The lady doth protest too much

Over at the National Post writer and editor of Holy Post Charles Lewis has felt the need to let atheists know that he in fact does not care what they think at a reasonable length(http://life.nationalpost.com/2010/12/05/dear-atheists-most-of-us-dont-care-what-you-think/). It’s very rare to see someone defeat their own point before they manage to make it but these are indeed strange times we are living in and as such I guess we should see why his toys left the pram and perhaps help him put them back in.

Launching into his diatribe, which is definitely about something he definitely doesn’t care about, we find the catalyst for this article is the recent debate between Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair. Lewis goes on to lament that, “Blair probably should not have even bothered and instead should have gone to mass that night or spent an evening helping out at a shelter or visiting someone who was lonely and sick in a hospital.” I can’t help but think by his own standards surely he himself would be better off tending to the needy rather than writing, editing, proofing and publishing his letter. Surely Mr Blair giving a defense of his faith to a sold out auditorium is a worthwhile endeavour and in many ways a requirement of his faith ( 1 Peter 3:15, Phillipians 1:7, Corinthians 10:5). What we have is Lewis telling us that Blair shouldn’t have wasted his time while at the same time doing the same thing himself, imposing an approach that he himself cannot follow.

So, what did Mr Lewis make of the Blair apologetic? Well, I’m not sure because while he is saying that Blair should’ve stayed at home or went out and helped the needy he also shows that he in fact didn’t watch the debate, “I have read bits and pieces about who bested whom.” Now, I may be being slightly picky but I find that I like to actively see the evidence before I make a decision but then again if I didn’t really care about it, why would I? In absence of taking the time to understand the arguments it seems that Lewis has found good filler, a good old fashioned ad hominem attack. Nothing sells ‘I don’t actually care’ better than attacking someone personally and he exquisitely demonstrates this with his not quite indifferent opinion of Hitchens as, “a pompous ass whose main intellectual arsenal is sneering and using sarcasm.”  Now I have read a lot Hitchens work, I have watched the majority of his debates and I think that there is a lot more to his ‘intellectual arsenal’, after all there are forty years of publication that would immediately dispel this idea of an intellectual myopia. If perhaps Lewis could’ve addressed Hitchens points and then explained how they were intellectually void and covered up with sarcasm then we may have had a case. I don’t want to judge Charles Lewis too strongly as I understand that his level of care when approaching the subject was minimal so he is likely to make mistakes, no matter how glaring.

So, in absence of having heard what Hitchens actually said and judging Blair for taking part where does Lewis take his non-interested article? Well apparently atheists, and one must wonder if he includes agnostics in with this, do not have the necessary understanding of religion and what it is and he feels, “the debate is useless for one simple reason: most atheists do not have a clue what religion is about.” There seems to be no accounting of the fact that a lot of atheists, and I would definitely count myself in this group so I know of at least one, migrated from belief to non-belief. I struggled to really understand what he was trying to say with this, after all if I don’t understand something I will engage with someone who does and based on that communication and a further examination of all evidences I can then make a judgment. It seems that Lewis doesn’t want to go this far, it seems that if you don’t understand by now then its tough because it turns out believers shouldn’t be wasting time explaining it to you.

Just when I thought he had ticked all the ‘bad apologetics’ boxes Lewis then reminded me that there was more in his ammunition and reminded us that, “..Godless societies have not done too well, unless you consider North Korea a success.” What impresses me more than a good sentence is a bad one that is self assured; a person who can confidently assert something that’s not based on fact must take a really special effort in blocking out reality. Firstly on the issue of North Korea we need not waste time other than point out that this has more in common with a theocracy and the atheism here is not organic, this argument has been knocked down more times than a bad stuntman and really does not hold up under serious discussion. If Lewis had in fact read any of the ‘new atheist’ writings, that on one hand he describes as having, “…captured the secular imagination.” and on the other says are written by a “dreary crew”, then perhaps he would’ve seen this argument beaten down with great confidence.

So what do we make of the implied claim that religious societies fare better than Godless ones? Firstly I would not claim that there is a causal link from religiosity to bad societal health but it does seem that there is a correlation between the two. Looking at Gregory S. Pauls study on ‘Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies’ (http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html) we can see quite clearly that there is actual real world evidence of a correlation between religious societies and increased homicide/teen pregnancy/abortions etc. It might be too much for Lewis to do a quick Google or Wiki search on the subject he apparently doesn’t care about but I think it would do him the world of good. I wouldn’t commit myself to draw the causal line with absolute confidence, as societies are complex organic things, but as a starting point of research I feel it helps direct the necessary questions.

Mr Lewis has little left in his back catalogue of apologetics at this point of the article and jumps on Hitchens opinion of Mother Teresa. I found this quite bizarre as he seems to think Hitchens is wrong about Mother Teresa as a fraud because of his view on her crisis of faith. I can only guess that he has never read Hicthens “Missionary Position” or his documentary “Hells Angel”. Hitchens had much more to hold Mother Teresa to rights for and it far outweighs her crisis of faith, her belief that poverty and suffering as a good thing and her fund raising from questionable figures are among those reasons.

With the straws firmly clutched Lewis then launches into what can only be described as some abstract literary hand waving such as, “Real faith is like real love — something that endures after the first attraction and then sustains life itself.” I struggle to grasp what he is trying to say coming to the end of his piece, perhaps as an atheist I just don’t get it, but this statement that faith sustains life is just a bumper sticker for his understanding of the human condition. The waning pace of the article is almost indicative of someone who has slowly realised that he is in fact the beast his wishes to slay. All I can say is that if this is what he produces about something he absolutely does not care about then the bar for his writings for things he does care about is set low enough for him to succeed next time.