1922 came to my mind, Hitch, when I read this of yours: “Religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.”
But before I get into that, I hasten to address the two challenges you’ve put to us “On Faith” panelists:
1) “Can [anybody] name a moral statement or action, uttered or performed by a religious person, that could not have been uttered or performed by an unbeliever?” Of course not! But consider what your statement concedes: Such moral statements and actions as HAVE come from religious persons, only “COULD” have come from unbelievers. Religion actually HAS been productive of your desiderata; you can only speculate that your irreligion MIGHT have been so productive.
2) “Can [anybody] think of a wicked action or statement that derived directly from religious faith?” Of course! Religion is natural, human beings are naturally wicked (as well as naturally good), so we should expect wickedness (as well as goodness) to come out of religion. Your claim that the world would be better off without religion is almost as patently stupid as would be saying that the world would be better off without sex, which is guilty of a list of horrors rivaling religion’s list. As for your assumption that religion is natural only to the extent of a surgically removable wart (the knife being reason), the cumulative evidence of history and of the human sciences is against you.
Back to 1922 and the yellowed newspaper clipping I have from my father about a sermon preached by “Harry,” a schoolmate of his. What Harry Emerson Fosdick preached on Sunday morning was frequently in the Monday-morning papers. Like you, Hitch, Fosdick had a witty way of irritating religious folk. This sermon's title was “How Religion Helps Mess Up the World,” a title you yourself could preach a rip-snortin’ sermon on. There the similarity stops. What I have to say to you I choose to say by contrasts.
1) Unlike you, Fosdick preached his sermons inside instead of outside the church. Your brother Peter listens more to sermons inside the church, less to sermons outside the church. How about coming inside to preach? Of course it would require that you advance from your present debater's moralism of religion as bad to the preacher's realistic recognition that religion is both bad and good.
2) Unlike you, Fosdick rightly saw religion as only one factor in messing up the world. If you had preached the sermon, its title would have been not “How Religion Helps Mess Up the World” but (simple-mindedly) “How Religion Messes Up the World.”
3) Unlike you, Fosdick had a joyful lift to his head, a lilt in his voice, a lightness in his laughter, and a twinkle in his eyes—all bespeaking his contagious Christian faith and love. (I remember especially that twinkle as I conversed with him at eye-level [as I am, he was a little guy].)
(From your New York City apartment, you may be able to see something reminiscent of Fosdick. It’s the twenty-story Riverside Church, which a fellow-Baptist, John D. Rockefeller -- who had urged him to start a liberal church of his own -- gave him the money to build.)
Hitch, you are (unwittingly) making a contribution to religion, which -- like every other dimension of human life -- needs continuous criticism. You understand religion’s potential for messing up the world. I invite you to explore religion’s potential for straightening it out. You could start by studying instances of religion's being "friendly to free inquiry" (as over against your assertion, above, that it's "hostile to free inquiry").
To begin, you might stay with that liberal Baptist, Rockefeller. In 1893, he gave some money ($78,000,000) to a Baptist preacher to start a school in Chicago, and its faculty has won more Nobel Prizes than any other school in the world. William Rainey Harper, that Baptist preacher, believed that the Bible is the world's best book for promoting freedom, and he was a specialist in it. Indeed, the first five presidents of the University of Chicago were professional scholars of the Bible.
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