Category: atheist-bashing

New Yorker: Krauss on Hitchens’s “deathbed conversion”

June 7, 2016 • 9:00 am

In the online New Yorker, physicist Lawrence Krauss debunks Larry Alex Taunton’s well-battered book on Christopher Hitchens’s supposed deathbed leanings toward Christianity. Krauss’s piece, “The fantasy of the deathbed conversion,” distinguishes itself from other debunkings in two ways: it doesn’t link to (or even mention the name of) Taunton’s egregious book, and it also discusses the general issue of purported but false deathbed conversions. (Darwin, of course, was subject to these rumors, as was Oscar Wilde).

Why, asks Krauss, are these conversions so important to Christians? The answer he suggests, which I think is correct, is that Christians are secretly fearful that God might not really exist, or that even if He does, their faith is simply the wrong one. If you’ve chosen Jesus over Mohammad, Allah will make you fry for eternity. The more people you gather into your flock, the more confidence you have that you’re right.

And why convert to Christianity rather than one of the thousands of other faiths on this planet? Good question.

At the end, though, I think Krauss goes a wee bit amiss:

In this regard, the saddest thing about these imagined deathbed conversions is that, even if they were real, they could hardly be seen as victories for Christ. They are stories in which the final pain of a fatal disease, or the fear of imminent death and eternal punishment, is identified as the factor necessary for otherwise rational people to believe in the supernatural.

If mental torture is required to effect a conversion, what does that say about the reliability of the fundamental premises of Christianity to begin with? Evangelicals would be better advised to concentrate on converting the living. Converting the deceased suggests only that they can’t convince those who can argue back. They should let the dead rest in peace.

I don’t think that evangelical Christians would have a serious problem with conversion being done under threat of torture. That, after all, is the very basis for accepting Jesus, and it’s a staple of Catholic dogma, as refined over the centuries by theologians like Augustine and Aquinas. The notion of Hell as a retributive punishment, a payback for a bad life and the mistake of having made the wrong “choice,” is alive and well to this day. And that idea says very little about the “reliability” of the premises of Christianity, at least compared to the lack of real evidence for either God or a divine Christ.

Finally, neither Taunton nor the Darwin-converters really tried to convert the dead; they simply lied about their conversion. It is, as Krauss notes, the Mormons who really try to convert people post mortem. There are some, like atheist Anthony Flew, who are rumored to have really converted to Christianity at the end (this is arguable, however).  What we see is not so much a refutation of Christianity but the equally depressing fact that believers, perhaps worried about their own beliefs, are willing to lie to buttress their faith.

By the way, if you want to hear a nice 28-minute BBC interview of Krauss by physicist Jim Al-Khalili, go here. It’s mostly about physics but also covers atheism.

h/t: Dom

Nick Cohen on Hitchens’s “conversion”

June 5, 2016 • 8:30 am

Poor Larry Alex Taunton has been beaten to death for his dumb book on Christopher Hitchens’s supposed late-life interest in becoming a Christian; and I won’t belabor the man after this post. But several readers called my attention to a new drubbing of Taunton by Nick Cohen in the Guardian: “Deathbed conversion? Never. Christopher Hitchens was defiant to the last.” (Taunton, of course, is a Christian, trying to claim an atheist for his own.) It’s worth reading Cohen because, well, it’s always worth reading Cohen, and, as usual, his piece is unusually perceptive. Plus he wrote to Hitchens’s son for comment.

First, Cohen recounts some of the slurs the tawdry Taunton levels against Hitchens and his friends:

The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist is the work of a true fanatic, who has never learned when to seize a golden opportunity to hold his tongue. Recounting a memorial for Hitchens in New York, for instance, Larry Alex Taunton has to say how much he hates the event and the mourners. “The funeral, like the man himself, was largely a celebration of misanthropy, vanity and excess of every kind,” he intones.

