Why Christopher Hitchens matters to me

When a bishop threatened a sitting President of excommunication, that can really piss people off. It didn’t take long for me to express my anger, as shown here in my Facebook post last September 30, 2010. The original Inquirer news has long been deleted for reasons I do not know. So incensed I was at the news that I was ready to exit the Catholic  Church as well. What I didn’t realized back then that this was the beginning of my journey toward nonbelief. This moment that set off my curiosity towards freethinking and atheism and eventually my awakening towards a life of humanism and secularism.

And my constant companion was Christopher Hitchens. His numerous Youtube videos of him debating theists on why religions like Islam, Christianity and Judaism are contributing to the persecution of women and stifling of free speech; the many CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and CSPAN interviews of him enlightening us to the evils of fundamentalism and the need to oppose absolutism; his BBC documentary explaining why Mother Teresa is a complete fanatic, fundamentalist and a fraud; his best-selling books including god is not Great explaining why religion poisons everything in our lives.

His arguments convinced me right away. Unlike dogma, his ideas let you think for yourself. For a 38 year old Filipino Catholic and former seminarian of eight years, that was a breath of fresh air, especially if I was told and taught for many years that God can be known through reason, faith seeking understading, which is a false premise since faith is a process of non-thinking, accepting something by abandoning reason. So there I was, soaking my mind in atheistic literature that was completely new to me. And I loved it!

The Hitch stood for free speech, empowerment of women, against dictatorship celestial or otherwise, defended homosexuality, and pleaded for us to use criticial thinking and not surrender our minds against the onslaught of mind-numbing conformity and impositions of religions.
               

“Faith is the surrender of the mind, it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It's our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. ... Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated” – Christopher Hitchens

So I learned to be brave, to question everything, and to stand for the same virtues that Hitchens stood for. Hitchens of course hated the idea of emulating him and putting him in the pedestal; but I owe him, his contribution to humanity for unshackling my mind from the prison of religion and faith. Christopher Hitchens ideas are universal and accepted by fair minded individuals around the world. When Hitchens wrote why Orwell matters, he got his analysis right. In many ways, he educated us to always pay attention to society's leanings towards absolute rule and constant surveillance. With Hitchens, a torch has been passed, now we need to be aware, not just of fascist and totalitarian tendencies, but of the uncritical surrender of the mind, against the evils of religion. That is why Christopher Hitchens matters to me.

Why Cardinal Tagle did not answer my question

For a theologian, let alone a Cardinal, one would think that he knows a thing or two about secularism and atheism. Yet this is what I think happened when I attended Cardinal Tagle’s 25-minute press conference in Kingsgrove NSW in South Sydney, Australia last Aug 1 as part of his talking tour: the Cardinal dodged it saying “it would need a semester to cover that question.” Okay I might have taken a bit longer to explain my question, about 2 minutes, which explains something about my lack of knowledge on the nature of press conferences, but that is nothing compared to the ridiculously long and vague ones asked by five other media reporters before me. And why is it that after I was cut off halfway through my question, the moderator, telling me to be quick due to time limitations, allowed two more questions? The Cardinal was also scheduled to deliver an hour long speech in the chapel next door. Was he concerned more about his talk than meeting the press? Was he afraid to engage an atheist like me? Couldn’t he just explain in a few sentences what his thoughts about atheism and secularism? So why didn’t he answer my question? I would not know. I would not pretend to know what his motivation was at the time. And since the Cardinal did not provide any word about my question, I will write my side of the argument here and hopefully the Cardinal himself had the generosity to explain his side.

My question was simple: what is the attitude of the Catholic Church towards atheism and secularism in the Philippines? The last time Cardinal Tagle spoke about “atheism” was to address the Catholic faithful not to fall for “practical atheism” where, in his own words, he lamented that “during Sundays, we profess our faith to God. But starting Monday, cheating happens because of money… we take advantage of other people for our own interest.” It is clear the Cardinal has a very low view of atheists. He implied that atheism is the complete absence of morality, a degeneration of positive human values. And he cleverly did that without even engaging real atheists.

I also pointed out that the Cardinal confused secularization and secularism. In 2013, the Cardinal spoke about the “effects of secularization and the media on the modern family.” For the record, the secularization thesis has been debunked and abandoned. I don’t know of any secular humanist who still promotes the secularization thesis. Secularism, on the other hand, states that best way to deal with religious differences is to come up with a morality that we all share and a morality not based on religion. Secularism actually enables us to build a strong democratic society by giving all religions equal voice in society. Secularism is consistent with the 1987 Constitution principle of separation of church and state. Therefore supporting secularism makes sense because it promotes equality and fairness. For a Cardinal, secularism is a topic that should be encouraged and not avoided.

So it is with sadness that the moral and spiritual leader of the Philippines Catholic Church would refuse to engage this question.