Hitchens: Heaven and Hell
Hitchens asks in his NY TImes review of the Pullman book:
It is not the claim that is moral or not...it is whether the claim is true or not. The truth of the claim establishes the morality. If true, it would be decidedly immoral not to tell humanity of it.
Sin is like a cancer. If a researcher, a diabolical one at that, invented a cure for cancer, but withheld it because he really like to see others suffer, then he would be a moral monster. Even if it was in his lab where the cure was created and he owns all rights to it legally. He has the credentials, the training, and the trials conducted on cancer victims in a country in the developing world. The cure works 100 percent of the time.
Now, imagine a counter-situation. He has found the cure for cancer and wants to share it but no one believes him. In fact, he is ostracized by the medical community, pharmaceutical companies, and the general public. They think he is a whack-job. He did not go to the right schools, did not come from the right place, and he is a short and balding undistinguished middle-aged and unmarried man...a loser in the world's opinion. In fact, he does not even have a college degree but has always shown a high aptitude for anything he does.
In a desperate attempt to gain attention, the man does all those things that cause cancer...he smokes, lives in a basement with an endless emanation of radon, he breathes in asbestos. In our culture, where the freak show has been finessed to a well-oiled machine, the American people can't resist paying attention to the story. Many want to see him a horrible death.
The man does die clinically of lung cancer. His cure necessitates a total non-functioning of bodily systems. And, it is the worst kind of death imaginable. A long descent to death's door where every step is more painful than the last. It takes months for him to die. He refuses all palliative and hospice care as to not provide the skeptics with any room for argumentation that something else contributed to his coming back to life than his cure. He says he is going through all of this in memory of his mother (and all others) who died as he is, from lung cancer. He seems uninterested in money.
The coroner officially notes the time of death in consultation with the medical specialists. It is done. He's dead. A follower of his, not a medical man, but a garbageman, is permitted to inject the cure into the man's veins. What the hell. There is not much harm that can be done to a dead man but desecration. Soon, his eyes open and he begins to breathe again. Some are convinced, others think that his is still a charlatan.
Now, this tale has some variations to the Jesus Christ story as told in the New Testament, yet essentially it is a story of a cure largely ignored. But ignoring the cure does not cause the cancer to not exist. The cancer is a fact just as sin is a fact. Never has an age been so unwilling to call sin "sin" yet so mired in its deadly hallows. And, our incorrect diagnosis keeps us from the cure. The cure that is Christ. The denial of the disease is indeed deadly, now and forever.
I don't trust a man who thinks he is good, or has the capacity to be good, without Christ.In fact, it is impossible to define good without a transcendent order of ethics. How else is the first researcher who withholds the cure to cancer considered an evil man? Arguments of personal, property, and patent rights (the things we seem so keen on to base our claims of moral legitimacy on in our secular age) offer no solution to the malevolent man. Oh, there is something more universal than his personal beliefs and claims..."your truth and my truth" kind of insipid nonsense? Well, exactly, that is my point.
Comments