Celebrity atheists abound these days. They move a lot of literary product and enrich themselves by selling something in which they do not believe. I sincerely wish their books would talk about God, but they really do not. In fact, their titles sometimes give their agenda away. The highest profile of them all belongs to the celebrated writer Christopher Hitchens who titles his classic work: God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Search far and dig deep into the volume and you will find precious little discussion about God. Rather, Hitchens is obsessed with what extremist religions stand for.

In my book, What God Can Do For You Now: For Seekers Who Want To Believe, written to help people overcome the obstacles to God-belief as well as refute the atheists who shift the subject away from God, I respond:

GOD IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL THAT PEOPLE DO IN THE NAME OF GOD.

RELIGION IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT PEOPLE DO IN THE NAME OF RELIGION.

Another superstar atheist, Sam Harris, spills his ink marrying God to Islamic terrorists: "We must not overlook the fact that a significant percentage of the world's Muslims believe that the men who brought down the World Trade Center are now seated at the right hand of God amid ‘Rivers of Purist Water.'"

When atheists deign to talk about God, they paint a picture of a deity no one would want to embrace. A third comrade in arms, Richard Dawkins, creates this subtle portrait:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, blood-thirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist and infanticidal, genocidal, malevolent bully.(R. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2006)

Don't you wish Dawkins would tell us how he really feels? He's real subtle. Even those atheists who do talk about God and are a little less vituperative present this irony: they have the exact same view of God as the fundamentalists: a control freak, an ogre who tells people what they must think, believe and do, who punishes those who stray and who leaves no room for women input or dissent.

I firmly believe that one of the reasons some people have trouble believing in God is that they inadvertently buy into their God concept which is extremist and which is a false picture of the Bible's viewpoint. According to the Bible God seeks a covenant, a relationship which is a two-sided agreement. God expects our input and, moreover, needs us as a partner to do together what neither of us can do alone.

Don't take my word for it. Many authoritative figures have their own concept of God. To Maimonides, anticipating modern physics, God is the unmoved mover who set the universe in motion. To Martin Buber, God is an Eternal Thou, always available in personal relationship. For Mordechai Kaplan God is not a transcendent power, but a naturalist force in the universe inspiring us toward the good.

Don't be defeated in your spiritual search by false information. Judaism offers a broad range of theological views to draw from. If you tell me that you are not sure you believe in God I will show you a God concept you will find compelling. My best advice is never to buy your God concept from an atheist. They spend too much time not telling you what they do not believe.

Rabbi Robert Levine, author of What God Can Do for You Now, spent the past week guest-blogging on Jewcy. Want more? Buy his book!

I'm tired. Most of my reading time in the last few weeks has been devoted to the "Four Horseman of Atheism"-Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. And now that I've emerged from my self-imposed sequestration-blinking in the sunlight and desperate for a beer-I deeply regret ever suggesting this article to Zeek.

My problem is not with atheism per se. If someone does not believe in God, that's no concern of mine. Just as it's no concern if, say, another Jew practices a more stringent level of observance than I do. (Or a lesser one, but he'd tough to find.) My problem, rather, is with these authors, for their smugness and dogmatism. I felt alternatively harangued or patronized or downright bored. Reading their books, one after the other, was an enervating experience.

Champion of Godlessness: Christopher Hitchens

The exercise did begin well, with Hitchens' god [sic] is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Hitchens is a gifted writer, so his book is actually entertaining. He explores many of the same themes as his colleagues in godlessness-how religion leads to ignorance, oppression, and ethical confusion-but in a more diverting way, despite, or maybe due to, his rhetorical excesses. Those who read this kind of book looking to be offended will come away satisfied: Hitchens calls the God of the Hebrews "ill-tempered and implacable and bloody and provincial"; he refers to Jesus as one of many "deranged prophets." Strong stuff, but why should he pretend to be reverent?

Many people dismiss Hitchens as a bloviator, an armchair warrior against "Islamofascism." But this book, anyway, is not an anti-Muslim screed. It's a sustained argument against the broader tenets of all religions-against the infallibility of scripture and the claim that religion "improves people." When Hitchens does discuss the murderous meetings of religion and politics (e.g. Belfast, Beirut, Belgrade), it's in support of his assertions, not to score points for "The War on Terror." And he is capable of tolerance. (Although I did wonder why, if, as Hitchens suggests, he'd be fine with religion if its adherents would just "leave [him] alone," he keeps running off to participate in televised debates.)

Extremist Atheist: Sam Harris

Anyway, if Hitchens goes overboard occasionally, Sam Harris falls in the water with disturbing frequency. In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Harris argues that reason (e.g. secular humanism) is in a fight to the death with the forces of irrationality (e.g. evangelical Christians and every living Muslim). This is a plausible, if not original point. There is no place for faith in political discourse, and we are facing real threats, such as an "Islamist regime" acquiring "long-range nuclear weaponry." (Or short range, for that matter.) But Harris often evinces his own form of extremism. To him, even religious moderation is a hypocritical "myth." In fact, he wants to chuck the whole thing out the window-baby, bathwater, and baptismal font (or bimah). And unless we do, he argues, we're all gonna die-we risk a global, religious-based conflict that causes the end of civilization.

Okay, I suppose that this is a possibility. But so was Y2K. And I'm still scratching my head over his limited support of-wait for it-torture. In all fairness, this issue is a small part of The End of Faith. Still, it highlights the book's bizarre mixture of rationalism and fearmongering. Harris paraphrases Alan Dershowitz, that subtle thinker, who proposed that we consider torture if, say, we have custody of a "known terrorist" who "has planted a large bomb in the heart of a nearby city." Harris himself suggests that if we can accept wartime "collateral damage"-which he defines as "the inadvertent torture of innocent men, women, and children"-then we should be able to accept the purposeful torture of guilty people. In other words, "If there is even one chance in a million that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will tell us something under torture that will lead to the further dismantling of Al Qaeda," it would be "perverse" to disallow it.

Actually, what's perverse is using extreme examples to justify an unreliable, corrupting practice. And to assume that it's possible to use torture with judiciousness. Listen, if Dershowitz's scenario comes to pass, I will personally pay for the car battery. Until then, one chance in a million is not enough.

Scientific Fundamentalist: Daniel Dennett

With Harris' apocalyptic warnings ringing in my ears, I turned, with relief, to what I supposed would be the coolly objective realms of science. "Supposed" is the key word here, for the proponents of natural selection, apparently, can be just as unappealing as its detractors. In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Tufts professor Daniel Dennett "[extrapolates] back to human history with the aid of biological thinking." What this means, in English, is that Dennett speculates about the origin and development of religion through the lens of natural selection. For example, he explains that early "folk religions" may have served Darwinian needs-in terms of group survival through social cohesion, or individual survival through the placebo effects of superstitious rituals. Today, though, with democracy and antibiotics, we have no need for these outdated belief systems, whose benefits are "mixed" at best and "toxic" at worst.

While these ideas seem reasonable, there is something oppressive about Dennett's (and Dawkins') assumption that natural selection explains everything-that human development can only be seen in terms of competitive advantages. I admit that I am oversimplifying, and I would never argue against natural selection. I only wish to point out that irrespective of his "humble philosopher" persona, Dennett can be as smugly dogmatic as an evangelical preacher. Surely he can admit that some aspects of human behavior remain mysterious, if only because no one was around to observe their development? Probably not. The condescension, the self-satisfaction that oozes from every page of Breaking the Spell suggests otherwise. And there's really no excusing Dennett's assertion that atheists should call themselves "brights"-which Hitchens, to his infinite credit, refers to as "cringe-making."

