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“Why would you write a book?”

Posted August 2nd, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

“You’re a Muslim, so why would you write a book about the founder of Christianity?”

That’s how Fox News’ Lauren Green began her challenge to Reza Aslan’s right to write about Jesus.  The video of her interview with him instantly went viral (in fact, several accidental theologists sent it on to me — thank you!).  It inspired several spoofs, including this one here.  Aslan’s book, Zealot (my San Francisco Chronicle review of it here) was already #2 on the Amazon bestseller list;  by the next morning, it was #1.

“Gotcha, J. K. Rowling!” Aslan responded.

But aside from the small detail that Christianity was founded by Paul, not Jesus, Green’s question may not be such a terrible one after all.

'Zealot'The First Muslim - CoverI’ve been there, and often still am — from the other side, as it were.  The first time conservative Muslims asked why I’d decided to write a biography of Muhammad, I spluttered in amazement: “But you don’t think he’s worth writing about?  This man who carved such a huge profile in history?  He’s your prophet, how can you even ask?”

It quickly became clear that this was not a sufficient answer, and that the question was not about my decision as a writer.  It was about my decision as a Jew.  Just as Green focused on Aslan’s Muslimness and assumed that his real agenda was to attack Christianity, so certain conservative Muslims focused on my Jewishness and assumed that my real agenda must have been to attack Islam.

Let’s get one thing straight right away:  just as many mainstream Christians have welcomed Aslan’s book, so many mainstream Muslims have welcomed mine.  It’s the conservatives we’re talking about here, those who cannot tolerate any deviance from received orthodoxy.

In the context of Fox’s Islamophobic politics on the one hand, and of the Israel-Palestine conflict on the other, perhaps such suspicion is inevitable.  But since Aslan’s book and mine both draw on scholarly resources but were written for general audiences, there’s another less obvious factor.  Most devout believers are unaware of the vast body of academic research on the early history of Christianity and Islam.  Used to hagiographic or devotional literature, they see any more dispassionate view of their revered figures as an assault on their belief.  Demanding perfection, they refuse to tolerate human imperfection.

But what if Green had interviewed Aslan not with the desire to criticize, but with the desire to know?  What if my conservative Muslim questioners had been more curious than judgmental?  Without such knee-jerk defensiveness, the question of what a non-Christian brings to the study of Jesus or a non-Muslim to that of Muhammad becomes an interesting one – a question, that is, about the value of the ‘outsider’ point of view.

Precisely because he or she does not come from a place of belief, what seems obvious to the insider is not at all so to the outsider.  It demands to be explored, to be understood on the multiple psychological, cultural, and political levels on which history takes place.  Done well, this process can create important new insights into otherwise received versions of history, opening up fresh ways of seeing and understanding, and finding new relevance in old stories.

As with Jesus, so with Muhammad:  by placing him in the world he experienced, in the full context of place and time, politics and culture – the ‘outsider’ biographer honors the man by honoring his lived experience.

Historical reality doesn’t detract from faith;  it humanizes it.  And when gross inhumanities are committed every day in the name of one faith or another, that alone should surely be more than enough reason to write.

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File under: agnosticism, Christianity, fundamentalism, Islam, Judaism | Tagged: Tags: 'Zealot', biography, Fox News, Islamophobia, outsider, Reza Aslan, The First Muslim, writing | 14 Comments
  1. mary scriver says:
    August 2, 2013 at 11:03 am

    The relevant term here is “fencing the Communion.” You know the little fence at the front of the church where you lean your elbows while waiting for the Elements to reach you? (Maybe not — ask a Catholic.) There was a huge early battle about who had to stay outside that railing and who was entitled to enter. Territoriality. Tribal. Strongest when the group is uneasy about its identity and afraid of dilution by outsiders. (Check the Mexican border. Heck, even the Canadian border.) Writing about American Indians without BEING American Indian is a mortal crime because it becomes harder and harder to define an American Indian.

    Prairie mary

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      August 2, 2013 at 11:13 am

      Great comment: territoriality is exactly the right word.

    • Mary Johnson (@_MaryJohnson) says:
      August 2, 2013 at 11:34 am

      Yes, Lesley you are SO right on here! And even if you’re a former believer, believers still automatically assume that a writer is out to, at best, criticize, at worst, completely demolish all they hold dear. People become so defensive that they can’t see that what a writer might really want to do is to explore, to understand, to express…..

