Damn dirty atheists!

[cambro]

I’m almost finished with Christopher Hitchens’s “god is not Great,” the latest of the slew of atheist bestsellers. It's a good read, and while he doesn't advance many slam-dunk intellectual arguments against faith, on a visceral level he does a great job of making religion seem ludicrous and offensive. (This may prove the most effective possible

Comments

[prufrock451]

I haven't read a single book on atheism, which I don't think is terribly shocking for an atheist. After all, we relativist existentialist bastards are accountable to no moral authority except ourselves, and I won't take crap from O'Hair any more than I will from Moses.

I am disappointed that Chrisopher Hitchens has muscled forward as the spokesman for atheism. He might talk conservative and love W. now, but you can still taste his college-days Trotskyism in every word he writes. No compromise, no taste, no acceptance; just the Permanent Revolution and fighting for the sake of fighting. A man his age should be more than a snotnose punk. Sad.

What I want is this: one single, solitary piece of glorious atheist art. Where's our Last Supper? Where's our Ave Maria? We're never going to win hearts and minds the way things are now, for one simple reason: we're a negation of history, tradition, and inspiration. We bring nothing to the table except dry-as-dust science and polemic screeds.

What the hell's on the scales for our side? La Marseillaise? Blade Runner?

[cambro]

Hitchens may be kind of a jerk at times, but I have to admit that I dig it simply because he's so good at it and so articulate. Every cause needs a bulldog. One's enough, though, and I wish some of the others (Dawkins, for instance) would be a little less smug and shrill.

Hitchens himself almost seems to agree with you about the echoes of his Marxism, since he compares his abandonment of it to a loss of religious faith and states "There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical [having left them behind]."

As for what's on our side, artistically...geez, I don't know. "Contact"? Doesn't quite stack up to "Paradise Lost"...

[prufrock451]

Yes, we need a bulldog, but we also need a slow-motion girl in a sundress in a field of dandelions. Where's the affirmation? Where's the glory?

There's a hell of a mission there for some atheist with more talent and hubris than me.