God Is Not Great?

Christopher Hitchens is an athiest. He wrote this article on why Mitt Romney needs to address his religion during the campaign for the Republican nomination. I didn't even bother reading the whole article through and that is mostly because the piece is just so condescending. He also wrote this piece comparing Muslims to Mormons. On another blog, I found the following comment from one of the readers:

For a man who labels Mother Teresa “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud” I would expect nothing better in his treatment of Joseph Smith. I’d forgotten about that one. He also said “I can’t stand anyone who believes in God, who invokes the divinity or who is a person of faith.” Christopher Hitchens is an extraordinarily brilliant, arrogant, publicity-seeking bomb-thrower. He’s a contrarian to his very core, which is almost certainly connected to his arrogance. The person he most reminds me of is an old acquaintance of mine who used to be an extreme archconservative racist who later became an extreme, radical left Unitarian. He hasn’t really changed his nature - he’s still an extremist, he’s just switched extremes. That seems to me to describe Hitchens perfectly.

Here is some background information on him. I thought I recognized the name when I started reading the first article. Maybe you have or haven't heard this book, but he wrote the popular God Is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything. I heard a radio interview with him on Hugh Hewitt and I meant to actually post about that when I first heard it about a month ago.

The following video is a debate between him and a Christian, Dinesh D'Souza that occurred recently. This is an article by D'Souza in anticipation of the debate.



Personally, I don't care for the guy. I think he is a moron. I think it's also just side-stepping to say that religion is the root cause of the world's atrocities. It just doesn't seem to fair to blame an institution for horrible acts that individual members commit. I think a person who identifies himself with an organized religion is just expressing his own particular brand of faith. However, people who do not ever declare themselves a member of such and such church still have their own type of religion, or at the very least a core belief system that guides their actions and behavior. Religion is just the formalized expression of the person's beliefs, but people who do not associate themselves with a particular church still have ideas that they hold dear. There is a church of environmentalism, capitalism, liberalism, conservatism, and just about any other -ism that you could ever think of. Adhering to the principles and ideals of these different movements constitutes a religion just as much as joining the LDS church, Jehovah's Witnesses, Muslims, or any other church.

I think the biggest problem with people who are anti-religion, anti-church, and particularly anti-Mormons ignore the fruits of the lives of the people who follow those tenets. While serving in Chile one thought that constantly ran through my mind was that if any of the people we were visiting had any idea at all about how selfless it is to be out there preaching on your own time and your own dime, then they would literally flock to join or at least listen to our message. I didn't go out to a foreign country and preach in every type of weather imaginable, face sometimes intensely negative reactions, but at the very least constant rejection because I'm just looking for a new adventure. I served a mission to teach people a better way of life that either prevents people from making the most tragic mistakes, or helps them to cope with life's greatest challenges.

So when a person like Christopher Hitchens denigrates and ridicules these things that I hold so close to my heart without careful and thoughtful scrutiny, I tend to disregard his arguments.