Ridiculous And Irrelevant
Posted on November 18th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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An Orthodox friend alerted me to Christopher Hitchens’ latest inane ramblings. It is admittedly odd that Castro has built a Russian Orthodox cathedral. Yes, this is clearly a way to curry favor with patrons in Moscow. Why should anyone outside Cuba care one way or the other? Castro is ridiculous, and above all he is irrelevant. The same might be said of Hitchens, which is why I have given up saying much about his articles. However, a few points need to be made about this one.
Hitchens goes through the usual motions of his typically unpersuasive anti-Christian whining, blaming the Church for “the clerical guarantee of serfdom and czarism,” as if the Church had any control over the Ulozhenie of 1649 or other policies of the Romanov dynasty. Did the Orthodox Church teach people to obey their secular rulers? Yes, just as Christian bishops have taught since the time of the Apostles. Far better that than the butchery of Hitchens’ confreres in the name of freedom and equality. Particularly in the post-Petrine period, when the Church was subjected to more direct control by the state thanks to the Westernizing efforts of Peter I, the Russian Orthodox hierarchy was in no position to protest against state policy. This year the Patriarchate did not fully support Moscow’s line on the war in Georgia, but immediately called for the cessation of hostilities. If that is what being “Putin’s most devoted and reliable ally” looks like, Russia could use a few more “allies” of Putin like this.
This was by far Hitchens’ most baldly Trotskyite rant in quite a while. I mean, not only does he talk about the White Army’s ‘atrocities’ in such a way that he expects his audience to follow his thinking that the Whites were the main bad guys at the time, but his main issue with Castro seems to be that he preferred Stalin to Lenin……. It’s all kinds of bizarre that someone could write from that perspective in 2008 and not be laughed back to their parents’ basement…..
Hi Daniel,
This is unrelated to your post, but do you anywhere in your writings give your reasons for being a theist, or for being a Christian theist, or for being an Orthodox Christian theist?
I’m a Roman Catholic philosopher who agrees with you that Hitchens’s anti-Christian writings are embarrassingly shallow and over-the-top (though I would add that they’re often wonderfully expressed), but I was wondering how important you thought reason, natural theology, and other such things were for arriving at Christian belief (obviously grace plays an important role, too–perhaps the only thing that plays a role–, but it can manifest itself in a particular person in his finding certain reasons for Christian persuasive and others against it unpersuasive).