Hitchens is reviewed in Salon (and other thoughts)

Hitchens gets the Salon treatment today, and the fur flies in the letters section.

By and large, the reviewer gives the book the "yes, but, and" treatment. As in "yes, we know that religion hasn't always lived up to its own standards, but this isn't anything new, and there isn't anything you can do about it anyway."

Yes, but, and works for all pseduo-contrarian arguments these days:

• "yes, we know that global warming is a problem, but we need to do more research, and there's nothing you can do to fix it anyway."
• "yes, we know the Iraq war is a mess, but we're there now, and we have to finish what we started regardless"

Folks in the letter pages go for the more standard rejections:

• Ad hominems (Hitchens is a drunk, a war supporter, a marxist)
• Atheist arguments are themselves arrogant, faith based, blind to their own inadequacies
• Secular states were just as bad if not worse in Nazi Germany, Stalinist USSR, and Mao's China
• Materialists just can't comprehend the mind blowingness of genuine religious experience
• There's more to life than just reason and logic

My response would be that:

• Yes, Hitchens is a jerk, but he's really scary smart
• This a rhetorical gambit, trying to establish symmetry between two sides of an argument where none exists. Religion makes unsupportable claims, Atheism is a critique.
• Atheists have rejected Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism. If these were religious sects, Hitler would be a martyr.
• Materialists believe in the mind blowingness of life without resort to imaginary third parties.
• There is more to life. Music, literature, gardening, family, you name it.
  

My point, and I don't know if this has anything to do with Hitchen's argument (I'm waiting for his book to arrive), is that religion is not separate from my world view, it is a subset of what I would call culture and the humanities. If you read Joseph Campbell, he describes how high religion took on and elaborated on the mythic traditions of primitive societies. Similarly, art and literature in the modern period are what Campbell called Creative Mythologies, which take on the role once served by the high religions of the East and the West.

The persistence of the high religions into the 21st century is a historical anachronism that puts them out of touch with human experience as it is lived today. The sacred texts of the modern period are to be found in Shakespeare and Melville and Joyce. If you want to understand the past read mythology for its historical and cultural insights. If you want to understand the present, read Pynchon or watch the Sopranos.