Misfired: Richard Dawkins

I had similar problems with Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion-he, too, is hopelessly arrogant; he, too, cannot conceive of human behavior outside of the terms of natural selection. Take altruism. Why, Dawkins asks, should we want to help strangers-the "orphaned child weeping," or tsunami victims-if they can be of no direct help to us? It's an important question; one, Dawkins admits, that Darwinism doesn't "easily explain." But instead of turning to sociology or brain chemistry, he speculates that altruism is like sexual desire. We don't desire only those with whom it would be advantageous to mate. But hey, when we were baboons in "strong, stable bands," we helped and desired each other. So maybe, in humans, these are vestigial urges-maybe when you give a bum a quarter and feel strangely attracted to a surly barrista, you are experiencing Darwinian "misfirings," "blessed, precious mistakes." Maybe. Or maybe humans, having higher cognition and more complex societies than baboons, have these urges for reasons that are only related to natural selection. But why bother asking that, when we already have our theory of everything?

Most of Dawkins' book, though, isn't about religion and natural selection. Really it's an atheist tract. Or think of it as a primer, containing everything from refutations of Thomas Aquinas' "proofs" to the dubious morality of scripture. All this would be illuminating, if The God Delusion didn't read as if it were written with closed fists. Dawkins is a reputedly a good writer, and this may be evident in his other books. In this case, though, I grew impatient after the fifth time he (a) announced that a joke was coming; (b) told the joke; (c) reminded the reader that he had just read a joke. This may seem anti-intellectual: perhaps I should critique only the quality of his ideas. But style matters too. Especially when one has just read about the same topics in three previous books.

Not a Horseman: R.D. Gold

Now I must cop to another mistake. When I came across R.D. Gold's book, I assumed that he had written a kind of atheistic primer for Jews-which was why I thought Gold should ride with the Horsemen. Instead, with Bondage of the Mind: How Old Testament Fundamentalism Shackles the Mind and Enslaves the Spirit: Towards a Better Understanding of the Religious Experience Gold seems to be going for the world's longest subtitle.

Well, that and a book-length debunking of the tenets of Orthodox Judaism-which, to Gold, is synonymous with fundamentalism. An American Jew, Gold is troubled by the growing "aggressiveness" of Orthodox Jewry's proselytizing. Although there's little personal information about him, in his book or on the web, it seems safe to say that he was inspired by the Horsemen: he calls fundamentalism "one of the most noxious forces in the history of mankind." But Gold doesn't go as far as atheism, arguing instead that religion "can play a positive role in one's life-sociologically, philosophically, and psychologically."

Gold spends the better part of his book explaining that the Torah is "a fanciful account of Jewish history, not a historical record of what really happened." In other words, the Torah was not revealed at Mt. Sinai, the Exodus never occurred, there was no conquest of Canaan, and so on. In addition, Biblical prophecy, the "uniqueness of the Jewish people," and the "superior morality" of the Orthodox are all illusions or logical fallacies.

All of Gold's arguments are sound. As is the second, shorter part of the book, which presents a guardedly positive description of Reconstructionist Judaism. Here, the author also suggests that a propensity for religious or spiritual longings may be "hard-wired" into the human brain. But just whom is Gold addressing? Less religious folks like me are not going to start shlepping to shul just because "the operating system of the brain" says that it's a good idea. Nor will fundamentalists, Jewish or otherwise, be swayed by neurology.

Who's Still Reading?

Actually, the question of intended audience is a crucial one for all the aforementioned books. Only Dennett overtly wishes to cajole a religious reader into re-examining faith. The rest of them seem to be talking to people who already believe what they do. And what is the point of that? I did find it instructive to read Dawkins' speculations about morality and natural selection. But I'm not a creationist. Indeed, while I have reservations about all these books, for the most part I can't argue against their theses. That's because while I do believe in God, I also know that belief in His existence is not proof of His existence: there is no logical argument for faith.

Similarly, I know that you cannot claim a causal link between religious belief and ethical behavior. You could even argue the opposite, considering just how many religions have a long history of oppression and slaughter. Thus while I may irrationally ascribe to Judaism, I believe that religion has no place in any government or legal system. But these books aren't really about the separation of church (or synagogue) and state. These books are against religion, or fundamentalism, even though there's barely a chance in hell that an "Islamofascist" or a Kahanist or a Rapture-ready Christian will ever read them, let alone become "brights."

Why not? Because human beings are irrational. Against our own self-interests, we smoke, we eat too much cake, and we don't save money. Against all evidence to the contrary, we believe in God, or gods, or that a savior was born in Nazareth. And we kill each other in the names of these gods. It's depressing, but I don't see how we can stop it. Even if we could, we'd find "reasons" to bash each other's brains out anyway. I'm not concerned about the apocalypse; nor, paradoxically, do I place much faith in the elevating power of reason. People being what they are-that is, venal and stupid-I can easily imagine bloody wars over the question of who is more of a secular humanist.

Christopher Hitchens wants to know why Nelson Mandela hasn't denounced Robert Mugabe, and insists that "[b]y his silence about what is happening in Zimbabwe, Mandela is making himself complicit in the pillage and murder of an entire nation, as well as the strangulation of an important African democracy." The most generous interpretation of this sentence is that Hitchens doesn't know what 'complicit' means.

The thing is, Mandela has denounced Mugabe. He has described Mugabe as aMadiba With Springbok Captain Francois Pienaar: The founding image of the rainbow nation paradigm example of African "'tyrants' who cling to power...'who have made enormous wealth, leaders who once commanded liberation armies.' They had come to 'despise the very people who put them in power' and 'think it is their privilege to be there for eternity.'" For good measure, Mandela added that "'we have to be ruthless in denouncing such leaders.'"

That denunciation of Mugabe came a year into Mandela's retirement from politics, when he was already eighty-two years old, at the height of a political, agricultural, and financial crisis in Zimbabwe. It made no difference in Zimbabwe whatsoever. So Hitchens' notion that "the smallest word" from Mandela would make a "huge difference" is patent nonsense. His complaint amounts to accusing Mandela of being culpable for "the pillage and murder of an entire nation" because he hasn't denounced Mugabe frequently or recently enough to satisfy Christopher Hitchens, regardless of the negligible practical effect of such a denunciation. Which is a distinctly less compelling indictment.

Incidentally, Hitchens' failure to give an answer to his own question isn't for lack of having received one. George Bizos told Hitchens that Mandela is "a very old man" whose "doctors have advised him to avoid anything stressful." Well, that just won't do it for Hitchens, who insinuates that Bizos—the heroic human rights activist and counselor to the defendants in the Rivonia trial as well as (more recently) to Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai—is prevaricating to cover up for Mandela's "squalid compromise."

It can't be that Bizos is stating the simple truth that Mandela is a frail ninety-year-old man whose body has been wrecked by decades of abuse and malnutrition and who lives in constant pain. It can't be that finally after all these years, his mind is beginning to show signs of what happens to a human mind after enduring for so long: Just before the Rugby World Cup final between South Africa and England last year, Mandela mistakenly called his beloved Springboks 'the All Blacks,' the nickname of their arch-nemesis New Zealand. That's not a minor lapse. It would be like a passionate fan of the Red Sox inexplicably calling them 'the Yankees,' at least if his support of the Red Sox were a profound symbol of his nation's post-apartheid reconciliation with which everyone from his country is intimately familiar.

South African blogger Michael Trapido puts things more politely than I can: "Madiba, of all people, has merited his greatness and earned his rest. While we would all love to see him as much as we can, exerting pressure will only shorten his time with us and be of benefit to nobody." Less politely, Hitchens believes Mandela owes it to Hitchens to give himself a coronary episode. Otherwise he's a squalid moral compromiser with Zimbabwean blood on his hands.

Next week in Slate: Christopher Hitchens explains that Martin Luther King's silence on genocide in Darfur proves that the once great man has descended into the squalor of moral relativism.

Last night the 92nd Street Y hosted a debate between Mr. "Shalom in the Home" Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and the inimitable Christopher Hitchens on the existence of God, something so wholly unprovable that the only guaranteed outcomes were bruised egos and hangover scars from all the ecclesiastical elbowing and bad kosher wine. The buzz around the sold-out event was louder than a book-selling rabbi's shrill or a drunk Englishman's demand for another drink. (Just speaking stereotypically of course.)

