Atheist Delusions

The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

David Bentley Hart

David Bentley Hart has an incredible vocabulary and a sharply barbed pen as the levels a heavy barrage toward today's fashionable atheists. His main topic is that of early Christian history when this new faith transformed and revolutionized the world in a way that seems most unlikely. But he starts out with a scathing attack on those who distort that history and accuse Christianity of much violence and discord and ignore the fact that most of the institutions of compassion in the world today had their origin in Christianity. To my mind there are parallels with D'Souza's "What's So Great About Christianity" but the pen has all the sharpness of Berlinski's "Devil's Delusion".

Wikipedia describes him as an "Eastern Orthodox philosopher, writer, and cultural commentator.". He has written "The Story of Christianity: An Illustrated History of 2000 Years of the Christian Faith." London: Quercus: 2007, so he has spent a lot of effort on the history of Christianity that he highlights in this book.

1. The Gospel of Unbelief

p 13 After a discussion of the charges of violence and all kinds of injustice that have been leveled against the Christian church he comments "Christianity expressly forbids the various evils that have been done by Christians, whereas democracy, in principle, forbids nothing (except, of course, the defeat of the majority's will)."

p14 "What I find most mystifying in the arguments of the authors I have mentioned, and of others like them, is the strange presupposition that a truly secular society would of its nature be more tolerant and less prone to violence than any society shaped by any form of faith. Given that the modern age of secular governance has been the most savagely and sublimely violent period in human history, by a factor (or body count) of incalculable magnitude, it is hard to identify the grounds for their confidence."

p14 "But it scarcely impugns the epochal genius of Charles Darwin or Alfred Russel Wallace to note that - understood purely as a bare, brute, material event - nature admits of no moral principles at all, and so can provide none; all it can provide is its own "moral" example, which is anything but gentle." Brings to mind Dawkins' "no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.." in River Out of Eden.

p15 In discussing Dennett he says "But there is something delusional nonetheless in his optimistic certainty that human beings will wish to choose altruistic values without invoking transcendent principles."

p15 Having conceded to Dennett that there really doesn't seem to be much apparent difference between believers and non-believers in terms of morality, he does express the conviction from his personal experience that "in that world of consummate hopelessness where the most indigent, disabled, forsaken, and forgotten among us depend upon the continuous, concrete, heroic charity of selfless souls - the ranks of the godless tend to thin out markedly."

p16 Continuing to discuss Dennett's ideas, he says "Good manners, however, should oblige him and others like him to acknowledge that they are inheritors of a social conscience whose ethical grammar would have been very different had it not been shaped by Christianity's moral premise . ."

p17 "if indeed the teachings of Christianity were genuinely to take root in human hearts - if indeed we all believed that God is love and that we ought to love our neighbors as ourselves - we should have no desire for war, should hate injustice worse than death, and should find indifference to the sufferings of others impossible."

p17 He decries the misquoting of history of two millennia with "a few childish images of bloodthirsty crusaders and sadistic inquisitors .. and more damning legends"

p17 "Christians ought not to surrender the past but should instead deepen their own collective memory of what the gospel has been in human history. Perhaps more crucially, they ought not to surrender the future to those who know so little of human nature as to imagine that a society 'liberated' from Christ would love justice, or truth, or beauty, or compassion, or even life."

2. The Age of Freedom

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