03.04
I attended the debate between Cristopher Hitchens and John Lennox tonight at Samford University with a close friend of mine, and I’ll say first off that it was quite a big affair, with probably 2000+ people attending. By the way, I’m really bad at guessing crowd counts so take that estimate with some salt. Nevertheless, there were lots of folks in the hall, and they were generally well behaved. Probably more so than some other debates I’ve been to. Sure, there were some hoots and claps at odd or inappropriate times, but that’s been standard fare for public debates forever. As a matter of fact, we’re really tame from a historical point of view. It’s a shame they don’t end debates with effige burnings any more. Ah, those were the days. Where has our passion gone?! All joking aside, it was fun. Let’s get down to brass tacks though.
My impression of Hitches is kind of disappointing. He wasn’t as dynamic as I had expected, or heard. I had heard that he broke debate rules a lot and even dropped the f-bomb some during debates. He was on his good manners this time I guess. Maybe he sensed the southern culture wouldn’t tolerate that and changed his style accordingly. I don’t know. Anyhow, most of his arguments just boiled down to the same old arguments that we get from athiests. Religion is silly, and Christians have done some bad things in the past. Pretty much all his material fell into one of those two categories. Of course, those aren’t serious arguments since the first one is the whole point of the debate anyway, and the second one is simply too easily refuted on multiple fronts. I’m going to ignore the simple ad absurdum arguments and focus on number two.
The idea that Christians have done terrible things is as historically accurate as it is theologically consistent. Sure, Christians have done bad things in the past. But Christians don’t do bad things because they are Christians, but because they are human. It’s fully consistent within Christian theology that all men will do evil things because of the sin that is in us. Christians are no exeption and should never claim otherwise. None of that absolves Hitchens from the evil in his own life though. The fact that Christians, as humans, have done bad things does not get atheism off the hook for it’s own atrocities. The question isn’t which worldview produced the most bloodshed or pain. It’s, which of those two worldviews finds such pain and evil acceptable. The answer is obviously, the one that has no mechanism of an ultimate justice. That would be non-theism.
Christianity isn’t just a concept or idea. It’s a created worldview with specific details that flow from the person who created it: Jesus Christ. That’s a simplistic way to describe it, but it serves the point of showing the difference between a religion and a philosophy, like atheism. This is important because, in analyzing the question of past evil comitted, Christianity has at it’s core the command of Jesus to Peter not to use the sword to advance his Kingdom. Any Christian who does use violence to advance His kingdom stands in violation of Christianity itself. In short, he’s not acting as an agent of Christendom at that moment, but of something else, perhaps selfishness. Christianity has a core. A violator of that core can not be properly labeled as an agent of Christianity anymore than Olympia Snowe can be called an agent of conservatism.
Contrast that with atheism. It’s a philosophy that simply holds a non-belief in the supernatural, and therefore God. Historically, a robust idea of atheism didn’t really develop en masse until Darwin enabled it to have a legitimate story to tell about it’s potential history. And atheism remains tied, heart and soul, to that idea of human ascendence through natural selection. Any practical morality is only a by-product – no matter what story is contrived to explain it – of some type of group think or social contract to treat each other well so we’ll all be better off. Tell me then, what part of that worldview is inconsistent with Stalin’s genocide? What part of atheism condemns, logically, the mass murders under Pol Pot? And that’s the point. Christianity is violated by the sword. Atheism, on the other hand, condemns nothing, admonishes nothing and allows horror to flow alongside benevolence, with nothing but personal preference to distinguish between the two.
