Chris Hedges: I Don’t Believe in Atheists

TruthDig today began to publish portions of the debate between Chris Hedges and Sam Harris that took place at UCLA on Tuesday, beginning with Chris' opening statement. Here's an excerpt:

Those who silenced Jesus represented all human societies, not the Romans or the Jews.  When Jesus attacks the chief priests, scribes, lawyers, Pharisees, Sadducees and other “blind guides” he is attacking forms of oppression as endemic to Christianity, as to all religions and all ideologies.  If civil or religious authority enforces an iron and self-righteous conformity among members of a community, then faith loses its uncertainty, and the element of risk is removed from acts of faith.  Faith is then transformed into ideology.  Those who deform faith into creeds, who use it as a litmus test for institutional fidelity, root religion in a profane rather than a sacred context. They seek, like all who worship idols, to give the world a unity and coherency it does not possess.  They ossify the message.  And once ossified it can never reach an existential level, can never rise to ethical freedom—to faith.  The more vast the gap between professed faith and acts of faith, the more vast our delusions about our own grandeur and importance, the more intolerant, aggressive and dangerous we become.

This is such an important reminder to all religious people. I am always hopeful that my own "tribe" might understand the truth of this. It sort of reminds me of the logic of parenting teenagers. The harder you hold on the more you're likely to push them away. The corollary for religion is, Chris Hedges would argue (and I would concur), the more insistent you are on your faith statements (call them creeds or fundamental beliefs...whatever) the more they devolve into ideology, which gives rise to intolerance, agression and eventually, violence.

Here is how Chris ends his essay...

The point of religion, authentic religion, is that it is not, in the end, about us.  It is about the other, about the stranger lying beaten and robbed on the side of the road, about the poor, the outcasts, the marginalized, the sick, the destitute, about those who are being abused and beaten in cells in Guantanamo and a host of other secret locations, about what we do to gays and lesbians in this country, what we do to the 47 million Americans without health insurance, the illegal immigrants who live among us without rights or protection, their suffering as invisible as the suffering of the mentally ill we have relegated to heating grates or prison cells.  It is about them.

We have forgotten who we were meant to be, who we were created to be, because we have forgotten that we find God not in ourselves, finally, but in our care for our neighbor, in the stranger, including those outside the nation and the faith.  The religious life is not designed to make you happy, or safe or content; it is not designed to make you whole or complete, to free you from anxieties and fear; it is designed to save you from yourself, to make possible human community, to lead you to understand that the greatest force in life is not power or reason but love.

While I thought he was really hard on Sam Harris at points and was sometimes arrogant in his tone, I thought he did a marvelous job of articulating the role religion plays in the world. However, the 25 commenters (to date) overwhelming disagreed. In fact, the comments really threw me for a loop. I'm realizing more and more that our world (especially the upper and upper-middle class, highly educated portion of the world) is full of (sometimes angry) atheists. I felt so sad about these easy caricatures of religion and religious people. I may have to write a comment.

Comments

[Terri]

Hi Ryan!

I agree with your concluding comments. I have a nephew, a fine, deep-thinking college student, who is an avid fan of Sam Harris. As my nephew spews out his own comments along with those of Mr Harris, I find no way to respond. I can only share my own beliefs, but they appear to him to be emotional & without any scientific basis. He "tried religion once", & it led him into depression that required counseling for him to get beyond it.
I have felt empty of ideas to share with him as we talk. Reading your quotes of Chris Hedges, I couldn't come close to saying anything like your first quote, & when I share something like the second quote, it seems to go no deeper than the air in fornt of me. How does one reach our young people?

[Max Ward]

I too was moved by Chris Hedges essay (that's all I've seen so far of the debate). I was thankful for his skill in sharing his insights. I think he undercut Sam Harris' position skillfully. And I too was saddened by what you accurately describe as "easy caricatures" in the comments to Hedges' article..

I also agree that the Hedges-Harris debate brings up the very issues you, Ryan, and commenter Terri raise. I don't have a clue as to how we might reach "our" young people because they learn to defy ownership. But I can make a pertinent observation. Sam Harris does what he does quite well, but he leaves the telltale tracks of a moral and intellectual lightweight. His success comes from the precision of his marketing. He researched the market and discovered what _they_ wanted to hear. His audience is largely teenagers and young adults (those 18-35 rabid consumers).

So it's not a question of What can we do? or as Terri put it, "How does one reach our young people?" That question was co-opted long ago by the establishment and growth of a culture centered on the capitalists' marketplace that expedites the selling of any and all well-packaged products.

When the only metric is profit the only thing left to do is compete.

-- Max

[Ryan Bell]

Max, thanks for stopping by. Your comments are most welcome and very thought provoking. I often reflect that the metanarrative of our time is the market and consumer capitalism. But I had never put that together with how we "compete" for our children's (or church's or community's, or whoever's) attention.

What seems so typical of Christians, in response to people like Harris, Dawkins and now, Hitchens, is to enter the debate at their level. Christians will never win a debate about whether there is rational irrefutable evidence for God.

From a philosophical level, I think Michael Polyani is most helpful in explaining how modernity limits truth to certain rational categories and relegates faith to something private and useless and now, with this new chorus of atheists, dangerous in the world. The missiologist Lesslie Newbigin wisely appropriates Polyani for the church's role in a post-Christian society in books like The Gospel in a Pluralist Society and Proper Confidence.

I think Hedges does a good job of reframing the debate, but I think the crowd, as you suggest, was leaning in favor of Harris before the night began. I wish I could have been there but alas, I was at a Dodgers game! :)

[Dick Larsen]

You know, it seems that the only answer is faith. Faith that if we keep sluffing off the confines of religion and stiving to live the teachings of Jesus, we we really have no need to fear the latest sales pitch. They are only effective and accurate when aimed at the model of religion.

[Tompaul]

Look what I miss when I don't stop by your blog for awhile. I think by and large Hedges nailed it. As usual he's really got his finger on human nature. Fundamentalist thinkers, be they a Falwell or a Harris, selectively choose which part of human nature to emphasize in their rhetoric, lumping people in binary categories while failing to see the common threads--and thus failing to see where they themselves fit. When we deny the capacity for evil in ourselves we only see it in others, and fail to see both ourselves and our Creator in others.