Did Bill Donohue answer Christopher Hitchens' Atheist Challenge?

I've been thinking about the PZ cracker abuse scandal and it occured to me that something said by Bill Donohue contained an answer to Christopher Hitchen's Atheist Challenge, and that challenge goes like this:

Here is my challenge. Let anyone name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever.

No nonbeliever would ever say what Bill Donohue said:

It is hard to think of anything more vile than to intentionally desecrate the Body of Christ.

And by "Body of Christ" Bill Donohue refers to a dry and tasteless cracker.

Is it a moral statement? When you call something vile or a hate crime you are making a moral statement. Would an atheist ever claim that abusing a cracker is the most vile thing he could think of? I don't think so.

Why don't Christians offer that as an example to prove Hitchens wrong?

When I take a look at those who actually try to answer Christopher Hitchens' Challenge they all fall into Hitchens' trap and try to make a moral argument that Hitchens would not consider insane and thus automatically make statements an atheist could make.

For example, College politico's "Christopher Hitchen's Atheist Challenge Answered" falls into the trap by saying:

How about: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"

The "endowed by their Creator" line is completely unnecessary, and would actually have been counter productive if it wasn't slipped in there to placate the Christians of that time who were in fact somewhat inclined, if they supported the British King, to see God justifying the divine right of kings to take away, arbitrarily, people's Life and Liberty and to constrain their pursuit of Happiness.

If we remove those religious words we get: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are are born with certain equal and unalienable Rights and among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." A statement which actually makes more sense than the original. However, it is not really a statement that captures the whole truth. The truth is more complicated. It is, as College politico notes, self evident that men are not born equal. We all have different levels of intellect and physical ability. I am not the mathematical equal of Stephen Hawking nor am I the physical equal of Mariusz Pudzianowski. However, those differences do not say anything about what rights I'm entitled to (if I'm a white male with land and money during the revolution).

College politico then makes a non-sequitur argument about looking at the difference between men and God to see that our differences are utterly superficial and claims that is the major logical linchpin of this argument. "With believe in a higher power comes the perspective necessary for each of us to see ourselves as neither intrinsically superior or inferior to one another." No, that is not a good argument because if there were a really smart God who could design this universe then also the differences between us and the animals we eat and keep on farms would be utterly superficial too. We're not going to give cows the same rights as men because of College politico's argument, are we? And if that were such an obvious, self-evident, argument, then why did the concept of the divine right of kings ever emerge in Christendom?

From there, College politico moves to utter bullshit arguments like the argument from blindness and incredulity:

... without a belief in a higher power it seems to me that it is impossible to justify any type of egalitarian society.

Just because College politico can't see the possibility only means he himself is blind to it. He is, at least aware, that he might only have blindness and incredulity going for him:

I just don't see any way for atheistic philosophy to logically refute the claims of the Nazis, Japanese empire, Eugenicists, or even Hunter's Civic Biology Book (from the scopes case).

Maybe I'm missing something... Perhaps someone can provide me with a sound logical justification for egalitarianism without the relying on belief in a higher power?

Yes, College politico, you are missing quite a lot. And all you have to do to find the secular motive is read the rest of the Declaration of Independence. Whether the secular argument can even be comprehended by him is another question because it was right there in front of his face when he took the quote from it because right after the quote comes this, a purely secular argument for independence:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

The argument after the fuzzy absolutes of "Life, Liberty and pursuit of happiness" have much more weight and meaning when considering the philosophy of government actually adopted by the United States. For one thing, it's obviously true that we do not govern the United States according to any absolute reading of those few lines in the Declaration of Independence. If you look at how we depart from the absolute you can see what it really has come to mean, what it meant to the men who used it to start a revolution and how incredibly secular it is.

If we take away a person's life or liberty because they commit a crime we are saying that your rights to that life, liberty and pursuit of happiness are conditional. You only get them if you play by the rules we can enforce. Thus lines like: "laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." To protect our safety and happiness we will remove the life and liberty of some criminals.

