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Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal answers the new crop of atheists – “To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.” (This is a little dense, but Dalrymple is one of our favorites and entitled to our forbearance)
The British parliament’s first avowedly atheist member, Charles Bradlaugh, would stride into public meetings in the 1880s, take out his pocket watch, and challenge God to strike him dead in 60 seconds. God bided his time, but got Bradlaugh in the end. A slightly later atheist, Bertrand Russell, was once asked what he would do if it proved that he was mistaken and if he met his maker in the hereafter. He would demand to know, Russell replied with all the high-pitched fervor of his pedantry, why God had not made the evidence of his existence plainer and more irrefutable. And Jean-Paul Sartre came up with a memorable line: “God doesn’t exist—the bastard!â€
Sartre’s wonderful outburst of disappointed rage suggests that it is not as easy as one might suppose to rid oneself of the notion of God. …
… The search for the pure guiding light of reason, uncontaminated by human passion or metaphysical principles that go beyond all possible evidence, continues, however; and recently, an epidemic rash of books has declared success, at least if success consists of having slain the inveterate enemy of reason, namely religion. The philosophers Daniel Dennett, A. C. Grayling, Michel Onfray, and Sam Harris, biologist Richard Dawkins, and journalist and critic Christopher Hitchens have all written books roundly condemning religion and its works. Evidently, there is a tide in the affairs, if not of men, at least of authors.
The curious thing about these books is that the authors often appear to think that they are saying something new and brave. …
… Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents sometimes told lies and violated their own precepts and rules. It can be summed up in Christopher Hitchens’s drumbeat in God Is Not Great: “Religion spoils everything.â€
What? The Saint Matthew Passion? The Cathedral of Chartres? The emblematic religious person in these books seems to be a Glasgow Airport bomber—a type unrepresentative of Muslims, let alone communicants of the poor old Church of England. It is surely not news, except to someone so ignorant that he probably wouldn’t be interested in these books in the first place, that religious conflict has often been murderous and that religious people have committed hideous atrocities. But so have secularists and atheists, and though they have had less time to prove their mettle in this area, they have proved it amply. If religious belief is not synonymous with good behavior, neither is absence of belief, to put it mildly. ..
Christopher Hitchens helps us make sense of the Kurds and the Turks.
In the past century, the principal victims of genocide or attempted genocide have been, or at least have prominently included, the Armenians, the Jews, and the Kurds. During most of the month of October, events and politicians both conspired to set these three peoples at one another’s throats. What is there to be learned from this fiasco for humanity?
To recapitulate: At the very suggestion that the U.S. House of Representatives might finally pass a long-proposed resolution recognizing the 1915 massacres in Armenia as a planned act of “race murder” (that was U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau’s term for it at a time when the word genocide had not yet been coined), the Turkish authorities redoubled their threat to invade the autonomous Kurdish-run provinces of northern Iraq. And many American Jews found themselves divided between their sympathy for the oppressed and the slaughtered and their commitment to the state interest of Israel, which maintains a strategic partnership with Turkey, and in particular with Turkey’s highly politicized armed forces.
To illuminate this depressing picture, one might begin by offering a few distinctions. In 1991, in northern Iraq, where you could still see and smell the gassed and poisoned towns and villages of Kurdistan, I heard Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan say that Kurds ought to apologize to the Armenians for the role they had played as enforcers for the Ottomans during the time of the genocide. Talabani, who has often repeated that statement, is now president of Iraq. (I would regard his unforced statement as evidence in itself, by the way, in that proud peoples do not generally offer to apologize for revolting crimes that they did not, in fact, commit.) So, of course, it was upon him, both as an Iraqi and as a Kurd, that Turkish guns and missiles were trained last month. …
WSJ reports the story behind the posthumous Medal of Honor award to Navy Lt. Michael Murphy.
At the White House last week, the parents of Navy Lt. Michael Murphy received the Medal of Honor posthumously awarded to their son. One of his former SEAL teammates, Marcus Luttrell, was on hand in the East Room but not entirely there. As a military aide read the citation extolling Lt. Murphy for his “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life” during a ferocious firefight in Afghanistan in 2005, Mr. Luttrell’s mind was firmly back in the mountains of the Hindu Kush on the day that Lt. Murphy died.
“Somebody had to tap me on the shoulder to bring me back. I kind of zoned out,” Mr. Luttrell recalled in an interview two days after the ceremony. As he spoke, his thoughts seemed to drift back to the battle again. “I remember how loud it was. And I remember our lungs being on fire”–but here he paused, then added: “I was thinking that nobody can have any idea what the hell happened up on that mountain that day.”
The bare outlines are harrowing enough. A four-man contingent of Navy SEALs were inserted by helicopter at night on June 28, 2005, in the desolate mountain region near the border with Pakistan. …
Gabriel Schoenfeld writing in the Weekly Standard brings a grown-up view to the torture debate.
THE INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES used by the Bush administration in the war on terror, says the editorial page of the New York Times, have “dishonored” our history. Have we, the paper asks while wagging its finger, become “a nation that tortures human beings and then concocts legal sophistries to confuse the world”? Even if one does not share the accusatory purposes of the Times, millions of thinking Americans are wondering if the use of torture in our battle with al Qaeda is ever legitimate.
But what exactly is torture? International treaties in force, including the Torture Convention, ban its use. But torture itself remains difficult to define. This was a point driven home in the testimony given in his confirmation hearings by Michael Mukasey, President Bush’s nominee for the position of Attorney General. …
Thomas Sowell points to the bad laws that originate many of today’s problems.
It is remarkable how many political “solutions” today are dealing with problems created by previous political “solutions.” Three examples that come to mind immediately are the housing market crisis, the wildfires in southern California, and the water shortages in the west.
Congress and the Bush administration are currently vying with each other to come up with a solution to the housing crisis, brought on by widespread defaults on home mortgage loans — especially defaults by those who took out risky “subprime” loans.
Why were borrowers taking out risky loans in the first place? And why were lenders willing to lend to risky borrowers? In both cases, the government was a prime factor in “subprime” loans. …