The 92Y Blog has a video excerpt from the evening, and we asked bloggers in attendance for feedback. Looks like God took a beating of Biblical proportions:

Felix Salmon: "I can't recall ever seeing such a lopsided debate -- if 'debate' is the mot juste, which it really isn't. Boteach didn't even attempt to defend his side of the motion, preferring instead to bash Hitchens's book; he ignored substantially everything that Hitchens said. His logorrhea was an embarrassment, especially when it became obvious that he had no strategy at all: all of his points about evolution, for instance, even if they had hit their mark (which they didn't) did nothing to bolster his purported cause. In any case, he was disqualified on account of Godwin's Law so many times that Hitchens would have won by default even if he didn't win overwhelmingly on the merits."

Rex Sorgatz: "Rabbi Shmuley Boteach proved, once and for all, that god is not dead. He's just exceptionally boring."

Neal Ungerleider: "Here's the thing... despite both Hitchens and Boteach being annoying, self-righteous egomaniacs, there's a difference between the two. Last night's debate taught me that Hitchens is an intelligent, annoying, self-righteous egomaniac. I wish I could say the same for Boteach. However, he still didn't convince me on the non-existence of God. Sorry, Hitch."

Lilit Marcus: "Thanks, Shmuley Boteach, for caring more about selling copies of your latest book than about making people who believe in God not come off like complete morons."

Phoebe Maltz: "I found myself wishing the rabbi could make one coherent point, not just evoke the Holocaust every two seconds, only to call Hitchens 'not a Nazi, but.'"

Sara Ivry: "Boteach’s repeated use of the name 'Christoper Hitchens' really made me think of the Bill Murray segment of Coffee and Cigarettes where RZA and GZA keep calling Bill Murray 'BillMurray,' as if one word. It made the whole debate seem particularly absurd, but at least brought back the good days of Wu Tang."

Daniel Radosh: After the way Hitchens treated Boteach, it was a little hypocritical of him to chastise God for condoning bloodbaths. To see the rabbi reduced literally to incoherent sputtering was almost sad, but then again, he had no one to blame by himself. Declaring that Steven Jay Gould, author of the classic essay 'Evolution as Theory and Fact,' did not believe in evolution, was probably not the wisest strategic gambit. I think the exchange that best captured the evening came when Boteach accused Hitchens of 'character assassination,' and Hitchens retorted, 'you should be more concerned that your character is committing suicide right here in front of everyone.'"

David Kelsey: "In a strange twist demonstrating that this debate was not personal in the least, both men argued that the other’s moral decency proved his own point. Boteach argued that morality came from religion generally, and Judaism’s influence specifically. 'It’s our morality he is embracing,' insisted Boteach. But Hitchins countered that, 'Religion borrows its morality from us, not us from religion.'”

Jeff Bercovici: "Hitchens wiped the floor with Boteach to such an extent that it was actually Hitchens who lost, in a sense, just by showing up. Lost stature, that is. He should be debating his equals, not publicity-hungry TV rabbis."

Rachel Sklar: "In the cab on the way home, we coined a new phrase: 'To Shmuley,' denoting the making of pathetic, unsupported non-sequitur arguments and the taking of flailingly weak intellectual positions, with a dash of name-dropping bluster thrown in for good measure. Excruciating. Christopher Hitchens could Bo-teach him a few things about theology!"

Emily Gordon: "Is God a mystical force or a conscious mind (I liked the moderator's vision of 'a New Yorker cartoon kind of God'), a present parent or a deadbeat dad, the same idea in many forms (including nonreligious ones) or accessible only by secret red phone? How can people be born moral, or inherently moved by religion or the Golden Rule, given all the baddies that both Hitchens and Boteach included in their survey of humanity, and how do you account for their nasty behavior? There are countless questions that could have made for a spirited and genuinely intellectual debate instead of the ping-pong of statistics, political arcana, and smooth putdowns--all of which I enjoyed, of course--that stood in for it. I would have liked to have heard how humanism can transcend the question altogether, or account for both points of view in a civilized and meaningful way, but it was not to be. I admire the Y for holding the debate, though, and perhaps it can be reprised with different and more fruitful combinations."

As Andrew Sullivan would say, money quote:

Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care, and flippant and fast and loose with national security: The case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut. Of course, against all these considerations you might prefer the newly fashionable and more media-weighty notion that if you don't show her enough appreciation, and after all she's done for us, she may cry.

That's about right. But let's add, willing to throw any vulnerable group under the bus --- from the Ricky Ray Rector photo-op slaughter to the Dick Morris-inspired DOMA to the last few weeks of innuendo suggesting Barack Obama was a crack dealer --- purely for self-aggrandizement. As for her vaunted experience, let's just say she was a reverse Eleanor Roosevelt: amplifying and exacerbating all the ugly features of her husband's administration.

There's been a lot of talk about the "New Atheism" recently. Last week, I confessed to not having a clue what distinguished "new" atheism from "old," and not for a lack of acquaintance with atheist ideas, past and present. The Damon Linker piece Stefan links to below is helpful in that it both acknowledges that the supposedly identifying feature of "new" atheism isn't new at all, and also gives a historical and analytic account of atheism's two strands. Unfortunately, Linker's analysis is barely more rigorous than Matthew Yglesias's (new atheists are jerks; old atheists were not), which is unsurprising given how superficial his understanding of the history of the relevant ideas is.

According to Linker, there are two basic approaches (for lack of a better term) to atheism, "one primarily concerned with the dispassionate pursuit of truth, the other driven by a visceral contempt for the personal faith of others." True, the latter is relatively newer than the former, but since each stretches back at least to the 18th century, 'old' and 'new' aren't terribly informative descriptions of them. So Linker goes with "Liberal Atheists" (the good kind) versus "Ideological Atheists" (the bad kind).

The deficiencies in Linker's argument come to the fore almost immediately. Among the liberal atheists are: Socrates, Sextus Empiricus, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, and Kant. Among the ideological atheists are: Comte, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Some prima facie objections: In what sense can Socrates or the ancient stoics plausibly be called "liberals" (or "atheists," for that matter)? In what sense can their liberalism, whatever on earth it might consist in, be comparable to the liberalism of the Enlightenment? What is the common ideology uniting Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and Dennett? (Illiberalism, apparently. More on that in a moment.)

Let's pause on just a few of Linker's examples. I have in front of me a copy of David Hume's Enquiry. Hume, let us recall, is supposed to be a liberal atheist. Here are the famous concluding lines of his masterwork:

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry or illusion.

Granted, this isn't quite as radical an idea as Diderot's hope of strangling the last king with the entrails of the last priest, but it is at least as radical as Sam Harris's proposal that public schools "announce the death of God." In fact, simply announcing the death of God is considerably less likely to halt the transmission of religious belief to younger generations than burning all books of theology. Perhaps Linker should have another go at explaining how it is that Hume belongs to one intellectual tradition and Sam Harris another, and try harder this time. For that matter, perhaps he can explain why having public schools instruct children to proclaim "one nation under God" every morning is a liberal value. (I must pause here to observe that misinterpreting David Hume seems to be a stock in trade of TNR writers. As I explain at some length here, whereof Linker and Leon Wieseltier cannot speak, thereof they should remain silent.)

Linker's remaining examples are similarly risible. Socrates, presumably in virtue of the fact that Plato records him as questioning the preconceived beliefs of his fellow Athenians, is counted among the liberal atheists. Presumably this is so because there is no other evidence of any kind that Socrates was an atheist, let alone that atheism in the modern sense is a concept that can be applied to ancient Athens. (Linker, noting that Aristophanes' inculpation of Socrates in The Clouds contributed to the latter's execution, seems to be endorsing the idea that Aristophanes' accusations were accurate.) In the Phaedo, by contrast, Socrates recounts for his followers an elaborate myth of creation and reincarnation, and as he approaches his death, instructs Crito to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius. (Needless to say, Linker completely elides the difficulty inherent to attributing any views to Socrates in light of the fact that everything we know of Socrates' beliefs is filtered through Plato, and further, that Plato, as a proponent of a kind of totalitarian aristocracy, is hardly an exemplar of the liberal politics Linker seeks to foist on Plato's teacher.)

