God is not Great - Book Report

I just finished Christopher Hitchens’ blockbuster God is not Great - How Religion Poisons Everything. Hitchens comes off rather crusty, arrogant and slightly irritable in his interviews - but with a fine sense of humor that can go from raspy to scathing in nothing flat. He comes off pretty much the same way in print.

The book is a fun read, but many of the arguments lack punch - not because they are not well thought out, but because they are not well enough defended. I am accustomed to heavy hitters such as Mark Twain and Carl Sagan taking on religious literalism and mystic pseudo-science (respectively) and building impregnable edifices of thought and evidence to reduce these negative forces to so much warmed-over intellectual rubble. Hitchens trips far more lightly through his arguments - engaging, humorous, but not explored from every angle.

One glaring inconsistency is actually pointed out by Al Gore in the book I am reading now, The Assault on Reason. Several of our Deist founders - the very paragons of the Enlightenment that Hitchens celebrates - remained slaveholders even while writing about universal liberty in the most florid language.

Hitchens never even addresses how mores might have developed in a strictly materialist or secular society. There is no evidence that Occidental culture would have been better off without Christianity than with. I argue in my previous blog entry, “Why I am a Christian”, that Christianity is the fount of our best mores and Hitchens never effectively counters my contentions.

I share Hitchens’ deep mistrust of religious fervor and disgust for the destructive distortions preached in the various names of God. I agree with his contention that scientifically, no recourse to the mystical is needed to explain the universe. By these lights, religion appears to be at best an atavism from the childhood of our species. Hitchens sets forth in his final chapters to prove that religion should be left behind and calls for a new Enlightenment.

But the warning remains from the previous Enlightenment and further, I think Hitchens fails to investigate the nature of human reasoning itself in sufficient depth (or really at all) to prove that we can entrust our future to reason alone, uninformed by any of our long cultural religious traditions. The leaders of the American Enlightenment felt that reason should be the foundation of our culture and their accomplishment is stunning - unparalleled really.

But reason does not exist in a vacuum. Human reason is a product of our emotions, a product of our intellectual frame of reference, a product of preconceptions so ingrained that we most often don’t even see them at work. And we wonder why two intelligent persons with only slightly different backgrounds can look at a moral problem, work their way through it with the best of intentions and the best their intellect can produce and come up with answers so divergent as to be nearly unrecognizable.

It is precisely because reason is such a fragile, derivative, refined human product that it cannot be trusted alone. It is our most powerful tool, but not our only tool. I am far from an advocate of organized religion, but at the same time, some sense of the divine, of our common value, of the sanctity of life and of our environment, some sense of awe and some sense of proportion - a recognition of the twin miracles of our self-awareness and our empathetic compassion, and at the same time, of our relative insignificance are frames we discard at the peril of becoming monsters.

God is not Great. Neither is Christopher Hitchens. But it is a tremendously fun read and if you’re in a bit of a snit about the horrible things Muslims and Christians are doing to each other and worse, the way they behave toward atheists, Hitchens scratches that itch quite nicely.

rbs

Bush to Close GTMO???

I am concerned about a report I heard tonight about Guantanamo Bay.

Several Democratic presidential candidates have indicated they would close Guantanamo Bay and the other secret torture camps the Bush administration has been using around the world. Richardson and Edwards both pledged to do this their first day in office.

Now I hear that President Bush wants to close Guantanamo - but of course not the other torture camps. The prisoners we are currently torturing at Guantanamo (using techniques developed in 2002 and later replicated at Abu Ghraib) will be separated and transferred to lower profile facilities worldwide.

I seriously doubt, given the history of this administration, that President Bush has had a revelation about the moral repugnance and ineffectiveness (for intelligence purposes) of torture.

But the administration has realized that Guantanamo Bay is an enormous thorn in their side from a public relations standpoint both with the voters at home and with the civilized world who now see the USA as a rogue state in open violation of international law and moral standards.

Scattering these prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to secret torture camps worldwide will make it much more difficult for the next administration to put a stop to the torture and to make sure that we, the American people, never tolerate such an outrage in our name again.