      • Lesley Hazleton says:
        August 2, 2013 at 12:12 pm

        Yes, I saw it happening with you too, Mary. (For those who don’t know, Mary is a former nun who wrote a deeply moving memoir about her years with Mother Teresa and her decision to become secular: http://www.amazon.com/Unquenchable-Thirst-Memoir-Mary-Johnson/dp/0385527470/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375470558&sr=1-1&keywords=mary+johnson)

  2. sharmin banu says:
    August 2, 2013 at 11:14 am

    Very well said:).
    Most devout believers are unaware of the vast body of academic research on the early history of Christianity and Islam. Used to hagiographic or devotional literature, they see any more dispassionate view of their revered figures as an assault on their belief. Demanding perfection, they refuse to tolerate human imperfection.

  3. Fakhra says:
    August 2, 2013 at 4:52 pm

    Reblogged this on TOAL.

  4. saheemwani says:
    August 2, 2013 at 6:57 pm

    The advantage of a writer who doesn’t share the ideas/beliefs of the subject, in your case a prophet whose life was centered exactly on those ideas/beliefs, is a much-needed unbiased perspective of what that man did.

    The disadvantage could be not understanding the subject himself and missing out on the essence of why he did what he did.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      August 2, 2013 at 7:29 pm

      True, but understanding is on whose terms? Part of what I mean by “an agnostic eye” (in the banner of this blog) is an independent one.

  5. fatmakalkan says:
    August 3, 2013 at 11:37 pm

    I agree with you as a devout Muslim. In many verses in Quran Allah wants human-beings to contemplate but human- beings are afraid to contemplate about their faith. Or they are lazy or they simply doesn’t care about religion. They are culturally Jew , Christian or Muslim. They prefer to follow their forefathers religion not their own. When they pickup Revised addition of Bible how come they don’t ask this question: who has a right to revise God’s word? They are def, they are blind and impaired to think. My ten year old daughter was asking me about popular Belief about Jesus being son of God or being God. She asked me: don’t Christians think that Jesus died 2000 years ago if God died 2000 years ago who is running universe?and If Jesus couldn’t save himself how he is going to save them ? Or don’t they think how come eternal God dies?
    Bible says God is one! Why they made him 3? She is also asking about Islam and She is developing her faith. Contemplating is the key. Who doesn’t contemplate doesn’t have real faith they copy others faith.

  6. Tea-mahm says:
    August 6, 2013 at 11:28 am

    Yes! Keep the word bridges safe to pass over… thank you, Lesley and Reza. T’m

  7. anon says:
    August 11, 2013 at 10:34 pm

    I don’t think Aslan was writing as a “Muslim”—though it may have effected his perspective. I havn’t read the book but from watching various interviews, Aslan, apparently, puts the illiterate Jewish carpenter from Nazareth into a historical context/time-period.
    However,the picture of Jesus (pbuh) in the Quran is a Jewish man who is intelligent, literate, a good communicator, exceptionally skilled, and highly spiritual.

  8. Luis Alexis Rodríguez Cruz says:
    August 24, 2013 at 8:30 pm

    Thank you for sharing your thoughts on the matter. I think that the reporter did not use an intellectual point of view to question Aslan. Anyways, conservatism and closed minds always try to overlap what it is true. Also I think that his book is an academic book such as yours, books for academics, for open minded people, for intellectual people who think critically. Negative comments will always exist…

  9. Farrukh says:
    August 25, 2013 at 7:20 am

    Hello Lesley,

    I just wanted to appreciate your statement:

    Historical reality doesn’t detract from faith; it humanizes it. And when gross inhumanities are committed every day in the name of one faith or another, that alone should surely be more than enough reason to write.

    I’ve just placed the order of your book, The First Muslim in India, it was very expensive, however, they have now priced it correctly. This shall be my third biography on Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be on him, which I’m going two read. The other two by Karen Armstrong and Safiur Rehman Mubarakpuri.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      August 25, 2013 at 8:31 pm

      Thank you, Farrukh. And re The First Muslim, the UK edition is due out November 7. Since India is part of the ‘UK and Commonwealth’ distribution system, it should then be easily available in bookstores.

