Does Peterson really understand Hitchins’ point?

[I Have Questions]

[\url=https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... ssues.html]Today[/url] he appears to demonstrate that he doesn’t…

Some of The Usual Suspects have been claiming of late that the very existence of the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™ is, in of itself, a violation of the counsel given by Presidents Russell M. Nelson and Dallin H. Oaks that encourages us to be civil, polite, and charitable in our disagreements with others on religious, political, and other matters.

Nit some people. Me.

I don’t see it that way at all. Please note that I don’t attack the character of the late Mr. Hitchens (whose style, eloquence, and mannerisms, to some degree at least, I rather admired). For example, I’ve never accused him of antisemitism, religious bigotry, anger management issues, financial corruption, cruelty, viciousness, racism, dishonesty, sadism, callous exploitation of innocent people, misogyny, perpetual smoldering hatred, gluttony, or mercenary hypocrisy. I’ve never portrayed him as an irrational buffoon or as a flat-out liar. (I pass over in silence the fact that The Usual Suspects have accused me of all of those things, and of a good many other negative things besides.)

My little Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™ theme is targeted directly and solely at one of the main claims of Mr. Hitchens’s bestselling 2007 manifesto god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. (It was, after all, the book’s subtitle. You may have noticed that.) It is intended to demonstrate — and, in my view, it has demonstrated, hundreds of times over — that the claim that “religion poisons everything” is indisputably false. It is, at the very best, a wild specimen of exaggerated rhetoric.

To argue, on the basis of supplied evidence, that a proposition advanced by an opponent is untrue is to engage the substance of the dispute. It is neither uncivil nor ad hominem, and it cannot reasonably be construed as defiant opposition to the counsel of President Nelson and President Oaks. Neither of them has ever taught that it’s the duty of a Latter-day Saint, or of a Christian more generally, to allow falsehoods to circulate without contradiction.

But you’re not addressing Hitchins’ point - which wasn’t that religions and religious people are always bad. If that WAS his point then a few examples of the opposite would be sufficient. You’ve built a straw man out of Hitchins and you’ve been blowing it down almost daily for years. Does it make you feel big, clever? However, you’ve missed his point, probably deliberately. Examples of religious people doing good don’t disprove his argument, because the claim isn’t ‘religious people are always bad.’. The question is whether religion introduces harmful ideas or justifications into moral decision-making. You’d have to show that religion improves outcomes in a way that wouldn’t happen otherwise—not just that good things sometimes happen alongside it. You haven’t done that at all. Why not? All you have to do is show the reverse is the case - that religion poisons nothing. Good luck with that.

[drumdude]

HULSEY: Yes, the question is if there is no God, why spend your life and career trying to refute that? Why don’t you just leave it alone and stay home? Fair enough?

HITCHENS: Well it’s not my—it isn’t my whole career, for one thing. It’s become a major preoccupation of my life though in the last eight or nine years, especially since September 11, 2001 to try and help generate an opposition to theocracy and its depredations.

That is now probably my main political preoccupation, to help people in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Israel resist those who sincerely want to encompass the destruction of civilization and sincerely believe they have God on their side in wanting to do so.

A thing—maybe I will take a few minutes just to say something that I find repulsive about, especially monotheistic, Messianic religion. With a large part of itself, it quite clearly wants us all to die. It wants this world to come to an end. You can tell the yearning for things to be over. Whenever you read any of its real texts or listen to any of its real, authentic spokesmen, not the sort of pathetic apologists who sometimes masquerade for it, those who talk—

There was a famous spokesmen for this in Virginia until recently, about the rapture say that those of us who have chosen rightly will be gathered to the arms of Jesus, leaving all of the rest of you behind. If we’re in a car, it’s your lookout, that car won’t have a driver anymore. If you’re a pilot, that’s your lookout, that plane will crash. We will be with Jesus and the rest of you can go straight to hell. The eschatological element that is inseparable from Christianity—if you don’t believe that there is to be an apocalypse, there is going to be an end, a separation of the sheep and the goats, a condemnation, a final one, then you’re not really a believer, and their contempt for things of this world shows through all of them. It’s well put in an old rhyme from an English exclusive bretheren sect. It says that, “We are the pure and chosen few and all the rest are damned. There’s room enough in hell for you, we don’t want heaven crammed.”

You can tell it when you see the extreme Muslims talk. They cannot wait, they cannot wait for death and destruction to overtake and overwhelm the world. They can’t wait for, what I would call without ambiguity, a final solution. When you look at the Israeli settlers, paid for often by American tax dollars, deciding that if they can steal enough land from other people and get all the Jews into the promised land and all the non-Jews out of it then finally the Jewish people will be worthy of the return of the Messiah and there are Christians in this country who consider it their job to help this happen so that Armageddon can occur so that the painful business of living as humans and studying civilization and trying to acquire learning and knowledge and health and medicine and to push back—can all be scrapped and the cult of death can take over.

That, to me, is a hideous thing in eschatological terms and end time terms on its own, hateful idea, hateful practice and a hateful theory but very much to be opposed in our daily lives where there are people who sincerely mean it, who want to ruin the good relations that could exist between different peoples, nations, races, countries, tribes, ethnicities, who say—who openly say they love death more than we love life and who are betting that with God on their side, they’re right about that.

