“The Vatican is an extraordinarily hard place to get access to, but we explained we’re not going to try to tell people what to think,” says Discovery president and GM Clark Bunting. Bunting says the investigators believe a demon can inhabit an inanimate object (like a home) or a person. The network executive says he was initially skeptical when first meeting the team but was won over after more than three hours of talks. “The work these folks do, and their conviction in their beliefs, make for fascinating stories,” Bunting says.

Bunting wins today’s credulous award. Only three hours of listening and he’s game for stories. This would be a good time to recall Nietzsche: “A very popular error: having the courage of one’s convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one’s convictions.”

So I watched the show, which apparently was not blessed by the Vatican but which also did not oppose it. First impression: if a shaman rather than a Catholic priest were telling these kinds of stories, most would consider the shaman a “primitive” and naive storyteller who believes in all kinds of fantastic magic. When Catholic priests say the same things, it is considered “religious.”

Second impression: everyone kept talking about evidence that supports the stories but no evidence was ever presented. Go figure. The show’s producer speaks to the issue: “It is a show about faith. There’s no empirical way to prove this stuff but science can’t explain everything.” He’s right — anatomists can’t explain this:

Over at Slate, Jeremy Stahl interviews Lawrence Wright for his piece on conspiracy theorists. Wright’s comments sound familiar: “I spent a lot of time trying to reason with various people who had these kinds of perspectives. And it was very frustrating. There was absolutely no way to argue with them because they rejected any kind of factual evidence. What they call facts aren’t typically facts. They sound like facts.” This is why I stopped arguing with creationists more than a decade ago.

Finally, we have the seemingly bizarre (but which should have been expected) news that the Catholic anti-Semite Mel Gibson is doing a film on second century BCE hero of Jewish nationalism Judah Maccabee. Over at The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg comments:

I’m working on a biography of Judah Maccabee…and so it was brought to my attention that Gibson is preoccupied with the subject. (My preoccupation is simple: Judah Maccabee led the first revolt for religious freedom in recorded history, and he is without parallel as a guerrilla fighter and as a man of faith).

A few years ago, I was having dinner with Christopher Hitchens, who had recently launched an excoriating attack on Judah Maccabee in his book, God is Not Great (Hitchens blames Judah Maccabee for, essentially, his success — the Maccabean revolt helped preserve, against the force and power of Greek culture, what Hitchens might call jealous-God Judaism, and thus paved the way for the birth of Christianity, which Hitch, as I’m sure you know, regrets).

This exchange places too much emphasis on Western monotheism and ignores the massive history of Mesopotamian religions that preceded (and profoundly influenced) this tradition. Maccabee did not lead the first revolt for religious freedom and while tribal nationalism can be a matter of faith, we needn’t buy the biblical myth that Maccabee was fighting for Yahweh. It is of course a time honored tradition to cloak earthly goals in the mantle of faith. While I doubt that Gibson’s movie will explore Maccabee’s mundane motivations, let’s hope that Goldberg’s book does.

Despite its new-agey western construction as the font of ahimsa, we are again reminded that Hindu tradition sanctifies caste and the perversion of untouchability. Hitchens astutely observes that these kinds of contradictions are to be expected when all that supposedly exists is cleaved with a Cartesian binary:

[This] was always latent in Gandhism: a highly dubious employment of the mind-body distinction. For him, the material and physical world was gross and polluting and selfish, while all that pertained to the “soul” was axiomatically ideal and altruistic….This false antithesis is the basis for all religious fundamentalism, even as its deliberate indifference permits and even encourages sharp deterioration in the world of “real” conditions.

The separation of mind from matter and body from soul is not merely a Western fallacy or Vedic fantasy. It is a widespread idea, found among most peoples across time and space. Whence cometh the soul?

This is a weighty question and The Simpsons have answers.

Using Homer’s Soul as their humorous foil, psychologists Paul Bloom and David Pizarro examine mind-body dualism and metaphysics:

[S]olving the mind-body problem remains a major preoccupation of both psychologists and philosophers; no science of the mind can be complete without it.

What does The Simpsons have to say about this issue? Most likely, absolutely nothing. The Simpsons is a fine television show, but it’s not where to look for innovative ideas in cognitive neuroscience or the philosophy of mind. We think, however, that it can help give us insight into a related, and extremely important, issue.

