palins move to the Naval Observatory on Massachusetts Avenue, whereas with the Clintons, the very thing that made all Bill’s friends turn white and pee green was that they made him the president, and he still wouldn’t stop. For me, it is astonishing that the Democrats have been babbling all week as if this point isn’t just waiting—indeed begging—to be made in riposte to their “opposition research.”
Walter Dean Burnham, one of the country’s pre-eminent Marxists, used to attract ridicule back in the 1960s and ’70s by saying that Ronald Reagan would one day be president. He based this on various calculations, one of which was what I’ll call the attraction-repulsion factor. Previous candidates of the right, from McCarthy to Nixon, indeed, had expressed powerful dislike and resentment of their foes. That can work, up to a point, but the problem is that if you radiate hostility, you also tend to attract it. Reagan didn’t radiate it and also didn’t attract it. He went on, in a genial enough way, to destroy the Democratic “New Deal” coalition. I don’t think Gov. Palin has quite that sort of folksy charisma, but I am still not sure it’s entirely wise to patronize her.
Interviewed by Rick Warren at the grotesque Saddleback megachurch a short while ago, Sen. Barack Obama announced that Jesus had died on the cross to redeem him personally. How he knew this he did not say. But it will make it exceedingly difficult for him, or his outriders and apologists, to ridicule Palin for her own ludicrous biblical literalist beliefs. She has inarticulately said that her gubernatorial work would be hampered “if the people of Alaska’s heart isn’t right with god.” Her local shout-and-holler tabernacle apparently believes that Jews can be converted to Jesus and homosexuals can be “cured.” I cannot wait to see Obama and Biden explain how this isn’t the case or how it’s much worse than, and quite different from, Obama’s own raving and ranting pastor in Chicago or Biden’s lifelong allegiance to the most anti-”choice” church on the planet. The difference, if there is one, is that Palin is probably sincere whereas the Democratic team is almost certainly hypocritical. The same is true of the boring contest over who can be the most populist, and of the positively sinister race to see who can be the most demagogically anti-Washington. With this kind of immaturity right across both tickets, it’s insulting to be asked to decide on the basis of experience, let alone “readiness.”
OTHER BLOGS:
Christopher Hitchens says vote for Obama
Christopher Hitchens on Dubya
An open letter that was published in The Daily Mirror.
Christopher Hitchens’ open letter to George Bush as outgoing President visits the UK
16/06/2008
Dear Dubya…
Surely Mr President, you are not leaving so soon? Must you run? Very well then, since you say so.
Can it really be eight years since you ran against Vice-President Gore and criticised his schemes for “nationbuilding” and the export of democracy on the point of a US bayonet?
When you were first elected, our Prime Minister Tony Blair came to Camp David and you found you used the same brand of toothpaste. There wasn’t a great deal more overlap with our politics than that.
The general view was that you were a provincial Texan with no interest in doing anything much except shrinking the budget and cutting the maximum tax rate. (This general view was more or less right.)
The most unfair thing said is that you came in spoiling for a fight, especially in the Middle East. I think had you really long planned such a thing, it might have been better executed. But the shock of 9/11 led to … shall we call it improvisation? In practice, this means your name will be forever linked to Iraq where your best hope is that history will look more kindly on the attempt to salvage that ruined country.
In the meantime, the other members of the “axis of evil”, North Korea and Iran, are measurably closer to nuclear status than in 2001.
China, the biggest long-term rival (and creditor) of the United States has hugely increased its reach and grasp. The Russian Federation has evolved into a near-hostile autocracy. And there is less than nothing to show for all the effort to break the impasse between Israel and the Palestinians. All around the world, people are marking time, waiting you out.
Opinions differ about the impact of all this overseas strain on the American economy. The mortgage crisis, and collapse of the dollar, could have befallen you anyway.
But one point seems inescapable: Sloppy book-keeping, profligate spending and unsupervised “outsourcing” of everything played their part. And nothing contradicts the ethos of your Republican party more than that. You might be surprised how many conservatives intend to vote for Senator Obama. These range from libertarians who oppose the Patriot Act and Guantanamo, to traditionalists appalled at the rise in spending, to those opposed to the war on grounds of prudence.
