ShareThisBy DAVID YOUNT
Scripps Howard News Service
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
For months, the Publishers Weekly list of best-selling religious titles has been led by a book that not only denies God's existence but claims religion to be evil.
Its author, Christopher Hitchens, is a professional polemicist who routinely employs ridicule to attack what most people find sacred. His latest tirade is "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything."
Hitchens' choice of title suggests the source of his anger. "God is great" is Islam's signature affirmation. Although the author finds folly in the faith of Jews and Christians, he targets the Muslim faith for the tragedy of 9/11. So long as faith remains a mere delusion, Hitchens merely makes fun of believers. But when belief is taken seriously and leads to action, he protests. That explains his hatred of America's Religious Right for seeking to legislate morality.
How does God regard his critics? Surely the creator does not doubt his own existence, nor does he need his faithful to vindicate him by killing "infidels." A terrorist of any faith who excuses his violence by claiming that "God made me do it" is no more credible than the schoolchild who claims "The dog ate my homework."
Any faith worthy of the name must be expected to have consequences. Although the vast majority of Americans claim to believe in God, some routinely ignore their creator or are indifferent to him. By contrast, Hitchens is not at all indifferent to God but passionate in his disbelief.
Which prompts the question: Why expend so much energy to prove that something (in this case, Someone) doesn't exist? When Michael Crichton devoted his latest book to denying the existence of global warming, he at least drew on science to support his disbelief.
Atheism is not just skepticism. It is a firm faith. So it's worth inquiring whether the God that Hitchens denies is the same God that most of us affirm. The diety the author denies is the Great Designer of all that is. Assuming that such an all-powerful God must be a perfectionist, Hitchens discredits him for having botched his creation, allowing pain and death.
Theologian Michael Novak counters that Hitchens has it wrong. God is not a perfectionist, but "deliberately made a world of probabilities and failures, of waste and profusion, of suffering and hardships and frustrations."
Paradise was lost because God allowed man and woman the freedom to choose rather than micromanage them. The God in whom Christians believe is one who suffered and died to liberate the creatures he loves.
"Atheists always pretend to know more about what I believe than I do," complains English critic A.A. Gill. "The thing about faith is that it isn't a fact -- if it were provable, it wouldn't be faith. So we never win the argument, because God isn't in the argument, he's in the absence of argument, in the space between words."
I would only add that we cannot possibly appeal to man's better angels unless we believe in angels.
(David Yount's latest book is "Celebrating the Rest of Your Life: A Baby Boomer's Guide to Spirituality" (Augsburg). He answers readers at P.O. Box 2758, Woodbridge, VA 22195 and dyount(at)erols.com.)
??