We might learn through this show something about common-sense metaphysics, about how people naturally think about consciousness, the brain and the soul.

As it turns out, The Simpsons illuminate these issues in all sorts of revealing ways. Homer’s Soul is the perfect teaching tool for a generation raised on the (dualist) philosophy of D’oh.

Over at Slate, Christopher Hitchens has written about the self annointed “bishop” Eddie Long and suggests an explanation: “[Bishop Long's skeptical friend] talks as if fevered denunciation of homosexuality has never before been an early warning of repressed desire.” Desire something, denounce it, and then indulge it.  Makes weird sense to me.

Another portion of Hitch’s piece caught my attention — the business of religion in America and its freedom from taxation:  “What concerns me isn’t even the laughable obviousness of his cupidity: the jewels and gold chains and limos and bodyguards. This is all a familiar part of the tawdry business of ‘Churchianity’ now finding loopholes for the rich and venal at a well-upholstered religious establishment somewhere near you.”

Here is to hoping that Hitchens is feeling as well as can be expected; we will miss him when he is gone and will need a new gadfly.

There is, probably first and certainly foremost, religious anti-Semitism. Unlike other nations or peoples, Jews were among the witnesses to the alleged lives and preachings of Jesus and Muhammad, and turned away from men they deemed false Messiahs. It is inconceivable that they will ever be quite forgiven for doing so.

There also is a continuation of the video interview, in which Hitchens makes some interesting observations regarding insular “organic societies” and how they are perturbed by the presence of alien and questioning Jews.

• American Christianity is not well, and there’s evidence to indicate that its condition is more critical than most realize — or at least want to admit.
• Culturally, America is still a Christian nation.

Vampire writer and gothicist Anne Rice may be many things, but bellwether of American Christianity she is not — this probably accounts for Lobdell’s confusion.

While it may be true that more Americans are distancing themselves from organized Christianity, the majority of Americans — 78.5% to be exact — claim affiliation with Christian denominations.  The statistic that has Lobdell concerned about Christianity in America is the growing number of people who say they are “Unaffiliated” (16% of Americans) with any particular faith or denomination.

What Lobdell seems to misunderstand is that the majority of these unaffiliated remain Christian; they simply do not identify with any particular Christian denomination or church.  This in fact is what Anne Rice said she was doing — leaving the Catholic Church but retaining her Christian faith in the gospels.  An astonishing 98% of Americans believe in God, and most of these believe in a Christian God.

This churched and unchurched Christianity, in turn, accounts for the widespread hostility to the construction of an Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero, and a more generalized hostility toward Islam.  In “Why Has Islam Become So Controversial in America,” Max Fisher puzzles over this hostility and surveys seven attempts to explain it.

While there is some truth to each of these explanations, none address the fundamental issue: most Americans are Christians and American Christianity has long been — and remains today — exclusivist and intolerant.

This is not simply my perception or sense of the situation after too many trips to Wal-Mart.  It is a fact confirmed by sociologist Stephen Merino in his recently published article — Religious Diversity in a “Christian Nation”: The Effects of Theological Exclusivity on the Acceptance of Religious Diversity.

Merino’s findings are hardly surprising:

• 66% of Americans believe it is “important” to be Christian in order to be “truly American”;
• 65% of Americans believe that the founders intended for America to be a “Christian nation”;
• 55% of Americans believe that the US Constitution actually establishes a “Christian nation”; and
• 80% of Americans believe that the nation was founded on “Christian principles.”

Of these Americans, a large majority also profess belief in the principle of “religious freedom.”  But the freedom they have in mind is the freedom to practice a Christian faith — they are quite intolerant and unwelcoming of “other faiths.”  As Merino suggests, “when many Americans think of religious diversity, the have only Christian diversity in mind.”

Among evangelical protestants (and especially those in the south), Merino found that special enmity is reserved for two groups: Muslims and atheists.  This fact may explain Christopher Hitchens’ surprising article defending the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero.  The atheist Hitchens may have concluded that the enemy (Islam) of his enemy (evangelicals) is a friend.

It is heart-wrenching because it appears that Hitchens’ cancer is inoperable (this is my guess) and he obviously is suffering from the chemo treatments.  Indeed, Hitchens stoically admits the cancer has spread to his lymph nodes and he “is dying.”