The Taming of Jesus

Posted July 27th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

'Zealot'“A tough-minded, deeply political book” — my review in the San Francisco Chronicle of Reza Aslan’s best-selling ‘Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth‘

‘Zealot’?  A biography of Jesus could have no more provocative title.  But it turns out to be the perfect one for Reza Aslan’s unearthing (or should that be un-heavening?) of “the Jesus before Christianity.”  As he cogently demonstrates, the real Jesus — the radical Jew who preached, agitated, and was executed for his pains — was a far more complex figure than many Christians care to acknowledge.

The zeal in question is both religious and political.  At a time when this kind of zealotry is associated predominantly with Islamic extremists, it’s fascinating to see similar processes at work in first-century Jewish Palestine, which was occupied territory – occupied, that is, by the Romans.  In opposition, messianic nationalist movements created what Aslan aptly describes as “zealous warriors of God who would cleanse the land of all foreigners and idolaters.”

This is the historical and political context Jesus was born into, one that takes us beyond the Christ figure created by his followers after his death to the actual man, “a revolutionary swept up, as all Jews of his era were, in religious and political turmoil.”

Given that turmoil, it should come as no surprise that “the Jesus of history had a far more complex attitude toward violence” than is usually assumed.  Gentle shepherds don’t have much place here.  Aslan reads the admonitions to love your enemies and turn the other cheek as directed toward relationships between Jews, not between Jews and foreigners, and especially not between Jews and occupiers.  “The message was one of repossessing the land,“ he writes, “a movement of national liberation for the afflicted and oppressed.”  A kingdom, that is, very much of this world, not another.

This historical territory has been explored before, by biblical scholars such as Richard Horsley and Dominic Crossan.  But in Aslan’s hands, it gains broader resonance.  He brings to bear his expertise in the volatile territory of politics and religion (his earlier book Beyond Fundamentalism analyzed the root causes of militant religious extremism) as well as his deep background as a scholar of religion, renowned especially for the most readable history of Islam yet written, No god But God.

As in those earlier books, not only does he get the full picture, but he can also write – sometimes irresistibly, as when he drops into a kind of tongue-in-cheek interfaith slang, mentioning Herod’s “nebbish sons,” for instance, and Herod himself as “King of the Jews, no less!”

But cherished legends, watch out.  Aslan can be scathingly dismissive of such episodes as Salome dancing for John the Baptist’s head, or Pontius Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus.  Prepare for words like “nonsense” and “fairy tale” as he traces what holds up historically (and geographically), and what’s been elided, even deliberately disguised, in the gospel accounts.  Which is not to blame the gospel writers.  Aslan points out that the concept of empirically valid historical reality is a relatively modern one.  “It would have been an altogether foreign concept to the gospel writers, for whom history was not a matter of uncovering facts, but of revealing truths.”

Perhaps the most fascinating part of Zealot, then, is the analysis of how Jesus was tamed by his own followers, and why.  Soon after his death, the early Jesus movement split between the “Hebrews” who stayed in Jerusalem under James’ leadership, and the Hellenists abroad led by Paul.  The bitter infighting between them would be resolved by force majeure:  the disastrous failure of the Jewish rebellion against Rome, which led to the torching of Jerusalem in the year 70 and the expulsion of surviving Jews from what remained of the city.  With the ‘Hebrew’ faction thus in disarray, the Hellenist appeal of Paul’s Christianity won out, and Jesus’ specifically Jewish revolutionary fervor would be toned down to suit a much larger audience:  the Roman empire itself.

This entailed absolving the Romans from responsibility for the crucifixion, instead blaming the unruly (and unrulable) Jews, and thus laying the basis for two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism. Where the early Jesus movement was Jewish, Christianity would now be anything but.  As Aslan notes, the gospels are, in this sense, a radical break with history – a wiping out of the specific past to be replaced by a universal future.

Yet Zealot itself is testament to the fact that they didn’t quite succeed.  Aslan’s insistence on human and historical actuality turns out to be far more interesting than dogmatic theology, and certainly more intriguing and exciting for any modern reader not piously devoted to the idea of gospel truth.  This tough-minded, deeply political book does full justice to the real Jesus, and honors him in the process.

(Seattle:  I’ll be talking about the book with Reza Aslan in the auditorium of the downtown Central Library on Monday July 29, 7-8.30 pm.  Free admission.)

