My Sunday Feeling

My excellent friend Renee Horton kind of stole my thunder for this week, seeing as how she wrote about the current wave of serious literature written by avowed atheists that seeks to, for lack of a better way to put it, remove or diminish greatly the use of religion and religious ideation in public discourse. To read her blog, go to http://losingourreligion.blogspot.com/ . I decided to write about it after reading a "debate' in Newsweek Magazine between pastor and author Rick Warren and atheist neurobiologist Sam Harris. I thought Warren acquitted himself pretty well while Harris came across as smug and angry. But that's just me. Read it here and judge for yourself. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17889148



Back in the Spring, prominent atheist authors Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens spoke here in Little Rock. I was not able to see Dawkins but I did go see Hitchens, whose writing I greatly admire. I arrived early and I was glad that I did as the room soon filled to capacity and the sponsors of the event were forced to scramble for extra chairs to accommodate the crowd.



I marveled at this. You know, it wasn't all that long ago that the news of such speakers coming to our fair city to lecture in public facilities would have provoked a whirlwind of protest around here. And yet here he was speaking freely to a SRO crowd in the Bible Belt.

But I digress. Hitchens is the author of a recent book entitled "God Is Not Great-How Religion Poisons Everything." It is his thesis, based as much upon the examination of the tenets and writings of all the major religions as anything, that religion is a distortion of our origins, our nature and our cosmos. The only hope for mankind is to adopt a secular and scientific view of reality and to base our policies and our politics accordingly.

Whereas it is my understanding that Dawkins is caustic and combative in his interactions with an audience, my take on Hitchens was that he was the model of British civility, particularly when engaging an elderly person in our group who had a question or comment. Dawkins and Harris come across as angry and dismissive of religion as the province of fools. Hitchens does not. He acknowledges that religion has served as a force for good if only intermittently. Anyway, Hitchens seems like the sort of guy you would like to have a drink with and from I understand, he might accommodate you if the conditions were favorable. Atheists can be as dour as Calvinists. Hitchens is their "good humor man."

Someone asked him how the crowds have been on his book tour. He said that they have been about like the one that showed up in Little Rock. He interpreted this to mean that people were ready for the arguments of the atheists, that they were fed up with how religion poisons the public arena.

I don't think so. At least not here in Flannery O'Connor's Christ-haunted South where Jesus-or a typically right wing facsimile thereof- is practically on the ballot every election year.

But I do think there is a sense that religious ideology of a certain stripe informs certain policy decisions to an inappropriate degree. Further, I believe that there is a sense that things are not working in this country as they should and that people are turning to Hitchens in order to examine the origins of this particular ideology that some folks feel have an inordinate influence.


Hitchens breaks no ground that wasn't broken earlier by the likes of David Hume and Sigmund Freud among others. But he and fellow Brit Karen Armstrong raise powerful and compelling arguments against religious fundamentalism of any kind. And I think that is how the debate in this country is going to be couched. It matters little to people like myself that the Bible was pretty much a work over time by a committee of people who had their own agendas. I believe that if God wanted to originate the species by evolution, that's OK by me. I don't believe for 5 minutes that gay folks threaten heterosexual relationships. As for myself, I am perfectly capable of scuttling my relationships with women. I don't require the assistance of an adherent from an alternative lifestyle to further the usual process of my undoing.

But there are people out there for whom these issues mean everything. And they vote.

I say let the debate begin. Go give Hitch a listen if he comes to your town. You'll at least come away from the lecture with a different perspective on things. What's the harm in that?


Plugola: For those who are in the least inclined, you can tune in to "Tales from the South" at KUAR 90 FM on Thursday at 7 pm to hear local authors, including yours truly, reading stories about Father's Day. It will be simulcasted (is that a word?) on http://www.kuar.org/.