Mud thou art, and to mud shall thou return.
Christopher Hitchens is an atheist dogmatist. For all his witty brilliance, he hasn’t figured out that only an unqualified reality— an absolute— could dare to be as consistently dogmatic as he is. And he certainly isn’t an absolute reality.
Yes, he can intellectually deny God— and still be morally good, loyal, filial, honest, even idealistic. Anybody may graft many purely humanistic branches onto their basic spiritual nature and thus apparently prove their contentions in behalf of a godless existence, but in that kind of experience only social fruits are forthcoming; not spiritual. It’s the graft that determines the nature of the fruit, even though the living sustenance is continually drawn from the roots of an original divine endowment of both mind and spirit.
Many God-knowing individuals aren’t blind to the difficulties or unmindful of the obstacles which stand in the way of finding God in the maze of superstition, traditional backwardness, and materialistic/atheistic tendencies of our times. They have encountered all these deterrents and surmounted them by living faith, and attained the highlands of spiritual experience in spite of all of them.
It’s true that many who are inwardly sure about God fear to assert such feelings of certainty because of the multiplicity and cleverness of people like Hitchens, who assemble objections and magnify difficulties about believing in God. It actually requires no great depth of intellect to pick flaws or raise objections. But it does require brilliance of mind to solve these difficulties; it’s too bad he no longer has the time to do just that.
If the nonreligious approaches to cosmic reality presume to challenge the certainty of faith on the grounds of its unproved status, then the spirit experiencer can likewise resort to the dogmatic challenge of the facts of science and the beliefs of philosophy on the grounds that they are likewise unproved; they are likewise experiences in the consciousness of the scientist or the philosopher.
Of God, the most inescapable of all presences, the most real of all facts, the most living of all truths, the most loving of all friends, and the most divine of all values, we have the right to be the most certain of all universe experiences.
—The Urantia Book
All are religious.
Your cherished views and zealous acts are your religion, for now.
Not to be confused with true religion, the “proof” of which is self evident.
I just get sad when some folks feel that they need to attack everyone who has a spirituality or a religion, as superstitious. How many potential allies have they thrown away by that one act of hostility?
An excellent point, Chick. But many atheists are just as fundamentally confused by reality as fundamentalist Christians are— to name one type of fundamental religionist. Their hostility is born of intolerance— which is a mask covering up their doubts as to the trueness of their beliefs.
And another thing.
The most thoughtless sophistry of atheists like Christopher (love that bit of name-sake irony) Hitchens is that there’s no “evidence” to support anything like a spiritual realm; that there has to be repeatable, physical, “scientific evidence” for everything; though they themselves cannot provide anyone with a friggin’ shred of evidence to verify that even a single thought bouncing around in their head just now is something exclusively “physical.”
That’s because Science cannot— and will never be able to prove consciousness and life are strictly physical things, or even why matter, motion, and life are “real;” but rather than deal with this truth, atheists simply opt to ignore the fact that science is utterly useless in the evaluation of spiritual realities.
Atheists are at best, mechanists— who insist, despite the colossal lack of “evidence”— that the universe and everything in it must be material. But if this were just a material universe, and man just a machine, that man would be wholly unable to recognize himself as such a machine— and likewise would he be wholly unconscious of the fact of the existence of such a material universe. So much for physical proof.
So far, science has failed to recognize the fact of the spirit-indwelt mind of the scientist— whose very supermaterial insight formulates these mistaken, and self-contradictory concepts.
A mechanistic concept of the universe is, in itself, a non-material phenomenon of mind. And ALL mind is of non-material origin, no matter how thoroughly it may appear to be materially conditioned and controlled. Man is a material fact of nature, but his life is a phenomenon which is capable of far transcending the material levels of nature.