Debating deity: D'Sousza v. Hitchens.

I recently sat in on bits of a debate between the lunatic Right-wing Dinesh D’Sousa and Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great. D’Sousa, you may remember, was the Christianist who wanted an alliance with “moderate” Muslims to install a moralistic government that would bash gays, cover up women, ban porn and generally impose the fundamentalist version of Sharia law on the country.

D’Sousa’s argument was that such moralistic campaigns by the state would end the fanatical Islamist movement. He seems to think that the whole terrorist campaign is the result of Muslims being offended by homosexuals and Western “immorality”.

Prior commitments kept me relatively busy during the debate but I could hear bits and pieces. So I will report on what I heard and about something interesting that happened afterwards.

It was my unfortunate experience to mainly hear the D’Sousa arguments. All I can say is that he is a smarmy debater who falsifies facts and uses bad logic to try to make his case for a deity.

D’Sousa finds it necessary to defend religion because some religious folks are engaged in nefarious, vicious actions, from flying planes into buildings to bombing abortion clinics or shooting staff who work there. These folk act based on the religious beliefs they hold. It is my contention that all actions come out of positive beliefs not out of negative beliefs.

As I noted once before atheism is a negation of a belief not a positive statement of belief. The atheist says he has no reason to believe in a god, he denies a belief but the atheist qua atheist asserts no belief. Individual atheists do, of course, assert positive beliefs but they do not do so as atheists but in entirely different intellectual categories. For instance, the atheist may be a conservative, socialist, libertarian, fascist, etc. It would be his positive beliefs that inspire action not his negative ones. As I put it previously “you can not get positive principles out o a negative concept. Not believing in a god doesn’t tell you how to live, what to value, what sort of society to yearn for, etc. By itself it gives no directions, values or beliefs. How could it? It is the lack of a belief”

The Islamists or Christianists who act in evil ways do so precisely because of their faith. A positive belief (in the sense of one that is asserted as factual and no in the sense of being beneficial) causes the individual to take positive action (in the sense of acting as opposing to not acting). The lack of a belief inspires no particular action. When an atheist acts in a particular way it is because of other positive beliefs he may hold not because he is an atheist.

This is important because D’Sousa was making the point that since religious folk are burdened by the vile actions of other religious folks then atheism must be blamed for the actions of all atheists. He entirely neglects the fact that the religious act because they are religious while the atheist can not act merely because he is an atheist. It is not atheism that causes the atheism to act but other beliefs he may hold.

D’Sousa wanted to blame atheists for the atrocities of Pol Pot and other Marxist dictators. Ostensibly atheistic these regimes didn’t kill because they were atheistic but killed because they were Communistic and were creating the utopia for which they yearned. It was their positive beliefs that lead to positive action not their non-beliefs.

D’Sousa seems incapable of understanding the difference. Or perhaps he does and is simply dishonest. In his case I suspect the later is often the case.

Two remarks I heard him make were so clearly false that I can not fathom any reason for making them except dishonesty. It was, again, related to the example of dictatorial regimes.

One was that D’Sousa kept referring to the Nazi regime of Hitler as atheistic. That is just absurd. One German attending the debate told me he was baffled by the remark as Germany, under Hitler, was highly religious. Hitler himself was a member of the Catholic Church and never renounced his faith, nor did his church ever find him worthy of excommunication. Hitler died a Catholic in good standing.

The second dishonest remark was D’Sousa’s claim that Cambodia, under Pol Pot, was the quintessential example of a “secular” society. He seemed to be saying that these evil regimes were the best examples of secular government.

Again the German attendee was confused. He remarked to me that he couldn’t think of a single German that he knew who actually attended church. He always thought of today’s Germany as an example of secularism. And he is correct. This is also true o virtually every successful, Western nation around. The United States is pretty much alone when it comes to religiosity among the Western, modern nations.

And, I should point out, that among the Western nations the religious US is pretty much alone in its tendency to execute people with a regularity that is frightening -- with the most religious backwater states, such as Texas, taking pride in how many people they can kill in any one year. The US is again pretty much alone in an aggressive, interventionist foreign policy that is responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. To the degree that other Western nations have been involved it has been under duress from the United States and in a very limited capacity.

The reality is that most the West today is secular and relatively peaceful. D’Sousa must know this. I sincerely doubt he is that ignorant and thus conclude his comments about secular societies being dictatorial is based on dishonesty and not ignorance.

After the debate Christopher Hitchens remarked to me that he was surprised that “so many libertarians” had sided with the religious side of the debate in a post-debate poll that was done.

Actually Mr. Hitchens was in error. He assumed the audience to be predominantly libertarian. In reality it was predominantly conservative with libertarians making up no more than 20% of the audience.

I was not present for the poll so I asked him what the breakdown was. He said it looked to be about a 50/50 split. He was disappointed at that but I was pleased. Yes, if the audience was predominantly libertarian I’d be unhappy -- libertarians tends to be more intelligent and less likely to be theistists. But when I realized that a predominantly conservative audience had split 50/50 on the god question I took that as an encouraging sign.

This audience, for the most part, should have been D’Sousa’s core group of supporters. That he could only muster half the audience in support of his position is just another sign that the United States is finally joining the West in the post-Christian era.

Photo: From a different debate. D'Sousa is on the far left and Hitchens on the right.

