Book notes on What’s So Great About Christianity
31 December 2007
Book notes on What’s So Great About Christianity
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Impetuous me, I wrote a comment on the book review: “New book out: Christianity and Homosexuality: Some Seventh-day Adventist Perspectives.” I got clobbered, pilloried, my humanity, and my Christian values were questioned. As a sensitive old man, sleep escaped me. I turned to late night television and clicked away until I reached C-Span 2.
What a late night find. I was tuned into a debate between Dinesh D’Souza and Christopher Hitchens held at King’s College New York. As a reader of Atlantic Monthly I would frequently encounter Hitchens: a fountain of words, a challenger of convention, a growling cynical atheist.
His opponent was Dinesh D’Souza, a native of India, the author of What’s So Great About Christianity, What’s So Great about America, and How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader: (a biography of Ronald Reagen). D’Souza is a former White House domestic policy analyst and is currently Rishwain Research Scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. (His resume left me a little cold, but I soon warmed to his carefully worded arguments.)
D’Souza is a wisp of a man and Hitchens is a brooding hulk with a vocabulary and Churchillian style of speech. No one in their right mind would consent to an open debate with this “enlightened erudite Neanderthal”. Ah, I said to myself, here comes healing for a wounded soul.
Both men carried baggage. D’Souza as a darling of the Bush White House and the “Moral Majority” and Hitchens as the M. L. Mencken of the 21st century.
For his part, Hitchens was his at his growling best, giving a litany of the cruelty and savagery of “Christian Crusades” et al. Cruelty, hypocrisy, and naiveté were his charges against Christianity and creationism.
D’Souza's counter-point to each charge was calm, poised, well-referenced, and telling. The audience loved it. I was impressed.
At the end, each debater received questions from the audience, for the most part, the questions were for 15 seconds of fame for the questioner. The final question was directed to D’Souza. His answer included a swipe at Hitchens’ book, The Missionary Position -- a cynical analysis of Sister Teresa’s work among the poor in India. Hitchens gave a snort, which was the only rebuttal offered him, as time had run out.
Following a closing statement, D’Souza walked across the stage to shake hands with Hitchens. Hitchens stood rooted to his podium. He did turn at the last moment to taken the hand of D’Souza. The day went to D’Souza.
At first light, I ordered What’s So Great About Christianity through Amazon.
The back cover of the jacket carries this endorsement from Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Institute: “ Responding to the current epidemic of atheist manifestos, Dinesh D’Souza applies just the right balm to the troubled soul. Assembling arguments from history, philosophy, theology, and science—yes science!—he builds a modern and compelling case for faith in a loving God. If you’re seeking the truth about God, the universe, and the meaning of life, this is a great place to look.”
Stanley Fish adds this note: “Infinitely more sophisticated than the rants produced by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, What’s So Great About Christianity leaves those atheist books in the dust.”
D’Souza make no bones about it. He takes direct aim at Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. He lays down seven propositional truths:
1. Christianity is the main foundation of Western civilization, the root of our most cherished values.
2. The latest discoveries of modern science support the Christian claim that there is a divine being who created the universe.
3. Darwin’s theory of evolution, far from undermining the evidence for supernatural design, actually strengthens it.
4. There is nothing in science that makes miracles impossible.
5. It is reasonable to have faith.
6. Atheism, not religion, is responsible for the mass murders of history.
7. Atheism is motivated not by reason but by a kind of cowardly moral escapism.
In Chapter 23 D’Souza's closing paragraph concludes:
“My conclusion is that contrary to popular belief, atheism is not primarily an intellectual revolt, it is a moral revolt. Atheists don’t find God invisible so much as objectionable. They aren’t adjusting their desires to the truth, but rather the truth to their desires.... Like a supervisory parent, God gets in our way. This is the perennial appeal of atheism: it gets rid of the stern fellow with the long beard and liberates us for the pleasures of sin and depravity. The atheist seeks to get rid of moral judgment by getting rid of the judge.
I strongly suggest one read What’s So Great About Christianity to see if D’Souza makes his case. I was reassured.
