While I Was Busy Making Other Plans

I'm looking at a copy of The Best American Essays 2017, editor: Leslie Jameson. The name didn't ring a bell -- is she the woman who wrote that ridiculous piece in The Atlantic praising Jordan Peterson and dissing The Left? No, that was Caitlin Flanagan.

Paging through the volume, an author's name catches my eye: June Thunderstorm. Her essay is against anti-smoking laws, maintaining that they have always been "about social control." A former smoker who might very well have died from emphysema if I hadn't quit over 20 years ago, I rolled my eyes and was about to dismiss her and everything she ever stood for before reading the entire first page of her essay, but then I remembered that, on this very blog, I did something similar with an essay by Thoreau on Lincoln, and then later found out that I was mistaken to do so, because the essay begins ironically, with Thoreau posing as the sort of insufferable upperclass American twit, who sneered at Lincoln, which the majority of the text of the essay actually denounces while praising Lincoln highly. Then it also occurred to me that June Thunderstorm might be a Native American, and therefore entitled to some attitudes toward tobacco which are foreign to me. Anyway, I don't feel like reading her entire essay right now, but I won't diss it before I do. Learned my lesson with Thoreau. I can't remember whether I've yet added the necessary PS and apology to that essay.

Inside the front cover are listed 32 editors of The Best American Essays, 1986 to 2017. I recognized 17 of those names. I've dissed at least three of them in this blog: Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick and Christopher Hitchens. One of those 17, Edward Hoagland, I admire very much,

and several more have some level of my respect.

After I'd first looked at that list of 32 celebrity editors for a minute or so, it occurred to me that all 32 of them, and surely either all or almost all of the essayists whose work is printed in this volume, and surely many if not most of the hundreds of other authors whom Robert Atwan mentions in the back of the volume as having also written notable essays published during the year under review, and many if not most of thousands more writers either printed or mentioned in the other annual volumes of The Best American Essays published since the late 1980's, have one thing in common: they've written entire volumes which were published long before they reached age 57. I'm 57, and I'd always planned to become a big-time celebrity writer long before I got this old.

Life is what happens to us while we're busy making other plans, as William Gaddis or Readers' Digest or someone else first pointed out. (John Lennon wasn't the first.) Although I feel perfectly justified in dissing Sontag or Ozick or Hitchens as if I could do better, because I think I could, I think I can, I think I do, I think I have for quite a while -- nevertheless, I have absolutely zero credentials to support this attitude. And you, you either agree with me, or you regard me as a conceited crank, which really wouldn't bother me, which you may or may not believe. But not being published, not having any entire published volumes written all by me, that really irks me.

Some people have suggested to me that I self-publish a volume. I don't think that really counts as being published, nor does blogging, which anyone can do. Being published means that a publisher has selected your work and approved and that it gets published and that you get paid for it.

Larry Alex Taunton Is Morally Disgusting

Specifically: Taunton is a douchebag who has written a book claiming that Christopher Hitchens was "shaky in his atheism." I'm not going to give a link to the book or even tell you its title. All I'm going to say is that Taunton is both a bad person and completely mistaken.

It takes a lot to get me to defend Hitch. Taunton made it there easily. Anybody who knows anything about Hitchens knows that he was extraordinarily committed to atheism and to combating religion (/spirituality, po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to), and that he wavered on that about as much as the Washington Monument is going to crumble into a heap of dust because someone stands beside it and sneezes.

What makes Taunton's effort to re-write Hitch's biography so vile is how important Hitch's atheist cause was to him. It was nearly everything to him. That cause is significantly different from my own atheist cause. I'm not here to defend Hitch's stance on religion, I'm here to defend simple common decency. This behavior on Taunton's part is disgusting.

That's all.

Well, wait, there is more: I've noticed a widespread tendency for Christians to mis-represent history which has to do with religion. Claiming that fundamentalism is no more than 200 years old, claiming that Christianity is responsible for everything good in Western society. (Calling certain things in Western society good which are not good at all...)