Likewise, Sextus Empiricus' beliefs are just totally incongruous to modern ideas of theism and atheism. I leave it to readers to decide whether Sextus' claims that we should suspend all judgments, that the acquisition of knowledge is impossible, and that we should live our lives utterly indifferent to whether we are on a torture rack or in the throes of ecstasy, constitute a hitherto unrecognized thread of the liberal atheist tradition, or whether instead including Sextus in the liberal atheist camp is a desperate effort to get recalcitrant data to fit a theoretical procrustean bed. It's worth noting, however, that the Pyrrhonian cosmology --- eternal recurrence of the same --- is also Nietzsche's cosmology.* Yet Sextus and Nietzsche, neither of them atheists in the same sense that Hitchens, Dennett, and Dawkins are, sit on opposite sides of Linker's divide. Funny, that.

We can go on. Kant represents liberal atheism? But Kant was not an atheist, and whether or not he can meaningfully be called a liberal is very much up for debate. (I say he can't.) Kant and Hume both belong to the same camp? But Kant and Hume sit at opposite poles of the most contentious debate of Enlightenment philosophy, namely empiricism vs. rationalism. Rousseau's skepticism was "self-limiting"? Are we talking about the same Rousseau whose policy prescriptions for education are as radical as anything in Plato (let alone Sam Harris), and who advocated government acting according to a "general will" which might not bear any actual relation to the preferences of the governed? Etc. etc. Read all of Linker if you don't believe me that every single example he adduces in support of his analysis is historically or theoretically confused, and that every thinker he cites could be construed according to criteria he provides as belonging to either of his camps.

The reason Linker's distinction is so historically flimsy, that his proffered exemplars of each tradition could just as easily belong to the other, is that it is not a conceptual distinction, and no logical rule precludes maintaining both sets of beliefs that Linker suggests characterize each camp: There is nothing inconsistent in affirming, on the one hand, that people should be free to reach their own conclusions about ontological and theological questions, and on the other hand, that certain answers to ontological and theological questions deserve contempt. Nor is there anything illiberal in trying to convince one's peers of the rightness of a certain view, provided one makes no effort to coerce them.

Conceding this point without realizing it, Linker writes that

[T]he tone of today's atheist tracts is so unremittingly hostile that one wonders if their authors really mean it when they express the hope, as Dawkins does in a representative passage, that "religious readers who open [The God Delusion] will be atheists when they put it down." Exactly how will such conversions be accomplished?

Well, so what? The fact that Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris adopt a hostile tone doesn't mean that they don't wish to persuade anyone. They could have simply embraced a poor strategy for persuasion. Even if so, their strategy is at least as effective for persuading believers as the one Linker endorses in citing the example of Sidney Hook: quietly noting that the evidence for theism is minimal, and observing that religious belief is a comfort for many people against loneliness and fear of cosmic meaninglessness (Marx made this observation too, by the way, and in fairly stirring language). Is the idea supposed to be that believers who read Hook's line on religion, finding his civility irresistible, will take the next possible opportunity to resign from their congregations and join the closest chapter of the Ethical Culture Society?

Or is the idea, instead, supposed to be that to try to persuade one's peers that their beliefs are false is in and of itself illiberal? I suspect this is indeed Linker's argument, as I can't find any other way to interpret the conjunction of the purely descriptive claim that

[A]lthough I may settle the question of God to my personal satisfaction, it is highly unlikely that all of my fellow citizens will settle it in the same way--that differences in life experience, social class, intelligence, and the capacity for introspection will invariably prevent a free community from reaching unanimity about the fundamental mysteries of human existence, including God.

with the claim that atheists like Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris cannot accept this state of affairs. Since all three of them do in fact acknowledge that this description of the world is true, in what sense can they not accept it? The fact that it is "highly unlikely" that a free society will reach unanimity about theological questions does not entail that it is impermissible to both pose and answer such questions in a public forum. Either Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris' beliefs about religion are true, or they're false. If they're false, then by all means refute them. If they're true, then adopt them. The tone in which they are expressed doesn't enter the calculation.

*Well, there's a question in both cases of whether eternal recurrence should be interpreted literally or as a heuristic device.

On Friday we spotlighted Ariela M’s apt deconstruction of Christopher Hitchens’s Slate piece Bah, Hanukkah, but I wanted to briefly discuss what about that piece I think is worthy of attention.

Christopher Hitchens Says: God is not great, but whiskey and cigarettes areMostly, I think Hitchens is full of crap, but when he points out that the Hasmoneans were imperialistic, and brutal, it’s not something to be ignored. We tend to tell the stories surrounding our holidays as if they had clear beginnings and endings the way fairy tales do, but that’s just not the case. The miracle of the oil is not the end of the story of the Hasmoneans. The warriors still had a great deal of work to do to protect the Jewish people from Greek influence, and if that meant killing Jews who had assimilated—so be it.

I do understand that was pretty much the war aesthetic of the day. People killed other people for disagreeing with them all the time. That doesn’t make it okay, though, and I am frustrated by how much we glorify the Maccabbees and generally side with the Hasmoneans when the Hasmoneans really were tyrants.

Chanukkah is a holiday that simply does not acknowledge any kind of middle ground between religion and secular life, and that the problem with it, and with the time period it glorifies. Hitchens may be a gasbag, but when he condemns the Maccabbees for slaughtering the Greeks and the ideas about reason that they brought with them he’s not just whistling Dixie.

I’ve kind of abandoned our regularly scheduled posts this week in favor of Hanukkah coverage, but Ariela M left such a good comment that we have to honor it with comment of the week:

Tamar,

I usually love what you write, but here I feel like your response to Hitchens's piece was a bit wimpy.  Let's be up-front here:  the Hitchens essay attacking Hanukah is a load of crap.  He introduces his point by glorifying epicurean culture, which is a bizarre move coming from someone who is quick to see the worst in any contemporary religious culture.  But the Maccabean critique of epicurean Hellenism was totally legitimate.  The epicureans glorified pleasure and physical beauty.  It was about eating whatever you wanted to the point where you got sick.  It was about worshipping perfect naked bodies, and considering physically flawed people to be worthless.  It was about maximizing the pleasure of powerful male heads of household at the expense of just about everyone else -- women, male slaves, etc.  They weren't exactly concerned about the widow and the orphan.

Hebrew culture, by contrast, offered some different values.  Instead of stuffing any old thing that looked good into your mouth, the Hebrew or Jew was supposed to think about each bite that went in and where it came from -- was it killed in a proper manner (kashrut), was it tithed to support the important institutions of society (truma and ma'aser), were corners of the field left for the poor (leket, shichecha, etc.)?  Instead of treating slaves and the poor as though they were sub-human, the Hebrew or Jew had serious constraints on the ownership of slaves and had important responsibilities to the less fortunate in society.  Instead of worshiping physical beauty, the Hebrew or Jew was taught the value of "Physical grace is deceptive and beauty is empty" (from the Woman of Valor verses).

 Besides ignoring the valid reasons that the Maccabees had for resisting being coerced to become Greeks, Hitchens also dismisses Greek imperialism by jumping to the fact that the Hasmonean regime that emerged was corrupt and brutal.  But how does this excuse Greek imperialism or establish that the Jews should have succumbed to it?  As my preschooler would say, two wrongs don't make a right.  As someone older than a preschooler might note, the eventual excesses of the French Revolution are no reason to stop celebrating the Revolution and its motivating ideals.  Similarly, we don't stop celebrating July 4th just because the American revolutionaries tarred and feathered their enemies (but maybe Hitchens thinks we should?).

Hitchens next parts ways with sanity altogether when he blames the Maccabees for creating Christianity in a bizarre twist on the old saw of blaming the Jews for killing Jesus.  For good measure, he pins the rise of Islam on the Jews as well.  So according to Hitchens, the Jews DID "cause" September 11th.