Aside from the obvious question about the believers who have announced they are praying for the arch-atheist (he doesn’t mind, so long as the prayers are for his recovery or comfort rather than suffering and death), he makes an interesting reference to David Hume, who while on his deathbed was visited by fellow Scot James Boswell, the famous diarist, confidante of Samuel Johnson, and compiler of the first English dictionary.

Boswell queried Hume on religion and the afterlife, thinking that the first famous atheist and scourge of religion might have changed his mind in light of his imminent demise.  No such thing occurred — here are some excerpts from Boswell’s diary account of his final meeting with the great philosopher:

[David Hume] was lean, ghastly, and quite of an earthy appearance. He was dressed in a suit of grey cloth with white metal buttons, and a kind of scratch wig. He was quite different from the plump figure which he used to present. He had before him Dr. Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric. He seemed to be placid and even cheerful. He said he was just approaching to his end. I think these were his words. I know not how I contrived to get the subject of immortality introduced. He said he never had entertained any belief in religion since he began to read Locke and Clarke.

I had a strong curiosity to be satisfied if he persisted in disbelieving a future state even when he had death before his eyes. I was persuaded from what he now said, and from his manner of saying it, that he did persist. I asked him if it was not possible that there might be a future state. He answered it was possible that a piece of coal put upon the fire would not burn; and he added that it was a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist for ever. That immorality, if it were at all, must be general; that a great proportion of the human race has hardly any intellectual qualities; that a great proportion dies in infancy before being possessed of reason.

I asked him if the thought of annihilation never gave him any uneasiness. He said not the least; no more than the thought that he had not been, as Lucretius observes. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘Mr Hume, I hope to triumph over you when I meet you in a future state; and remember you are not to pretend that you was joking with all this infidelity.’ ‘No, no,’ said he. ‘But I shall have been so long there before you come that it will be nothing new.’ In this style of good humour and levity did I conduct the conversation. Perhaps it was wrong on so awful a subject. But as nobody was present, I thought it could have no bad effect. I however felt a degree of horror, mixed with a sort of wild, strange, hurrying recollection of my excellent mother’s pious instructions, of Dr. Johnson’s noble lessons, and of my religious sentiments and affections during the course of my life. I was like a man in sudden danger eagerly seeking his defensive arms; and I could not but be assailed by momentary doubts while I had actually before me a man of such strong abilities and extensive inquiry dying in the persuasion of being annihilated. But I maintained my faith. I told him that I believed the Christian religion as I believed history. Said he: ‘You do not believe it as you believe the Revolution’.

He had once said to me, on a forenoon while the sun was shining bright, that he did not wish to be immortal. This was a most wonderful thought. The reason he gave was that he was very well in this state of being, and that the chances were very much against his being so well in another state; and he would rather not be more than be worse. I answered that it was reasonable to hope he would be better; that there would be a progressive improvement. I tried him at this interview with that topic, saying that a future state was surely a pleasing idea. He said no, for that it was always seen through a gloomy medium; there was always a Phlegethon or a hell.

As you can see from Hitchens’ interview, a bit of Hume lives in him and will die with him — their writings, however, will remain and keep us company.  This will be his immortality.  My thoughts are with Hitchens and I hope him the best.

Postscript — It appears that some people wrote The Atlantic and stated they were praying for Hitchens’ death.  Hardly surprising.  Jeffrey Goldberg, who conducted the interview, has an appropriate message for these people.  Congratulations to The Atlantic staff.

Regardless, Boaz astutely notes the connection between religious and political extremism, both of which are based in fear:

Both religious and political extremists operate from the same modus operandi: they find those issues around which people hold deep core beliefs — beliefs that, generally speaking, cannot be articulated nor defended through logic — and they exploit them. It’s a terribly simplistic strategy — tell people that “those people” are out to get them, that their own cause is righteous, and that without a militant — even violent — defense of one’s core beliefs, their livelihood and lives are threatened. Then the manipulators — ambitious political tacticians and unprincipled sycophants — stoke the flames of hysteria until they’ve engulfed rational thought entirely.

Boaz then attempts to correct three “misconceptions” that many Americans have regarding Islam:

• Misconception 1: Islam is a religion of violence.
• Misconception 2: Islam calls for the oppression of women.
• Misconception 3: Moderate Muslims enable radicals by tolerating their behavior.