So, unfortunately, I can't really say that Taunton's bad behavior comes completely out of the blue. In some Christian circles, and by no means only fundamentalist or conservative circles, it's downright typical. Perhaps if more Christians were expert in history, some of them would become ashamed and speak out against this mendacity. I don't know. If Christians are reading along here who respect my honesty, my interest in history and primary sources, and my commitment to getting historical statements right, perhaps they will heed my call to be on the lookout for Christians who are supposed to be historians, who are lying. Lying to themselves in many cases, I am sure, and convinced that they are telling the truth, and so it is perhaps more accurate to say that they are mistaken, than to call them liars.

Hitch and Mother Teresa

A thought-experiment: Imagine that God and Heaven and Hell all exist. (some of you already believe all of that, I know.)

Imagine that Christopher Hitchens -- "Hitch" to many of his friends and admirers -- went to Heaven when he died. Hitch is surprised that Heaven exists, and surprised again that he's being let in. "You guys are good sports," he says to Saint Peter. (Hitch says this because he was an atheist and extremely critical of religion. The subtitle of one of his books is "How Religion Poisons Everything.") Saint Peter smiles, holding open the gate, and corrects Hitch: "Not 'us guys.' Just one guy decides who's in. Just the Big Guy."

Hitch is so overcome with emotion that when he tries to speak he cannot. Saint Peter smiles and nods. It's pretty clear to see what Hitch is thinking and feeling. To Hitch's unspoken but obviously-visible statement, Peter replies, "Yeah, you're gonna like the Big Guy. Everybody does."

With the gate closed behind him, Hitch walks on in over the floor of clouds, spotting Jimi Hendrix, and Jean-Paul Sarte -- and there's Abraham Lincoln! And Lincoln recognizes him, and waves! Hitch is very surprised and flattered that Lincoln would take any notice of him --

-- and then he see Mother Teresa and gets very upset.

The reason this is funny, as some of you know, is that Hitch was severely critical of Mother Teresa, portraying not as an angel of mercy but as a sadistic monster who thrived on the suffering of others and did much less to alleviate that suffering than she is widely believed to have done, and much less than anyone in her position could easily have done.

And the reason I wrote out this little thought experiment is that for a very long time I assumed that Hitch's portrait of Mother Teresa (see his book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, published in 1995) was accurate. (Yes, the book's title is a bit egregiously nasty. Well, nasty is a subjective call.) Just very recently, though, it occurred to me that my negative image of Mother Teresa relied entirely on Hitch's say-so, and I reflected that I had been taking the word of the same man who flatly stated that religious poisons everything, which I find to be an utterly absurd oversimplification of the actions of billions of people over the course of tens of thousands of years or more, actions which I cannot characterize as 100% poisonous; and that Hitch is also the same man, and for all I know the only person on Earth, who supported both W's invasion of Iraq in 2002 and Ralph Nader's campaign for the Presidency in 2004; and that he, like most or all of the other leading New Atheists, made many statements about Islam which I find to be beyond the pale -- in short, it occurred to me just very recently that for decades I had been taking the word of a man about Mother Teresa, a man whose word I generally didn't take about most things. We both believe that God was invented by mankind and not that mankind was created by God, but -- now that it occurs to me that he has been the sole authority for my picture of Mother Teresa, so that I wonder whether that picture is accurate -- I can't think of anything else on which we agree.

Well, there's the so-called Hitch's Razor: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." But it's not as if I hadn't already figured that out. Okay, if I tried hard I might find a dozen things upon which Hitch and I agree. But without trying hard at all I can find many more than a dozen things he wrote or said which I find to be perfectly absurd.

And so I find myself compelled to wonder: is there anything at all to Hitch's version of Mother Teresa's care for the poor and sick, which seems like it was a terrible misfortune for those poor and sick people? (He also described Bill Clinton as a monster. Add that to the list of his opinions I find to be absurd.)

I know there are many of you who assume that Mother Teresa was a monster, as I did until -- well, until just a few days ago, actually. Maybe she was. I don't actually know. But for those of you who assume so, I have only one question -- do you have any evidence for this view other than what Hitch said and wrote?

The New Atheists Are A Herd Of Turnips!