On a more serious note, Hitchens completely ignores what Hanukah has been for the past two thousand years of rabbinic Judaism.  The appeal of a story in which a small band of Jews stood up to a large, powerful empire that wanted to destroy them is not hard to understand for a people who spent much of the last 2000 years living as a small band of Jews dominated, oppressed, and terrorized by large powerful empires of Christians throughout Europe.

Finally, I can't help but point out Hitchens's fundamental misunderstanding of the First Amendment.  The First Amendment does not privilege "enlightenment" over "faith," as he fantasizes.  On the contrary, the First Amendment, had it existed in ancient Greek Palestine, would have protected the right of the Jews to continue to practice their religion freely, eating their kosher food and worshiping in their temple, free from any coercion by the Greek majority.  Granted, it would also have protected the right of the Hellenizing Jews to assimilate to Greek culture, but it most certainly NOT have protected the Greeks' right to defile the temple and ban Jewish practices.

Finding things to criticize about the texts and actions of people from more than 2000 years ago does not take a genius.  It's easy.  It's cheap shots.  What's challenging is finding continued worth and value in ancient texts and rituals, which is one of the reasons I usually enjoy reading your column.

I have to run to get ready for Shabbat now, so I can’t give the lengthy response that I want to except to say that I dropped the ball here.  My post was written in response to Steve Almond’s piece on Jewcy, and I just added in the line about Slate right before publication, without spending the appropriate time analyzing Hitchens’s writing.  Ariela is right about everything she says here, though I still hesitate to side with the Maccabees with such zeal.  I think Jews should be held to a higher standard, and that should mean an absence of brutality which is just not evident in the Maccabees’s behavior.

At any rate, more on this on Monday.  Shabbat Shalom and Happy Chanukkah to all!

Matthew Yglesias took a trip to the Netherlands recently, and, as if struck by Zeus's own thunderbolt, discovered that secularists in Europe tend to come into conflict with the most combative and aggressive modes of religiosity there, whereas secularists in the United States tend to come into conflict with the most combative and aggressive modes of religiosity here. What he takes away from this observation is that secularism in Europe can be allied to right-wing nationalism, as it shares, according to him, a common goal of minimizing the spread of Islam, though each group has its own motivations. In fact, there is no reason why European secularists couldn't in principle welcome immigrants from Muslim countries; what they can't and shouldn't abide is any effort to amend European civil law to conform to Islamic religious norms, including calls for exceptions within Muslim communities to equal rights for women and gays.

Granted, there are European political figures who are both secularist and anti-immigrant, e.g., Pim Fortuyn --- though it's worth noting that his party, the List Pim Fortuyn, like Connecticut for Lieberman, was an ego trip and not a movement. In general, however, collaboration between anti-immigrant and secularist forces in Europe is a tactical accident, and as there is no reason a secularist who does not maintain anti-immigrant priors should have any principled objection to Muslim immigrants per se, such an alliance is likely to dissolve as Muslims assimilate into European culture.

Conversely, the same rationale that Yglesias points to as the cause of xenophobe-secularist cooperation in Europe exists in the United States. Right wing nationalists here are doing their (thankfully insufficient) damnedest to keep out the Mexicans. Secularists might just as easily be alarmed by a huge population of Catholic would-be immigrants. Yet there is no such alliance between anti-immigrant populists and secularists in the US. And that's because Mexican Catholics neither aggressively proselytize on behalf of their faith, nor do they engage in efforts to subvert or amend the law to restrict other people's personal freedoms. Instead, it's illiberal native-born Protestants who do that, and consequently, it's illiberal native-born Protestants against whom American secularists direct their efforts.

The root of Yglesias's analytic confusions is his free susbtitution of the concept of atheism for the concept of secularism, and back again. I'll assume he, and Jewcy's readers, are well aware of what the difference is, and refrain from elaborating. What he takes to be the voices of strident anti-religiosity are atheists. The warm and fuzzy ecumenical pluralists who tolerate religious diversity over here are secularists. Except that, when push comes to shove and Christianists make efforts to insert their faith into civil law, secularists push back as strongly as they can, just as European secularists push back against Islamism. Amazing, I know.

Whereas Yglesias fails to draw relevant distinctions between atheism and secularism, he ahistorically fabricates distinctions among varieties of atheism. What, pray tell, is this innuendo supposed to mean:

the "new atheism" -- which is mostly like the old atheism but involves people acting like jerks

The "jerks" he has in mind are Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Which leads me to wonder, what point in time is the dividing line between the "old" and the "new" atheism, 2006? It certainly can't be very long ago. In 18th century Scotland, where the Enlightenment produced Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, and David Hume, the father of modern philosophical skepticism and atheist par excellence (nobody has ever substantively improved upon Hume's savaging of the argument from design) --- in other words, the birthplace and birth time of modern materialism --- people were still burned at the stake for heresy. Even so, atheist literature throughout history treats religion every bit as caustically as Hitchens and Dawkins do today. The "old atheists" that David Broder might approve of are figments of Yglesias's imagination. The only "new" development in atheism is that by the late 20th century, the combination of free speech doctrines and changing mores enabled atheists to come out of the closet in relatively large numbers without fear of ostracism or worse --- and even today, atheists are a reviled minority in the US. So is the distinction between "old" and "new" atheists anything other than that the latter express their views openly?

To Yglesias, the "new" atheists are distinguished by their strident rhetoric, which is entirely unlike the un-strident rhetoric of, say Matthew Yglesias, in the very same post, alleging that "Will Saletan...proclaim[ed] the truth of white supremacy." Not that I particularly disagree. But please explain to me what makes Yglesias's remark an example of civility while Hitchens' and Dawkins' oratory remains vicious. On the other hand, if nothing intrinsic to each specimen of rhetoric makes any more intemperate than the others, we should consider the possibility that the Hitchens-Dawkins line on religion only strikes anyone as especially strident because religion in our society continues to be elevated to a protected sphere of discourse, such that criticizing religion in terms just as forceful as one would criticize anything else is somehow out-of-bounds purely in virtue of the fact that it is religion being criticized. One of the premises of the "new" atheists (if we must), is that religion deserves no such special privilege.

Have I mentioned that sneering at the supposed stridency of contemporary atheists is reading from a worn-out, hackneyed, lazy, positively Pragerish script?

Christopher Hitchens is a thorn in my side. By day I flack for Mr. Hitchens old employer The Nation, where I field regular calls from rabid atheists trying to reach him. God is Not Great didn't move me, but I was disturbed by his self-serving Vanity Fair piece last month, where Mr. Hitchens wrote too-little, too-late about a young man from California who enlisted in the Army on Mr. Hitchens advice and then was killed in Iraq. I thought I might actually meet Hitchens last summer, when The Nation squared off with Vanity Fair in a publishing league softball game. I imagined him standing at home plate, a scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other, staring impassively as the pitches flew by. Didn't happen.

So when I saw this week that Mr. Hitchens had lobbed a broadside against Hanukkah in Slate, I wanted to dismiss it.

The basic premise of "The Triumph of Tribal Jewish Backwardness" is this: 150 years before the birth of Christ, Jews in Syria and Palestine were starting to get into some crazy shit. Jews were reading Greek intellectuals, heart-ing Epicure, and straying increasingly towards a spiritual framework rooted in philosophy rather than the cumbersome conventions of the Torah. Mr. Hitchens, himself known for taking a little too much pride in his genitals, brings foreskin into the picture, noting that Jews fondness for Epicure meant they were starting to question circumcision.

Enter Hanukkah. Created, Hitchens argues, as a way to pit the secular populism of the Maccabees (good) against the imperialistic and decadent tendencies of Hellenism (bad), Hanukkah was designed to stop the slide into secular hedonism. It's Hanukkah as propaganda, selling straying Jews on the miracle of the burning lamp before they stopped believing entirely. From there, Mr. Hitchens writes, all competing visions of hell broke loose:

The Hasmonean regime that resulted from the Maccabean revolt soon became exorbitantly corrupt, vicious, and divided, and encouraged the Roman annexation of Judea. Had it not been for this no-less imperial event, we would never have had to hear of Jesus of Nazareth or his sect-which was a plagiarism from fundamentalist Judaism-and the Jewish people would never have been accused of being deicidal "Christ killers." Thus, to celebrate Hanukkah is to celebrate not just the triumph of tribal Jewish backwardness but also the accidental birth of Judaism's bastard child in the shape of Christianity. You might think that masochism could do no more. Except that it always can. Without the precedents of Orthodox Judaism and Roman Christianity, on which it is based and from which it is borrowed, there would be no Islam, either.

