Comments

1. Terry Glavin

   Saturday 15 December 2007 at 21:54

   The first hour was excruciating, listening to four perfectly intelligent people comparing and evaluating the rhetorical and logical arguments, devices and gimmicks that might be employed to disabuse the religious of their irrational and backward and primitive ideas.

   Then it comes around to more a sensible discussion about why they would bother. Hitchens nails it by making clear that religious belief is like a noxious weed that will never be fully extirpated, and he shocks Dawkins by refusing to say that we wishes the churches were empty, and the next thing Harris is going on about how everyone needs “the sacred” in their lives and Dennett just wants a different kind of church to go to on Sundays and so on.

   Dennett should be a Unitarian and Harris should take up crystals and dreamcatchers and save us the bother, I thought. Then it struck me.

   What would really do these four vaunted intellectuals some real good is to spend some time with ordinary working people, the kind engaged in “vulgar” and “trivial” affairs like earning a living and raising kids without nannies, the kind of people who aren’t professors and professional polemicists, and who persist in fiddling with their prayer beads and going to gurudwara and attending mass.

   The “four horsemen” might just find that a lot of the poor backward sods who are the subject of such handwringing in the first half of the conversation (Gosh! How can we change their minds?!)aren’t as stupid and superstitious as they imagine them to be.

   It sounds a lot to me like Hitchens gets this already.

   So. Way less Dennett, way less Harris, tell Dawkins to give us a Christmas carol, and then give Hitchens the floor.

2. Jura Watchmaker

   Sunday 16 December 2007 at 2:38

   I too found the discussion excruciating.

   That said, I’ll add a half-hearted defence of Harris, who I believe is right to talk of the need for spirituality. Harris appears to get his from a kind of secularised buddhism; I get mine from the cultural paganism of the folk arts. Give me songs, stories and morality plays grounded in the fantastic imagination and mundane experience of ordinary people, and I’m in my element.

   I want my two hours back.

3. Terry Glavin

   Sunday 16 December 2007 at 5:13

   Good for you, Francis.

   And “Well that Cromwell was a lovely fellow in many ways” or whatever it was, was painful to hear. “Fine boy, chopped down Christmas trees.” And the slaughter at Drogheda, and forbidding Catholics to worship or own land, and shipping 12,000 Irish off into slavery. Delightful chap.

4. hakmao

   Sunday 16 December 2007 at 14:02

   It sounds a lot to me like Hitchens gets this already

   There is a reason for this.

   It is not the believers who are worthy of contempt, but the religious hierarchies who use those beliefs to oppress, repress and control the faithful, often in collusion with the State.

5. John in Cincinnati

   Sunday 16 December 2007 at 14:23

   Hitchens had all those debates, especially in the Bible Belt, and questions from the audience.  I think he was surprised to find that religious people often take from the Bible what they want, rather than what’s really there.

   Thank God.

6. Will

   Tuesday 18 December 2007 at 11:39

   http://newhumanist.org.uk/1667

   AC Grayling:

   “For the present it will be enough to remark that where we are now in historical terms owes far more to the struggle against religion than to the very nice music, buildings and paintings which jointly seem to exhaust Mr Dalrymple’s idea of civilisation, and which resulted from the fact that the church was a rich (the richest) patron for many centuries, and painters and composers had stomachs like other men. To attribute “Western civilisation” to the inspiration of a version of the Zeus-impregnates-mortal-girl-who-then-produces-hero myth is the sort of remark that by now ought scarcely to merit a horse-laugh: but apologists and Secret Sharers like Mr Dalrymple, clutching at straws, will always clutch at the most golden ones.”

7. Paul J.

   Friday 21 December 2007 at 1:04

   Terry: Why would you think these guys have nannies? And why should Dennett be a Unitarian? The fact that Unitarians welcome atheists doesn’t mean that it is necessarily the right place for us to go, Dennett might well find them as silly as I do.

   I have no real desire to eradicate all belief in gods, but if only one side (the theists) pleads its case to people (which they love to do in schools, prisons etc. around the world), the other side automatically loses.

   There are legitimate arguments for atheism which people have a right to know before building their hopes and dreams on religious doctrines.

   Doubt is what keeps human civilization moving forward. Not just doubt about the supernatural, certainly, but it’s as good a place as any to administer it.