Bluster masquerading as reason

A sexual abuse scandal in Germany has become an excuse for anti-Catholic bigots to vent their hatred

Rex Murphy

National Post

Saturday, March 20, 2010

If we are to have an adjudication on the Pontiff's complicity or innocence in the matter of cover-ups or evasion by the Catholic Church in the sexual-abuse scandals that have rocked it, I'm not sure I'd go to Christopher Hitchens to get it. On this matter, he is, in a manner of speaking, an interested party. The man who "did in" Mother Teresa has made anti-religious rage a great theme of his career. This week's Hitchens column -- headlined "The Great Catholic Cover-Up" in Thursday's edition of the National Post-- is a case in point.

The author of "God is Not Great" is one of the most militant, abrasive secularists of our time, perhaps only second in renown to the increasingly tedious and tendentious Richard Dawkins. Militant secularism is a peculiar phenomenon. It prides itself above all on reason, but reason in a very shrunken capacity--a kind of blustering, blistering, angry half-logic that perpetually targets the anachronistic straw-man conception of God as a big, bearded White Guy in the sky.

Continue reading