Jesus Christ! So, while Christmas to Mr. Hitchens is a silly celebration of false or ridiculous idols (he's right on this count, pointing out that pine trees, yule logs and plastic farm animals have nothing to do with Christ) Hanukkah is an actual dangerous reveling in the symbolic relics of a bloody and oppressive regime.

While I could point out that Mr. Hitchens own support for bloody and oppressive governments run deep (see above re: Hitchens insistence that the War in Iraq is morally just) I found it hard to dismiss his case. If Hanukkah is really the bloodlust fandom of an imperial regime -- rather than the silly but lighthearted celebration of an oil-based miracle -- is it right to burn the candles bright?

Mr. Hitchens is frustrating because the foundations of his arguments are always so subjective. Were the Maccabees really oppressive? Is his reading of the Torah -- of the theology (or philosophy) behind his arguments -- sound? Ultimately, these details don't matter. In reality, Hanukkah has become the epicurian delight Hitchens extolls: a celebration of food and family -- of gifts and games. No foreskin, but still. Is Hanukkah over-hyped in an effort to conflate it with Christmas and fold Jews into the holiday shopping season? Of course. Should it be state-supported and bolstered by publicly-financed menorahs? No. Is it a dangerous orgy of facist gesamtkunstwerk? Hardly -- not in the realistic context its celebrated.

Hitchens may be right -- or at least on to something -- but more than that, he's silly. This week is Hanukkah, so it must be time to shit on Hanukkah. His is an opportunistic atheism, seeking out windows of opportunity to discredit religions and celebrations for reasons that only he really understands or takes to heart.

I just flew in from New York City and boy are my liver, kidneys, and soul (sorry, Josh) tired. I can finally say that I understand what Kingsley Amis, in his profound and subtle vade mecum On Drink, called the “metaphysical hangover.” I may never again leave the safety of my sun-drenched NorCal balcony. I mention this only because it’s a shame that my delightful Magic Mountain-style convalescence should be interrupted by blood-boiling nonsense like this:

What do you make of the following statement: “Asians are gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered.” While we’re at it, what do you think of this, incidentally from the same speaker: “The Black community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” Or this, the same speaker again: “I just don’t hear from moderate Judaism, do you?” And (yes, same speaker): “Strip-searching Irish people. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole Irish community and they start getting tough with their children.”

The speaker was Martin Amis and, yes, the quotations have been modified, with Asians, Blacks and Irish here substituted for Muslims, and Judaism for Islam—though, it should be stressed, these are the only amendments. Terry Eagleton, professor of English literature at Manchester University, where Amis has also started to teach, recently quoted the remarks in a new edition of his book Ideology: An Introduction. Amis, Eagleton claimed, was advocating nothing less than the “hounding and humiliation” of Muslims so “they would return home and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man’s law”.

The heated exchanges that followed were trivialised in the mainstream media as “a nasty literary punch-up”, “the talk of the literary world”, “a spat” between “two warring professors”, and the silence that followed seemed to confirm it as a passing tiff between two high-ranking members of the chattering class.

I see it differently. Amis’s views are symptomatic of a much wider and deeper hostility to Islam and intolerance of otherness.

The conceit of the opening paragraph (“yes, the quotations have been modified, with nonsense here substituted for the original remarks”) is jaw-dropping in its juvenility and disingenuousness, but there is much, much more to object to here. I was reminded of a great passage in Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great—rhetorically brilliant if not entirely convincing from a theological standpoint—in which he holds up the ninth and tenth commandments as examples of organized religion’s totalitarian leanings: “The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey. . . . The commandment at Sinai which forbade people even to think about coveting goods is the first clue. It is echoed in the New Testament by the injunction which says that a man who looks upon a woman has actually committed adultery already.”

The connection, of course, is that Amis’s remarks, spoken off the cuff in an interview, were a confession of an urge, a fact which Ronan Bennett acknowledges but which does nothing to soften his belief that Amis despises “otherness”: “Amis sought to excuse the passage quoted above by pointing out that it was prefaced by the words ‘There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, “The Muslim community . . . (etc)”’.” Later, Bennett notes, “He also confessed to ‘little impulses, urges and atavisms now and then’, which was uncomfortably like a collusive wink to the audience: we all have our little prejudices, don’t we?”

It’s difficult to argue that Amis hasn’t shot himself in the foot, but let’s look at that sentence. I don’t think Amis has admitted to “little prejudices.” I think “little frustrations,” or perhaps pretty big ones, is closer to the truth. Honesty doesn’t get one very far these days, when politicians are so often criticized for, as a friend of mine put it recently, not manipulating us skillfully enough. (What is a “gaffe,” ever, but a failure to control our reactions?) Yet, all Amis is guilty of here is honesty. He has stated in effect that his frustration and impatience with the secularizing impulse, such as it is, in Islam leads him to unpleasant thoughts, thoughts that his rational mind would (mostly) disavow.

In the other corner we have folks like Terry Eagleton and Ronan Bennett pretending that they have never pondered anything so base. Their vantage is not the real world of airport security or subway stop and search, but a liberal empyrean where human nature must be checked at the door. I wonder why, if the transcendent tolerance of Eagleton et al. really exists, we always hear that this or that comment or cartoon risks “radicalizing” the “moderate Muslim.” I’m not in the camp that claims the “moderate Muslim” doesn’t exist, but I’ve always wondered why one thought to be so easily inflamed to violence can be called “moderate.” In a sense, it’s the tread-lightly liberals, deathly afraid of this inevitable “radicalization,” who are most guilty of insulting Muslims. They call them lambs in public, but their secret thoughts couldn’t possibly be more clear.

Today’s New York Times print edition ran a cover story on Iraq accompanied by the kind of ample photo spread the paper usually fills with a buffet of limp corpses, weeping mothers, and soldiers in prosthetic rehabilitation. But today’s photos captured a joyous Baghdad wedding, an amiable Baghdad restaurant scene, and a busy Baghdad marketplace. The piece was about increased security and an emergent sense of normalcy in Iraq.

 

 From The New York Times:

The security improvements in most neighborhoods are real. Days now pass without a car bomb, after a high of 44 in the city in February. The number of bodies appearing on Baghdad’s streets has plummeted to about 5 a day, from as many as 35 eight months ago, and suicide bombings across Iraq fell to 16 in October, half the number of last summer and down sharply from a recent peak of 59 in March, the American military says.

As a result, for the first time in nearly two years, people are moving with freedom around much of this city. In more than 50 interviews across Baghdad, it became clear that while there were still no-go zones, more Iraqis now drive between Sunni and Shiite areas for work, shopping or school, a few even after dark. In the most stable neighborhoods of Baghdad, some secular women are also dressing as they wish. Wedding bands are playing in public again, and at a handful of once shuttered liquor stores customers now line up outside in a collective rebuke to religious vigilantes from the Shiite Mahdi Army.

 

If you’ve followed The Iraq War using The New York Times as your only source, you’re pretty confused right now. The narrative would run as follows: for four and half years American imperialists visited Armageddon on the innocent people of Mesopotamia. Then for four months the same foul forces employed a military shill and delivered a more attenuated version of hell-on-earth. Then on November 20, 2007, in some kind of Hawkingesque spacetime singularity, there was sudden hope and progress in Baghdad. And that’s just from the reporting side of the paper. If you’ve chanced to peek over the much touted “firewall” dividing the reportage on the front page from the analysis in the editorial and op-ed sections you’re really lost at sea. Because as Dowd, Kristoff, Rich and co. will tell you, this was not only an oil grab, a power grab, an Oedipal psychodrama, and a neoconservative delusion all at once, but it was also lost before it began.