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File under: Christianity, Judaism, messianism | Tagged: Tags: 'Zealot', Christ, gospels, life of Jesus, review, Reza Aslan, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Public Library | 9 Comments
  1. Sohail Kizilbash says:
    July 27, 2013 at 9:51 am

    Thank you Lesley for the review. It seems to be a very interesting book.

    Annemarie Schimmel said in one of her books that, it does not matter what the fact was, what matters is, what people believe in. I suppose 3 billion plus people will continue to believe what they have been told for the last 2,000 years.

  2. Jerry M says:
    July 28, 2013 at 10:37 am

    I was watching a fox news interview with him and I was surprised at how ignorant the interviewer was. For a US writer who writes on religion and who already wrote a book on Islam, it would be a surprise for him not to tackle Christianity.

  3. Matthew Melle Johnson says:
    July 28, 2013 at 5:44 pm

    Reblogged this on Von Melee.

  4. Nancy McClelland says:
    July 29, 2013 at 7:34 pm

    Jerry, I saw the same interview — buzzfeed was pretty astonished by it as well:
    http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/is-this-the-most-embarrassing-interview-fox-news-has-ever-do

  5. danielabdalhayymoore says:
    July 31, 2013 at 4:05 pm

    Greetings:
    Please excuse me, Lesley, if this has been covered, as I haven’t quite managed to read through every email here (your About page). But I am wondering if you have been interrogated as thoroughly (credentials, etc.) by the “western media” regarding your book on the Prophet Muhammad (salallahu alayhi wa sallam) as heavily as Reza Aslan has on this book of his on (the prophet) Jesus (alayhi wa sallam). It occurred to me to ask this, having read and found certainly thought-provoking your fine book on the Shi’a split, and on Muhammad, and having viewed a good interviewer talking with him from Huffington Post, and read about the Fox interviewer, who (without viewing it) seems to have been less so. Have you been put on the defensive at all?

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      July 31, 2013 at 6:06 pm

      Oh yes. Not as publicly, and not by “western media,” but some conservative Muslims have made it clear that for them, my Jewishness is as suspicious as Reza’s Muslimness is to Fox News. Basically they ask the same question: what made you, as a Muslim/Jew, write about Jesus/Muhammad. And behind that question, first, a challenge as to your “right” to do so, and second, the assumption of an “agenda” — in Reza’s case, anti-Christian, in my case, anti-Muslim. On the other hand, many thinking Muslims have welcomed The First Muslim, as you’ll see if you scroll through comments on posts about the book, just as many thinking Christians have welcomed Reza’s book. Humanizing history doesn’t undermine faith, as conservatives seem to imagine; both Jesus and Muhammad are not less but more remarkable when seen in their lived context and experience.
      I’ll be posting at greater length about all this very soon.

      • Nancy McClelland says:
        July 31, 2013 at 11:16 pm

        What an excellent and humble response to an honest and obvious question. Kudos to you both.

  6. milons says:
    September 7, 2013 at 4:56 pm

    It’s a shame you have to entertain comments from some of my bone-headed co-religionists, who can’t see past your Jewishness. They tend to define themselves against what they’re not as to opposed to what they are and have done a fine job of covering beauty with filth. It reminds me of the Month Python sketch about the Spanish Inquisition.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      September 7, 2013 at 6:19 pm

      Vive Monty Python!

Anti-Sleaze

Posted May 29th, 2011 by Lesley Hazleton

Is Reza Aslan considering a run for political office?  This recent TEDx talk sure sounds like it.

Aslan wrote the best-selling ‘No God But God,‘ by far the most readable introduction to the history of Islam, and his recent anthology of 20th-century Middle East literature, ‘Tablet & Pen,’ is a fixture on my bedside table.

Like any good politico, he starts out all rosy-eyed.  Bear with him.  He draws clear parallels between prejudice in the U.S. against Jews and against Catholics — both groups seen at one time as un-American, foreign, “other” — and the current politically manipulated wave of Islamophobia.  And he draws the clear conclusion:  anti-Muslim zealots are so angry because they know they’re on the losing side of American history.

As they say in the Middle East, “from your lips to God’s ears.”