So when I say, as the subtitle of my book, that I think religion poisons everything, I’m not just doing what publishers like and coming up with a provocative subtitle, I mean to say it infects us in our most basic integrity. It says we can’t be moral without Big Brother, without a totalitarian permission. It means we can’t be good to one another, it means we can't think without this. We must be afraid, we must also be forced to love someone who we fear, the essence of sado-masochism and the essence of abjection, the essence of the master-slave relationship and that knows that death is coming and can’t wait to bring it on. I say this is evil. And though I do, some nights, stay at home, I enjoy more the nights when I go out and fight against this ultimate wickedness and ultimate stupidity. Thank you.

Leave it to Christopher Hitchens to say in 1,000 words something incredibly more profound than Daniel Peterson has said in 100,000 blog posts.

[I Have Questions]

It’s funny because, if Peterson wanted to really rebut Hitchins he would need to demonstrate that atheists are far worse people than theists. That without religion people are incapable of being moral and kind and neighbourly, just for the sake of being moral and kind and neighbourly. And Peterson knows he cannot do that, and so he bastardises Hitchins actual point into something he thinks he can demean by posting a few examples of people doing some good in the world who happen to be religious.

Cheap. Lazy. Disingenuous. That’s Dan for you. Meanwhile Hitchens published 18 books in his lifetime.

[Marcus]

...So when I say, as the subtitle of my book, that I think religion poisons everything, I’m not just doing what publishers like and coming up with a provocative subtitle, I mean to say it infects us in our most basic integrity. It says we can’t be moral without Big Brother, without a totalitarian permission. It means we can’t be good to one another, it means we can't think without this. We must be afraid, we must also be forced to love someone who we fear, the essence of sado-masochism and the essence of abjection, the essence of the master-slave relationship and that knows that death is coming and can’t wait to bring it on. I say this is evil...

Peterson regularly provides examples of Hitchen's point. Here is just one:

...Of course, consistently naturalistic thinkers understand that there is really no such thing as “the moral universe” and that the cosmos in which we live arcs toward nothing at all because it has no purpose and is completely indifferent to us and our quaint moral notions...

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... -file.html

Peterson's stance toward religion has clearly poisoned his view of the universe and anyone who believes differently than he does. One of his (inadvertently, I'm sure) funniest takes on Hitchen's writings was when he decided to compare his assumptions about Hitchens' book to composers of great religious music.

He made his argument by blatantly and dishonestly plagiarizing several blog entry's worth of material, stolen from from another writer's intellectual property. He not only copied the words, he shamelessly copied their FOOTNOTES, in the exact same order, word for word, exact reference for exact reference. Did he really think people would believe he did all of that research, and originated all of that thought he presented on the history of those composers? He presented his blog entries as though he did.

Clearly, something poisoned the Afore's ability to be honest in his dealings with his fellow men. I'm not sure religion should be blamed for all of it, but it's hard to avoid that conclusion given how dishonestly he writes.

[Physics Guy]

I haven't read Hitchens's book, but Peterson isn't claiming to respond to the book, just its subtitle. Its subtitle is indeed an untenable hyperbole which is easy to refute, because it's an unrestricted claim: "everything". If I say that everything is green, you don't have to prove that nothing is green to refute me. All you have to do is produce a single thing that isn't green. And interpreting my statement in that easily-refuted way isn't attacking a straw man. "Everything is green" really is that easy to refute. If I didn't actually mean to advance such an obviously false assertion, then I shouldn't have said what I said.

If Hitchens didn't really mean "everything", or didn't really mean "poisons", or didn't really mean "religion", then he shouldn't have put those words together in his subtitle.

(If he kind of meant "poisons" but only in the weaselly sense of 'subtly corrupts in ways that might not always be visible but trust me they're there deep inside even though it may be impossible to tell", then Hitchens was doing bait-and-switch, and is thus fair game.)

[Marcus]

I'll have to disagree-- in drumdude's quote, Hitchens explained what he meant by "religion poisons everything," and while the words are clunky his point is valid. And he didn't say 'trust me,' he literally explained why, in that he considers 'everything' to mean what is basic to being a human, and therefore, legitimately, everything:

...So when I say, as the subtitle of my book, that I think religion poisons everything, ... I mean to say it infects us in our most basic integrity. It says we can’t be moral without Big Brother, without a totalitarian permission. It means we can’t be good to one another, it means we can't think without this... [It is the] essence of sado-masochism and the essence of abjection, the essence of the master-slave relationship and that knows that death is coming and can’t wait to bring it on. I say this is evil...

When a person like Midgley literally writes that he wouldn't know that rape is bad if his religion didn't tell him so, and therefore he assumes any who reject religion don't have the capacity to know rape is bad either, he fully supports Hitchen's point.

[Gadianton]

It says we can’t be moral without Big Brother, without a totalitarian permission. It means we can’t be good to one another, it means we can't think without this.

Sounds exactly like what Peterson himself claims. At least we know Hitchens isn't misrepresenting Dan's position.

[drumdude]

In the UK, the book was sold without that same tagline:



Clearly he didn’t think it was so fundamental to his argument that it couldn’t be left out - it was obviously meant for impact and dramatic effect. You’d think a creative filmmaker like DCP might understand this.