The broom is in place. The carpet has been lifted. A few thousand victims of institutionalized American torture are about to be swept under it.

rbs

Edwards made the Pledge

On Chris Matthews show on MSNBC, John Edwards has now added his voice to that of Bill Richardson (and to a lesser extent, Obama and Dodd). Edwards pledged that on his first day in office he would close Guantanamo. Unlike Richardson, he did not go on to mention the various secret prisons around the world, but I believe he would close those as well.

I'm waiting for the other Democrats to make the pledge. I don't expect any of the Republicans to do so. Not even McCain.

rbs

Blue Grit - Book Report

Laura Flanders is one of the founding commentators on Air America Radio - the new voice of the American left. Her book, Blue Grit, is an examination of what is happening at the grass roots level of the Democratic party and how this is at odds with the D.C. based national Democratic party establishments.

Flanders holds that the true strength of the Democratic party is at the grassroots and is divided among local single issue groups who are variously patronized and denigrated by the far more conservative national party. In recent years, the Republican party has been a three-way coalition among right-wing Evangelicals, anti-tax Libertarians, and powerful big business interests. The Democratic coalition is far more diverse - including environmentalists, civil libertarians and their vast multitude of client demographics, labor leadership, and consumer advocates.

In Blue Grit, Flanders tells several stories about local Democratic electoral successes despite deliberate neglect from the national party. Among her stories is the newly elected Sheriff of Dallas County, Texas. Their first Democratic Sheriff in decades. Their first Hispanic Sheriff probably ever. Their first woman Sheriff ever. Their first openly lesbian Sheriff. Simply because the citizens of the county were sick of business as usual and wanted someone who would talk straight and get the work done.

Americans will vote for liberal values - if the Democratic party will bother to offer them. But the national party has been chasing the Republicans farther and farther to the right under the illusion that they can out-center the Republicans and the left has nowhere else to go. Blue Grit is a rallying cry to local single-issue liberal groups to take over the Democratic party. It’s really not an astounding work or a great read, but it is good practical advice to us local activists. The American public is better than we think they are. They will vote for liberal values - but only if given the opportunity. The old saw is - run a conservative Democrat against a Republican and the American people will vote for the real thing every time.

I don’t know if Flanders will influence the national party, but she certainly influenced me. I am active in the local Democratic party. Now I will do some research to find those local single-issue groups and try to knit them together under our banner. We can work together and make this a better country.

rbs

A Moment of Hope

A Moment of Hope

Moments ago I just heard Governor Richardson, Senator Obama, and Senator Dodd each separately publicly commit to closing Guantanamo Bay and the secret prisons on their first day as President. I believe that just became a standard plank in the Democratic Party Platform.

(Note - watching it again, I noted that only Richardson made that pledge specifically. Dodd pledged to "restore American civil liberties" and Obama made no pledge, but noted the damage Guantanamo Bay and the secret prisons have done to America's international moral authority. rbs 6-4-07)

Promises aren’t always kept, but I could tell from the way these people spoke that they considered such a move critical to restoring America’s moral leadership in the world. There are a lot of things I really like about these candidates - but there is such a clear difference on this particular issue. The Republican candidates lined up last week in support of the secret prisons and specifically (with the significant exception of Senator McCain) in favor of torture.

There is no brighter line between the presidential wings of these parties than this. I don’t think it could possibly be more clear. This is a moment of hope for those we have oppressed - though they don’t yet know it.

As a sideline - while I have been a fan of Governor Richardson for many years and looking forward to him running for President, I saw tonight what I’ve really liked about Senator Biden for many years. I remember in the midst of the Abu Ghraib scandal that Biden just about came across the table at Secretary Rumsfeld. “My son is serving over there!!! You just made it more likely that he might not come home!!” (paraphrased).

That Joe Biden showed up again tonight vibrating with rage about our failure to stop the genocide in Darfur. It is refreshing to see someone with a true passion for saving lives and for meeting our moral obligation to save life when we can and to treat all people fairly and humanely. I’ve observed that about Biden over the years. When people are in danger, and particularly when that happens because of our actions, he addresses it with powerful moral authority.

I haven’t seen the entire debate yet, so I’m not ready to have overall reactions. When I get a chance, I will see the whole thing and give my reactions here.

rbs