Tom Zwemer
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For those interested in watching the debate, you can find the video here:
http://www.tkc.edu/debate/
Thanks Tom:
I'll add this to my growing collection of Hitchens debates.
While the cynic might simply believe Hitchens debates for mere marketing purposes, (his book has sold very well) I do admire his willingness to debate anyone who wants to tackle him publicly. Plus, it's good the subject is being discussed.
Don Miller put it well when he said something like: these things aren't about truth. They are only about who is smarter.
D’Souza's book is written for the believer, not the atheist. To sincere and open nonbeliever D'Souza's words are just as inflammatory as the claims of Hitchens are inflammatory to the Christian.
Tom
Your informative review of this book has convinced me to take it off my list of things I want to read and for that I am grateful.
I think it neither accurate nor appropriate to malign the motives of all those who do not share my Christian convictions by asserting that all of them are engaged in a moral revolt against God. Some are and some aren't and only the One in whom they don't believe and I do knows the difference.
Thanks again for saving me some time and money. I do appreciate it!
Dave
To Ya'll
The debate was much better than the book. Tom
To denigrate those who have opposing opinions does nothing to support a rational argument. Motivations, as David says, can never be known by other humans.
One should choose, or adopt a belief system that makes sense to him, anything else is merely tradition and not using or reasoning powers.
D'Souza's premises are simply opinion and cannot be substantiated.
Elaine
I agree completely. But if you remember--Hitchens et al were/are past masters at denigration. Their primary skill is in the "put-down". Reference The Missionary Position. That doesn't mean we should reply in kind. Yet it is quite popular in the Spectrum sponsored Web Site of which the respondents above are quite prolific--a little denigration slips in. Bigotry--bias--out of touch etc are popular choices.
I was mistakened about the possibilities of the book, having heard the debate. In the debate, D'Souza turned the other cheek and thus turned the tables on Hitchems. I had high hopes that the book would do the same. It turned out to be a polimic in kind of the writings and growlings of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Sagin et al. Never-the-less D'Souza's presents some importance evidence and corrects some serious myths of Church history and Western Civilization.
It is strange though that the critiques focus on style and not the essential arguments. I didn't hope to change anyone's mind or orientation. I merely suggested a new facet to an age old argument.
I remain a creationist Christian. Even Paul failed in his debate in Athens.
Tom
Tom, aren't most Christians Creationists? Believing that God created this world and humans says nothing about acceptance of an artificial time imposed upon the Bible or explanations of something no human observed.
Tom
It seems to me that unbelievers often compare the worst of religion with the best of secularism and some believers do the exact opposite.
Deciding in advance what is morally unacceptable and then attributing it to either religion or secularism also occurs at times, I think.
I agree that Stalinism and Maoism probably harmed and killed more people than all the religions of the world in the whole of human history. One response I sometimes hear from nonbelievers is that in fact they were religions too.
I'm happy to call them "religions" if we can call "secularism" and "scientism" the same. In this case the discussion switches from religion and nonrelgion to good religion and bad religion. This is where I think it should be in the first place.
Even Hitchens believes that we humans are "pattern-making mammals." But this is the business of religion. It conceptualizes the most comprehensive conceivable "pattern" and pinpoints our lives within it in ways that tell us how to live, why we have so many problems and how we can at least partially remedy the situation.
By this standard even he--Hitchens--is a "religionist," a pretty eloquent and energetic one at that!
Did you see anything along these lines in the debate?
Dave
Dave
I wrote a long reply. I don't know what happened to it.
In the debate, I didn't hear much along the lines you suggest.
The book is full of that analogy.
Basically. D'Souza finds that atheism is a horizontal religion. That is no more vertical than the ceiling.
I read Hitchens on a regular basis dispite his arrogant cynical approach to most any topic. He is an accomplished essayist, a bit of an alocholic, and egocentric to the extreme. I was surprised that in the debate. D'Souza didn't take Hichens' bait.
In my last/lost response I cited pages 26,27,28 in which D'Souza extracts the basic thesis of leading atheists and then in the remainder of the book marshalls evidence to falsify those assumptions.
On second reading, I find the book a fair background of D'Souza's bebating points. Tom
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