Greater Than You Think, no so great?

Recently, following a rather longer than intended post on the demonising of Atheists by parts of mainstream UK theism, I received an unsolicited email from a web publicist from the Hachette Book Group.

Sadly, they weren’t offering to promote my blog. Perhaps sadder still was what they did have on offer. Perhaps. I really can’t decide as of yet.

“I’d like to offer you the opportunity to review Greater Than You Think for free or host a giveaway on your site.”

(Anonymous Web Publicist, 2008 )

I can gather a few things about this “offer”. First, the web publicist is working by volume rather than engaging with existing online discussion. That’s okay, she’s a paid web publicist after all and at least she’s not clogging up my comments threads with off-topic discussion.

Clearly she doesn’t expect everyone she contacts to have much of an audience, rather if she pings enough then a few bloggers with sizable audiences will respond. Well, my audience probably isn’t that large so I’d be wasting her time.

I rather strongly suspect that she may not read all of the blog entries nor visit the actual blogs, but rather skim over the extracts of blog entries in an RSS aggregator set to read blogs by category. Or something like this. I can understand that if one read only the first opening paragraphs of the last post I made, they may think that I am sympathetic to the theist response to the supposed threat of “new atheism”, which I am not.

I also gather that said publicist has a job on their hands with this book. A provided link to what is supposed to be an author biography page at the Hachette Book Group website leads to a blank page. Indeed, the author, a Father Thomas Williams, is hard to find information on. - Note the update below regarding this section.

There is just the Author blurb to go by (which is reproduced and mildly re-worded elsewhere as another biography).

“Thomas D. Williams, LC, ThD, is Vatican Analyst for CBS News and a professor of theology at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University in Rome. He has also worked extensively for NBC News and Britain’s Sky News, covering church and ethical issues, including the final illness and death of Pope John Paul II, the 2005 papal conclave, and the election of Pope Benedict XVI. Father Williams also regularly appeared in the MSNBC series The Ethical Edge and is author of several books and dozens of articles, both scholarly and popular.”

(Hachette Book Group USA, 2008 )

The Regina Apostolorum I am somewhat familiar with. It’s a University that teaches bio-ethics courses from I guess you could apologetically call a “pro-life perspective”. Epistemologically, the philosophy of the Regina Apostolorum is influenced by the extremely authoritarian and even cult-like Legion of Christ; a Catholic congregation wherein vows of obedience forbid the criticism of their superiors or their actions and mandates the reporting of members who do.

“The approach is reinforced from the start by requiring Legion priests, who pledge total fidelity to the pope, to take a vow in addition to the traditional vows of poverty, chastity and obedience taken by other religious orders. Legion priests, in their fourth vow, swear never to speak ill of the Legion, its Rome-based founder Maciel, now 80, or of their superiors. They also promise to inform on anyone who does.

“You are not supposed to question authorities or systems. It is a methodology that is cult-like,” said Paul Lennon, who was a Legionary priest for 23 years.

Archbishop John F. Donoghue has challenged that assessment. “Any suggestion that the Legionaries of Christ are a ‘cult’ is to be disregarded as irresponsible and false,” he wrote.”

(National Catholic Reporter, 2000)

Methinks the Archbishop doesn’t know what a cult is, for if he did he’d probably invite scrutiny and constructive criticism rather than tell people what to think (i.e. not act like a cult in response to allegations of being cult-like)! Fortunately, not having taken the fourth vow, I’m at liberty to criticise Archbishop Donoghue.

The superiors put forward certain a priori principles, an act that can not be criticised by those lower in the congregation. In the case of the “pro-life”, conclusions are subsequently pre-determined (via a priorism) and describing the study thereof as “ethics”, oxymoronic. Ethics is a form of intellectual exploration, not a dogma of pre-determined conclusions.

Universities and their academics shouldn’t institutionalise confirmation biases. That’s what News Ltd. is for.

Seeking out and recruiting friendly, uncritical minds is what the Legion of Christ is all about though, and I suspect that somewhere at Hachette in the Faith Words division, there is a legionnaire-friendly or two doing the very same through their job.

