Giving atheism a bad name, part three

Did you catch the train wreck in what Christopher Hitchens said to Douglas Wilson as part of their third exchange? Wilson had asked if Hitchens subscribed to a particular moral standard extraneous to himself. More specifically:

"When another atheist makes different ethical choices than you do (as Stalin and Mao certainly did), is there an overarching common standard for all atheists that you are obeying and which they are not obeying? If so, what is that standard and what book did it come from? Why is it binding on them if they differ with you? And if there is not a common objective standard which binds all atheists, then would it not appear that the supernatural is necessary in order to have a standard of morality that can be reasonably articulated and defended?"

Hitchens attempted to parry that series of questions via misdirection: Stalin, he says, "called upon a reservoir of ignorance and servility" that had been built by the czar and the Orthodox Church. He knew this would be a smart move because -- wait for it-- he was an ex-seminarian.

Can't you just hear the organist pounding out spooky-sounding chords in a minor key to accent that factoid? After all, everybody in the smart set knows that seminarians are well-schooled in manipulating the hoi polloi, right? Hitchens apparently thinks that if seminary training had not paved the way for the machinations of this ruthless Communist, there would have been no gulags, no secret police, and no politically-engineered famines to kill thousands of Russians. Hitchens has gone Dorothy one better. All she did was rip the curtain away from the Wizard of Oz. Hitchens set his sights higher, and now implies with confidence that behind every mass-murdering dictator stands a professor of homiletics.

Yeeeah. Suuure. Note to Mr. Hitchens from Cecil Adams of "The Straight Dope:" Joseph Stalin was expelled from the seminary, and by all accounts hated his brief time there. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Douglas Wilson did not push Mr. Hitchens into that chasm of his own making, as he should have (figuratively speaking, of course), but he did explain how Hitchens had missed the point of the New Testament's Good Samaritan story.

Moreover, he said, the moral law that Hitchens says we all know without God's aid does not seem crystalline if the only thing backstopping it is this particular atheist's touching regard for unfettered human solidarity. If we don't need God to tell us that murder is wrong, said Wilson, then how is it we still contend with each other over a host of issues related to murder? "We have abortion, infanticide, partial-birth abortion, euthanasia, genocide, [embryonic] stem-cell research, capital punishment, and unjust war," Wilson explained. "Murder is the big E on the eye chart, and we still can't see it that clearly."

In other words, Moses' hike up Mount Sinai can hardly be dismissed as a waste of time, though Hitchens at least pretends to see it that way.

Fortunately, Wison was just warming up. "If given a choice between living in a Virginia governed by Jefferson and living in a Russia under the czars, I would opt to live under your beloved Jefferson. Fine. But this is not a concession, because it is not the point," Wilson observed, with no little exasperation.

He finished by noting that Hitchens had not yet answered the question of authority. He seems to have pinned Hitchens on that one. If Hitchens actually answers the authority query, I'm betting it will be by cautioning about how easily it can be mishandled by religiously- minded tyrants, and by singing again from his hymn book of praise for secular humanist sages like Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, of course, is no more fitting for Hitchens' purposes than Stalin was, seeing as how he found deism no handicap to the genius of his political expression, and famously cut and pasted the words of Jesus into a copybook. But because Wilson did not call the Stalin bluff, I have no great hope he'll call the Jefferson bluff, either.

Nevertheless, Wilson found his footing in this round, and if he keeps it, we'll get more gems like this: "The difference between us is that I have a basis for condemning evil in its Christian guise. You have no basis for confronting evil in its atheist guise, or in its Christian guise, either. When you say that a certain practice is evil, you have to be prepared to tell us why it is evil."

As any Thomist can tell you, grace builds upon nature. Neither of the parties to this argument is a Thomist, however, so it will be interesting to see what we get from Hitchens by way of the comeback he must now attempt. Wilson is officially ahead on points.

The back story:

Part Two

Part One

Looking ahead:

Part Four