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Former atheist sounds a wake-up call
THE RAGE AGAINST GOD: HOW ATHEISM LED ME TO FAITH
By Peter Hitchens
Published by Zondervan, $22.99
Like many self-righteous adolescents, Peter Hitchens, brother of well-known contrarian Christopher Hitchens, had numerous reasons for abandoning his belief in God.
But the real reason, suggests journalist and author Peter Hitchens in The Rage Against God, is that he felt entitled to do whatever he wished. A similar sense of entitlement fuels today’s anti-theist philosophy, and it has pushed Western civilization to the brink of chaos.
Peter HitchensThat’s the premise of this thought-provoking, carefully written book, which isn’t as much about atheism and how it led Peter to faith (despite the subtitle) as it is about the death throes of Christianity and religion in the West, mainly in the United States and England. In The Rage Against God, Peter, who has since returned to his Anglican beliefs, sounds a wake-up call.
Hitchens’ older brother, Christopher, fills his bestsellers with references to his atheist philosophy and sexual escapades. He makes headlines with his views on everything from the existence of God to the career of Mother Teresa of Calcutta to the rightness of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. His most recent release, Hitch-22, has been reviewed by nearly every major newspaper and magazine.
By contrast, Peter’s The Rage Against God, published in the United States in May, has largely been ignored, although it earlier received some attention in Britain, where it had a different, more accurate subtitle: “Why Faith Is the Foundation of Civilisation.”
Written mostly to refute another of his brother’s highly-touted books, God Is Not Great (2007), The Rage Against God shoots down some of his brother’s theories, such as his notion that the order to love thy neighbor as thyself is too extreme to be obeyed. Or that religious education is tantamount to child abuse.
Ultimately, as Peter Hitchens sees it, the relativism and secularism propounded by his brother and other atheists have replaced Christian principles, not just relegating those principles to the sidelines but also diminishing Christian influence in education, law and nearly every aspect of Western culture.
Memoir, argument and cultural history, The Rage Against God contends that secularism is a political movement that “seeks to remove the remaining Christian restraints on power.” And in an age of power worship, “the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire for absolute power.” Peter describes the abuses of power he saw at the end of the Cold War when he lived in the Soviet Union as a foreign correspondent. He shows how these abuses have seeped into British and American society. Now, he says, secularism is poisoning culture and replacing liberty with tyranny.
Other circumstances have also contributed to the collapse of religious belief in the West, Hitchens argues. Patriotism is often conflated with religion -- as happened during the world wars, Vietnam, and the invasion of Iraq. People are persuaded that God is on their side. When they learn of wartime atrocities, they grow disenchanted with patriots and priests.
He writes that the “anything-goes” era of the 1960s and 1970s added to the decline of belief and moral standards, as did the sexual revolution and a spirit of rebellion that seemed to consume young people.
Equally disturbing to Hitchens, Anglican and Roman Catholic liturgies have watered down their services into pep rallies hoping to attract youth and increase the number of parishioners. They’ve replaced poetry and tradition, he writes, with “denatured committee-designed prayers and services” that are “ugly.”
Decrying the loss of traditional prayers, Hitchens poignantly describes the beauty of chants “spiraling up into chilly stone vaults at Evensong ... and the mysterious ... poetry of the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimitis.”
Only poetry, Hitchens says, can truly counter atheism and “ambush” the heart.
Even so, faith is the bottom line.
Accepting God’s existence is a matter of faith, he says. And since no one can prove or disprove the existence of God, atheism is also a matter of faith. Despite his brother’s atheism, Peter Hitchens insists it’s “better by far to believe.”
He makes that point in a compelling book that deserves more attention than it has received.
[Diane Scharper teaches English at Towson University in Maryland. She and her son, Philip Scharper, edited Reading Lips, prize-winning memoirs about coping with a disability.]
Section:
I. Book Reviews
Obviously, I haven't read the
Obviously, I haven't read the book yet. But if the reviewer is accurate, this sounds like the usual smear/hatchet job on atheists by a believer, maybe mixed with a bit of sibling rivalry. Yep, atheists are just a bunch of power-hungry sex fiends who don't want God getting in their way! The fact that the Christian Church and maybe especially the Christian hierarchy have only rarely lived according the the Gospel of Christ as enunciated in the Sermon on the Mount has nothing to do with unbelief! The fact that the hierarchy has often played cheerleader for the warmongers is beside the point!
And poetry is going to save us! Well, good. Instead of reading Peter Hitchens, I think I'll read T.S.Eliot.
Orion, it seems as if it'd be
Orion, it seems as if it'd be good for you to read the book. Your other points are well taken regarding the need for a faith-filled person to live according to the way Jesus laid out for us. I think, otherwise, you're being too harshly pre-judgmental. For instance, the point about poetry leading to a better spiritual life is (and I suspect you know this in some way)a metaphor. It's one way of stating that faith doesn't come from our owh efforts; it's a gift. Faith doesn't come as result from the brain; it comes from the heart. Hitchens is not the only contemporary to proclaim this type of thing: from something like "in the 21st century we need to be mystics or nothing at all" to something like "emotion is a form of knowing" to "only 20% of all of us are convinced by facts/reasoning; the other 80% by other means". Poetry is only one means to those ends: think drama, movies, commercials, pictorial and audial art etc, etc..
If you have a chance to read
If you have a chance to read the book, you'll find that neither the book nor the review here is very good. Hitchens offers some good insights based on his own very English experience, but his analysis of atheism is self-serving and transparently aimed at his brother, Christopher.
Bertrand Russell's teapot
Bertrand Russell's teapot will shine some light:
"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time."
