Last month, Town Hall Seattle ran a program called ‘Three Lives,’  originally touted as eulogies of three public figures — Christopher Hitchens, Kim Jong-Il, and Vaclav Havel — linked by the sole fact that they’d happened to die within four days of each other in December.  I was asked to speak about Hitchens.  “No way,” I said.  “Not unless you’re ready for an anti-eulogy.”

They were.

Here’s the video, in which I start at about the 4.45 time mark, running to 23.10.

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But if you want to see a really great presentation, go back to the video and start at the 57.35 mark, where ACT Theatre artistic director Kurt Beattie and actors Bob Wright and Tom Carrato deliver a stunning tribute to Vaclav Havel, inspiring me to go out and buy a copy of ‘Disturbing the Peace’ the next day, when I also read this moving assessment by his long-time translator, Paul Wilson.  I’m only sorry Havel had to die for me to pay closer attention.  But then that’s kind of Wilson’s point.

I think of them as H2D2 — not the name of a techno-punk band, but the two H’s and two D’s of the ‘new atheism’ quadrumvirate (that’s a triumvirate plus one, or at least it is now) consisting of Hitchens and Harris, Dawkins and Dennett.  One of my first posts here on The AT was Is Christopher Hitchens Running for Pope? and I’m far from the only one to suspect his evangelical fervor.

Now Reza Aslan, author of Beyond Fundamentalism and No God But God, by far the best general introduction out there to the history of Islam, is tackling both the fervor and the astounding simplicities of H2D2 thinking.  In a post over at the Washington Post’s ‘On Faith,’ he starts by talking about an atheist ad on the side of a London bus (what is this thing with buses and religion?), but quickly gets to the point.  The H2D2 movement, he says, is:

… a new and particularly zealous form of fundamentalism–an atheist fundamentalism.  The parallels with religious fundamentalism are obvious and startling:  The conviction that they are in sole possession of truth (scientific or otherwise), the troubling lack of tolerance for the views of their critics (Dawkins has compared creationists to Holocaust deniers), the insistence on a literalist reading of scripture (more literalist, in fact, than one finds among most religious fundamentalists), the simplistic reductionism of the religious phenomenon, and, perhaps most bizarrely, their overwhelming sense of siege —  the belief that they have been oppressed and marginalized by Western societies and are just not going to take it anymore.  This is not the philosophical atheism of Feuerbach or Marx, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche (I am not the first to think that the new atheists give atheism a bad name).  Neither is it the scientific agnosticism of Thomas Huxley or Herbert Spencer.  This is, rather, a caricature of atheism: shallow scholarship mixed with evangelical fervor.

Read Aslan’s full piece, posted on the Washington Post’s ‘On Faith’ blog, here.

Meanwhile Hitchens’ new book Hitch-22 is, to quote the Hitch himself, Not Great.  I opened it expecting an extended fireworks display of wit, and instead found a self-conscious memoir written in the pompous style of a member of some musty gentleman’s club in St James’ Square, musing aloud while nursing a glass of port and a gouty foot.   All the “good bits” had already been quoted in the reviews (yes, all of them — that’s how many there are), which obligingly glossed over the far more extended sophomoric sections.  But he did finally get me to laugh out loud when he makes the belated discovery that one of his grandmothers was half-Jewish (the shock!  the awe!), impelling the great atheist to go haring off to eastern Europe in sentimental search of his Jewish roots.  Oy vay.

“New atheists” Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are having a ball with the pedophile priest scandal — it seems to prove everything they’ve ever said about the evils of religion.

It’s disturbing enough that anyone at all is having a ball with this ghastly issue, though maybe that’s inevitable when the Hitchens-Dawkins style of atheism has all the hallmarks of being a religion of its own.  But worse is that their call for the Pope to resign smacks more than a little of… well, to be kind, disingenuousness.  To be less kind, hypocrisy.

If you don’t believe in medicine, you’re hardly going to call for a better doctor.  If H and D really believe all they say about the evils of religion, then there’s no way they could imagine that a change of Pope could make any difference, especially when nobody in the upper reaches of Churchly hierarchy seems capable of plain human feeling — capable, that is, of expressing pure unadulterated outrage that such things have been done under the guise (literally) of priestly robes.

I don’t question H and D’s outrage,  but while most of us are watching this unfold with horror, they can barely contain their glee.

I wish I could feel that glee, but I’m with Nick Kristof on the Op-Ed page of today’s New York Times, talking about “the other Catholic church.”  This is the “grass-roots church” of nuns and priests working with the poor, the sick, and the needy both in the States and worldwide.  “Their magnificence,” writes Kristof, “lies not in their vestments, but in their selflessness.”

Maybe H and D could learn just a bit from that selflessness.   They’ve leapt on the bandwagon of scandal with no apparent purpose other than self-promotion.

Or maybe Hitchens is running for Pope?