While I appreciate Boaz’s efforts, it is complicated — and ultimately undone — by the fact that there is no single Islam.  Boaz and her compatriots in Boulder may interpret Islam in a particular way, but this particular interpretation cannot lay claim to truth or authenticity.  There are multiplicities of Islam and in certain strands of the Muslim faith, these “misconceptions” are truths.  I do not particularly enjoy pointing this out — primarily because it can be used by the ignorant for their generalizing and stereotyping — but it is a fact.

As Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have correctly noted, there are parts of the Koran and other Islamic texts that are quite explicit about violence and conquest.  There are other parts that are quite explicit about women and oppression.  What a person chooses to background and foreground is a complex matter of history, location, and exegesis.  All this aside, language is slippery and interpretation is messy.  Authorial intent and reader response are two different issues; the disconnect between them can often be immense.

Whenever and wherever you have religion grounded in books — all written by different authors at different times, and compiled over decades or even hundreds of years, you are going to have contradictions and ambiguities which leave ample room for different interpretations.  As Stanley Fish would say, some communities of readers will interpret the writings one way and other communities of readers will interpret them another way.  There are many thousands of communities that read Islamic texts; consequently, there are many thousands of interpretations of Islam.

Boaz’s preferred interpretation is therefore just one of many.  If Boaz were to live for a year in Saudi Arabia or spend a year teaching at a madrassa in rural Pakistan, her interpretation of “Islam” (which does not exist in the singular) would most likely undergo radical change.  But Boaz does not need to visit these places to understand that Islam has many heads; she merely needs to do some reading.  The Economist recently reviewed John Calvert’s new book, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism, and had this to say:

[Professor] Calvert does not disguise the crudely Manichean character of Qutb’s worldview. He believed in an all-out global struggle between a noble vanguard of true Muslims and the massed ranks of jahiliyya. He depicted Islam’s external enemies as an insidious alliance of “Crusaders and Jews”—the same phrase that is used by al-Qaeda and the global jihadists of today.

But he was not, as has been suggested, an “Islamo-fascist” or an advocate of indiscriminate violence. Qutb opposed the killing of innocents and would have been appalled by what his followers, from the Egyptian radicals of the 1970s and 1980s to the current jihadist groups, have carried out in his name. This rich and carefully researched biography sets Qutb for the first time in his Egyptian context, rescuing him from caricature without whitewashing his radicalism. It is no small achievement.

As should be apparent, once Qutb committed himself to writing — his famous manifesto is titled Milestones, his words got away from him.  Authors can never be sure how their words or ideas will be interpreted or used.

Agnosticism is not atheism or theism. It is radical skepticism, doubt in the possibility of certainty, opposition to the unwarranted certainties that atheism and theism offer.

This sounds to me more like philosophical skepticism; radical skepticism it is not — the latter often approaches nihilism.

Nor does Rosenbaum’s formulation sound quite like the original definition of agnosticism, which Thomas Henry Huxley provided in 1869 during the early evolution debates:

This principle may be stated in various ways but they all amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty.

The definition I prefer derives from a methodology:

All metaphysical claims should be evaluated using the full array of concepts provided by positivist inquiry, which include (but are not limited to) things or ideas such as facts, data, evidence, measurements, statistics, experience, logic, and reason.

Using this broad and open-minded methodology, I arrive at this definition of agnosticism:

There is little to no evidence supporting the idea that supernatural agents or forces exist, but this does not foreclose the possibility that such agents or forces exist.  Also, this does not foreclose the possibility there are things or forces that exist in the universe of which we are unaware or do not understand.

In terms of conceptual affinities, these various definitions usually align agnosticism more closely with atheism than with theism.  The primary difference is that agnostics do not proclaim that theists are delusional, infantile, credulous, ignorant, psychotic, or stupid.  This is where Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris go off the rails.

Supernatural and religious claims can be evaluated without deploying any of these derogatory and normative terms.

Roy begins by touting his credentials as a “real” scientist who produces “facts” rather than opinions:  “As a practicing scientist for 60 years known worldwide for my science, I produce data, hard facts (not my opinions) to make my contributions to science, industry, and posterity.”  If you don’t believe him, he proudly says, just try googling his name.

