The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> something screwy with Hitchens

something screwy with Hitchens
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Thursday, October 7 2010, 14:36:10 (UTC)
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I find it harder and harder to reconcile Hitchens' enlightened and piercing critique of Christianity and all things religious with his almost faith-based conviction that Islam is the most dangerous force stalking the earth today. Itīs very like listening to one of the most intelligent and humane Europeans in the 30s say that Jews were the enemies of mankind. Something just doesnīt make sense.


One of the brilliant points Hitchens makes about the Church is that their recent apologies for a laundry list of crimes they committed against Humanity for centuries didnīt stop them from saying, "yes but from now on, weīre infallible again". The Church apologized for burning people, for forcibly converting people, it apologized for the Crusades, for teaching hatred towards Jews for centuries and for not doing enough to stop Hitler and on and on. A frightful list of "mistakes were made" but with never a sense that maybe they should no longer claim divine inspiration for the rest of the stuff they teach. Can such an institution ever be trusted again when it next condemns people or ideas or practices? His answer is a big fat "NO".


He also points out that contrary to the view that Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and other Facsist dictators were atheist, they were really nothing more then the Right Wing of the Catholic Church...they were either religious movements wrapped in a political disguise or political movements hiding behind god...take your choice.


Germany had banned its monarchy after WW I and instituted a pretty democractic republic...with another great constitution. This was overthrown and another sort of dictatorial rule imposed which went on to implement a final solution to one of the basic teachings of the Church, that Jews were to blame for killing the Christian god and also were enemies of the world. They apologized for it, both church and state, once they were defeated, but it had been their policy till then. Jews were responsible for the hatred Christians directed at them, Christians were not.


What amazes me is that Hitchens canīt see the same pattern playing out yet again. Neo-cons are the new fascist Right Wing of the Protestant Church in America...either that or they use the church to mask their crimes, take your choice. While Hitchens makes much of the separation of church and state in America, it means little when neo-cons, taking their oaths upon the Book of Revelations take office...they may well be secular in their political life, but they are implementing the same Christian ethic of demonizing and then wiping out, if they can, other religious groups with whom they have been in competition for ages, including, at one time, sects of their own faith. Only this time around they realize that they have to demonstrate actual "threats" not imaginery ones....and so "terrorism" is born, its midwife the same Christian Church and its secular arm.


Americaīs war on Iraq and Islam is faith-based. The need for it cannot be deduced from the facts...itīs justification is metaphysical and almost divinely ordained.


Why canīt Hitchens see that the same political forces which apologized for the Holocaust, "oops, we were wrong", are not to be trusted this time when they paint Islam in the same colors they just used against Judaism, which they admit, six million dead later, was a mistake and "we're very sorry". Why should anyone trust the church again when it again claims infallibility, or as in this case neutrality? And why should anyone believe again in any government, whose officials come from a Christian background, denunciations of Iran when they were so wrong on Iraq...or Iraq when they were so wrong on Vietnam, or against Muslims when they were so wrong on Jews?


It may have been the Church preaching the hatred of Jews,but it was the governments which supported those churches and allowed their teachings, who implemented the Final Solution...just as it was always the Secular Arm that the Church used when the actual killing had to be done, for god. America may not be officially Christian, but Christian teachings are the most wide spread and the government subsidizes those teaching through tax exemption...so there is support for the Christian religion in America...support and endorsement. And this is the same religion that stoked the fires against the Jews just a few decades ago. And itīs the Church again, though hiding behind neo-cons and "patriots" that is behind this latest Crusade against Muslims...though they will deny it strenuously.


Why does Hitchens believe whatever neo-cons and the Church say and do...when he sees so clearly, after the fact, that fascists (the old neo-cons) and the same Church were so wrong the last time around? I think the answer lies in his Euro-ness. He does tend to come across as a bit of a snob, an upper-crust aspiring sort of fellow. He admittedly prefers Western Society and values to MidEastern ones...he reminds me in this of those Europeans who looked down on Eastern Christians as being their inferiors, not because of Jesus, whom they both claimed to worship, but because they had "foreign" ways of worshipping him.

