Hitchens' culturally illiterate readership?
Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great, "must be banking on a readership that has not read Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. These Christian authors dramatized the themes and stories of the holy book that Hitchens disparages."
So writes Mary Grabar at TCSDaily.com.
She quotes Hitchens making this paradoxical assessment:
We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.
Hitchens is a brilliant man and he's often a thrill to read, but in the above paragraph it seems he's cutting off the branch on which he sits. That's my assessment. Grabar makes her full case here:
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=061507A
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2 comments:
The whole point was that a "man-made" work is far more wonderful than the so-called "word of god".
Of course, the author choses to ignore this and instead go on an ad-hominem campaign and call Hitchen's readers illiterate.
I am currently reading "Crime and Punishment" and I find it much more enlightening on moral topics than the Bible.
The author's case would only make sense if "Crime and Punishment" was divinely inspired.. which is too far out, even for a simpleton (this is not an insult, just an observation) such as herself.
Speaking of "Crime and Punishment," Dostoyevsky was a convinced Christian. I guess the scholars will have to argue about whether "Crime and Punishment" is a good book despite Dostoyevsky's Christianity, or because of it.
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