His authority thus established, he provides a singular definition of science that is crimped and cramped:  “First emblazon on your mind that science must have experimentally verifiable facts as its data.”  This is of course one way of doing science, but science is larger than experiment and result.  By Roy’s definition, Darwin was not doing science and neither is Richard Dawkins.  This definition has also been used to exclude paleontology from the lab and beaker realm of “real” science.

So who can speak for science, asks Roy?  He answers:

Surely not the likes of Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Sam Harris? Not one of whom qualifies as any kind of (hard) scientist. Stephen Weinberg or Stephen Hawkins, whom I respect enormously as brilliant experts in their fields, are distinguished enough in “science,” but astronomy and cosmology are not classical science.

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, and while much of his work is synthetic and interpretive, this does not exclude it from the realm of science.  Daniel Dennett does not claim to be a scientist, but is a philosopher who deals with science.  Christopher Hitchens is a cultural essayist and journalist, and has never claimed to be a scientist.  Although Sam Harris writes on social and theological matters, his scientific credentials are perfectly adequate (even if he is producing dubious imaging studies that purport to deal with religion).

Roy singles out Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris because they are vocal atheists and anti-religious.  But Roy doesn’t stop there — he makes the ridiculous claim that Stephen Weinberg and Stephen Hawkins are merely distinguished in “science” (note the denigrating quotes), and what they study (astronomy, cosmology, and physics) does not constitute “classical science.”

At this point, Roy is beginning to sound like a doddering and cranky fool.  Either do science my way or you are not a scientist.  Roy’s view of science is largely instrumental — if you can’t design a light bulb or synthesize a useful industrial compound, you really aren’t a scientist.

This is not simply my reading of Roy, he will brashly tell you himself:  “To represent science, let’s use the real, useful hard science from the last 200 years that the public at large accepts as good and valuable. Experiments on stuff you can touch and feel, “results you can measure and repeat a dozen times.” Where the experiments of friends and competitors confirm or deny your work. Mainly — yes, mainly — on something of value to society.”

Roy sounds like the perfect guy to be considering important scientific questions such as:  What is religion? Where does it come from?  What are its origins?  What causes it to change?  Although I doubt that the “public at large would consider answers to be good and useful,” this is not and should never be the guiding criterion for scientific investigation.   Moreover, I looked at Roy’s long list of publications and do not see a single one in which he has generated a precious, experimental, verifiable, repeatable “fact” that bears on any of these questions.

Roy concludes by noting there is some science, given his narrow definition, that bears on the interrogation of religion:

How come the “deniers” are never confronted by facts and investigated by a reporter who has carefully gathered information from senior scientific authorities (for example, Prof. Larry Dossey’s data on the huge percentage of doctors who pray with or for patients, and on their “belief” in miracles)? Why is the hard data for pure scientific and spiritual healing by the shamans of Hawaii by Jeanne Achterberg never mentioned? All are recorded on MRI scans. Or the three decades of research and data collected by Professors Ian Stephenson and Jim Turner at the University of Virginia on reincarnation here and now, worldwide? Remember, in science, one white crow destroys your theory of “all crows are black.”

Prayer has been studied, multiple times, and the results show no difference in outcomes.  Shamanic healing has been much studied, and its efficacy has been recorded.  I recently wrote about it in my post on Placebo Effects and Shamanic Healing.  These studies aside, there are many researchers — all of whom are scientists of one kind or another — engaged in the study of religion.  These include Jesse Bering, Pascal Boyer, Scott Atran, Ara Norenzayan, Justin Barrett, Richard Sosis, Harvey Whitehouse, Joseph Bulbulia, David Sloan Wilson, David Lewis-Williams, Michael Inzlicht, and others.  Roy probably has not read their work, or does not consider it valuable, because it is not “hard, classical science.”

These researchers do not design light bulbs or synthesize chemicals; instead, they ponder much deeper and more difficult questions regarding the brain-mind, and how it interacts with the social environment and larger culture.  They also work in an evolutionary context that is historical by definition.  This is harder science than lab work, which when boiled to its essentials is fairly simple.  Roy and others like him have never been forced to consider anything that happened in the past.  If it didn’t happen in the lab, it must not have happened.

