Responding to Hitchens and David Brooks

Responding to Hitchens and David Brooks on Chanukah

by Rabbi Michael Lerner

In the typical fashion that have made Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins into heroes among those who hate (sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not--there are some destructive elements in many religions, but that's not the whole story) the religions of the world, we get in the article on Chanukah (which you can find below) Hitchens' distortions endorsed by Dawkins.

The approach is typical: a religious view or practice is misdescribed and distorted, then ridiculed. The critique is made to seem plausible by quoting out of context and taking the least sophisticated possible interpretations of whatever religious tradition is being critiqued.

Unlike Hitchens and fellow traveler Dawkins, I first present the entirety of Hitchens attack, so you can read it in context, then the original text he is crirtiquing which I wrote in 2007 and which he misrepresents. All this followed by my comments.

After you've read it all, you could try to figure out why anyone with a serious intellectual curiosity would give a moment's attention to Hitchens' intellectual clownishness.

Both Hitchens and Dawkins take the most primitve versions of religion, seemingly unaware of the variants of religion that have evolved through the ages. They seem unfamiliar with how religious and theological interpretations have evovled ovder the course of the past two thousand years or more. They take English translations of texts that are complicated in their original meaning, and then they ignore the struggles over the centuries by the faithful to figure out what those meanings really are.

Moreover, both Hitchens and Dawkins argue as though it is sufficient to disprove a theology or a worldview if you can find people using it to justify oppressive behavior. Yet there is no ideology and no anti-ideology that hasn't been used in an oppressive way.

This way of arguing is kind of like denouncing "democracy" and using as proof text the presidency of George W. Bush. Sure, it was horrible, it really happened, and its violent and oppressive consequences are still with us, and it was produced by a democratic system (well, not fully democratic). But showing the barbarity of US interventions in Iraq, now under Obama in Afghanistan and Pakistan, does not lead anyone with sophistication to reason in the Hitchens/Dawkins style: "this destructive behavior emerged in a democratic system, therefore democracy is worthless." Yet that is precisely the form of argument underlying most of Hitchens/Dawkins.

Imagine how they'd howl if we used the same form of argument against atheism and said: "Hitler and Stalin were atheists, they established political systems that persecuted the established religions of their societies, and those societies then killed tens of millions of innocents, therefore atheism produces genocide." The argument is ridiculous for the same reason that Hitchens/Dawkins are ridiculous.

But being ridiculous is only the beginning. Look below to see how dishonest or at least intellectually sloppy Hitchens becomes in an article that Dawkins then publishes on his website with praise.

David Brooks is altogether different. His thinking is much more nuanced and sophisticated. He doesn't show any of the vulgarity of Hitchens and Dawkins. So although I strongly disagree with his fundamental worldview and the politics it yields, I believe his mis-reading of Chanukah deserves a far more respectful treatment than I'm going to give in this piece, because it would take a much longer historical discussion. Yet I will take on one of his primary mistakes in the third section below.

ENDS

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