Taunton says that Hitchens was his “friend”, but he marks his true friends and allies against a godly checklist and finds them wanting. The defender of the Christian faith spies Lawrence Krauss and cannot restrain himself from calling him “the smarmy little physicist Lawrence Krauss” (the professor is not only a renowned theoretical physicist but has also made the scientific case against the existence of a god or gods, ergo Taunton must jeer). Stephen Fry is not just an actor and writer but a “homosexual activist”. And Salman Rushdie becomes “the serial blasphemer Salman Rushdie”.

That last jibe gives you Taunton’s measure. Somewhat notoriously, Rushdie and his translators were targeted by the Ayatollah Khomeini for satirising the founding myths of Islam. In a choice between the atheist Rushdie and clerical murderers, Taunton, the Christian, instinctively decides to excuse the taboos of a deadly strain of Islam. Better to have a murderous faith, it appears, than no faith at all.

Cohen in fact wrote to Hitchens’s son Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, asking him about this issue (and adding that he needn’t reply if the matter was too painful). The son replied; Cohen says this:

I put the book aside last week. There seemed no need to write about Taunton, as Matthew d’Ancona and Padraig Reidy had already taken him to pieces with admirable vigour. But then Alexander Hitchens wrote back about that “bloody book”.

On the deathbed conversion – I spent my father’s final weeks and days at his bedside and watched him draw his final breath and die, and can assure you that there was no hint of any sort of conversion (as I’m sure you have already guessed). In fact, we barely spoke about religion at all except for joint expressions of frustration at the god botherers who made the rounds in the ICU and other units where dying people could be preyed upon by vulturous Christians.

I want to print what he said because lies on the web can last for ever and need to be countered. Indeed, they have always needed to be countered. In the 19th century, American believers claimed Tom Paine had died “howling and terrified”, recanting his assaults on organised religion and the reliability of the Bible.

After the New York Observer repeated the canard one too many times, the atheist Robert Ingersoll made a large bet that it could not justify the claim. He forced the editor to run a retraction headed “Thomas Paine died a blaspheming Infidel” when he won.

A thank-you from Hitchens’s son:

Taunton, of course, now claims that Hitchens was only “flirting” with the notion of Christianity, but if you read the book, you see that the claim goes beyond this. What you actually read is Hitchens expressing interest in the Gospels, as someone would who wanted to learn about religion. Taunton then turns this intellectual interest into a spiritual search, and, as we know, all the evidence is against that.

Cohen, who is a treasure for rationalists—or should be—has written the ultimate takedown of Taunton, for he goes beyond simply his execrable book. The peroration:

One of the charges against Christopher Hitchens that has stuck is that he was a member a new breed of “militant” atheists that besmirched the genteel world of modern western culture. Hardly anyone who threw around the term worried about the moral equivalence they were drawing between men and women, who used only the power of language, and a wave of genuinely militant religion that crushed lives, sexually enslaved women and made medieval prejudices modern. Nor did they reflect that “faith-based” political action, from the Rushdie affair via 9/11 to Islamic State, placed a moral duty on atheists to adopt a more robust mode of argument.

I am delighted to say that Taunton’s sole achievement is to show us that, in death, Hitchens provided a further reason for militant rejection of religion: its creepiness.

One can’t show this cartoon too often; be sure to put it on your Facebook page!

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Eric Metaxas in WSJ: Atheists hate Taunton book because they’re afraid of God

June 3, 2016 • 1:45 pm

There’s a certain kind of person who, when they say something extraordinarily stupid online, see the inevitable pushback as evidence that they were right: that they had “hit a nerve” or uncovered some deep and unpleasant aspect of the human psyche. Chris Mooney was like this when writing about accommodationism, and John Horgan is like that about everything. None of these people ever consider the more parsimonious view: that they’ve just written something really dumb and are being called out for it.