 

So, why the change in The New York Times? Things have simply reached a saturation point. If credibility is a concern at all, you can only go so long saying black is white and white is black. With the flood of good news coming from Iraq, The Times knew the game was up.

 

I don’t think I’m alone in sensing a moment here. Christopher Hitchens’ Slate piece this week was a circumspect expression of thanks for the apparent turn of events in Baghdad. Hitch has, in the past, fallen prey to a small degree of premature triumphalism in regards to the war and it seems that genuine promise demands something a little more humble. He writes:

 

To have savaged and discredited al-Qaida in an open fight and to have taken down a fascist Baath Party, which betrayed its pseudosecularism by forging an alliance with al-Qaida, is to have scored an impressive victory on any terms. However, the price of this achievement was often the indulgence of some excessive conduct on the part of the Shiite parties and militias. The next stage must be the reining-in of the Sadrists and the discouragement of Iranian support for such groups. Again, one hardly dares to hope, but there are some promising signs.

Whether or not one is very hopeful (as am I) about Iraq it pays not to invite hubris. Anything can happen. But one thing needs to be mentioned more: to whatever extent normalcy prevails in today’s Iraq it cannot be called a “return” to that condition. Under Saddam Hussein, Iraqi normalcy meant a 24hour fear state and unimaginable misery. If things proceed satisfactorily in Iraq no one should say that the U.S. managed to stabilize a nation it destroyed. Rather, coalition forces succeeded in nurturing the growth of consensual government in a region that had never known anything like it.

 

I’m never not moved when Hitchens describes the American Revolution as the last revolution that’s still kicking. It’s with hope for Iraq that I refer to Mark Steyn’s recent syndicated piece about Thanksgiving and the blessings of the nation state. Steyn writes:

So Americans should be thankful they have one of the last functioning nation states. Because they've been so inept at exercising it, Europeans no longer believe in national sovereignty, whereas it would never occur to Americans not to. This profoundly different attitude to the nation state underpins in turn Euro-American attitudes to transnational institutions such as the U.N. But on this Thanksgiving the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American national sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive happens — a tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan — the U.S. can project itself anywhere on the planet within hours and start saving lives, setting up hospitals and restoring the water supply. Aside from Britain and France, the Europeans cannot project power in any meaningful way anywhere. When they sign on to an enterprise they claim to believe in — shoring up Afghanistan's fledgling post-Taliban democracy — most of them send token forces under constrained rules of engagement that prevent them doing anything more than manning the photocopier back at the base. If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable. It's not just Americans and Iraqis and Afghans who owe a debt of thanks to the U.S. soldier but all the Europeans grown plump and prosperous in a globalized economy guaranteed by the most benign hegemon in history.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Check out the Vanity Fair slide show. Izzy wants to include the waxing sequence as collateral content for our "hairy men" lead story. I'll let her go ahead and do that. 

Last seen preciously explaining why "[t]he discussion of [Che] Guevara is still divisive and complicated, years after his death, and it should be," the good folks over at Campus Progress have launched a jihad on use of the word "Islamofascism." They've been prompted to do so by David Horowitz's "Islamofascism Awareness Week," a right-wing roadshow that the former left-wing radical is taking to college campuses across the country. Anyways, it would be nice if liberals expressed as much outrage over actual Islamic Fascism as they have at David Horowitz's supposed exploitation of it for his own, nefarious political purposes.

The first (of many) errors in the piece is its authors' (Annika Carlson and Sarah Dreier) attempt to label the use of "Islamofascism" a "conservative smear tactic." It's true that many of those who use the word are "conservatives," but it was neither originated by conservatives nor is there anything inherently "conservative" about it's use." Christopher Hitchens, no conservative he, wrote about "fascism with an Islamic face" to describe the September, 11th terrorist attacks. Paul Berman is also a popularizer of the term. The authors attack Stephen Schwartz (a Jewcy contributor) without bothering to mention that the man is himself a Muslim and a scholar of Islam. But, alas, he is brushed off as a writer for the Weekly Standard, and thus his thoughts can be discarded.

Carlson and Dreier also take issue with the fact that "the term Islamofascism is offensive to Muslim Americans." Boo-hoo. There's nothing remotely offensive in the use of this phrase unless one is an intended target of its wrath, in which case, you're already offended by America's lascivious culture. Simply put, Muslims who are not themselves fascists -- who do not believe in the imposition of Sharia law, the stoning of women, the beheading of gays, the abolition of secularism -- have a duty to distinguish their peaceful Islam with that of the type that's trying to destroy Iraq and acquire nuclear weapons.

There's a lot of this walk-softly, lets-hold-hands type of stuff in the essay, and the best case for the continued use of the "Islamofascist" descriptor comes, unsurprisingly, from Christopher Hitchens. He was not responding to the Campus Progress piece in particular, but likely anticipated the liberal reaction that would likely follow from Horowitz's deliberately provocative campus outreach project. Hitch first points out that the Left has never had a problem using the word fascist to describe its political enemies (and I'll add that "fascist" flows from liberal lips today like shit from a goose when describing the Bush administration), particularly when referring to the ties between the Catholic Church and right-wing, authoritarian governments in Latin America, Spain and the Balkans. It appears then, that the Left's aversion to use of "Islamofascism" has much to do with the simple fact that Islam is a non-Western religion, supposedly comprised of the wretched of the earth, and thus, a different standard must apply to its most fanatical adherents, whose real motivation must, at "root" be a legitimate anti-imperialist impulse (for the most sinister and perverse form of this sort of thinking, see my essay on Columbia University professor Joseph Massad's rationalization of Muslim state homophobia as just that).

Read Ali Eteraz's Reply to this post, and Jamie Kirchick's Counter-Reply. 

Josh’s post about the Hitchens / D’Souza debate reminded me of Tobias Wolff on his wicked stepfather: “[A]n atheist of the Popular Science orthodoxy. (Jesus hadn’t really died, he had taken a drug that made him look dead so he could fake a resurrection later. The parting of the Red Sea was caused by a comet passing overhead. Manna was just the ancient word for potato.)” I’m in sympathy with Josh, but his neuroscience is of a piece with this triumphalist literal-mindedness:

Descartes believed that somewhere in the brain there was a driver’s seat for the soul—the site where “you” make the decision to act, whether morally or immorally. But the “I” that so many take for granted is known to be nothing more than the brain’s interpretation of its own complex functioning. Multiple things occur in the brain that the “I” isn’t aware of and couldn’t control no matter how hard it tried. . . . Whence did the soul of the “I” come into being in terms of human evolution? And how can something be transcendent if it can be surgically removed?

That last question certainly begs the question: In order to take Josh’s point, one has to take it on faith that the soul or the moral will can be surgically removed. This is hardly so apparent as he makes it seem. Evelyn Waugh, asked how someone as horrible as himself could claim to be a Christian, supposedly retorted, “Were it not for my religion, I would scarcely be a human being.” In God Is Not Great, Hitchens takes this idea and runs in the wrong direction with it. Some interviewer has just wondered how an atheist can possibly lead a moral life. Hitchens notes rather astutely that what the interviewer is really wondering is how he himself would lead a moral life without religion.

I no longer have my copy of the book—I liked it so much that I gave it to a family member. As I recall, and readers should correct me if I’m wrong, Hitchens regards this slip merely as proof of the interviewer’s moral turpitude. Don’t ask me why: I was fascinated by it, as I’ve always been by the story about Waugh, because it reminds me that people often force themselves to behave contrary to their nature, whether by reason or unreason. It’s nothing short of miraculous that one can use his brain against itself. My own neurological configuration, for instance, gives me the desire to smash the headlights of the guy who steals my parking space, but it also taketh it away. I see this as evidence that my brain is in working order.

