… where one of three experts agree “heaven is a f-ing celestial North Korea.”
Most of us try to avoid voicing personal opinions about religion, let alone arguing about what we do or don’t believe. But Thursday night’s Connecticut Forum proved that people do like to hear others arguing about this sort of thing. A packed house at the Bushnell listened in as an atheist writer, a Baptist reverend, and a Jewish rabbi held an interesting and civil conversation (that only briefly escalated to yelling) on the stage of the Bushnell theater, moderated by Connie Schultz, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist.
I can’t believe I’ve lived in Connecticut for over two years and only heard about the Connecticut Forum rather recently from my friend Peterson Toscano (who wrote an account of his experience as Christopher Hitchens’ personal valet for the night). The Connecticut Forum is a quarterly series held at the Bushnell where famous writers/artists/personalities/important people have discussions and where the audience can join in through comment cards. I felt rather old-fashioned and New Englandey at this event, since it reminds me of what I’ve read about the Victorian-era lecture circuits.
Christopher Hitchens, the author of God is Not Great, is a blunt and angry atheist who manages to keep up a reputation as both a sharp debater and a heavy drinker. He discovered his disdain for religion as a kid, when a combination nature/religion teacher told students how kind God was to make nature green-colored, because green is the shade most restful for human eyes. Hitchens remembers thinking, “This is bullshit.”
Professor Edward Gomes is a Baptist reverend and chaplain of Harvard University who uncannily reminded me of Samuel Clemens – wise-seeming, but with a young spirit, and full of unexpected and irreverent zingers. He’s an openly gay Baptist, and if you want to get a taste of his personality, check out this video of him with Stephen Colbert.
Rabbi Kushner, the author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, kept coughing into the mic, and over the course of the evening I found myself feeling kind of sympathetic to him since Hitchens seemed to target him more than Gomes. Kushner’s religious ideas come from the life-altering death of his young son from a horrible rare disease. This event challenged his thinking of God. If God is all-powerful, how could he let something like that happen to an innocent child? The basic gist, then, seems to be that is that God does in fact not have infinite power, but instead has infinite kindness.
“What difference does it make whether there’s a God or not?” Shultz asked to start off the event. The three responses were a good summary of each men’s perspective: Kushner said that people need God to rely on in the trying times of their lives, to summon strength to go on; Gomes said that he simply could not imagine a world without a God; Hitchens posed the question that if Jesus, Moses, etc did not exist, “are people just going to start screwing in the streets?”
Hitchen’s response got a spattering of spontaneous applause from the peanut gallery, although as the night progressed non-atheists seemed to get less timid and Gomes and Kushner would get some cheers as well.
While Hitchens often ended up playing the role of provocateur to Schultz and Gomes throughout the evening, they rarely took the bait but rather responded in thoughtful, although mysterious, answers. For instance, a Gomes response on why religion doesn’t always make sense was “I look forward to the day all will be clear. Somebody will have the answer. I can’t wait.” While I could see that his point is that the whole thing is a matter of faith, it was sometimes unsatisfying to hear responses like this.
But there were a number of times when Gomes and Kushner, as believers in God, responded to questions about belief in God in more concrete ways. They tended to frame belief in God as a human-centric manner: what people need from a belief in God (security, strength, forgiveness), not what God demands of people. Often in other settings (like in church) I’ve found the emphasis more on what God needs you to do, not the other way around. The forum, as more of a discussion rather than sermon, at times provided a bit of a refreshing perspective on religious belief from religious leaders themselves.
The nature of religious inclusion and exclusion in today’s world of both growing radicalism and ecumenicalism was a recurring theme as well. Gomes and Kushner tended to under-emphasize the differences between their faiths and others, possibly because the audience was a mixed bag of beliefs. When Kushner described Jews who blend practices of other religions like Buddhist meditation into their daily lives, Hitchens got fired up.
He said that given the fact that people have fought and died for religions for milleniums (and still are), isn’t it impossible to gloss over the differences between religions? I felt that when the conversation turned into this type of debate, Hitchens in fact did seem to have the upper hand. Kushner and Gomes remained reluctant to expound upon the idea promoted by both their religions – that those who believe are chosen people and/or will be rewarded in heaven, and that whose who don’t believe/belong are destined for some other, not-so-nice fate.
This brought us to Hitchens’ declaration of heaven as a “f-ing celestial North Korea” where he would never want to end up.
Which illustrates the simple fact that it is probably impossible for people to debate religion and win each other over when some believe and some do not, but it’s certainly thought-provoking to listen to them try.
The next CT Forum is on food and features famous chefs Anthony Bourdain, Alice Waters, and Duff Goldman.
Great report!
There is a part of me that sometimes wants to cheer for Hitchens’ brand of atheism because he *sometimes* emphasizes the incredible scientific and social progress that can be directly attributed to the rejection of religious ideas and superstition. It’s similar to the way that I feel about early Soviet poster campaigns that denounced the Orthodox Church as a promoter of czarism, reaction and bigotry. Sometimes challenges to institutional religion are absolutely necessary.
