You Can't Always Get What You Want

When I logged onto AOL this morning (after a long and exhausting weekend), I found two stories on my main page.

One story was about Karl Rove leaving the White House at the end of the month, after which he will write a book justifying all of his scummy activities in politics, for which he will no doubt get a hefty advance.

The other story was about the head of a toy company in China who, after a recall of 967,000 of his tainted merchandise, committed suicide by hanging in his factory.

And I found myself wondering, Why couldn't it have been the other way around?

Tom Moran

Does Dinesh D'Souza Know His Ass From His Elbow?

I suspect that most of you know the conservative pundit Dinesh D'Souza, author of such tomes as What's So Great About America and The Enemy at Home (which is subtitled -- and I'm not making this up -- The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11). If you don't know him, you know his type: he's the phoney-baloney who sat next to you in class and pretended to know all the answers while secreting a cheat-sheet in his shirt pocket. Subtlety is not his forte.

His latest column is entitled Do Atheists Disbelieve in God, Or Do They Hate Him?

This poses an intriguing question, one which you would think could be answered fairly easily by anyone with a grade school education: can you hate that which does not exist? Can I, for example, hate the Easter Bunny?

The sheer stupidity of the question does not deter Dinesh:

When I read atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, I don't get the impression that they are motivagted [sic] by mere unbelief. I don't believe in unicorns, but I don't go around writing books full of rejection and bile about unicorns. When I read The God Delusion and God Is Not Great, I see that their authors do not so much disbelieve in God as they hate Him. Consequently, the arguments spelled out in these atheist books are out of sync with the actual vehemence of their authors.

I am not going to discuss God Is Not Great, since I have not read it (not that this would deter, say, Ann Coulter, who wrote an entire book "refuting" Darwin without bothering to read anything he'd written), but D'Souza's discussion of Dawkins and his book The God Delusion is not only what they call in the logic game a Straw Man argument, it completely misses the point. I'll get to that in a second.

Dawkins and Hitchens contend that God is not demonstrable according to the scientific method. But then, lots of things are not demonstrable according to that method. Can Dawkins and Hitchens give a scientific account of consciousness? Can they locate free will under a microscope? What about "equality" and "justice" and "rights": none of these things have any material existence, so does that make them illusions? Since even Dawkins and Hitchens have no problem accepting the existence of lots of immaterial things, they never explain why God is the one immaterial entity that stirs up their skeptical indignation. Somehow the scientific case against God seems to be an inadequate explanation for their belligerent atheism.

First of all, this line of argument is so specious it's really beneath contempt. D'Souza knows (or would know if he'd stayed awake during a Freshman course in philosophy) that there isn't an argument for the existence of God that hasn't been demolished centuries ago. The argument by design, for example, was pretty definitively refuted by Kant and Hume in the 18th Century.

So it's not the "scientific case against God" that explains the "belligerent atheism" of Dawkins and Hitchens. What does explain it is rather obvious: religion (or, to be more accurate, monotheism) is responsible for more pain and suffering on this planet than anything else. And that we're better off without it. It's not God they hate: it's the results of belief in God.

D'Souza then tries to set off Dawkins and Hitchens against Michel Onfray, the French author of The Atheist Manifesto:

While Dawkins and Hitchens insist that we can be moral without God, Onfray with astonishing frankness concedes Nietzsche's point that the death of God also means the death of Western morality and Western values. So if God goes, that means that "equality" and "rights" go too. This is a possibility that Dawkins and Hitchens have not even considered. In many ways I think Onfray's atheism is more honest, more darkly appealing, and more dangerous than the atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens.

It will surprise no one that D'Souza has a book to plug while he's spewing this junk. It's title? What's So Great About Christianity (can't accuse Dinesh of being overly original in his titles, can we?). I can't wait to read the chapter where he justifies the massacre of 70,000 Muslims by the first Crusaders (who also burned the Jews alive in their synagogues) as an example of what's so great about Christianity.

It may seem counterintuitive that a wave of atheist chic is hitting America not long after the 9/11 attacks, but I don't think so. I think people are finally waking up from their dogmatic slumbers and realizing that monotheism is not just stupid but evil -- and that the first Crusaders, the Nazis (who, for all their supposed antipathy to Christianity refused to allow atheists into the SS and had Gott Mitt Uns on their belt buckles) and the 9/11 hijackers all had one thing in common: they all thought that God was on their side. So did the slave traders of the antebellum South, for that matter, who used to quote the Bible to justify their "peculiar institution."

If there is a God, He's got a lot to answer for. More, I suspect, than Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens put together.

Tom Moran

Monster On (Not In) A Box

Lately I've been toying with The Monster. The Monster (the term is borrowed from Spaulding Gray's monologue which was later made into a 1992 film) is depicted on the left. It is one manuscript -- all 1,867 pages of it.

This is not necessarily a good thing to do. I've spent the past few years wrestling with him, and I'm not sure I'm up to doing it again. But something tells me that this might be a good time to take another look and see what might be possible.

Could The Monster be made available to the public someday? Well, with the help of a new agent and a disgustingly large advance, possibly. It would still take a lot of work (it needs to be expanded a little).

In the meantime, he stays on top of the box. And there are other monsters on other boxes awaiting their turn. That's the good thing about having an incompetent agent -- you build up quite a backlog.

Tom Moran