6.05.2006
Trend-spotter!
[Posted 8:05 PM by Nick Desai]
The TNC office is so chock-full of diverse glossies, broadsheets, reviews, and loose-leaf screeds that after yesterday’s mail delivery, I literally had to read myself out from under a suffocating pile of verbiage. And, in escaping, I even came away with something: a trend.
If you are an unshakable atheist with a talent for polemics again Islamo-Fascism, what is a la mode? Counterintuitively, perhaps, it’s a peculiar kind of Christianity. Its adherents do not consider the metaphysics underpinning Christian thought to be true, but they appreciate the cultural achievements of believers.
Here is Christopher Hitchens, the man who doesn’t “trust anyone who believes in religion”:
I don’t have the nostalgia for the lost period of faith. I’m glad it’s over and my children won’t have to know about it. Except from me . . . . I teach them this stuff and they don’t know what I think . . . .
You are not educated if you don’t know the Bible. You can’t read Shakespeare or Milton without it, even if there was nothing else of it. And with the schools now, that’s what I hate about secular relativism . . . . I quite understand Christian parents who want to protect their children from a nihilistic solution where there’s no way of knowing what’s been discussed . . . . I’m very glad I was taught it. I was taught it as revealed truth . . . .
I know the King James Bible pretty well. It’s a fantastic document. I could not imagine my life without it. You couldn’t read Paradise Lost. You couldn’t read William Blake. Knowing about it is absolutely vital to me.
And this is snipped from Oriana Fallaci’s New Yorker profile (Her best line: “I must CRUSH the potatoes.”)
In September, she had a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI at Castel Gandolfo, his summer residence outside Rome. She had criticized John Paul II for making overtures to Muslims, and for not condemning terrorism heartily enough, but she has hopes for Joseph Ratzinger. (The meeting was something of a scandal in Italy, since Fallaci has always said that she is an atheist; more recently, she has called herself a “Christian atheist,” out of respect for Italy’s Catholic tradition.) Last December, the Italian government presented her with a gold medal for “cultural achievement” . . . .
Images of soiling recur in the books: at one point in “The Rage and the Pride” she complains about Somali Muslims leaving “yellow streaks of urine that profaned the millenary marbles of the Baptistery” in Florence. “Good Heavens!” she writes. “They really take long shots, these sons of Allah! How could they succeed in hitting so well that target protected by a balcony and more than two yards distant from their urinary apparatus?” Six pages later, she describes urine streaks in the Piazza San Marco, in Venice, and wonders if Muslim men will one day “shit in the Sistine Chapel.”
“Christian atheism”? An interesting synthesis of “God is dead” intellectualism and crescendo religiosity among the masses? Of course, two instances do not a trend make. Except in the world of internet trend-spotting, that is, and I have heard that soon that you will be allowed to do it with one or even none at all.