But you have to take a step back and look at Hitchens’ whole agenda. Hitchens has for the last decade been part of what commentator Edward Herman calls “the Cruise Missile Left”:
http://musictravel.free.fr/political/political36.htm
Essentially, these are liberals who actually support U.S. imperialism and war. In the lead up to the Iraq War, Hitchens played the cynical role of posturing as an opponent of the war while attempting to drive wedges in the movement . . . red-baiting socialists and communists and using his critique of religion to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment. In the last analysis, he wasn’t against the war on Iraq at all, he simply wanted to turn it into a modern day secular Crusade in which liberal Americans would lead the fight to destroy evil fatwah-issuing Muslim clerics.
And even in his current incarnation in which he focuses on the negative impact of religion and superstition in society, it often seems to me that there is a strong flavor of the White Man’s Burden in this thinking…in which “western” rationalist ideas and values represent the pinnacle of “civilized” society that must be shoved down the throats of the superstitious heathens.
As for the other panelists…well, I think they are absolutely correct that in the current atmosphere of social dislocation and disorientation and individualism, religion is a powerful source of solace for many people who are suffering (that’s the real meaning, of course, of Marx’s adage that religion is the opiate of the masses…it helps individuals to kill the pain of living under capitalism). That doesn’t mean that the religious formulations that people cling to can or should be accepted as factual, much less as appropriate determinants of social policy.
A friend of mine grew up in a dirt-poor family in a small working class town in New York state. The kind of family, as he often said, where as a kid he was often sent to school with lunches consisting of a mustard sandwich because bread and mustard was all they could ever afford. His mother was an ardent fundamentalist christian. He always felt that this was in no small measure because she was married to an alcoholic man who physically and emotionally terrorized her and she felt she had no means of escape because she was a woman with no job skills, no source of income except for her husband, and no way out.
Although my friend grew up to be fiercely atheistic in his beliefs, he always remembered that his mother’s religion was the only comfort that she had in her life. His take on it was that until we had fashioned a better world for people like his mother to live in, we had no right to ridicule her for the faith that she clung to in order to survive it.
“Often in other settings (like in church) I’ve found the emphasis more on what God needs you to do, not the other way around. ”
Sounds like Catholicism. I wish that a Catholic was represented among the panelists, and how about a Muslim?
Great write-up.
P.S. Generally I avoid these Connecticut Forums like the plague…but can’t wait to see Anthony Bourdain (author of the scathing Kitchen Confidential), Alice Waters (founder of Chez Panisse), and Duff Goldman (of Ace of Cakes fame).
Kevin,
Your guess is correct about the Catholic thing. And yes I wish there were more faiths represented. The Jewish and Christian faiths have so much in common it would have been cool to hear a different perspective. In the program book they had a really interesting chart listing info about a few dozen of the most popular religions around the world, some of which I’d never even heard of.
Thanks for the full write up of what was an excellent program. It was the best, most varied, and truly open discussion about God I have ever heard.
Why does Peter “avoid the Ct Forum like a plague”? They are really cool programs.
too bad those “forums” aren’t free to the public
The Oxford English Dictionary says the earliest known definition of “forum” is: “The public place or market-place of a city. In ancient Rome the place of assembly for judicial and other public business.”
By this definition, it should be free to the public. Sorry, I’m a word nerd.
I admit, when I first got to the Forum and I saw that the crowd was way more affluent and white than your average group of Hartford city dwellers – judging by appearances and the fact that tickets range from $25-$65 – I was a bit put off.
But I started realistically thinking about it: the CT Forum is a nonprofit and I bet it costs a LOT to get these big name people there. I know nothing about this, but don’t you think it probably costs thousands/tens of thousands of dollars to get these famous people to come?
Of course the Forum has some corporate support, but they also run the CT Youth Forum, and it says on their site that they give away 1,000 tickets every year to high schoolers and community members.
So I don’t really think that realistically they could make this completely free to everyone, although I wish it was!
I suppose it costs a lot of money to bring in so-called experts. Maybe what they should do instead, is bring in folks from the community to discuss these hot button issues. I’m not judging anyone here, I just don’t understand why you would pay to listen to someone else’s opinion…at the very least they should stop calling it a forum.
p.s. It would be cool to have a listing on this site of all the free arts and culture related events in Hartford.
To be fair, I think people pay not to “listen to someone else’s opinion” but to be entertained . . . these speaking circuits usually involve people of some celebrity, and sometimes pit two or more controversial figures against each other. It’s really theater of a kind. Like I said, I’ve never gone to the CT Forum and I find most of the pairings obnoxious (what do these two or three wealthy white male pundits think about some burning issue of the day), but I’d pay to go to almost any of them before I’d pay to see Phantom of the Opera!