And, naturally, the Tea Party
And, naturally, the Tea Party believes in the Tea Pot, and Glenn Beck is the Mad Hatter who will serve us the Kool-Aid from the Tea Pot in the sweet bye and bye. Yes. It is all becoming quite clear now.
"But the real reason,
"But the real reason, suggests journalist and author Peter Hitchens in The Rage Against God, is that he felt entitled to do whatever he wished. A similar sense of entitlement fuels today’s anti-theist philosophy, and it has pushed Western civilization to the brink of chaos"
It may well be that selfishness & egotism & other vices *contribute to* atheist rejection of theism, or of religion, or of Christianity in particular: but to treat these as though nothing else contributed to atheism or as though evil in Christianity were not an issue, is very unwise. Apart from anything else, it relieves the Church of the duty of repentance & conversion; if it is beyond criticism, it is free to "sin on more", when it should "sin no more". An unrepentant Church is in danger of going where unrepentant individuals go. If it must play the Pharisee, secure in its own sinless self-righteousness & blindness to its need to repent, it has no business dragging down anyone else to Hell.
People reject Christianity often because of its sins. Its authoritarianism plays a part. So does the murderousness & venom of directed against certain groups. So does the arrogance and pride perceived - rioghtly or wrongly - in many of its theological claims. Its history of supporting the mighty against the weak - notwithstanding the Magnificat in its own NT - plays a part. Its proto-Nazi barbarity to the Jews is a problem.
These things are facts, & they are worthy of unqualified & absolute condemnation. Atheists re-act to them in a very healthy way when they reject them, because such things ought to be rejected. To defend them is a moral atrocity, because that implies that Jesus is Jesus the Hitlerian, Jesus the Murderer, Jesus the Liar, Jesus the Child-Rapist, Jesus the Ecclesiolater, Jesus the Lover of all that that is wicked. This is to confuse the Holy Redeemer with the Devil. How can anyone pretend that the Satanification of Christ & the Satanification of His teaching is good and holy & pleasing to God? The atheists are not those who reject God intellectually, but those who make Him into an idol or a devil.
Atheists are rebuking the wickedeness of the Church, & keeping it from from what amounts to Satanolatry - this is surely the work of God through them. The OT People of God were not above criticism - how can the NT People of God claim to be ? The Church has become an idol separated from the people who are its members; & idols have a nasty way of sooner or later being smashed to pieces.
If religious belief implied
If religious belief implied morality then it would be impossible to raise moral objection to religious belief. Since I can raise moral objection to religious belief, I conclude that religion does not imply morality. If religion does not imply morality then it has lost it's purported purpose.
That's a logical falacy.
That's a logical falacy. Additionally, probably one of the earliest human cultural constructs was religion, and codes of morals. I think it's easy in our modern secular society to forget the organic connection between faith and morals. In a society in which we can have anything we want, the old rules no longer apply. But our society is the product of centuries of civilization which grew out of early efforts to understand why we were human and how we were going to organize ourselves, questions answered by through religious thought in all cultures. The anonymous author, divorced from the relgious tradition can have exactly what he or she wants--a moral objection to religion and a world in which religion has lost its purported purpose. But in that sense, the whole society and culture has lost its purpose as well.
Interesting how many atheists
Interesting how many atheists and anti-Catholics read the National Catholic Reporter!
It's interesting how many
It's interesting how many "traditionalist" Catholics read it, too. I guess the NCR just appeals to a whole broad spectrum of folks!
What may say even more about
What may say even more about NCR bloggers is that apparently no one read the book before offering an opinion.
If this review is accurate,
If this review is accurate, there are several things I find troubling about Peter Hitchin's analysis. One is that he paints with a very broad brush and seems to divide people and issues firmly in exclusive camps. For instance, I don't believe that all, even maybe most, atheists are atheists because they want to do whatever they want. Actually, I have met many who have come to that conclusion because they are sensitive to, and cannot reconcile, so much of the evil in the world (something in which christians themselves have often nurtured and participate).
"Christian principles" is a great soundbite, but just whose interpretation of Christian principles should be the ones that are the foundation of society. Should they be Rome's or should they be the evangelical fundamentalists of the Republican party or those of the more liberal protestant denominations. Should they be the anti-war christian principles of the Quakers and the Catholic Worker or the hawks of the Religious Right? Is he not aware of the great conflicts that exist among those who call themselves christian? It is just too easy to uses phrases like "Christian principles" as a panacea as if there is uniform agreement as to what that means.
I don't doubt that there were the abuses of power that he witnessed at the end of the cold war, but I have to ask if he is blind to the abuses of power by many leaders of every Christian denomination? Abuse of power is a human issue and will be part of any person and organization that has power. It clearly is not something that happens to just those outside the Church.
And, lastly, I fully agree with the beauty and poetry of the prayers and chants of the Church. Yet, I have to part company with his genuine, but subjective experience and trying to universalize and impose them on those who do not get the same deep connection that he gets from them. He does not seem to acknowledge that for others, these practices may not bring to others what they bring to him. And, I would have to ask, don't their needs to have a method for connection that works for them count?
My sense is that, while Peter, makes many good, valid points, his conclusions are too sweeping and then to be dismissive of how God and the Holy Spirit works in others.
I'll bet there are no
I'll bet there are no atheists in that mine in Chili where 33 miners lay
trapped w/o hope of rescue unitl early December. It is possible of course
that someone went down into the mine w/o religion...but we can believe there are some real come to Jesus moments if not hours going on down there.Let us all pray to Our Lady of Candelaria for their imminent and safe rescue!
Interesting how atheists
Interesting how atheists still need the belief in God to provide them with the self satisfying justifications and half baked rational the hurl. God, nor people who possess faith require atheists to justify their intellecutal existence. The pedantic and maudlin atheist rants after so much time become little more than the dribbling of a common bar-room bore.
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