Harsh words for atheists, and a search for common ground

By Rich Barlow  |  March 19, 2008

I Don’t Believe in Atheists
By Chris Hedges
Free Press, 212 pp., $25

The Faith Between Us: A
Jew and a Catholic Search
for the Meaning of God
By Peter Bebergal and Scott Korb
Bloomsbury, 240 pp., $24.95

What do neoconservatives, right-wing televangelists, and the current crop of atheist authors have in common? According to Chris Hedges, they're all fundamentalists of one sort or another, seduced by the siren proposition that the world can be made a utopia. In "I Don't Believe in Atheists," Hedges roasts their kind.

He writes that Sam Harris ("The End of Faith," "Letter to a Christian Nation") oozes "childish simplicity and ignorance of world affairs" and can be "idiotic and racist," as when advocating the option of bombing an Islamic nation that gets nuclear weapons.

Christopher Hitchens ("God Is Not Great") is "an illiterate" for saying theologians duck the question of who created a creator. Thomas Aquinas, among many others, wrote on the topic, Hedges writes.

Hedges's sensibilities are informed first and foremost by his two decades as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, and particularly by having witnessed the hell of the Bosnian war. A Harvard Divinity School graduate, he skewers Harris's assertion that religion caused that national slaughter, saying it resulted instead from Yugoslavia's economic disintegration. Having read and debated with Harris and Hitchens, he discerns a dangerous intolerance that is also found in fundamentalist Christians. The latter would get us to heaven by expunging non-Christians; the atheists, says Hedges, take a wrong turn down the road of science and reason.

"To turn away from God is harmless. Saints have been trying to do it for centuries. To turn away from [acceptance of humanity's inevitable] sin is catastrophic," writes Hedges. "We are not saved by reason. We are not saved by religion. We are saved by turning away from projects that tempt us to become God, and by accepting our own contamination and the limitations of being human."

What I've read of the atheist writers leaves me unpersuaded that they're chasing utopia, but Hedges's main point that they're often intolerant cranks is dead-on. Still, his book is a cascade of invective that, coming in such a slender volume, makes it surprisingly and tediously repetitive. Nevertheless, atheists and believers should read Hedges, if only to better inform their theologies with appropriate humility.

"The Faith Between Us" initially reminded me of an exchange in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie "Commando" between the hero and a woman whose car he has hijacked:

Arnold: "A guy I trusted for years wants me dead."

Woman: "That's understandable. I've only known you for five minutes and I want you dead, too."

After a few minutes reading Scott Korb, the Catholic in this Jewish-Catholic coproduction, I wanted him, not harmed, but afflicted with writer's block. My expected sympathy (I'm Catholic) was muted by his seeming neuroticism: His one-time veganism seemed as much about fear as thoughtful eating. Yet I came to appreciate Korb's virtues. As the above demonstrates, he's more brutally self-revealing than most of us would have the courage to be, and he's refreshingly non-doctrinaire. (He's also had tough breaks that might change anyone.)

Toss in Peter Bebergal, a Cambridge resident who is the book's Jewish voice and feet-on-the-ground pragmatist to Korb's Woody Allen, and you have a work that has keen spiritual insights, and that is more compassionate than Hedges's book, if less bracingly edgy. Readers with more taste for memoirs than I have may enjoy the interdenominational duo.

You can reach Rich Barlow, a freelance writer, at barlow81@gmail.com.