David Bentley Hart -- one of the best Christian writers alive today -- shreds a silly post from some nobody secularist. . .fun, fun, fun.
Journalism is the art of translating abysmal ignorance into
execrable prose. At least, that is its purest and most minimal essence. There
are, of course, practitioners of the trade who possess talents of a higher
order—the rare ability, say, to produce complex sentences and coherent
paragraphs—and they tend to occupy the more elevated caste of “intellectual
journalists.” These, however, are rather like “whores with hearts of gold”:
more misty figments of tender fantasy than concrete objects of empirical
experience. Most journalism of ideas is little more than a form of empty
garrulousness, incessant gossip about half-heard rumors and half-formed
opinions, an intense specialization in diffuse generalizations. It is something
we all do at social gatherings—creating ephemeral connections with strangers by
chattering vacuously about things of which we know nothing—miraculously
transformed into a vocation.
[. . .]
Which brings me to Adam Gopnik, and specifically his New
Yorker article of February 17, “Bigger Than Phil”—the immediate occasion of
all the rude remarks that went coursing through my mind and spilling out onto
the page overhead. Ostensibly a survey of recently published books on (vaguely
speaking) theism and atheism, it is actually an almost perfect distillation of
everything most depressingly vapid about the cogitatively indolent secularism
of late modern society. This is no particular reflection on Gopnik’s
intelligence—he is bright enough, surely—but only on that atmosphere of
complacent ignorance that seems to be the native element of so many of today’s
cultured unbelievers. The article is intellectually trivial, but perhaps
culturally portentous.
Simply said, we have reached a moment in Western history
when, despite all appearances, no meaningful public debate over belief and
unbelief is possible. Not only do convinced secularists no longer understand
what the issue is; they are incapable of even suspecting that they do not
understand, or of caring whether they do. The logical and imaginative grammars
of belief, which still informed the thinking of earlier generations of atheists
and skeptics, are no longer there. In their place, there is now—where questions
of the divine, the supernatural, or the religious are concerned—only a kind of
habitual intellectual listlessness.
Give yourself an Easter gift. . .read the whole thing!
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