Now we have Eric Metaxas, writing at the Wall Street Journal, who claims that the atheist rancor toward Larry Alex Taunton’s book, The Faith of Christopher Hitchens (see earlier post today), reflects atheists’ own fears that God might in fact exist. Metaxas:

Avenging anti-God hordes have crashed the book’s Amazon page, fulminating with one-star reviews that the book is “tripe!” and “dishonest” and “morally reprehensible,” and accusing Mr. Taunton of riding the beloved Hitch’s coattails “to make a fast buck.” It is pretty obvious that none of these Amazon “reviewers” has actually read the book. But why haven’t they, and why are they so outraged? [JAC: I’ve now read the book, and it’s just as bad as you’d think.]

Do they fear that Mr. Taunton is some Bible-believing Svengali whose nefarious power over their ailing colleague was sheerest opportunism? And are they afraid that actually engaging with Mr. Taunton and his ideas would put them in the same danger as the man they so admired?

How can people so vocal about the importance of “evidence” and “reason” behave like this? Yet there they are, posting their angry one-star reviews, “liking” all other one-star reviews on the page to try to discourage book buyers, and then indignantly clicking away.

But one must wonder: Could it be that, in the friendship between the two men, they detect the possible existence of something they deny but secretly fear might be real? Is God a subject too scary to seriously consider with facts and reason?

The idea that Hitchens was curious about faith and engaged with it intellectually apparently would amount to an intolerable betrayal in the minds of some atheists, so they simply pretend that it never happened, despite the clear evidence to the contrary.

Well, we already know that Hitchens was intellectually engaged with faith: he was curious about it and, like all subjects, he wanted to learn about something before he passed judgement and, like religion or Mother Teresa, brought it to its knees. And speaking of “clear evidence,” what about Hitchens’s own statements that if he ever seemed to be embracing God, he would have been either in his last throes of dying dementia or addled by drugs? And what about the testimony of those who knew him best: his friends, his colleagues and his wife, all of whom assert that Hitchens was certainly not flirting with Christianity? All of these people knew Hitchens better than Metaxas did. None of these data are mentioned by Metaxas. Instead, he ends like this;

If atheist activists want to be taken seriously, they must be willing to engage the facts. The fact is that Mr. Taunton has simply said that Hitchens late in life was “not certain” of his atheism. Unable to tolerate this crack in the atheist facade, Mr. Taunton’s critics reacted hysterically. The response lent credence to what many of us suspect—that atheists really do fear some facts, and, more than that, fear where those facts might lead.

We surely can’t take Metaxas seriously because he won’t absorb the facts stated above. There is not the slightest evidence that Hitchens was uncertain of his disbelief, save the unsupported speculations of Taunton.

If we are angry, it’s not because we are scared that God might exist. I’m surely not; I don’t worry about God at all! We’re angry because a man who many of us thought of as a sort-of-friend, so sympatico was he with our views, is being maligned. We are angry that man who was an intellectual and rhetorical hero of many, who showed not the slightest sign of leaning toward a deity, is being coopted by the faithful to make a quick buck—confirming how badly religion can make you behave. And, above all, we are angry because atheists, at least in principle, respect the truth; and both Metaxas and Taunton have bent the truth to shore up their own weakness for superstition.

 

Mr. Deity on Hitch the Apostate

June 3, 2016 • 12:30 pm

He’s not acting as Mr. Deity here, but that’s how we know Brian Keith Dalton. And Dalton is really upset at the new book claiming that Hitchens was pondering becoming a Christian as he neared the end of his life. This is the most worked up I’ve ever seen Dalton, and be aware that there’s strong language here.

I wonder if Taunton has any reservations about having published his book.

There’s probably nothing more worth saying about the author of this contemptible book .

h/t: Phil

New Atheism is dead: a case of self-plagiarism

May 31, 2016 • 10:15 am

UPDATE: I notice that The Raw Story has closed its comments after only 15 of them, and none particularly nasty. I wonder if they’ve learned their story is an old one.

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“Self-plagiarism,” or repeating your own words in different pieces, is sometimes okay so long as you make it evident, and don’t recycle too much of your stuff. In Faith versus Fact I used a couple of paragraphs from previous essays I’d published, slightly changing the wording to integrate them better into the book. In the book’s notes I also pointed out which sections had been published before. Publishers are okay with this. What they’re not okay with—and neither am I—is publishing the same piece twice without indicating that it was published before.