Your party’s new standard – bearer a man bored by economic questions and whose prestige depends on his part in America’s last foreign policy calamity. Perhaps Senator John McCain will be stage one in helping make you look good by comparison…
Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens: “Thomas Jefferson: Author of America”
Last Sunday was the birthday of both gentlemen above. When Hitchens became an American citizen it was at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC on their respective birthdays. Often heard in debates saying “Mr Jefferson, build up that wall” when talking about the separation of church and state you may be tempted to think that the 188 page book will be only a love sonnet.
What does follow in the book is a sharp account of Jefferson, and one that does show the man, frailties and the conflicts and contradictions that went into a man who’s living monument today is the United States. This book is highly recommended as a first read on Jefferson (as indeed is Hitchens book on Thomas Paine’s the Rights of Man) for not only being erudite, informative but a joy to read – with the benefit of being concise.
Perhaps the contradictions that most comes across about Jefferson is the subject of slavery and race. On the one hand he believed the red race as being equal to the white race. In a double contradiction for a deist he says of slavery “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just” and rejected the argument that inferiority could justify enslaving one group over another. Yet he kept slaves, had an affair and children with Sally Hemings and advocated a policy of colonization – which meant free the slaves and extradite them back to a native country, for fear that black free men may be free with daggers seeking vengeance. Jefferson remarked: “Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”
The doctrine that force should be used rather than appeasement also can be found, less successfully in the march to Canada (a miscalculation of what it would take by Jefferson) where the burning of Toronto was the tit for tat that led to the burning of the White House (that first point friends in DC failed to mention as they impressed the latter upon me). The Barbary Wars, where Jefferson made the case for a US Navy to protect citizens from kidnap and piracy while Adams suggested appeasement and paying of ransom and tribute in response. As President, Jefferson saw through his determination, without need to trouble Congress.
The factions between the Federalists and the Republicans (sovereignty of states) is also well covered. It could be argued that Jefferson stating that states had a duty to break away from a central government that threatened their liberty was advocating a view that would lead to the Union being threatened. The issue of slave states, in the south and not in the north brings the issue to a head for Lincoln. Yet to do so was not the way Lincoln himself saw it when he said in 1859:
All honor to Jefferson: to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.
Christopher Hitchens writes of how historians view Jefferson:
Modern and postmodern historians are fond of using terms such as “inventing America” or “imagining America”. It would be truer to say, of Thoma Jefferson, that he designed America, or that he authored it.
This being the case, it would be lazy or obvious to say that he contained contradictions or paradoxes. This is true of everybody, and of everything. It would be infinitely more surprising to strike upon a historic figure, or indeed a nation, that was not subject to this law. Jefferson did not embody contradiction. Jefferson was a contradiction, and this will be found at every step of the narrative that goes to make up his life.
Jefferson saw Jesus as a human figure, rather than a supernatural one, and the Jefferson Bible is an attempt to leave the New Testament with the philosophy of Jesus, and to offset Paul’s perversion of the doctrines of Christ. About the belief or non belief in god/s that his neighbour may have as a private opinion he did not care for because it “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg”. However, Jefferson made a remark about the Christian fundamentalists of 1800 during the election, and these words stand true today about the will to allow the liberty of the human mind to use reason and rationality:
The returning good sense of our country threatens abortion to their hopes. They believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
What Hitchens has done well is an account of the man, rather than the myth, and for this the reader must be thankful. He even debunks other biographers accounts of Jefferson. That this is done in a book that can be read on a Sunday afternoon, with a prose that makes it vivid makes it less a biography then the adventures of Jefferson.
OTHER BLOGS:
Hitchens V Hitchens – The Brothers Debate
Christopher Hitchens and Peter Hitchens debate Iraq, God and morality with each other – 3 April 2008 USA.
Enjoy!
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13
Part 14
10,000 hits
Well it is only a number after all – but this blog really only got going due to a conversation with Andy Thompson who told me to write the story of what happened to me and my friends at the Atheist Alliance International Conference exactly the way I told him – this resulted at 5 am in writing the blog Police Question Atheists! and the blog has gone from strength to strength since. Thank you for reading and if you have enjoyed yourselves tell your friends.
Right now the blog has (not my intention) found itself on a stock market where fictitiously you can trade shares in a blog where the value is based on incoming and outgoing links to the site – in that sense the blog is going well and reports on the American Atheist Conference should see more traffic increasing the value. Not a cent changes hands, it is all a bit of fun with the intention of seeing the popularity of a blog.