But suppose I do smash those headlights. Suppose the gentleman in turn beats me into baby food—thus putting the moral reasoning center of my brain out of commission. Does this mean my soul has been “surgically removed”? A carpenter doesn’t cease to be a carpenter because he can’t use broken tools. Perhaps the soul is the carpenter, not the tool—the one who exercises the will, not the will itself. (I promise that this isn’t a coded Jesus reference, just the first analogy that came to mind.) This is by no means my own view of the conundrum, but the ease with which it presents itself suggests that the matter isn’t closed just because our understanding of the brain has deepened.

I can’t hope to address the question of the soul in the space of a blog post. What I hope to address is the lack of curiosity on both sides of this debate. Now, as Josh rightfully points out, D’Souza is by far the guiltier party. I first suspected that D’Souza was a lazy, thoughtless fraud when I read this post by James Wolcott about an advance copy of The Enemy at Home:

D’Souza makes a tired Buchananite reference to Piss Christ, so tired that its creator is misnamed as Jose Serrano. It’s Andres Serrano, of course, which any philistine should know. Perhaps the name will be corrected when the book is published, but there is no way to correct falsehoods such as labeling “Jose Serrano” a “liberal hero,” because these are fancies lodged in the penny arcade of D’Souza’s dim imagination.

Serrano’s work, despite its artistic deficiencies, wasn’t meant to be anti-Christian, but this fact does nothing to advance D’Souza’s paranoid views and must be ignored. No surprise there. D’Souza’s mind is so childish that when criticized by Scott Johnson in The New Criterion, he resorted to schoolyard taunts. Josh zeroes in on D’Souza’s accidental auto-refutation, to hilarious effect:

D’Souza actually made this point himself accidentally when he reminded us that in absence of evidence of unicorns he feels no need to speak out for their non-existence but simply lives as if there are none. I’d have liked to have heard Hitchens remind him that a) the belief in absurdity is offensive on its own b) that if part of the unicorn myth involved the sanctioning of murder in the name of one’s unicorn tribe, it would become necessary to fervently attack the belief in unicorns and that c) if Dinesh understands this principle with regard to unicorns, his willingness to suspend it for the Christian God proves his hypocritical selectivity . . .

This “hypocritical selectivity” and lack of curiosity reminded me of a letter sent to The New Criterion by a prominent and, for my money, breathtakingly brilliant Eastern Orthodox theologian, in response to my Hitchens review: “[I]n agreeing with Hitchens that the ‘argument from primary cause’ is infinitely regressive . . . he commits a very basic logical error. The one thing the idea of a primary cause cannot be is regressive.” Well, he’s right. He’s also pretending not to grasp my very basic objection, which is that believers choose the “vanishing point” of this regression to suit themselves. In Catholic high school it was presented to us very simply: “What caused the Big Bang, then? It must be God.” But the Big Bang could just as easily be the “uncaused cause,” as any schoolboy can see, and Young Hitchens would surely have demanded to know what brought about God.

Even the smartest guys in this knock-down, drag-out fight cling to their irrational prejudices and untested hypotheses. We can be thankful for that: It forces us to see that none of us really has it figured out. And we can take comfort in the fact that no matter what their faults, at least they’re not Dinesh D’Souza.

In the climate of our postmodern culture, few things are less "post" than defending science and rationality against superstition and wooly thinking. With most engaged in the hysterical bid to adopt the correctly "nuanced perspective" and a "wide reaching respect for difference" combined with an "open mind" that is "resistant to totalizing," it seems as if today one needn't look far to find the next public conversation where cognitive dissonance is celebrated and clear thinking is dismissed as "arrogance." Last night's King's College-sponsored debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D'Souza at the Center For Ethical Culture was only another such event.

Debate roundups for these scenarios can be every bit as useless as the book reviews of Hitchens and D'Souza's respective diatribes against and in favor of religion. Both debaters make their cases about as well as they can be made. Whether you prefer the acerbic anti-theistic style of one or the pulpit punditry of the other is a matter of taste. Whether you think one was more right than another, however, depends on your basic understanding of rational argumentation and the scientific method as well as the limitations of both.

What's most interesting in this regard is not D'Souza, who essentially regurgitates theistic errors and rhetorical sidesteps, but those in the audience who applauded his points. But this isn't to say they were all idiots. D'Souza himself is a well-spoken fellow, with a decent enough command of the history of science and the ins-and-outs of certain philosophical problems. It is precisely what he upheld in spite of intelligence and knowledge that becomes the most intriguing/disturbing. D'Souza knew the speed of light off the top of his head (easy enough, but still uncommon), he knew the legacy of seminal geneticists, and a few basics about Einstein (even if he tried underhandedly to pass him off as a theist). The majority of the great scientific minds throughout history, he said, were religious, therefore science is proof of religion's truth. He had the auditorium's Christians alight with the notion that their camp had been responsible for the majority of scientific accomplishment throughout history. But for the things he did know, did he not know that the majority of minds throughout history have been religious due in no small part to the threat of death for proclaiming any other worldview--a threat that has been with most humans for most of their years on this planet?

D'Souza's compartmentalized his thinking and is thus so unaware of what it feels like to stand on solid argumentative ground, he couldn't possibly be aware how much he's leap-frogging. What do I mean by leap-frogging? One example: in his opening statements, he proposed to prove the value of religion on the basis of evidence with no recourse to superstition. For the remainder of the discussion, he proceeded to remind everyone that certainty was problematic, thus negating the atheist's adherence to evidential argument. Furthermore, he consistently reproached Hitchens for not presenting evidence, meanwhile failing to live up to his initial promise. Instead, he reiterated the impossibility of evidence-based certainty. Whatever lily-pad will keep you from sinking, I guess...

But Hitchens could have done more to educate the folks who were getting off on his opponent's bullshit (and I mean that in the most Harry G. Frankfurt sense of the word). Not once did he remind Dinesh that atheism is not a firm belief but rather a stance with regard to knowledge. In fact, D'Souza actually made this point himself accidentally when he reminded us that in absence of evidence of unicorns he feels no need to speak out for their non-existence but simply lives as if there are none. I'd have like to have heard Hitchens remind him that a) the belief in absurdity is offensive on its own b) that if part of the unicorn myth involved the sanctioning of murder in the name of one's unicorn tribe, it would become necessary to fervently attack the belief in unicorns and that c) if Dinesh understands this principle with regard to unicorns, his willingness to suspend it for the Christian God proves his hypocritical selectivity and disqualifies him as one worth paying any attention to when he speaks about the universe and the human mind operating according to a rational set of laws.

But to Hitchens: why not school people in precisely how the human mind does work at this point in the argument? It certainly does obey laws--laws so material that the notions of subjectivity and consciousness on which the theist's argument rest get blown to smithereens. If a human subject with a "mind" who makes ethical decisions that transfer to his or her immortal soul suffers a brain injury impairing his or her interpretive systems, ability to read human emotions (key to the brain response we know as 'compassion') then what's happened to the soul? If I can remove the part of a person's brain that enables ethical judgment, have I not surgically removed their moral soul? This connection between what the religious call the soul and what is known about material brain functionality severely undermines the theist's notion of the "I" that makes choices that bear on "my" eternal soul. If I'm a neuroscientist, I can plug your immortal soul into a machine and map it's electricity.

Descartes believed that somewhere in the brain there was a driver's seat for the soul--the site where "you" make the decision to act, whether morally or immorally. But the "I" that so many take for granted is known to be nothing more than the brain's interpretation of its own complex functioning. Multiple things occur in the brain that the "I" isn't aware of and couldn't control no matter how hard it tried. The notion of heaven, this place where all the "I"s will someday go because of things they did or didn't do, is not commensurate with what is known about the brain. The human "I" in other words is little more than the transcendentalizing of an evolved brain phenomenon. If one accepts evolution, as D'Souza does, then one must also accept that these brains once had no ability to conceive of themselves in this way, much less to glorify it so. And so grows a new problem for the theist--not the atheist--to explain, one that isn't unlike the ensoulment debate regarding abortion. Whence did the soul of the "I" come into being in terms of human evolution? And how can something be transcendent if it can be surgically removed?

Many have charged the new atheists of wearing out an old argument and passing off as if its new. But these questions are completely current.