One week ago I posted some excerpts from Chris Hedges' opening remarks in a debate with Sam Harris, along with a few of my own comments. This has proven to be one of the most popular posts on my blog in a long time. One of the reasons for this, I think, is that this perennnial debate between theists, atheists and anti-theists has reached a boiling point once again. Indeed, a new trinity of atheists has emerged in Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Sam Harris (The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation), and most recently, Christopher Hitchens (god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything). Now the Christian and Muslim apologists are tripping over themselves to refute the claims of these and others who are attacking God and religion.
This week, TruthDig posted some comments from Sam Harris in response to Chris Hedges' opening essay. They did not post Sam's actual opening remarks. Sam points us to his website where other statements of his can be found. I want to highlight just one thing that Sam says that I think all Christians should take to heart:
I would like to briefly address the main claims that Hedges makes in his essay:
Real religion has nothing to do with superstition, irrational beliefs, or tribalism. God is not an anthropomorphic deity; He is just “the name we give to our belief that life has meaning.”
It should be immediately clear to all readers that Hedges is simply dodging the fact that millions (probably billions) of people practice religion in the naïve, anthropomorphic, and superstitious forms he would rather not defend. By saying that faith is really something other than the irrational belief in magic books, virgin births, the power of prayer, etc., Hedges ignores how pervasive the problem of religious irrationality is.
Several comments:
- I, too, felt uncomfortable with the way Hedges simply brushes aside certain branches of Christianity as not "real religion." It's not fair - and just too convenient - for Hedges to simply define "real religion" as the kind that he thinks is good and then exclude all other forms of religion as "false." In reality, Christians have been doing this kind of thing for years. It goes something like, "We are the real Christians, unlike the Catholics [fill in your favorite group to hate], who pray to Mary or think the Pope is infallible." These are all very weak arguments that gain their strength by comparing the best of what my group believes and does with the worst (or even caricatures) of what your group believes and does. You can always win the argument that way.
- However, I would also say that Harris does the same thing, by comparing the rationality and purity of science or atheism with the irrationality and evil of faith. This does not adequately account for irrational atheists OR rational theists. It doesn't account for Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Mother Theresa of Calcutta, C.S. Lewis or countless others for whom faith guided them to the heights of humanitarian causes and the betterment of the world.
- Finally, I am not comfortable with being lumped into the camp of crazed, wild-eyes, superstitious and violent religionists just because I believe that God is alive and active in his world today and even intervenes in people's lives and world events. Nor do I think I am a dangerous person or anti-scientific just because I believe that a benevolent God created the world (I'm not arguing here for number of days or a young age of the earth) and is coming again to set up his eternal kingdom. The categories are just too binary for me. Like everything else, there are nuances about science and religion that gets missed in this kind of debate format. Check out Nancey Murphy, here and here (though neither of these resources are a direct answer to Sam Harris or Chris Hedges).
Two things I think Christians can do to help themselves:
- Don't make ridiculous claims and "straw man" arguments to try to prove your point. Have the humility to admit that many things Sam (and others) say about religion and religious people are absolutely right. Religion HAS been a force for evil in the world. Religion in the 21st century is a dangerous thing and we should be able to understand why people would be skeptical or downright hostile toward religion. We, Christians, and people of other faiths need to own our contribution to this mess we're in!
- Secondly, don't do this! I mean...this is just lobbing a softball to everyone who wants to say that all religion amounts to nothing more than empty-headed superstitions.














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