See what you think:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/VgLAzwgizdk]

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File under: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, US politics | Tagged: Tags: American Muslims, Catholics, diversity, Islamophobia, Jews, No God But God, Reza Aslan, Tablet & Pen, TEDxConejo | 1 Comment
  1. Philip says:
    June 5, 2011 at 8:56 am

    Canada has a similar “story” and yet we do not have the extreme anti immigrant attitudes in the mainstream culture. Canada was more like the United States before we became officially bilingual and multicultural. This changed the narative somewhat such that we believe multi-culturalism and multi-linguistic skills are positive values. We are eager to embrace them so they can enrich the Canadian story, Of course, such “stories” are also cultural myths. We know that the newcomers which we accept as adding to the cultural mix will in the end have children that will embrace the Canadian culture more than than their parents culture. They will speak English or French, learn to love hockey and maybe even learn to appreciate the Queen. They will also accept abortion as a necessary medical procedure, same sex marriage as a right, and oppose the death penalty, etc. The wider Canadian culture will come to enjoy the rich variety of ethnic celebrations and even embrace them. Such as this year the Bollywood awards are being held in Toronto and not India. The parliament of Canada allows the carrying of the kirpan in its chambers. Slowly visible minorities appear “normal” on radio and TV news shows They are increasingly becoming members of parliament. Sikhs and Muslims and those of African and Asian origin are achieving positions of influence. There is little or no comment or concern over this. In fact the current Conservative government won a majority because it sought out the “ethnic vote”. They were criticized for being so blatant about it.

    Canada is moving quicker and with more grace to be transformed by the current wave of immigrants, which we know we need economically, than the United States. The result is a more liberal culture with less strife.

The Books She Carried

Posted November 13th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

Am off Monday to the hills outside Guadalajara, back December 1.   No phone, no computer, no electronics of any kind or size means I’ll be offline for two weeks.  I’ll be hiking like a mountain goat, eating like a pig, and frolicking like a five-year-old.  But that doesn’t mean I’m leaving my mind behind in Seattle.   With my newly enhanced vision, I’ll be reading like crazy.

So what does an accidental theologist pack for such a trip?  Here’s the list:

— Reza Aslan’s new anthology of Mideastern 20th-century literature, Tablet & Pen.  A big, solid, juicy collection translated from Arabic, Turkish, Urdu, and Farsi.  Some of the writers I already know, but many I do not.   I’ve dipped into it already and know it’ll be a wonderful travel companion, equal parts exploration and pleasure.

— Two novels by the newly crowned Nobelist Maria Vargas Llosa:  The Storyteller and (for the plane) Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.

— Four volumes of The History of al-Tabari (from a forty-volume translation of the great early Islamic historian) which I will re-read very closely, pen and notebook in hand, in the clear early-morning hours before breakfast.

— A novel by Luis Alberto Urrea called The Hummingbird’s Daughter, recommended by a friend.  Might be a bit too magical-realist for me right now, but it’s set during the Mexican Revolution so into my suitcase it goes.

— A Teach Yourself Spanish book (file this one under good intentions that will probably come to naught).

— And then a toss-up as to the last selection:  one of two classics — either Montaigne’s Essays, whose wit and elegance I dip into occasionally and have been telling myself for years I should read all the way through, or Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, the Victorian blockbuster satire of greed and concupiscence that is as contemporary now as it was 140 years ago.  Maybe the Trollope’s the book to read on the plane trip back…

Until December — Lesley

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File under: art, Islam, Middle East | Tagged: Tags: accidental theologist reading list, History of al-Tabari, Maria Vargas Llosa, Montaigne, Reza Aslan, Tablet & Pen, Trollope | 6 Comments
  1. charlotte gerlings says:
    November 13, 2010 at 4:59 pm

    I took Montaigne on a stay in an isolated Tibetan mediation centre once – and Montaigne won! Never without him now, in the shape of a fat, battered Penguin on my desk. But off you go with your Trollope if you must – have a great break anyway. Does your electronic cold turkey include digital cameras, or can we expect some photos when you get back? PS Loved your account of the ‘found’ photograph, there’s a short story in there somewhere…

    • charlotte gerlings says:
      November 13, 2010 at 5:02 pm

      Oops, now there’s a significant slip – I meant meditation centre of course.

      • Lesley Hazleton says:
        November 13, 2010 at 10:45 pm

        Thanks C — That resolves my dilemma — Montaigne and Trollope are both coming with.

  2. Lynn Rosen says:
    November 14, 2010 at 10:21 pm

    Darling, you surpass all my intellectual expectations! Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.