Preying on grief.

It was a sad day when that disgusting lunatic, and he was a lunatic, killed the people at Virginia Tech. This deranged mental case, only recently released from an institution murdered 32 people. And to make sure the world understood that he felt justified in doing so he released a maniacal rant to the media during the long break he took between the killings.

During his tirade he attacked “rich brats”, drinkers, and hedonists. He sounded like a cross between a socialist and a fundamentalist Christian. He hated the rich and he hated the sinful. And like both groups he dwelled and mulled over every assumed slight he ever experienced. He was the perpetual victim whining about every injustice, real or imaginary. And in the end he was consumed with his hatred and killed.

Now many people on the Virginia Tech campus are religious. Most likely the majority of them are. It is to be expected that they will reflect on this tragedy in religious terms. And the atheists and non-believers of the world will leave them be. It is not the typical response of an atheist to inflict greater pain on someone at this time of trauma and suffering.

Yet one of the worst maggots on the extreme Right has used this sorrowful occasion to throw cheap shots at atheists. Dinesh D’Sousza once had some things to say that were of interest. But that was before he turned into one of the creepiest figures on the Right. He is the one harping on about how Christians in America ought to forge an alliance with Islamists and all go out and stone gays together.

His view is that the way to end Islamist extremism is to adopt their methods, bash a few homosexuals, burn some books, arrest the immoral and return to a theocratic moral country. That, says this appeaser to tyranny, will show them that America is just as moral as the Islamists themselves and they will no longer hate us.

Right! And the reason the Nazis were such lunatics was because the US didn’t round up the Jews. D’Sousza is delusional. And in one of his fits of, where he is possessed by the spirit of Ayatollah Khomeini and he channels the man, he wrote an attack on atheists in regard to the attack.

He wrote:

Notice something interesting about the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings? Atheists are nowhere to be found. Every time there is a public gathering there is talk of God and divine mercy and spiritual healing...
...To no one's surprise, [Richard] Dawkins has not been invited to speak to the grieving Virginia Tech community. What this tells me is that if it's difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil. The reason is that in a purely materialist universe, immaterial things like good and evil and souls simply do not exist. For scientific atheists like Dawkins, Cho's shooting of all those people can be understood in this way--molecules acting upon molecules.

What does creepy Dinesh mean atheists are no where to be found? Surveys show that 20% of youth the age of the typical Virginia Tech student are atheists. Were they supposed to use this time of mourning to make points about their atheism? Were atheists supposed to crash these times demanding the right to speak?

In addition D’Sousza is not just creepy. He’s stupid. But anyone forging alliances with extreme Islamists is obviously working with less than a full deck. (That he hasn’t been shunned by the Right is even more scary.) Atheism as such is merely about the existence of a deity. Atheists, as individuals, have much to say about morality. Some like Ayn Rand, were often accused of being “moralists”.

The idea that atheists have nothing to say during times of grief is born out his own ignorance. I remember well picking up the collected works of Robert Ingersoll and reading some of his comments at a funeral. The friend to whom I was read it started crying. He said it was so moving he couldn’t help himself.

It would be a rare thing indeed for an atheist to make a spectacle at a time of mourning or the funeral of another. I don’t know what D’Sousza was thinking. Half the time I don’t think he knows himself. Every atheist I know has dealt with grief. I have lost to death people in my life, people I have loved very much.

And I have dealt with evil and injustice in ways that D’Sousza would never know. I have looked in straight in the face not just written about it from some Pacific coast mansion. But never would I think to try to impose an argument about the existence of Dinesh’s imaginary friend on others at a time of such sorrow.

Alas, we can’t say the same for Christians can we. Like vultures they wait for times of misery and sorrow to swarm around their victims. They lurk in the halls of hospitals preying on the dying and the mourners. They use every tragedy as a recruiting tool, every pain as another excuse to intrude and preach. To some they may offer a delusion of a life after death but often they are there to condemn and harass. Yes, at times of national or personal grief religion often is very visible and sometimes it is ugly.

I have known fundamentalists, in particular, the very group Mr. D’Sousza is so fond of, to tell grieving individuals that their loved one is burning in hell for eternity because they hadn’t been ‘borned again”. They were the “wrong” kind of Christian or even more horrifying, not any kind of Christian. They have used funerals to preach the horrors of eternal torment telling grieving families that their loved one is being tortured by the God of the Bible. And they relish in such actions.

And who was it that put in an appearance at these funerals to taunt and torment the grieving? It was not an atheist or agnostic. It wasn’t Richard Dawkins, who D’Sousza loves to hate. It was Rev. Fred Phelps and his Baptist congregation from Kansas.

This derange sect of fundamentalists said they will be picketing at the funerals and memorial services. And Shirley Phelps-Roper, the daughter of the church founder, said that the individuals who died deserved to die because they weren’t Christians.

She said: “The evidence is they were not Christians. God does not do that to his servants. You don’t need to look any further for evidence those people are in hell.” She said that the mass murderer “was also fulfilling the word of God.”

D’Sousza is right about one thing. Atheists are not making themselves visible at this time of grieving. They happen to know that this is not the time for a philosophical discussion. People need to be left alone and allowed to mourn. The only people who don’t understand that are the ones who share D’Sousza’s belief in a God. Perhaps now you understand why I think he’s such a creepy little maggot.