2008 Woodie Awards
My favorite atheist
Josh Rutledge
Issue date: 2/6/08 Section: Opinion
I love Christopher Hitchens. He is as blunt as the title of his book, “God Is Not Great,” and I cannot help but marvel at the impudence of a man to call Mother Teresa “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.”
What sets Hitchens apart as an atheist is that he’s unwilling to simply discount religion. He abhors it. In “God Is Not Great,” he writes that religion is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.”
He doesn’t pick and choose which religions he hates. He hates them all, though he often seems to have poignant contempt for Christianity.
Most atheists don’t like name-calling. They claim to be on a more academic level, crowing about how they are more rational than theists.
But Hitchens is the kind of atheist who doesn’t mind calling John Calvin a “sadist and torturer and killer.” And although I have more than a few friends who dislike Calvin, I doubt they’d go that far.
Also in “God Is Not Great,” Hitchens writes, “As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything.”
In short, Hitchens hates people like me. But what boggles me is that Hitchens doesn’t see the irrationality of his hate. What has religion ever done to him? Is religion destroying hard-won human attainments? What about the load of attainment Hitchens earns denouncing religion? Religion pays his salary.
He points to all horrors in history that were the result of religion, but should someone like Hitchens care about that? All those people are dead. And to Hitchens, those people were nothing more than evolved primates.
On what ground does Hitchens condemn a walrus, much less me? Hitchens would answer that human ethics is the product of evolution, but even if that were the case, would it be an obligation to follow that evolved ethic?
Hitchens writes, “(I) believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion.” Fine. But who died and left Hitchens in charge to decide what is ethical? For him to even use that word, he must steal it from my worldview’s dictionary.
Under Hitchens’s worldview, I am free to do whatever I want. And if that means I want to kill Hitchens himself, it cannot be unethical. He might not want that. I might get locked in jail. But that still doesn’t mean he could call the act unethical.
But it is unethical. I know that. Hitchens knows that. All people who have been murdered knew that.
Hitchens hates Christianity. But what is hate? Or better, what is love? Is it selflessness? It can’t be. That would assume humans have an obligation toward one another. Again, where did that come from? Evolution?
Love must be selfish. And if that is the case, is it all that different than hate? The consequence of atheism is chilling if love is this conditional.
Yet it is Christianity that is “violent and irrational”?
Fine. Agreed. God? Dead on a cross? Seems irrational. Definitely violent.
But I guess that is the nature of unconditional love, which is the only reason I can love Christopher Hitchens, no matter how much he might hate me.
Josh Rutledge is a senior journalism and mass communications major from Chattanooga, Tenn.
What sets Hitchens apart as an atheist is that he’s unwilling to simply discount religion. He abhors it. In “God Is Not Great,” he writes that religion is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.”
He doesn’t pick and choose which religions he hates. He hates them all, though he often seems to have poignant contempt for Christianity.
Most atheists don’t like name-calling. They claim to be on a more academic level, crowing about how they are more rational than theists.
But Hitchens is the kind of atheist who doesn’t mind calling John Calvin a “sadist and torturer and killer.” And although I have more than a few friends who dislike Calvin, I doubt they’d go that far.
Also in “God Is Not Great,” Hitchens writes, “As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything.”
In short, Hitchens hates people like me. But what boggles me is that Hitchens doesn’t see the irrationality of his hate. What has religion ever done to him? Is religion destroying hard-won human attainments? What about the load of attainment Hitchens earns denouncing religion? Religion pays his salary.
He points to all horrors in history that were the result of religion, but should someone like Hitchens care about that? All those people are dead. And to Hitchens, those people were nothing more than evolved primates.
On what ground does Hitchens condemn a walrus, much less me? Hitchens would answer that human ethics is the product of evolution, but even if that were the case, would it be an obligation to follow that evolved ethic?
Hitchens writes, “(I) believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion.” Fine. But who died and left Hitchens in charge to decide what is ethical? For him to even use that word, he must steal it from my worldview’s dictionary.
Under Hitchens’s worldview, I am free to do whatever I want. And if that means I want to kill Hitchens himself, it cannot be unethical. He might not want that. I might get locked in jail. But that still doesn’t mean he could call the act unethical.
But it is unethical. I know that. Hitchens knows that. All people who have been murdered knew that.
Hitchens hates Christianity. But what is hate? Or better, what is love? Is it selflessness? It can’t be. That would assume humans have an obligation toward one another. Again, where did that come from? Evolution?
Love must be selfish. And if that is the case, is it all that different than hate? The consequence of atheism is chilling if love is this conditional.
Yet it is Christianity that is “violent and irrational”?
Fine. Agreed. God? Dead on a cross? Seems irrational. Definitely violent.
But I guess that is the nature of unconditional love, which is the only reason I can love Christopher Hitchens, no matter how much he might hate me.
Josh Rutledge is a senior journalism and mass communications major from Chattanooga, Tenn.