In the context of the revolution it meant only those liberties the revolutionaries felt that the English King wasn't giving them. It is against that "long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism" where we find the liberty they sought.

It's a philosophy about what government is for and its a very secular philosophy that an atheist can easily ascribe to. Government isn't here for church and king it's there for its citizens, it's "we the people."

Also interesting is this statement from College politico:

... these inequalities have been used throughout history to justify things from slavery to genocide to segregation.

College politico doesn't seem to realize that the man who wrote those words, Thomas Jefferson, was himself a slave owner, or that genocide (of some of the native American Indians) and segregation (of Blacks and of the sexes) are part of American history long after those words were accepted as our declaration of independence. And we still today do not live by them in any absolute sense. If you commit murder, we claim the right to execute you still. If you commit a felony, your liberty can be taken from you and you'll go to prison. If your pursuit of happiness includes use of certain drugs, you can have your liberty taken from you.

And what does it mean that the president who is trashing our constitution also happens to be an out spoken Christian? Why will you Christians not own up to what appears to be completely insane about your morality?

What is "high art" in our Brave New World?

"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead." -- Mustapha Mond in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World"

The question hit me when I was reading a transcript of Hugh Hewitt's show where he had Christopher Hitchens and David Allen White debating the impact of Christianity on Western Civilization.

During the debate David Allen White expressed the opinion that great art needs a "higher vision," whatever that means (I think it's just code for great art should be religious/Christian). Hitchens sort of agreed thereby falling into a bit of a trap that made him sound like a bogus Mustapha Mond talking to John the Savage in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World." Hitch talked about it in terms of the transcendent and the supernatural, with the supernatural being a kind of faux transcendent in Hitchens' mind… I think. I don't know because Hitchens got vague and as examples of infinite and majestic art he talked about the photographs taken by the Hubble telescope and Stephen Hawking writing about black holes. Hitch said there was more in them than in the contemplation of religious art. The natural world is wonderful enough. White countered by saying there's been a diminution of the "inner life." And Hitch, having pointed to raw science instead of real art and literature, couldn't counter successfully. The "inner life" just isn't there in Hubble photos.

I disagree with Hitchens. Art does not need to be transcendent to be great. And no, science does not replace art, Hitch, and one day you're going to get hoist on your own science petard when you meet a religionist who has actually read Stephen Hawking's equation dense papers and not just the no-math pop-sci books like "A Brief History of Time" or "The Universe in a Nutshell." One of these days they're going to show you some pictures from the Hubble and ask you if you know what you're looking at.

Mr. White claims he's not against science, but that doesn't mean he cares about science. In fact, he gives away his disinterest in science saying that in the Middle Ages, there was the notion of the five wits: common sense, fancy imagination, estimation, sometimes called judgment or memory and then complaining that his students don't know about them. Egad! Pre-Freudian psychology is his guide to the inner life? He might as well have talked about the four elements, Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Or he might as well have talked phrenology. Modern psychology can do better than that. We even have drugs that can alter your "inner life" now, just like in that old preachy-teachy god-blathering novel that White and Hitchens would probably consider great art; "Brave New World."

Yes, there is an inner life, things going on inside us, and that's what art is meant to touch on. Yes, religious art touches on the human element in way Hitchen's science examples don't. Yes, the inner life is worthy of exploring in art but that doesn't mean science can not also tell us a lot about that too.

Scientific imagery and scientific writing isn't really "art," even if there is an art to scientific writing and imagery. If you showed Galileo a lot of the pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope most of the time he wouldn't have known what he was looking at. He'd probably see strange and bright colored smoke and gas with no real sense of scale. Even in the sixties people would have thought it was just cool psychedelic art. You'd have to explain what they were seeing.

Art should generally have a human element. It should be about people, not nebulae and black holes. It should touch on our inner life. But great art does not need to be transcendent or supernatural. Sometime the transcendent is just vague and escapist.

