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new post about hitchens; spelling corrections in other posts

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Greg Gauthier 2022-03-26 18:06:08 +00:00
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@ -22,8 +22,6 @@ I think people like Dawkins and Hitchens actually function as receptacles and br
I grew up in a lower-middle class household in a suburb of Chicago, in the 70s and 80s. Granted, books were difficult to come by at the time (you really had to be motivated to go to the library, and you really had to be aware of where to find things that would answer your questions well). But, I was also brought up in a Catholic home. A religious tradition with an absolute *treasure trove* of collected wisdom on some of the deepest questions in philosophy and science. Yet, I had never heard of *anyone* from this tradition until I was well into my late twenties. Not even the community college I attended had classes on ancient or medieval philosophy at the time.
In the world I lived in, even before the internet, there was no excuse for this. Boethius, Augustine, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Newman, and especially Lewis, were all easily accessible. All it would have taken was a single priest or tutor or even my own father, to give me a list of names to look for in the library.
It's as if everyone after WWII was completely ashamed of themselves for being what they were (western and Christian), and the way that transmitted itself into the next generation, was in the form indignation and repudiation. If you're going to hide my heritage from me out of shame, then of course, I'm going to not take it seriously.
In the world I lived in, even before the internet, there was no excuse for this. Boethius, Augustine, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Newman, and especially Lewis, were all easily accessible. All it would have taken was a single priest or tutor or even my own father, to give me a list of names to look for in the library. It's as if everyone after WWII was completely ashamed of themselves for being what they were (western and Christian), and the way that transmitted itself into the next generation, was in the form indignation and repudiation. If you're going to hide my heritage from me out of shame, then of course, I'm going to not take it seriously.
The point I'm driving at, is that the righteous indignation my generation felt, was not that of being lied to about God, but rather, it was about having had the resources needed to answer these questions sufficiently, hidden from us with the excuse that we were intellectually incapable of, or constitutionally unwilling to, understand them. Turning to atheism was just a way of expressing that indignation, and there is no more grotesque or self-destructive an example of this projected indignation, in my view, than Christopher Hitchens.