Ain’t That Right, Mr. Hitchens?
” The effectiveness of Hitchens’ book is also undermined by the large number of errors it contains, many so glaring that they will be picked up by even a casual reader with some knowledge of history and theology. The Gnostic gospels are not of the “same period and provenance” as the canonical Gospels, but were written several decades later; the “synoptic” Gospels are not synonymous with the “canonical” Gospels; “Q” is an assumed source for the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, but not Mark and John; the process of deciding which books to include in the New Testament was not one in which “many a life was horribly lost;” “the Vulgate” was what the Reformers were trying to get away from, not what they were attempting to translate the Bible into; Luther declared “Here I stand, I can do no other” at Worms, not Wittenberg; John Adams was not a slaveholder, nor was T. S. Eliot a Catholic; the amount of wood from relics of the True Cross would not be sufficient if gathered together to recreate the Cross, much less create a “thousand – foot cross;” Christians have never practiced animal sacrifice, nor did the Arian heresy teach that the Father and the Son were “two incarnations of the same person;” the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption were promulgated in 1854 and 1950, not 1852 and 1951; the Lateran Treaty was signed seven years after Mussolini marched on Rome, not after he “had barely seized power;” Maryland never prohibited Protestants from holding office, and condoms are not a “necessary” condition for preventing the transmission of AIDS, or else celibates would all be infected. Given all these errors (and many more), there is no reason to accept anything Hitchens writes on his own authority, and he offers no authority other than his own for most of what he writes.
Hitchens’ errors extend even to fields in which he claims to be an expert. This self-professed admirer of Evelyn Waugh describes Sebastian Flyte of Brideshead Revisited as being “heir to an old Catholic nobility.” In fact, Sebastian was the younger son, with little prospect of inheritance, and the Flytes became Catholic only when Lord Marchmain converted to marry his wife. As luck would have it, the very paragraph following the one sentence Hitchens quotes from Brideshead begins: “Sebastian always heard his mass, which was ill-attended. Brideshead was not an old established centre of Catholicism.” All the humor in Hitchens’ book is similarly unintentional, such as reading about Christianity’s supposed obsession with sex in a book with page after page discoursing on such topics as the evil of virginity, the horror of circumcision, and “the hideous consequences of the masturbation taboo.”
But what of Hitchens’ major arguments? Is there a persuasive core buried beneath the errors and falsehoods? Even Hitchens admits there is not. The book eschews philosophical argument in favor of anecdote, with the reader offered a parade of horrible religious extremists to contemplate. But such argument does not prove that religion is false or that God does not exist. As Hitchens acknowledges, “I do not say that if I catch a Buddhist priest stealing all the offerings left by the simple folk at his temple, Buddhism is thereby discredited.” Exactly. The fact that some horrible things have been done in the name of religion, and that some repulsive men have professed religious belief, does not disprove the existence of God, or show that religion is a malign force. ”
Hitchen’s Hubris: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/hitchens_hubris/
Is there an editor or researcher in the room?
