Being Threatened

Today's publishing world allows a place for hysteria in printed form. Many popular-level political books from both the right and left go beyond being provocative, and dive head-first into hysterical ranting. The same is true in many other fields of study, including religion.

Chris Hitchens' latest book, God is not Great, is one such example. Like Richard Dawkins' God Delusion, Hitchens offers a hysterical and frenzied warning against the evils of religion. Like Dawkins' opus, many level-headed voices from across the ideological spectrum have joined in harmony critiquing Hitchens as the atheistic counterpart to the anti-intellectual, dogmatic, tyrannical, uncompromising strain of theism he so gleefully skewers. I'm content to leave it to others to demonstrate Hitchens' folly (there was a decent book review in the WP today as one example). My burden here is to try and move beyond the bombast to speculate on the reasons behind the bombast.

I have no doubt that people like Hitchens and Dawkins write as people who have arrived at a place of being deeply offended by religion and everything it stands for. There is no doubt that this visceral resentment strongly fuels the often blind rage reflected in their writings. This makes me sad, and also makes me wonder about the respective experiences of these men that influenced their current posture.

But I'm not sure the vitriol of their writings can be chalked up to personal offense alone. I have thought for some time that when people make a habit of going on vitriolic bends about some topic or other, there is an element of fear and threatening fueling it. In other words, when the fundamentalist theist goes outer limits about Darwinism, for example, is it just because they find Darwinism repugnant? I doubt it. It's also because they feel threatened by it; that it's not just that something stands in opposition to their most important belief commitments, but that this something is gaining ground and becoming very threatening because of it. So when Hitchens and Dawkins fly off the grid when it comes to religion, I suspect it's not just because they find religion repugnant. It may also be because religion is not only not waning, it's gaining, and by extension, is putting people like Hitchens and Dawkins into an ever smaller association. This is a threat, a severe one in fact. Such a threat tends to provoke a kind of violence of desperation in those who struggle ever harder to find safe quarter. With Hitchens and Dawkins, their weapons of violence are the tongue and pen (or computer stroke).

From their perspective, it truly must seem inconceivable that they are surrounded by so many who are personally religious, or who may not be particularly religious but don't have any real beef with religion either. The frustration that leads to desperation that leads to losing all balance and the ability to responsibly think things through is what leads to the loopy end products that baffle those who know these two men and remark about how intelligent they can be at other times. Perhaps ironically, the same has often been said of Pat Robertson by those who know him. He has an Ivy League doctorate and is quite intelligent and well read. But so often, you'd never know it.

As I said, I'm admittedly speculating so this post should be taken with a few kilograms of salt. But when you combine personal offense with feeling under assault by the very thing that offends you, it becomes a very potent combination. And folks who embody this combination, regardless of where they fall along the ideological spectrum, too often compromise their reputation by producing blind drivel that is entirely too easy to shred to pieces, as Plantinga recently did with Dawkins' work. The lesson is to be aware of what we bring to our analysis of an issue, and realize that we can be blinded by our own frenzy, and damage ourselves severely, not to mention damaging our cause, whatever it is.