As I noted in an earlier post, religion and science are not “at war.”  Science, conceived in a broad sense, is however investigating religion:

We should begin with the recognition that “science” — in the strict sense of performing experiments, gathering data, and testing hypotheses using statistics — is but one strand in the larger enterprise of what might loosely be called positivism.  Science, stricto sensu, can make only limited — but important — contributions to the search for truth.

It is the larger enterprise of positivism, which includes contributions from history, philosophy, sociology, economics, psychology, neurobiology, anthropology, etc. — that can and should investigate the supernatural-religious.  Simply erecting a wall around religion and declaring it off limits to rational inquiry does nothing to advance our understanding and forecloses the possibility of approaching something approximating truth.

If Roy wants to enter this debate, he needs to get over his lab-based view of science and faith in “facts.”  Because geochemistry has little or nothing to say about supernaturalism or religion (other than to disprove the creationist fantasy that the earth is 6,000 years old), Roy will need to do a great deal of reading to catch up with the current investigations into religion, which is not represented by Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens or Harris.  Facts, standing alone, say nothing and mean nothing.  Given that Roy only produces facts and not opinions about those facts, I am left wondering what, if anything, he has to say or contribute to the investigation.

As Nietzsche aptly put it, “There are no facts — only interpretations of facts.”

With the latter Hitchens in mind, I have not yet been able to bring myself to read his jeremiad, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.  I read a fair amount of history, so don’t need Hitchens twisting the knife or re-stating the obvious.  Secular preaching to the atheist choir is not my cup of tea.

Hitchens’ latest object of scorn is a much more delicious target:  Prince Charles, whom Hitchens hilariously calls the “prince of piffle.”  You can find Hitchens’ broadside over at Slate, and here are some choice excerpts:

So the speech made by Prince Charles at Oxford last week might bear a little scrutiny. Discussing one of his favorite topics, the “environment,” he announced that the main problem arose from a “deep, inner crisis of the soul” and that the “de-souling” of humanity probably went back as far as Galileo. In his view, materialism and consumerism represented an imbalance, “where mechanistic thinking is so predominant,” and which “goes back at least to Galileo’s assertion that there is nothing in nature but quantity and motion.” He described the scientific worldview as an affront to all the world’s “sacred traditions.” Then for the climax:

“As a result, Nature has been completely objectified—She has become an it—and we are persuaded to concentrate on the material aspect of reality that fits within Galileo’s scheme.”

We have known for a long time that Prince Charles’ empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant.  He fell for the fake anthropologist Laurens van der Post.

The last sentence caught my attention, so I hit the hyperlink to read about this anthropologist whose name I have never once encountered after years of studying anthropology.  Van der Post sold millions of books and apparently was a charlatan.  When the mystic mixes with the anthropologist, it is the kind of thing that attracts a certain kind of crowd:

Van der Post was a Jungian mystic and a spiritual adviser to Prince Charles; according to British newspapers, he taught the prince to talk to his plants. In 1982 Charles made him godfather to his heir, Prince William. Van der Post was also a close friend of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, exerting an influence on her policy in South Africa.

He had a following in the United States as well. For several years, he gave the Advent sermon at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. The year he died, he attended a celebration of his work in Boulder, Colo., and 4,000 people came.

Four thousand credulous and worshipful souls in Boulder!  Unsurprising.  There is an ethereal, uncritical vibe in Boulder and the palpable feeling, easily discovered in any coffee shop or marijuana dispensary, that everything is alive and vaguely connected as universal soul.  I have nothing against such harmless harmony, but Hitchens sternly warns against the consequences of such peaceful and complacent love-think:

[As Prince Charles] paged his way through his dreary wad of babble, there must have been some wolfish smiles among his Muslim audience. I quote from a recent document published by the Islamic Forum of Europe, a group dedicated to the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate and the imposition of sharia, which has been very active in London mosques and in the infiltration of local political parties. “The primary work” in the establishment of a future Muslim empire, it announces, “is in Europe, because it is this continent, despite all the furore about its achievements, which has a moral and spiritual vacuum.”

So this is where all the vapid talk about the “soul” of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The “vacuum” will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now.

It is a long way from vapid talk of the soul to the establishment of a radical Islamic world empire, and one can reasonably disagree.  But the image Hitchens conjures with this line – credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran — is one for the ages.