  3. Kathleen Kelley says:
    November 23, 2010 at 3:47 am

    Upon your return, twill be interesting to hear
    which books were reached for but not started cause the scenery, sun, smells got to you first….
    which books were started but languished early on cause they appealed in the rain of Seattle but drooped uder the suns of Mexico…
    and which book(s) reached the “finished” line.
    Hope you get sooooome time to just sit 

    Am reaching for Llosa here in the gray of England…

  4. randomdue says:
    December 20, 2010 at 8:57 am

    Sachiko Murata has an interesting book, titled “The Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook of Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought,” which I have only partly read, but hope to complete sometime in the future.

    I also hope to read “Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light” by the same author. From what little I’ve read Professor Murata’s work, I find the approach enlightening and interesting.

That Old-Time Atheist Religion

Posted July 18th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

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.

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File under: agnosticism, atheism, fundamentalism | Tagged: Tags: Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, On Faith, Reza Aslan, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris | 6 Comments
  1. Pietra says:
    July 18, 2010 at 7:59 pm

    Okay, I’ll work harder to read some of these people; maybe if I sit up I won’t fall asleep so quickly.

  2. Lynn Rosen says:
    July 19, 2010 at 9:24 am

    Medear, your post and your take on Hitchens’ “shock&awe” discovery caused an orgasm of delight in this corner. Don’t never quit your spot-on good bits.

  3. Charlotte Gerlings says:
    July 22, 2010 at 5:59 am

    Hi Lesley, the pedant in me feels bound to point out that the atheist proclamation on London buses was not actually Dawkins’s idea, although he usefully offered to match the money raised to fund it in other UK cities too. It was in fact the creation of the prominent secularist Ariane Sherine, a witty young writer and journalist, London-born of Iranian and American parents and incidentally, raised as a Christian.
    A couple of years ago, offended by a particular Christian tagline, she wrote in the Guardian newspaper: ‘Now, if I wanted to run a bus ad saying “The ‘bits’ in orange juice aren’t orange but plastic – don’t drink them or you’ll die!” I think I might be asked to back up my claims. But apparently you don’t need evidence to run an ad suggesting we’ll all face the ire of the son of man when he comes, then link to a website advocating endless pain for atheists.
    ‘When I called the Advertising Standards Authority, the nice lady said they’d only received two complaints about the bus ads, neither of which had been investigated, because the quotations used are clearly from the Bible and there’s nothing in the code to prohibit advertising a religious message.’
    Two years on from the bus campaign, Sherine remains a staunch member of the British Humanist Association but she has resumed comedy writing, saying she’s no longer ‘involved in any atheist stuff’. And who can blame her when atheism is regularly misrepresented and conflated with fundamentalism in such articles as Aslan’s ‘On Faith’? As an atheist for over forty years, I’m truly tired of hearing what religionists have to say about non-believers – and so-called New Atheism doesn’t mean our critics’ counter arguments are either new or better reasoned.
    Mainland Britain has become a secularised society (the established Church of England loses credibility at every turn) nor is there discrimination against anyone wishing to run for local council office or parliament; their religious affiliations or otherwise are not considered relevant. Any disparagement directed at atheists comes from those who profess an all-powerful God of infinite love and understanding – how weird is that?
    Dawkins and company are currently high-profile thanks to modern media coverage. As a ‘private’ atheist who doesn’t engage in polemics ( full-on RC education did for me as far as any kind of apologetics is concerned) I’m not always happy with this but if that’s what it takes to offer an alternative to the virulence of God’s children – chosen, born-again, self-mortifying, whatever – then better stand by for more of the same!

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      July 23, 2010 at 10:07 am

      Not pedantic at all — full of good information. I like your terminology too: secularist/religionist instead of believer/nonbeliever, as in fiction/nonfiction, the latter being entirely determined as the absence of the former. Might post exactly this. Thanks.

      • charlotte gerlings says:
        July 24, 2010 at 2:47 am

        Off on a tangent:
        ‘Fiction/nonfiction, the latter being entirely determined as the absence of the former’ – an intriguing semantic point. What might we use as alternative pairings?
        creative / factual
        conceptual / representational
        fabrication / actuality
        inventive / derivative
        Whatever you do, don’t go near TRUTH (hornet’s nest, ton of bricks etc)

        • Lesley Hazleton says:
          July 24, 2010 at 10:40 am

          Challenge accepted! Stay tuned…

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