Yesterday I became embroiled in an online discussion about the New Atheists. I asserted that they constantly show a near-total lack of knowledge of topics which they nevertheless constantly discuss: historical topics having to do with religion. A rather bright person challenged this assertion of mine, and I quickly backed down and said that I should have said that New Atheists do this, not "constantly," but "occasionally."

Upon reflection, I think I was much too quick to back down from my claim that New Atheists "constantly" display an appalling lack of knowledge on historical topics which they nevertheless constantly discuss. Let me review some evidence (And before I do let me state to whom I'm referring when I say "New Atheists." I mean Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, other authors who treat religion similarly, and their fans):

In addition to his bronze age goat herders meme (By the way, Dick, it's "goatherds," not "goat herders." "Goatherds," just like "shepherds"), Dawkins recently tweeted that Trinity College in Cambridge had produced more Nobel Prize winners than "the entire Muslim world." He did not respond to the tidal wave of responses to his tweet which pointed out cultural bias in the awarding of Nobels and in others things. It was rather shocking that such an elephant in the room needed to be pointed out to someone like Dawkins, yet, here we are. We now know Richard a little better.

The subtitle of one of Hitchens' most popular book refers to how religion allegedly "ruins everything." Clutch your pearls, ladies, I'm about to make a very indelicate comparison: Hitchens' entirely indiscriminate and therefore entire senseless use of the term "everything" reminds me of its misuse by the Nazis: you may have seen photographs of Nazis carrying or hanging signs reading "Die Juden sind an allem schuld," which translates to "Everything is the Jews' fault."

There's the fearmongering Islamophobia which was spread by Hitchens and continues to be spread by Harris, Dawkins, PZ Myers and other New Atheists, which routinely refers to Islam as if it were a unified political and cultural unit. It's true that Islam strives to a unit, but Muslims have waged war against other Muslims without cease since not long after Muhammad's death. Islam has not formed anything remotely resembling one united political entity since the 7th century.

There's Harris' characterization of Islam, while being interviewed by Chris O'Donnell on MSNBC, as currently "going through its medieval stage," a conceit which, besides being as quaintly 19th-century as Harris' borrowing of Mills' utilitarianism, again refers to all of Islam, all 1 billion Muslims, as one entity at one stage of development, and implies that the crude aggression of ISIS is inherently characteristic of Islam, when it's as clear as can be that the vast majority of Muslims oppose such aggression, not to mention that almost all of the people currently fighting ISIS are themselves Muslims. Clearly, some things can never be clear enough to be clear to some people.

There's Victor Stenger's 2-word response to being informed that there were some drastic historical inaccuracies in one of his anti-religious tirades -- the same 2-word response often heard from fans of Dawkins when it's pointed out that the oldest parts of the Bible were written in the Iron Age, mostly or entirely by city dwellers, and that those of the Israelites who were rustic raised more sheep than goats: "So what?"

There's Free Inquiry, New Atheism' flagship publication, publishing Michael Paulkovich's utterly ahistorical assertion about 126 ancient authors who should've mentioned Jesus if he'd existed, but didn't. And not having issued a retraction.

A small portion of the above might be dismissed as something which occurs only occasionally, but all together, it shows a clear tendency, an inherent trait: New Atheists don't know Jack Q Shit about history, and they're determined to remain ignorant about it. They claim to be ushering in a new age of enlightenment, to be mounting a strong challenge to religion. They're doing neither. They're not the people to be representing atheists. They're not the intellectual descendants of Epicurus, Hume, Marx, Twain, Nietzsche and Russell. They are turnips, and intelligent atheists ought to join with others in mocking and deriding them.

Someone Asked Me What "New Atheists" Are, And How They're Different From "Old Atheists"

Dawkins, Harris, PZ Myers and their fans are New Atheists. Hitchens and Victor Stenger were New Atheists. They combine a cluelessness about history and religion and the humanities with a propensity for making sweeping inaccurate statements about them, and don't seem interested in ideas concerning religion which are more complicated than sound bites. Some prominent examples:

Dawkins started the "Bronze Age goat herders" meme. (Coincidentally, he also coined the term "meme" in his book The Selfish Gene, back when he was doing something he did exceptionally well: writing about biology.) Point out to a typical New Atheist that the oldest parts of the Bible were written in the Iron Age, by town-dwellers, and that the Israelites' primary livestock animal was sheep, not goats, and the typical response is "So what?" So why do you keep repeating Dawkins' meme, that's what.

