Lacking Good Manners

Lack of good manners
Olavo de Carvalho
Cheaters’ “debate” technique has been simplified a lot lately.

They do not appeal to the refinement of old sophists or to that
false rhetoric that Aristotle called eristic. In order to save time, or
out of laziness and incapacity to study those things, they move
the dispute from the terrain of logic to that of psychological
manipulation, seeking not to persuade or even to confuse, but
simply to scare and subjugate.
The method which they use for this purpose is simple.

Feigning great innocence, they throw out shocking or insulting
statements in a misleadingly sophisticated language. Then they
immediately impose on their adversary politeness rules that
exclude all the possibility of an equivalent complaint or retort, so
that the unhappy creature has no choice but give in to the trick,
trying to move shyly in a terrain that has been already
demarcated to humiliate him.
The polemicists who have been most successful in

employing this technique are the Four Jackasses of Apocalypse –
Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris e Daniel
Dennett – whose extremely modest objective is to wipe out
religion from the face of the Earth, imposing in its place the cult
of “reason “ and “science”.
They do not hate all religions equally. Their bête noire is
Christianity, and especially Catholicism, in which they declaredly
see the greatest enemy of mankind. For reasons we shall soon
point out, they prefer to try to destroy it by a generalized attack
against “religion”, in the rather reasonable hope that the
suppression of the genus will bring along the annihilation of the
species.
It happens, though, that “religion”, such as they employ this

word, is not a historically identifiable entity. It is not even a
concept. It is a fetish-word, a verbal scarecrow whose array of
meanings includes indistinctly: Christianity, gnosis, the statist cult
of the Caesars, witchcraft, shamanism, astrology, alchemy and
esotericism in general, all possible and imaginable indigenous
religions, Mormonism, ufology, spiritism and I don’t know how
many more things, conferring to all these a fictitious unity based
in the mere use of a common term.
Soon thereafter, they attribute to the amorphous entity

designated as such the unity of a conscious subject, capable of
decisions and actions, and therefore of moral responsibility, and
then proceed to judge the strange creature. Its conviction in such
circumstances is inevitable. With so many different,
heterogeneous, and mutually incompatible historic incarnations,
“religion” can hardly escape any accusation brought against it.
Omnipresent and indefinite, the imaginary monster takes the
blame for all evils that afflict the poor human species. And as a
general set encompasses all its particular instances, each one of
existing “religions” automatically comes to bear not only its guilt,
but the guilt of the whole set, and therefore the guilt of each of
the others in particular.
The ease, the boldness, and the frequency with which the
four idols of atheistic militancy appeal to the transfer of
culpability would already be enough to catalogue them among the
greatest intellectual swindlers of all time. To give but one
example among innumerable others: in one of his latest polemic
charges, Christopher Hitchens, recalling that German soldiers in
WWII had in their belt buckles the inscription “Got mit uns” (“God
is with us”), concluded from it that Nazism was a Christian,
Catholic regime, and therefore the Church of Rome was to blame
for the war, the Holocaust, etc. The missing detail is the
following: Hitler was not an atheist, but obviously not a Catholic
either. He was a Gnostic, firmly committed to remodeling the
Gospel and realizing the earthly Final Judgment without waiting
for the heavenly one. For this purpose it was necessary, he said,
“to smash the Catholic Church as one steps on a frog”.
Gnosticism is the oldest and fiercest enemy of the Church, which
condemns it as the root of all heresies. But for Christopher
Hitchens and his applauding audience it doesn’t make the least
difference. Catholicism is “religion”, Gnosticism is “religion”: their
faults are therefore shared. But isn’t Gnosticism a pseudo-
religion? It makes no difference: pseudo-religion is religion.
The most constant and effective application of this dirty trick

has consisted in alleging the deeds of Islamic terrorists as
evidence of the danger posed by… Christianity!
What about atheism? Isn’t it to blame for anything? The

most blatant fact of modern history is that the atheistic ideology
of communism has killed more people, in a few decades, than all
religious wars had killed since the beginning of the world (double-
check it at Professor R. J. Rummel’s website:
www.hawaii.edu/powerkills). From a rational point of view, there
should not be the least margin left to discuss which is worse,
atheism or religions – even all of them put together. How do the
Four Jackasses do on this one? They call communism “religion”
and the problem is solved. “Religions”, especially Catholicism,
come to be blamed for all the crimes of the governments who, in
the name of scientific atheism, killed most religious believers.
To be an atheist, the Four say, consists only in the refusal to

believe in God – in any God – and not in proposing any concrete
objectives or values. Thus conceived, atheism is only an intimate
attitude with no identifiable historic incarnation and therefore
cannot, by definition, be accused of anything.
The fact that in practice this atheism is not only a refusal to
believe, but brings with it the apology of “reason” and “science”,
cannot make it responsible for the crimes of scientific ideologies,
Marxism and Nazism, because, so the Four say, they were not
based in science, but in pseudo-science. I will not dare to ask
how legitimate it is to reintroduce the notion of “pseudo” –
forbidden to those who defend religion – as a valid distinctive
criterion. Neither will I will ask what right do they have to resort
to the distinction between science and pseudoscience as if it were
something obvious, primary and automatic, when it seems to
have completely eluded a whole constellation of eminent Marxist
scientists. What seems to me most beautiful in this move is the
devout appeal to the notion of “purity”, denied to the defenders
of religion. According to the Four, the fact that Marx or Darwin
openly defended the systematic elimination of “inferior peoples”
does not make their atheism guilty of anything, because one as
the other, in proposing this murderous idea, did not do it with a
coherent devotion to rational and scientific atheism, but for a
passing religious temptation…
Reduced to a pure idea or, more appropriately, to the

personal version that this idea assumes in the mind of the Four
Jackasses, atheism is so innocent, as blameless as a geometric
figure in the heaven of platonic forms. This is the debate that the
Four propose, just as communists propose the confrontation
between the innocence of their ideal society and the evils and
sins of the existing society, or as Seyyed Hossein Nasr, in Ideals
and Realities of Islam, compares the beauty of his ideal Islam to
the ugliness of Western societies as they are historically known.
The most fundamental requirement of honest confrontation – to
compare ideals to ideals, realities to realities – is thereby
eliminated a priori, and the poor adversary of the Four is left with
the inglorious task of defending, in vain, the real against the
ideal.
With the help of their publishers and billionaire marketeers,

this has been the “proposal for debate” offered by the Four to
whoever is naïve enough to fall into their trap. The more strict
the requirement for academic politeness in these confrontations,
the less viable it becomes to denounce the essential hoax that
generated and modeled the proposal. Yet, once the hoax is
uncovered, all the apparent intellectual respectability of Hitchens
and his partners falls apart, along with the basic lie that they play
this dirty game with high and most noble intentions. It is not
healthy to discuss politely with swindlers just because to
denounce their hoax is forbidden, in limine, as a terrible lack of
good manners.

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Lack of good manners

Cheaters’ “debate” technique has been simplified a lot lately.

The method which they use for this purpose is simple.

The polemicists who have been most successful in

It happens, though, that “religion”, such as they employ this

Soon thereafter, they attribute to the amorphous entity

The most constant and effective application of this dirty trick

What about atheism? Isn’t it to blame for anything? The

To be an atheist, the Four say, consists only in the refusal to

Reduced to a pure idea or, more appropriately, to the

With the help of their publishers and billionaire marketeers,

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