Saturday, August 08, 2009

Atheist Delusions

I want to direct readers to this link, which is to a review of Atheist Delusions, by David Bentley Hart. It is not simply because the book is the latest from my younger brother, but because it ought to be read, that I use this blog in an obviously familial gratuitous manner.
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3 comments:

RC Cola said...

Is it possible that I heard your brother being interviewed on EWTN back in March about this book?

Or perhaps was someone else being interviewed and his book was brought up?

Either way, I've been looking forward to it and I'm glad you brought it back to my attention.

9:53 PM
Mark said...

From the RC perspective: I’ve read this interview with David Bentley Hart,

http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3301

and was moved by the content of this discussion. The question of the suffering of the smallest, most vulnerable and innocent among us, has afflicted me for some time.

My struggles with this question keep taking me back to the life of Janusz Korczak (a man worth knowing), his love and sacrifice for all of his little charges, and the evil that was stalking and eventually murdered them all.

I know that rejection of God and His ways quickly leads to the worship of false idols – one’s race when it comes to the Nazis, political ideologies and state power for both the Nazis and the Communists, and for others a host of less spectacular, more private, and often ridiculous gods – unnecessary plastic surgeries come to mind. Neither are we, would be servants of Christ, exempt. But these false idols often seem veiled to those worshipping them.

Czeslaw Milosz (another man worth knowing) in his book “Legends of Modernity” remarks that Fascism, while being evil, also prescribed “brotherhood, fraternity, and noble right conduct” for human interactions, but that these values were not binding when it came to the Nazi's contact with those they deemed “non-human”. Paraphrasing, he goes on to remark that evil takes forms of willful blindness, lying to one’s conscience, and perverted appeals to higher sentiments. With the father of all lies in the background, the Nazis and Communists did unspeakable evil, yet many of them thought they were doing good.

Denial of God and His ways is indeed a delusion, a precursor that often leads to the worship of idols, slavery to sin, and suffering of the innocent. I intend to read this book.

8:26 AM
tdunbar said...

I really like that book: not over my head like "Beauty of the Infinite" but more extensive and thought provoking than his other popular writings.

3:02 PM

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