Hitchens finds the crimes of Christianity less reprehensible than the crimes of Islam...but even here he has to close one eye to do so for the historical record is clear; Christianity has been the far more barbarous and bloody religion, even towards its own adherents....no one has killed or tortured more Christians than have other Christians....but none of that matetrs to Hitchens because in the final analysis he isnīt as shocked by Christian crimes against humanity as he is that Muslims would dare emulate Christians and start committing some of those crimes themselves. For instance he makes much of Sunni killing Shia'a (if indeed they are responsible) as a sign of Islamīs utter depravity while forgetting sectarian violence among Christians for centuries right up to Ireland today...


Much like our nationalists who never see the murder of a Christian by another Christian as being worthy of martyrdom....neither does Hitchens see a crime as a crime, regardless of the religion of the criminal. Though Christianity, by his own indictment, has been bloody, awful and cruel in ways no other religion still present in the modern era has, still, it is the admittedly awful religion of the society he loves best, while Islam is the religion of a society he doesnīt care for at all...and I doubt would feel any more comfortable among if it was Christian.


Hitchens isnīt a bigot in religion so much but for culture, for society, for geography. Heīll concede that all religions are bloody and barbarous and bad for our health, but the religion that comes from places other than the West, because any society other than Western society is inferior, must also be worse than western Christianity. It simply MUST be or else that society that nurtured it and was nurtured by it for centuries must bear a good deal of the blame for its crimes.


His condemnation of Islam and Muslims sounds uncomfortably like condemnation of Jews for the past centuries leading right up to the Holocaust. Itīs as if Christians especially those, like Hitchens, infected by Christianity at an early age who may go on to repudiate it all the same, canīt seem to help viewing with greater horror any religion but their own, condemn their own as they might. How he cannot see that it has been Christianity, the religion he so rightly skewers for so many crimes, that has committed not only crimes agsinst Jews but does so with impunity now towards Muslims, though they hide their practised hand and leave it to their political wing to carry out the actual murders..as they did back during the Inquisition.


Why does Hitchens approve of skepticism towards the church but not towards our government, which can be shown to have lied, with disasterous results, at least as often as has the church? Why should we believe what our government said then about Iraqi WMDs and nuclear tubes....when he tells us we should not believe our church which taught us to hate Jews or those governments, then, who actually carried out the murders, or turned Jews away so they could be murdered? Why should we now believe a government when it tells us about Iranīs "threat" to world peace and life on this planet when we know they lied to us again and again? Why must we not believe our churches but continue believing our governments?


Why not demand more than metaphysical evidence of them BOTH. Show me that the sun revolves around the earth, donīt just tell me to take it on Faith because Christianity is the superior religion, the one with Truth and God on its side, and then declare me an "enemy", a heretic, if I remain unconvinced. Show me that Muslims pose and have always posed and always WANTED to pose a real threat to Western Christianity and our way of life and that our many intrusions and wars against them, plus blind support of Israel, has nothing to do with it, donīt just TELL me that and expect me to take it on faith (as we had to on Iraq) because America and the West is the superior culture and that Truth, if not god, is on our side, or else I am an "enemy" and un-patriotic and un-American to boot...and that soon I may be declared an "enemy of the State" with a license to assassinate me issued by a President to be carried out by a Blackwater clone.


I refuse to take religion on faith or based on miraculous tales or holy relics, Hitchens and I agree in this...but I also refuse to take governments on faith or based on think tank reports and aluminum tubes. Here we disagree. Hitchens, from some weird motive decides that America CAN be trusted again and again...or at the least that American government claims should be taken on FAITH, plus whatever paltry and clearly CIA pre-fabricated "intelligent designs" they may have...that this should be enough, no need to think for yourself. Thatīs what I find odd about his point of view...other than that, I love the guy.



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