Is "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov transcendent or supernatural? Is it not great art? Does it not say something about the inner life? Is "Lord of the Flies" by William Golding transcendent or supernatural? Wouldn't those stories be more descendent than transcendent yet still showing us the inner life?

Mr. White doubted if science could inspire art, or would do so 600 years in the future. Pointing to non-art doesn't help your case Hitch. White then pointed out that after leaving our planet for the first time to set foot on another world, on the moon, an extraordinary human achievement, an engineering feat, there were only two works of art that were inspired by that event; Norman Mailer’s Of A Fire On The Moon and a minor poem by W. H. Auden.

What?!

Only a book by Norman Mailer and a poem by W. H. Auden?

Hitchens doesn't challenge this. Why doesn't Tom Wolfe's book, "The Right Stuff" count? The Mercury program was part of getting to the Moon. And Tom Hanks produced a great HBO miniseries, "From the Earth to the Moon" back in 1998.

I get the feeling that both Hitchens and White would never consider any TV miniseries great art. They seemed too snobbish and old-farty to credit TV with anything.

Science does inspire art, it's just not the kind of art that David Allen White, and probably Hitchens, would give the label great to. The moon had inspired dreams of exploration and literature long before John F. Kennedy proposed going there. There was H. G. Wells' "The First Men in the Moon" and Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" way back in 1865 with a projectile launched from Florida and lands in the Pacific Ocean, not unlike the Apollo Program. Isaac Asimov wrote "Trends" in 1939, a short story in which religious fanatics oppose a fictional first flight to the Moon in the 1970s. "Prelude to Space" was a 1951 novel by Arthur C. Clarke which is about a fictional first flight to the Moon. There were many more such stories in the pulp science fiction magazines. There were movies too, from "Destination Moon" to cheesy stuff like "Cat-women on the Moon."

The science fiction writers had already been to the moon. Actually getting there killed all the stories about going there for the first time. But you'll still find stories about lunar colonies in science fiction magazines like Analog.

There were thousands of Apollo/moon paintings and images all over the pop culture landscape. I've seen everything reflected in the mirror-like surface of an Apollo space-helmet, earth, DNA molecules, Newton, M. C. Escher's hand, but in space glove, with that reflective globe reflecting back the space-helmet reflecting the globe to infinity... Alan Bean, one of the astronauts who went to the moon became an artist and he's still painting.

David Allen White seems to be unaware of all that art and literature that is already out there if he can think of only two examples. There's more than any of us can view and read. And he would dismiss it all because his guardians of literary taste would dismiss it as pop trash. His choice of Norman Mailer's book is suspicious. I think it reveals his real opinion about science and the Apollo moon landings.

Norman Mailer's other books are better. So, why? Because America became bored with space travel and Mailer saw it coming. That's why. Mailer wrote of the banality of the astronauts and the fearsomely conformist culture of NASA and predicted a been-there-done-that attitude toward space travel by the public.

Mailer was partly right. Public interest waned, missions started getting cut off and Neil Armstrong did a few car commercials before disappearing from public consciousness. Buzz Aldrin and John Glenn were the only two astronauts who stayed in the broader public eye. Do you think David Allen White even knew we had a space station before a crazy female astronaut in diapers put NASA back on the front pages?

Mr. White's doubt that "great" art can be inspired by science depends on his subjective validation of "great." Sure he can point to arty-farty experts like T.S. Eliot calling Dante’s Paradiso the greatest poetry that can be written and thus back up his judgments, but T.S. Eliot only matters if you give a damn about T.S. Eliot's judgments. That religion has inspired all "great" artists isn't surprising if you have defined great art as religious art and all your experts agree with that.

Mr. White says that St. Francis is still inspiring artists. I wouldn't know. I never read any. Perhaps some reader of my blog can tell me if I'm right to guess that the St. Francis of art, literature and drama bears about as much relation to the real St. Francis as H. G. Wells' "The First Men in The Moon" bears relationship to the real Apollo 11 moon landing? Imagine what "great" art believing Catholics will be making out of the saintly Mother Teresa legend? Think it will bear much resemblance to Hitchen's book about her?