On p 1 of The Selfish Gene Dawkins approvingly quoted GG Simpson's pronouncement that we should completely forget about all attempts made before 1859 to answer the question, "What is man?" That should have warned me that neither Simpson nor Dawkins knew very much at all about things written up to 1859, and led me to expect things like Dawkins' activity since 2004, when he's published very little work in biology.

More recently Dawkins tweeted the fact that there were more Nobel prize winners from Trinity College than from "the entire Muslim world." Immediately I and a whole bunch of other people pointed out cultural bias, duh! in the awarding of Nobels. Last I heard Dawkins hasn't felt the need to reply to any of us about that. It's getting more and more difficult to take him seriously except in a very negative way.

Hitchens created a very popular meme in the subtitle of his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.



But of course it doesn't poison EVERYthing. Life's much more complicated than that, billions of people's lives over the course of tens of thousands of years, and yes, I'm saying that if you want to say something deep about religion, you have to have at least an inkling of all of those billions of people's lives, or at the very best you're only going to say something deep every now and then, completely by accident.

Michael Paulkovich is a New Atheist, and the editors of Free Inquiry demonstrated quintessential New Atheist behavior when they published an article because they liked the sound bite: "126 ancient authors who should've mentioned Jesus but didn't," without seeming to care at all about checking into whether or not Paulkovich is making any sense. He's not.



Sam Harris is a peculiarly mid-19th-century sort of New Atheist: his moral philosophy is utilitarian, like that of John Suart Mill, as if he hadn't heard of how Mill had been thoroughly dismantled by the late 19th century by people like Nietzsche.



Dawkins has a lot of credibility in the filed of biology, richly deserved, but he's helped to give an undeserved credibility to New Atheism. It's very bad luck that these people are currently the public face of atheism, but we atheists who actually know something about history, philosophy, the arts and religion -- about the humanities -- just have to speak up louder and more persistently. That's the only way that an intelligent and informed public discussion of religion will get underway.

"Betrachte die Herde, die an dir vorüberweidet[...]"

Herd behavior: people tend to believe all of the official stories about Roswell, the JFK assassination or 9/11, or to disbelieve all of them. Actual independent thought, it seems to me, would have produced more people entertaining conspiracy cases involving the Federal government in some of these cases, and not in others. But the great majority of people, seeing Federal conspiracies either in all of these cases and in other cases, or in none of them, seem to be choosing sides and following party lines more than thinking.

In politics, similarly, people tend to think that their side can do no wrong and that the other side are horrible people. This applies to independents too, from whom one might expect more nuanced thought. Instead, one encounters the stereotype of the independent as the lone voice of reason, with fanatical ideologues both to his left and to his right.

Even more so with agnostics and Buddhists under their simpleminded banner; "Everybody Else is Wrong." Recently I read an article, written by a Buddhist, under the title "Is Buddhism Agnostic?" I thought about that for a while and had to conclude that, yes, it is, and that that's why I dislike it so much. Like agnosticism, Buddhism is primarily concerned with smugly pointing out the misconceptions of others. What do they themselves believe? Weeeeelllll... certainly not what is usually said that they believe. And straight back to the everybody-else-is-wrong hobbyhorse.

Human minds are so complex. Almost everybody is actually right about a great deal. Even, say I through clenched teeth, those damned agnostics and Buddhists. Even when they're following a herd and so are only right by default. You may know someone for decades and never once see them make sense, but don't assume because of that you know everything about what they know.

Christopher Hitchens was a dingbat, but he was undeniably and admirably his own dingbat, clearly thinking for himself. (Did anyone else on Earth both support W's Iraq war and campaign for Ralph Nader in 2004? If so I'll give you good odds that they were just following Hitch.)

Anyway: follow me and help re-elect President Obama.