This silver age is different. In his King's College debate with
D'Souza (tkc.edu/debate), Hitchens went for the jugular right from the
start: "Christianity is masochistic, as well as partly sadistic. It
attacks us in our deepest integrity. It says that you and I wouldn't
know a right action, wouldn't be able to derive it or a right thought
without the permission of a celestial dictatorship that guards us
while we sleep, that can convict us of thought crime, that supervises
our every waking moment, that is in fact the origin of
totalitarianism, and that will continue to judge us and persecute us
and supervise us even after we were dead."

D'Souza argued the opposite, declaring that Christianity undermined
dictators and brought into the world "the idea of individual dissent,
the notion of personal dignity, the idea of equality, the idea of
compassion as a social virtue. . . . If you look at the world of
Athens, which is to say Greece and pre-Christian Rome, you discover
civilizations where women were treated very badly, where human life
didn't count for a whole lot. The Spartans notoriously would leave the
feeble child on the hillside to see if it was still alive in the
morning. The great philosophers of Greece and Rome viewed these
incidents with equanimity--it is only from Christianity that these
things that had been uncontroversial for a long time become
controversial for the first time."

Hitchens went for the jugular right from the
start: "Christianity is... in fact the origin of
totalitarianism

In his King's College debate with
D'Souza (tkc.edu/debate), Hitchens went for the jugular right from the
start: "Christianity is masochistic, as well as partly sadistic. It
attacks us in our deepest integrity. It says that you and I wouldn't
know a right action, wouldn't be able to derive it or a right thought
without the permission of a celestial dictatorship that guards us
while we sleep, that can convict us of thought crime, that supervises
our every waking moment, that is in fact the origin of
totalitarianism, and that will continue to judge us and persecute us
and supervise us even after we were dead."

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1923812/posts

The silver age of freethought [why atheists like Christopher Hitchens
are grumpy]

WORLD ^ | November 17, 2007 | Marvin Olasky

Posted on 11/10/2007 7:39:36 AM PST by rhema

Atheistic books are selling ("Backward, atheists", June 30), but so
are debates between atheists and Christians. Christopher Hitchens,
author of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, debated
last month--before packed houses in Washington and New York--Oxford
professor Alister McGrath and author Dinesh D'Souza (What's So Great
About Christianity). But none of this is new in American history:
Hitchens' best-known predecessor, Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899) sold
out auditoriums throughout the last quarter of the 19th century, in
what became known as "the golden age of freethought."

"Freethought" included atheism, agnosticism, and some left-wing
political -isms as well, and had the backing of publications such as
the Boston Investigator, the (New York) Truth Seeker, the (Kentucky)
Blue Grass Blade, and the (Texas) Iconoclast. Ingersoll, a colonel in
the Civil War and the attorney general of Illinois until he became the
golden mouth of atheistic rhetoric, was blunt at times but generally a
cheerful warrior who preferred beckoning to ranting. "I am simply in
favor of intellectual hospitality," he declared as he traded ideas
with listeners.

This silver age is different. In his King's College debate with
D'Souza (tkc.edu/debate), Hitchens went for the jugular right from the
start: "Christianity is masochistic, as well as partly sadistic. It
attacks us in our deepest integrity. It says that you and I wouldn't
know a right action, wouldn't be able to derive it or a right thought
without the permission of a celestial dictatorship that guards us
while we sleep, that can convict us of thought crime, that supervises
our every waking moment, that is in fact the origin of
totalitarianism, and that will continue to judge us and persecute us
and supervise us even after we were dead."

D'Souza argued the opposite, declaring that Christianity undermined
dictators and brought into the world "the idea of individual dissent,
the notion of personal dignity, the idea of equality, the idea of
compassion as a social virtue. . . . If you look at the world of
Athens, which is to say Greece and pre-Christian Rome, you discover
civilizations where women were treated very badly, where human life
didn't count for a whole lot. The Spartans notoriously would leave the
feeble child on the hillside to see if it was still alive in the
morning. The great philosophers of Greece and Rome viewed these
incidents with equanimity--it is only from Christianity that these
things that had been uncontroversial for a long time become
controversial for the first time."