Finally Mr. White bemoans how the ability of religious faith to inspire great painting, music, literature and architecture has diminished. He's right too. That inner life he talks about is changing: Welcome to our Brave New World.

I don't know what kind moldy old-farty material Mr. White had in mind, but it wasn't that long ago when religious novels and Hollywood sword and sandal films like "Ben-Hur," "The Robe," "The Ten Commandments" and the like were hot literary and box-office properties. "The Ten Commandments" was one of the more expensive epics of its time. Lew Wallace’s "Ben-Hur" was once one of the most important, widely-read American novels of the last half of the 19th century. There are both silent and talky versions of the movie. And it continued to be widely read until the 1960s, when our Brave New World began to take shape. That's a long life for a book. But today "Ben-Hur" has receded into near oblivion. Does anyone read it now? When is the last time there has been a new printing of it?

For awhile it may have seemed like Mel Gibson might have been bringing back the sword and sandal genre with some new violent and psychotic twists. In 2006 USA Today announced "Hollywood turns to divine inspiration" and religious movies were coming back.

Instead the more recent movies aimed at the "faith-based market" have failed to bring in the bucks. "Evan Almighty" earned $99 million domestically, but the film reportedly cost about twice that much to make. "The Nativity Story" barely recouped its $35 million budget. Films that were just "family-friendly" and only nominally Christian got tagged with the "Christian" label, and distributed by Fox Faith, seem to have suffered as a result of that Christian marketing. In the meantime, "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt," based on Anne Rice's novel, seems to have gotten canned. And Mel Gibson's star has faded; a victim of shooting off his drunken mouth.

When is the last time you saw a character in a film pray or go to church? I don't go around choosing to watch only films that make no reference to religion, but almost every time I see a film it's like I'm entering an entirely secular world. No one prays or goes to church in most movies I watch, it's like religion doesn't exist. Of course, a lot of the films I see are pretty mindless action/adventure and comedy. I'm not looking for "higher vision" or the transcendent when I see films and it appears neither is most of the rest of the film going audience.

Can the Spiderman films be called transcendent? Spidey has transcended some of the human condition. Are comic-book superheroes the new transcendent icons of our transhumanist desires? Or are they just fairly mindless forms of entertainment? No matter, the Gammas and Deltas love it. They don't think about such things.

Is all that magic in the Harry Potter books transcendent? Now there's a set of films and books where the absence of religious notes is rather glaring. What happens after you die is a religious question and people die and come back to life in Harry Potter. Yet there isn’t any religion in the Harry Potter books. No one prays or goes to church or talks about God. It's conspicuously absent to the point where you know that the author intentionally left it out. It reads like one of those censored government documents from the X-Files, as if a CIA officer had gone through and removed the remotest hint of religion with a heavy black marker.

The science behind the comic-book heros is so silly it might as well be the supernatural. Sometimes it is. We've taken all the tropes and symbols of the transcendent and the supernatural, all the symbolic codes established by the ancients from even before religion became a part of the political power structure, and we've turned them into the most mindless forms of entertainment we can imagine, thus trivializing the transcendent.

Okay, that's film. It's for a mass audience of Deltas and Gammas. Epsilons still prefer re-runs of "The Three Stooges" and "Gilligan's Island," and their favorite pop-music group is, of course, "Simple Minds."

However, the same is true of most of the novels and short stories Betas read. It's either science fiction or realistic. Just one example of realistic, "High Fidelity," by Nick Hornby, a funny novel about the romantic struggles of Rob Fleming who, after his girlfriend leaves him for another man and because of the pain of the breakup, starts rethinking the monogamy his cynical nature had him thinking was a sign of insecurity. I'm not going to say it's great art, but it touched my inner life in ways no literary work called "transcendent," great or classic ever did.