I will be leaving for America in a few hours for the American Atheist Conference. Looking forward to catching up with people I met in Washington DC, listening to speakers and meeting up again with Richard Dawkins. Will be writing about the experiences as I did with the AAI conference (which you can read about here).
Next blog will be from the other side of the pond.
Hitchens in New York
The above is a video of Christopher Hitchens debating Rabbi Shmuley Boteach at New York’s 92nd Street Y.
“So little evidence for such a horrible proposition.” Hitchens is always entertaining to listen too, and makes the case that belief in a supreme being was more about explaining a strange alien world in which we live – the first idea about a theory of everything which became so entangled with our way of thinking, culture and institutions in ancient times that the hangover is still with us.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach makes the romantic inspiring defense for religion – it gives purpose, a sense of belonging and lifts us up to virtues making us beyond an animal state. It misses the point that as social beings we have the capacity to come together, and do, over many things from leisure activities, work and political. A sense of belonging and hope is possible “without invisible means of support” for those reasons are shown in our daily lives. Virtues are recognised, not based on faith claims, on how those that have them are respected and the consequences of having them.
Hope you enjoy the video – Hitchens also covers the science that suggests the world we live in was not jump started by certain gods I could mention. That it is a serf wish to suppose, and thank goodness that theocracy is not the rule that we live in.
The freedom of religion and none is one way out of the shadows in our thinking.
I did laugh at the “Non-Prophet organisation” joke. Reminds me of the one that “Atheism is myth-understood”.
In a restroom – Hitchens and Mother Teresa
What will follow is an article by Hitchens on Mother Teresa, but reading it reminded me of something that happened to me in the USA last year which I shall start with linked to the otherwise obscure title of this blog. 
This was the first and hopefully last time I am ever accosted for my world view in a bar toilet. That convenience being a restroom in Virginia USA the evening of Hitchens talk at the Atheist Alliance International Conference in Crystal City. Naturally wearing my branded A t-shirt I did stand out. That it said Staff Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science meant that as part of the OUT campaign I was out there with a Red A to a bull in the Men’s Room.
Naturally I did not expect a conversation to start in a restroom with an American, let alone one wearing an Arsenal football top. But he noticed my T shirt and asked about what I was doing. Mentioned that I had just listened to Hitchens and then the fun began.
Because what was worst of all for this young man of catholic faith was the books that Hitchens had written on her - The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice - was for him all out disrespect for a great person. Now being taken literally on the fly, I pointed out that letters she had written revealed that she did not actually have faith in the supernatural – her belief in belief actually drove her to take a stand which did not help the poverty of people, notably on birth control and safer sex. As a woman that happened to be a nun with a world platform she spoke against the social reform to end poverty – the emancipation of women on equal terms with men in the economic, social and political sphere.
No doubt charity, vaccinations, food, clothing and shelter do give much needed comfort to the poor. These things were much needed in Calcutta (Bengal). It seems less obvious that strict catholic dogma was what above all the poor needed; or that the only way the necessary aid was going to happen was through faith organisations that were promoting the tolerance of the social norms that allowed the poverty to fester.
As I washed my hands, noticing that in the Gents there were baby changing facilities and thinking how good that was he remonstrated with me that it did some good. As I used the hand dryer I pointed to the baby changing facilities pointing out that I had never seen that in England, but it seemed a good idea. I was open to better ways of doing things compared to rigidly defined social and gender norms.
He said well I guess that a heathen atheist would never understand the good people do because of god. I replied that someone wearing an Arsenal top could not be all that bad. I accept that being that close to Washington DC I was in a bubble that is perhaps a different experience to the rest of the USA. Having said that, where else can you get a discussion with a complete stranger in a toilet about Hitchens and Mother Teresa – pity it did not happen at the bar. Would have been more comfortable. Definitely more restful.
Below is the article that brought forth those memories by Hitchens entitled “Belief in Belief”. Enjoy.
A question that interests me very much (and always has) is this: I know that I do not believe in either any god or any religion, and I can give my reasons in a manner that the other side can at least understand, but can the same be said for those who claim that they do believe? A shorter way of putting this is to ask whether our antagonists in this ancient argument truly mean what they appear to say.
