{"id":464,"date":"2013-12-18T20:54:39","date_gmt":"2013-12-19T04:54:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=464"},"modified":"2020-10-18T11:59:23","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T18:59:23","slug":"hitchens-and-the-speculative-end-of-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2013\/12\/18\/hitchens-and-the-speculative-end-of-religion\/","title":{"rendered":"Hitchens and the Speculative End of Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

There have been several online articles in recent days about Christopher Hitchens<\/a>, author of god is not great<\/b> [lower cases intentional], who died just two years ago.<\/p>\n

Jerry Coyne checks in on rival takes on Christopher Hitchens, both on Salon, including this one by an editor for The Atlantic, Jeffrey Tayler, criticizing an earlier essay (which was critical of Hitchens) by Sean McElwee.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2013\/12\/14\/the_real_new_atheism_rejecting_religion_for_a_just_world\/”<\/a><\/p>\n

\nMcElwee calls for a \u201ctruce\u201d between believers and nonbelievers. But he stands on the losing side of both public opinion trends and history. According to a Pew poll conducted in 2012, a record number of young Americans \u2013 a quarter of those between the ages of 18 and 29 \u2014 see themselves as unaffiliated with any religion. Atheists\u2019 ranks are swelling, and believers are finding it increasingly difficult to justify their faith.
\n…
\nMcElwee then tendentiously defines religion so as to paper over its often decisive role in precipitating conflicts. Though he allows that it might \u201cmotivate acts of social justice and injustice,\u201d \u201c[r]eligion is both a personal search for truth as well as a communal attempt to discern where we fit in the order of things.\u201d Religion first and foremost consists of unsubstantiated, dogmatically advanced explanations for the cosmos and our place in it, with resulting universally applicable rules of conduct. A good many of these rules \u2013 especially those regarding women\u2019s behavior and their (subservient) status vis-\u00e0-vis men, and prescriptions for less-than-merciful treatment of gays \u2013 are repugnant, retrograde, and arbitrary, based on \u201csacred texts\u201d espousing \u201crevealed truths\u201d dating back to what the British atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell justly called the \u201csavage ages.\u201d (Islam by no means has a monopoly on such rules \u2013 check Leviticus for its catalogue of \u201ccrimes\u201d: working on the Sabbath, cursing one\u2019s parents, being the victim of rape \u2013 that merit the death penalty.) Just how such \u201choly\u201d compendia of ahistorical, often macabre fables are supposed to help anyone in a \u201cpersonal search for truth\u201d mystifies me.
\n…
\n\u201cThe impulse to destroy religion will ultimately fail,\u201d McElwee claims. Just what he means by this is unclear. Hitchens spoke out tirelessly against religion but never believed it could be eradicated; rather, he likened it to Camus\u2019 plague-infected rats, scurrying about in humanity\u2019s sewer, ever awaiting a chance to reemerge.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Despite the unpleasant allusion to rats, I would endorse Hitchens’ take on the futility of eradicating religion, simply because human psychology is what it is, and ignorance of the world and the universe is the default, requiring constant effort (i.e. education) to overcome. Back to my reset-the-world scenario<\/a>: humanity would recreate culture and language and religions and science, and while science would be more or less the same — because it’s grounded in reality — cultures and languages would be different, and so would religions, because they result from psychological biases of the human mind in attempting to understand how the natural world works.<\/p>\n

An SF writer influential when I was a teenager was Arthur C. Clarke, not just for the scales of space and time he evoked, and humanity\u2019s small place in it, but for his calm assumption that, as humanity matured and moved out into the universe, the old superstitions of religion would fade. You don\u2019t see much in the way of institutionized religion in Star Trek, to take a pop culture example. But I’ve changed my mind over the years about the likelihood of the Clarke assumption, without a species-wide leap toward more comprehensive education. And how would that happen? If anything the past decade or so has shown is that increased access to information \u2013 i.e. the internet \u2013 only creates self-reinforcing communities clinging to one ideology or another, the very opposite of any possible shared culture or comprehensive education about the real world. It demonstrates that most people can, in fact, \u2018get by\u2019 not knowing much of anything, and \u2018believing\u2019 lots of things that aren\u2019t real, and still conduct themselves functionally as human beings. And there doesn\u2019t seem to be much reason for thinking how or why that should ever change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There have been several online articles in recent days about Christopher Hitchens, author of god is not great [lower cases intentional], who died just two years ago. Jerry Coyne checks in on rival takes on Christopher Hitchens, both on Salon, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,7,12,2,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-philosophy","category-religion","category-science","category-thinking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=464"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":470,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464\/revisions\/470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}