So, either all Mr. White's experts are wrong, or I've been living in Huxley's Brave New World most of my life. Remember, Orwell feared the banning of books, but in our Brave New World there's no reason to ban any books because nobody wants to read them. Orwell feared we'd be deprived of information, but we have the internet and far more information than we can deal with. Orwell feared that the truth, whatever that is, would be hidden. In reality it has been drowned in the sea of irrelevance and people are preoccupied with comic-book movies, their sexual/romantic relationships and the orgy porgy of celebrity news about Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and crazy astronauts in diapers. Okay, we may not be cloned and grown in bottles yet, but our pop-culture is mass produced and we get a lot of our identity and quite a bit of "inner life" from pop-culture.

So, what is great art in our Brave New World? Is it the transcendent comic-book superheroes and boy wizards, or is it the more realistic "High Fidelity," or is it still the moldy oldies that liberal arts University professors torture their fewer and fewer students with? Is the greater art Spiderman and Harry Potter, or is it "Lord of the Flies" and "Lolita," or is it John Donne's and Dante Alighieri's poetry?
Or, is it Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon."

It probably depends on if your an Alpha, a Beta, a Gamma or a Delta, but I invite all my readers, no matter what caste you are, to make a case for your choice in my comments section.

Al Sharpton admits the Bible is a bunch of crap

Christopher Hitchens and Al Sharpton had a debate on TV's Hardball a few days ago (video of the event can be found here and here) and during that debate Hitchens started pointing out things like how bad the Ten Commandments are and how it's absurd to think the place Moses and the Hebrews had just left, Egypt, didn't have its own laws and ethics. Al Sharpton pooh-poohed Hitchens points saying that's just religion, not God. Hitchens was basically saying the Bible was a load of crap and Sharpton didn't argue that point. I wonder why Hitch didn't point that out and ask Sharpton, "are you a deist or a Christian?" If Sharpton isn't going to defend the Bible, then where does he get his vision of what God is?

Al Sharpton backed off into a position that, for all we know from his current argument, could have been a deist position or a Hindu position or a Muslim position. He did not defend the Bible because he knew he couldn't. This a common tactic used by modern Christians in these debates. Christians, as well as Jews and Muslims, need to be called on it. Al Sharpton is supposed to be a Pentecostal, not a deist, Hindu or Muslim. His autobiography is even called "Go and Tell Pharaoh."

By not dealing with Hitchens Biblical criticism, by explicitly dismissing it as "just religion - which could be wrong" he leaves behind anything that could define what he meant by God. What is God if not defined by a religion? A Christian really can't be dismissing the Bible and criticism of it as "just religion." It's suppose to be his religion.

If you agree, then the next time you use the name "Al Sharpton" make it a link to this blog post so that its title: "Al Sharpton admits the Bible is a bunch of crap" shows up on a Google search for Sharpton's name. Or, write your own Sharpton blog with a similar title and I'll link you.

Sharpton accused Hitchens of attacking religion rather than God, but the whole idea of what God is which is espoused by Christians, Jews and Muslims comes from that Old Testament description which includes giving the Hebrews the Ten Commandments. Other religions, like Buddhism, don't necessarily have a God concept.

Hitchens' book is called "God is not Great" and Sharpton fixated on it. But since Hitchens doesn't believe in god, it is clear that he is really criticizing religion, not a God that doesn't exist except as a concept in such religions.

I'd have to admit to being somewhat agnostic about some kind of "intelligence" underlying "creation." But any assertion beyond "maybe there was an intelligence that designed the universe" requires evidence, and that's where all religions go off into crazy land. They go too far in making claims for that "intelligence" that they have no right to make. The definition Sharpton wanted to use is too minimal to mean anything religious and can't be argued with, we can only argue against the mentally anthropic projections people put on the cause of the universe, those assumptions that some entity "desired," "planned," "wanted," "willed," and "designed" this universe. It could be Einstein's God they mean and Richard Dawkins dealt with that one in his book.

Hitch should have just said "yes, I'm arguing against religion not God. Are you or are you not religious? What is religion to you any way?"