The Sharpton/ Hitchens SmackdownHere's the video everyone's talking about.

Remarks from the Fray:

Say what you will about them, but Sharpton and Hitchens are a couple of sharp and articulate guys. It's fun to watch them go at it mano-a-mano (for a while, at least). But regardless of their impressive intellectual chops, these guys are really, mainly, professional provocateurs. While they're no doubt sincere in their views, after a while they start to seem like a couple of actors playing their signature roles in a show of political theater. And in a theatrical sense, the last thing you'd want to do is get along too well, or express views that tend to be anything less than flamboyant or outrageous. This is a world in which Mother Theresa is a "bitch" and Mormons are destined to be defeated by "those that really believe in God." I'm not saying that Sharpton and Hitchens are insincere, but their fame and their livelihoods largely depend on them taking public stances that create a stir. If Sharpton is a demagogue, then Hitchens might be something more like an anti-demagogue—what better way to attract a little attention than by telling billions of people that their God is a fraud? In the end, it seems to have as much to do with book sales and speaking fees as anything else.

However, while a Clash of the Titans smackdown between atheism and faith, represented in one corner by Hitchens and the other corner by Sharpton, might make for a fun and relatively civilized evening out, I think it focuses on the wrong disagreements. While it may be true that your average person of faith shares a belief in the supernatural and the afterlife with a jihadist suicide bomber, to try to place them on some kind of a continuum seems silly and absolutist. Likewise, people who shun religious faith don't automatically become Josef Stalin. I think there's plenty of room for atheists and people of faith, in general, to get along. In most respects, Sharpton and Hitchens, being responsible and moderate members of American society, are on the same side. The real, serious, argument here is between people of moderation and good will, versus homicidal fanatics. For my own part, I'm happy to let people believe that Jesus has a special plan for them as long as they don't live in willful ignorance of science, reason, and our Constitution, or try to blow up my Acura.

--Fingerpuppet

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Friedrich Nietzsche, as a rule, was not envious. Yet he wrote in 1888, "[Stendhal] took away from me the best atheistical joke that precisely I might have made: 'God's only excuse is that he does not exist.'"

Of course one can't tune in to Sharpton versus Hitchens expecting Dostoevsky versus Nietzsche or Blake versus Voltaire. But is this the best we've got now?

Hitchens' spiel about his book inevitably opens with the story of how he knew religion was all nonsense when he was still in knee pants. This makes sense, given that his ensuing attack on all things religious – especially the scripture-based religions that dominate the news – smacks of a clever young boy's gift for overstatement. There is no denying the mountain of evidence accrued in his book – and in so many books before his – that religion has often fallen victim to charlatans and, more seriously, that peoples have justified and continue to justify slaughter and mayhem in God's name. However, Hitchens' ensuing conclusion, that God is a wicked and authoritarian figment whom we should simply quit, is an impotent suggestion seemingly derived to sell books rather than do good.

Religion seems to be an inescapable part of the human portion. There is no society yet discovered (and I think we know about them all) that has managed to do without it, and no attempt to atheize a group has yet succeeded. Not that Hitchens advocates the abolishment of churches, but how can such a weighty book take this anthropological fact so lightly? God – whomever he she or it may or may not be – will always exist at the threshold of knowledge, just smaller than the quark and just farther than the observable universe. That our smalls have gotten smaller and our larges larger is beyond debate, but faith too adjusts to knowledge.

Perhaps we are thus slaves to some evolutionary vestige. Perhaps the crutch of an explanatory power, of a "greater than," is something we should jettison in favor of procedural models of rationality. (I personally think that that would be a wonderful development.) But faith is a powerful vessel for morality – much more compelling than rationality. Advocating its total abandonment simply because its historical hobgoblin, the fundamentalist, dominates headlines is simply stupid. A less flashy but less negligible book might address the need to update the scriptures. Excise genocide and intolerance and emphasize human rights and call it "The Modern Testament" or something like that. Why not? A church organized under such a text would be far likelier to catch fire with those who matter, the mega-church going multitudes, than Hitchens' head-boy atheism.

And as for "the Rev." Sharpton making the case for God, the above Stendhal quote might be adjusted, "Charlatans who abuse God's name have only one hope: that he does not exist."

--CookMiller

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