“Sometimes publishers find themselves on both sides of the debate. Hachette published Hitchens’s God Is Not Great through its Twelve imprint, which led FaithWords, another Hachette house, to want to respond. Publisher Rolf Zettersten looked to Catholic priest Thomas Williams for Greater Than You Think: A Theologian Answers the Atheists About God (June), which provides brief two-and three-page answers to a series of questions. Says editor Holly Halverson, “We wanted more of a handbook that wouldn’t scare people off.”“

(Publishers Weekly, 2008 )

Rolf Zettersten is a former vice-president of Focus on the Family (another authoritarian organisation with cult-like practices), the very same organisation that amongst pushing a “pro-life” line and other socially conservative, sectarian political goals, launched the multiply fraudulent Love Won Out ministry. Holly Halverson, if she is who I think she is, is the co-author of a few children’s books with religious overtones from the 1990s.

I’m not fond of getting overly personal so I won’t delve further into their biographies, but suffice to say, we have the makings of a text from a perspective incapable of applying critical reasoning to its own assumptions. A perspective that employs a priorism and gainsay.

This is the kind of mentality that gives rise to closed societies, and silly arguments like “you need to embrace God before you can know the truth of His existence” (I paraphrase each time that this circular argument has been put to me or another).

Now they’ve contacted me, presumably because I’m not the greatest fan of Christopher Hitchens. I wonder if it was this line that did it…

“The closest think I can really think of to a nasty atheist leader (who’s leadership stems from their atheism rather than them being a leader who happens to be an atheist – a few dictatorships have the latter) would be Christopher Hitchens.”

Note that I said closest. Hitchens’ “leadership” of atheists stems from his atheism, rather than his atheism being coincidental to his leadership (e.g. such as with Stalin – which excludes Stalin from the status of “atheist leader” and Mao for that matter). But he’s not that much of a leader; at most he is authoritative rather than an authority figure and even then his status as authoritative atheist is quite contestable, even by the average atheist of the street.

I’m also more inclined to put Hitchens’ foibles (which I do think are sometimes bigoted) down to ignorance and wrong-headedness, rather than the known repetition of falsehoods. I do think he has short-comings but not as bad as the worst that the “new-atheist-phobes” have put on the table. As for his general unpleasantness towards fools, well I can forgive that.

There is worse “spiritual leadership” to be found in theism as a product of theism than Hitchens’ bile.

I’m hardly going to be favorable to a “flea” riding on Hitchens’ God is Not Great even if I’m not willing to give God is Not Great an easy run. At the very least I’m not going to suspend my criticism the way a good legionnaire would, nor would I toe the Focus on the Family line. My critical mindedness doesn’t have much in the way of an off switch (which does have its downsides incidentally).

Now I’m not sure that I even want to give my address to these people, or if the offer is valid outside the US or even if I have the time or inclination to read the book. Still, I can’t dismiss it out of hand even with its perhaps dubious intellectual pedigree and my prior observations of the vacuous and often academically fraudulent response to the “new atheism”. I’m always on the lookout for black swans so to speak.

Is this book going to be any different to the not-so-great dross I’ve already read on the subject? Is this book not so great that it needs the attention of small-time bloggers like myself?

Should I take up the offer?

~ Bruce

Update (8th June): My suspicions (not assertions I’d like to point out) about the means by which this blog was approached may not be so well founded. Since this blog entry was first posted, it has become apparent that said anonymous web publicist appears to be aware of the content of my blog and didn’t use the suspected RSS aggregation method (or the like) for identifying potential participants. Likewise, the Hachette Book group website hasn’t updated with full author details and the like as it’s currently undergoing a revamp.

Given the recent spamming of my and other local progressive Atheist bloggers in-boxes with various theological arguments (Iftikhar Ahmad, I’m looking at you in particular at the moment), the offer from Hatchette is somewhat of a Popperian black swan so to speak. Which is a good thing in case I’m being too obscure with the black swan reference.

These facts make the marketing of this book a somewhat more interesting than I had previously thought. Although, I’m still somewhat perplexed about why I’m being approached (and I’ve had further explanation).