The recent disclosure that Mother Teresa had for almost half a century been unable to feel the presence of Christ in the Eucharist or the ear of God listening to her prayers, is of great importance here. (See the recent book of her despairing letters, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light.) Not even her most fervent admirers regarded this woman in any sense as an intellectual, and she evidently struggled to combat her doubts in a highly traditional way—namely, by making ever-more extravagant and even masochistic professions of “faith.” This would be superb confirmation of Daniel Dennett’s hypothesis about “belief in belief”— the strange idea that, though faith itself may be ludicrous and incoherent, the mere assertion of it may possess some virtues of its own.
Even though I have sometimes described her as a fraud (for her collusion with rich oppressors of the poor like the Duvalier family in Haiti and for her other corrupt dealings), I would now hesitate to put Mother Teresa in the same category as a Falwell, a Haggard, a Sharpton, or a Robertson. These men have never done a day’s real work in their lives and are or were simple parasites who pinch themselves every morning at their good fortune at living the easy life of exploiting the gullible. For them, religion is nothing more than a trade, or a racket.
The same, I think, can be said of the numberless clerics convicted of child-rape (why on earth do we allow ourselves the silly euphemism of “abuse”?). Their foul crime is not one of hypocrisy. No priest who sincerely believed even for ten seconds in divine judgment could conceivably endanger his immortal soul in this way, and those in the hierarchy who helped protect such men from punishment in this world are equally and obviously guilty of a hardened and obscene cynicism.
But the racketeering and exploitative side of religion, as with its no-less-marked tendency to generate wars, atrocities, and repressions, isn’t the whole story. What of those who try their best to help others and lead a decent life, attributing this conduct to their belief in a Virgin, a Prophet, or to the story of Exodus, or any other such fabrication? I never cease to wonder, in dialogues with such people, whether they are really saying what they mean or meaning what they say.
To any humanist, for example, it’s perfectly obvious that the city of Calcutta would benefit from an influx of volunteer nurses, doctors, inoculators, sewage experts, and others, just as it would not benefit from the attentions of people who regard poverty and death as a secondhand share in the “mystery” of the Crucifixion. There are actually quite a good number of activists of the first type (I spent some time there once, watching the great Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado do his work for UNICEF documenting the massive campaign for vaccination against polio), but for some weird reason the only person anyone can name is a woman who spent her entire life campaigning against birth control—a stupid campaign that Bengal most definitely did not and does not need.
Is it not possible that the missionaries of “faith” regard the objects of their charity as mere raw material—human subjects for a tortured experiment in their own psyches? It seems that, the more Mother Teresa lost conviction in the teachings of her religion, the more energetically she silenced her doubts by ostentatious crusades against divorce, abortion, and contraception using “the poorest of the poor” as her backdrop and her excuse. And does this not degrade such work as she actually did? For her, the helpless beggar was just that—helpless, to be sure, yet for that reason easily available for her own exhausting propaganda. The case for assisting starving Bengalis is complete on its own terms, but most of the money raised for the “Missionaries of Charity” went—as Mother Teresa herself happily admitted—to the building of convents that were consecrated, in effect, to her own ambition and her own very extreme teaching of Catholic dogma. These preachings went dead against the only certain cure for poverty—the emancipation of women from the status and condition of breeding machines—that the human race has ever discovered.
In other words, “faith” is at its most toxic and dangerous point not when it is insincere and hypocritical and corrupt but when it is genuine. At that point, its energy of certainty and self-righteousness can be used, not only to reinforce the Church but also (as Mother Teresa’s continuing reputation demonstrates) to impress even the secular. The evidence now is that this is how she and her confessors squared the circle. Repress your misgivings, overcome your despair, redouble your efforts, and we will make you a saint and later claim that you cured the sick even after your death. It’s at this point that the cynical loops round to meet the naïve and say in effect that anything is permissible as long as it keeps the illusion alive. Again, one has to stand amazed before a clergy who can use, as a recruiting sergeant, a wretched old lady whose own faith, as they well knew, had worn to a husk.
Round table Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens – The Four Horseman
Oh to have been a fly on the wall I thought, as we marched from Jefferson Memorial to the White house during the Atheist Alliance International Conference 2007, as I had got wind of this Round table discussion happening but kept my mouth shut sworn to secrecy. So it is with great delight that the discussion between Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens is now available to watch on the internet, and will be on DVD next month.
In many ways the Round table discussion is better than the talks. Because they are bouncing off ideas, anecdotes, and experiences between them back and forth – and dealing with the common criticisms that they have encountered. Do enjoy, about two hours split in two parts:
Part One
Part Two