Here’s one example, and a rather bad one. Someone called my attention to an article in May 25’s The Raw Story, written by one Chris Hall, called “Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris are old news—a totally different Atheism is on the rise.” It’s the usual beefing about how the Four Horsepersons are old, misogynistic white men and have become obsolete as new and more diverse voices are rising. (Let me add that I certainly favor diversity in atheism, but that those “old passé guys” become well known because they wrote engrossing books, not because they’ve proclaimed themselves leaders, or have oppressed others or silenced competing voices.) Be that as it may, the article looked oddly familiar to me, and, Googling some of the phrases, I came across a virtually identical article written by the same author, but published in June, 2014 on Salon under a different title: “Forget Christopher Hitchens: Atheism in America is undergoing a radical change.” And that article, with a title identical to the new one, was taken from an Alternet piece also published in June 2014. 

Is there any indication that the new article is a retread of the old one—that it was published before? Nope. Is there any difference between the new article and the two old ones? Not that I see—except for one slight change:

Old pieces:

But in 2014, Hitchens is dead, and using Dawkins or Harris to make a case for or against atheism is about as relevant as writing about how Nirvana and Public Enemy are going to change pop music forever.

New piece:

But in 2016, Hitchens is dead, and using Dawkins or Harris to make a case for or against atheism is about as relevant as writing about how Nirvana and Public Enemy are going to change pop music forever.

This is doubly ironic, for if those Old White Guys were irrelevant in 2014, why even mention them two years later? This also shows that the author is conscious of having published the exact same piece twice, changing but a single date.  I wonder how many times he got paid for it?

At any rate, when you republish a piece after two years, it’s journalistic ethics to say, “This piece was originally published on Salon and Alternet in 2014.” And, of course, people still cite Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris to make the case for atheism. The arguments for unbelief don’t become obsolete so quickly! In fact, one can still cite Mencken or Ingersoll to make the case for atheism. Theists come up with new arguments for God, but they’re invariably tweaked versions of ones that have long been refuted.

 

 

The Guardian slams Larry Alex Taunton’s book on Hitchens’s “conversion”

May 30, 2016 • 10:15 am

I’ve now read most of Larry Alex Taunton’s odious book The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Famous Atheist, and I stand by my judgment that Taunton is a vulture, profiting from picking at the corpse of a man who can’t respond. As you surely know, Taunton’s book was written to suggest that, at the end of his life, Christopher Hitchens was flirting with becoming a Christian, or at least adopting a belief in God. Those who knew Hitchens—his friends, associates, colleagues, and relatives—have universally decried this thesis. Hitchens, they say as one, was a diehard nonbeliever, who was simply interested in learning about religion. He didn’t know Taunton well, or for long, and the book’s thesis rests of a couple of long road trips and discussions Taunton had with the cancer-stricken Hitchens. Taunton has clearly misinterpreted Hitchens’s interest in religion, and in his traveling companion, for a desire to find God. But most of us who have watched Hitchens’s career (and videos) have not seen an inkling of weakness toward faith. Indeed, several times during his last few months Hitchens said that if there were postmortem rumors of a deathbed conversion, they would be either lies or he would have been demented with pain or drugs.

Taunton, of course, is a devout Christian. His aim, though he denies it, is to profit from a rumor that Christians would love: that the world’s most famous atheist was flirting with God.

The Guardian now has a review of Taunton’s book by Matthew d’Ancona, “Christopher Hitchens and the Christian conversion that wasn’t.”  The title tells all, and a few excerpts from the review will suffice:

There is so much wrong with this book that one hardly knows where to start. But its fundamental error concerns the nature of intellectual inquiry itself. For Taunton, there is only one such pursuit, and it is unidirectional: if you are interested in morality, you are, axiomatically, interested in religion – which, for a southern evangelical, means the gospels. When Hitchens observes that a child and a piglet are morally different, Taunton says that “this was unambiguous theism, as he well knew”.