Hitchens blasted away at how those who give thanks to God are
"condemned to live in this posture of gratitude, permanent gratitude,
to an unalterable dictatorship in whose installation we had no say.
Some of us refuse this on moral grounds, as well as on the grounds
that the story is a fairy tale, made up by fallible and opportunistic
human beings. Christianity offers something horrible--vicarious
redemption. You are told that by applauding a human sacrifice, a
particularly cruel and revolting one, that took place before you were
born to fulfill a prophecy in which you had no say, that it condemns
you either to punishment in sin if you don't accept it, or if you do
accept it offers you the chance that your own sins can be forgiven
you."

D'Souza said from the start that he would not enter into a theological
debate: "We have from the atheists' side a belligerent attack on
theism and specifically on Christianity. I want to try to answer this
attack by using the same tools of reason and skepticism and science
and evidence that is the banner under which the atheists march. In no
way, this evening, will I rely on Scripture or any kind of theology to
make my points. I'm going to focus entirely on reason and evidence."

The result was an asymmetric debate. Hitchens blasted away:
"Christianity requires of you compulsory love, as well as compulsory
fear. You have to simultaneously love someone, you're commanded to
love them and be frightened of them at the same time. This is no way
to teach morals. Second, you're told not that you might get a second
chance but that all your debts can be paid. [Payment by another]
should be rejected by anyone with any self-respect. So the vicarious
redemption by human sacrifice is an immoral preachment with very
immoral implications, as is compulsory love coupled with compulsory
fear."

D'Souza did not explain substitutionary atonement but looked at the
positives of Christian culture and compared negatives with the
enormities of atheistic practice: "At the Salem Witch Trials 18 people
died. The Spanish Inquisition over 300 years killed 2,000 people. Try
to compare that to the crimes inflicted by atheist regimes not 500,
not 1,000 years ago, but within our lifetime. If you look only at the
big three--Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, Nazi Germany--you have within
the space of five decades over 100 million casualties. So, atheism,
not religion is responsible for the mass murders of history."

This was all a reversal from the golden age of freethought, which of
course took place before brief periods of freethought in Russia and
Germany became preludes to the worst tragedies the world had ever
seen. Ingersoll's speeches emphasized history and science; theists
countered him with revelation. He exuded optimism; his critics spoke
of man's depravity and urged caution. In the King's College debate,
though, D'Souza seemed cheerful throughout and Hitchens sarcastically
grumpy.

Temperament aside, Ingersoll of the golden age had two advantages over
silver age Hitchens. First, Ingersoll was fighting for secularistic
liberty within an America where church and state were still
interwoven. He took potshots at blasphemy laws: "An infinite God ought
to be able to protect himself, without going in partnership with State
Legislatures. Certainly he ought not so to act that laws become
necessary to keep him from being laughed at. No one thinks of
protecting Shakespeare from ridicule, by the threat of fine and
imprisonment." The naked public squares of today do not afford
Hitchens such easy targets.

Second, the golden age of freethought had the golden glow of peace and
broadening intelligence that 20th-century war, genocide, and mass
culture dispelled. Ingersoll orated about Science with a godlike
capital S, declaring that when "the day of Science dawned," not only
riches but "the development of mind [followed]. There is more of value
in the brain of an average man of today --of a master-mechanic, of a
chemist, of a naturalist, of an inventor, than there was in the brain
of the world four hundred years ago." Many today no longer carry such
disparagement of past wisdom and hubris concerning the present.

In the Q&A section of the Hitchens-D'Souza debate, a King's College
student from Tonga stood up and said that before Christianity came to
his part of the world, people in southern Pacific islands were eating
each other. He asked Hitchens, "If you had arrived there first, what
would you have offered us in place of Christianity?" Hitchens did not
answer the question but expostulated against God because people were
in misery for millennia before missionaries arrived.

Ingersoll answered such questions differently. He argued that belief
in what the Bible declared was a blip on the way to the greater
revelations of the late 1800s: "This century will be called Darwin's
century. . . . Write the name of Charles Darwin on the one hand and
the name of every theologian who ever lived on the other, and from
that name has come more light to the world than from all of those. His
doctrine of evolution, his doctrine of the survival of the fittest,
his doctrine of the origin of species, has removed in every thinking
mind the last vestige of orthodox Christianity."

Hitchens defends Darwin's doctrine of the survival of the fittest, of
course, but in the 21st century, with our knowledge of how many have
died because their neighbors declared them unfit, it's hard to do so
with such exuberance.

it is only from Christianity that these things that
had been uncontroversial for a long time become
controversial for the first time."