Hitchens in ur Kitchens
Honzo December 9th, 2007
The sometimes funny WuzzaDem looks at Hitchens’ reply to Romney’s Mormon speech: Shocker: Christopher Hitchens Bashes Mitt Romney Speech.
According to the admittedly very contradictory scriptures of the New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth warned his disciples and followers that they should expect to be ridiculed and mocked for their faith. After all, how likely was it that God had decided to reveal himself to only a few illiterate peasants in a barbarous backwater?
What better way to make this point than by mocking and ridiculing Christians?
I think what I like the most about this quote from Hitchens (the first part) is that he is completely anthropomorphizing God here; something the new atheists are always complaining about theists doing (and rightly so!). God must act in the ways that Hitchens thinks that God should act, or the God that others posit does not match Hitchen’s imagined God and therefore does not exist (is there a man of straw in there somewhere?).
C/P at Hundiejo.com
- Culture , Humor , Nature of God
- Comments(4)
I am continually amazed at how elementary the ‘new atheists’ understanding of the Christian God is. It’s like they got pissed off one day b/c of something some fundamentalist freak-show said, and decided all Christians must believe in that simple, ethno-centric, patriarchal deity who loves to tell us of his compassion for us while at the same time threatening to destroy us in his undying wrath.
I’m not angered by them….I feel sad for them. For being such supposedly smart people, they sure don’t recognize a straw-man when they see it. Unfortunately, it is this inability that keeps them from the ground of absolute reality - a reality they claim to already understand.
What also amazes me about this quote is how sarcastic he is about God revealing himself to backwoods, illiterate peasants. I guess he doesn’t see the genius of this move on God’s part!
a) Word.
b) *Minor Qualification* I guess that strictly speaking, Hitchens does not argue here that there is no God, but that the story of God that Christians and Mormons (I am speaking from my perspective and I think the Mormons would agree that I am of another religion than they are) is not possible because the story does not make sense to Hitchens. I kinda make that next jump in the post. While I think Hitchens makes that leap elsewhere, he is just not making it in the above quote.
Richard Dawkins, in one of his latest books, talks of how he stopped believing in religion at the age of 7. In a review of this book by one of his colleague scientists, they lament that Dawkins appears to still have a “7-year-old’s understanding of what religion actually is.” I wish I knew who said it, but it’s quite a genius critique.
Yeah, that is a great quote, Cheapham.
I am pretty sure Prothero said it in his review of one of Dawkin’s books in the Washington Post.
Update, according to the speech he gave at MU, that part was edited out of the book review.