Of course, Hitchens knew no such thing. For him, as for any atheist, morality did not need the framework of religion. Philosophy did not depend upon the supernatural, and ethics did not require a godhead to be worth discussing – a discussion that can be traced back at least as far as Socrates in Plato’s Euthyphro.

At the heart of the book is a series of conversations between Hitchens and the author, partly conducted on long car journeys across America. Hitchens, stricken with cancer, makes use of the time with Taunton to study the Gospel of John. Unfortunately, this entirely characteristic curiosity is misinterpreted by the author as the first stage of a glorious conversion.

. . . It is tempting to write off this book as no more than an outburst of epic self-deception. But its craven purpose – to claim Hitchens posthumously for evangelical Christianity – is to defame a man who was a champion of the Enlightenment and an enemy of all systems of thought that elevate one caste (priestly, or otherwise) above the rest. It is a shoddy tactic in the culture wars that began in America but are spreading in battles over theocracy, identity and social uniformity.

Far from being the double agent of the author’s addled imagination, Hitchens incarnated the pluralism in which he believed so passionately, revelling in the contradictions that are the hallmark of the authentically modern self.

He had no religion, other than friendship. Laughable in itself, Taunton’s Judas kiss serves notice yet again that the literalists of all faiths respect absolutely no limits in pursuit of their higher cause.

IF YOU BUY THIS BOOK I’LL SHOOT THE KITTEN

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I can’t recall any nonbelievers making the claim that a religious person gave up their faith on their deathbed. You may say that that scenario isn’t believable, but neither is the notion that Hitchens was flirting with Christianity.

Robert Wright’s rant against New Atheism

May 26, 2016 • 9:00 am

On his Templeton-funded “MeaningofLife.TV” site, Robert Wright fulminates about New Atheism (click on screenshot below). I’m pleased to see that both Krauss and I are included on Murderers Row along with the remains of the Horsepersons (sadly, Wright identifies me as a “paleontologist,” which is bizarre.) His beef: New Atheists lack “intellectual humility,” instantiated by their belief that “we’re sure that God doesn’t exist”. But that’s not true: we think it highly probable that God doesn’t exist, which is the scientific attitude. (See The God Delusion.)

We’re also said to be advocates of “scientism” and that we see no good products of religion. The “scientism” accusation is a canard, and I’m sure that most of us accept that religion can sometimes motivate good works. The claim is not that, but, on balance, that religion is inimical to human progress.

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As he’s done so often, Wright argues (25:50) that there may be some teleological force behind the universe—something that may, for instance, have created the laws of physics. Although he, like John Horgan, claims to be a nonbeliever, they both fit Dennett’s definition of “believers in belief”: those who say, “Well, I see no need for religion, but it’s really good for all those Other People.” In fact, he’s loath to find any endemic problem with religion; when religion behaves badly, it’s often caused by people who criticize religion (43:30)! The lesson: we should stop criticizing religion, and I think Wright would be really happy if we’d do that.

The bit goes on if you click on the section called “the holy war against religion.” Here Wright takes out against antitheism, the attempt to dispel religious notions held by others.

As I said, MeaningofLife.tv was begun last year with a grant from the Templeton Foundation, and I’m sure they love the attack on New Atheism. So long as somebody attacks the antitheists and also leaves room for the possibility of the divine, as Wright does, the money will keep coming. I just found out that Wright also has an 18-month position as a Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at the Union Theological Seminary, with the mission of finding compatibility between science, spirituality, and religion. Wright’s position is, of course, funded by Templeton. 

UPDATE: At lunch I watched an hour of the 90-minute Union Theological Seminary debate between Wright and Lawrence Krauss, and I recommend it. There’s an epic quarrel about the question of “how do you get a Universe from nothing?”, and that alone is worth the time.

 

h/t: candide001