03/13/2020
Remember Christopher Hitchens # 1, by Gonzalo T. Palacios.
My mother was born in Maiquetia, Venezuela five years before the end of the Nineteenth century. A devout Catholic all her life, she stopped going to school before finishing the fifth grade. These peoples were trapped by the culture of an uneducated elite, heirs to the political and economic powers that oppressed the bulk of the population. Somehow, my mother and her siblins managed to discard most of the superstitions and falsehoods inherent to their social status. Like most of her friends and relatives, my mother learned to respect and perhaps to fear the civil, religious, and military institutions that unceasingly enpowered the oligarchy since their arrival from Spain three hundred years earlier.
I was no more than 8 years of age when I heard my mother teaching older my brother about the religious foundation of our country. “De los curas y los mu***os, o hablar bien, o no hablar,” an old Spanish saw instructing us to speak well about priests and the deceased, or not to speak at all. Death was the great equalizer of men and women: once dead, everyone deserves the same respect the clergy, los curas, demanded from the rest of us. It is this tradition of respect that inspires the following post mortems for Christopher Hitchens, “Great” but not god…
The end and the beginning.
God is not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) was written four years before his death. His friend Tony Blair summarized Hitchens’ life thus: “He was an extraordinary, compelling, and colorful human being whom it was a priviledge to know.” Others exalted his beautiful writing style, his devotion to the pursuit of Truth, and his antipathy to any entity or institution which oppressed the human race. Hitchens was deeply influenced by the Enlightenment, an ideology elevated in England to a pseudo-philosophical movement that eroded the traditional values of philosophers and theologians of the time. The Enlightenment marks the beginning of political phenomena like present-day populism that has given us the Trump adminsitration and the rule of Pope Francis, neither of whom holds that religion poisons everything.
Mr. Hitchens’ title reflects not the beginning of his “pursuit of truth” but its conclusion, i.e., “The Need for a New Enlightenment”(page 277) that would confirm his titular premise. Honoring my mother’s wisdom, I will respect Hitchens’ memory (R.I.P.). I begin this first post mortem explaining a few serious flaws in his Conclusion (pages 277-283).
The Pursuit of the Truth vs the Possession of the Truth.
The very wording of “the great Lessing’s” segment Hutchings used to introduce his conclusion betrays the validity of the entire paragraph. If Hutchings is right in stating “we do not have the option of ‘choosing’ absolute truth of faith,” he should have avoided using the definite article in Lessing’s quote. Reapeating that definite article emphasizes the existence of an absolute truth.
If Hutchins’ assertion is true that those of us who claim ”to know the truth of revelation” are deceiving ourselves and/or others, what can be said of those who know the truth of their own assertions? What or who validates their assertion?
Much of the text of the Conclusion deliberately confuses the reader by arbitrarily giving a false or wrong meaning to terms accepted in a different way. “Eschatology,” for example has nothing to do with “the passing away of all earthly things” nor does it mean a “death cult” (page 282). Finally, when Hutchins, a master of the language oversimplifies the rarely used term “intelligent design” calling it “tripe,” the master deliberately denies the real mening of those two words. Today, “intelligent design” is properly understood “Thanks to the telescope and the microscope,” the results of seriously religious scientists of the past.
Gonzalo T. Palacios, Ph.D. [email protected]
