Another word game from Hitch-22

Indeed, that index entry on  p. 435 of Christopher Hitchens's memoir ("word games, ... 264-266") was good for another web log. It's from the chapter titled "Salman."

At all events there came a time when someone arrived late at a dinner party, complaining of having been stuck at an airport with nothing to read but a Robert Ludlum-style novel. This didn't seem worth pursuing until the complaint was refined somewhat: "I mean it's not just that the prose is so bloody awful but that the titles are so sodding pretentious...The Bourne Inheritance, The Eiger Sanctioni; all this portentous piffle." Again, not a subject to set the table afire, until someone idly said they wondered what a Shakespeare play would be called it if were Ludlum who had the naming of it. At once Salman was engaged and began to smile. "All right, Salman: Hamlet by Ludlum!" At once—and I mean with as much preparation as I have given you—"The Elsinore Vacillation." Fluke? Not exactly. Challenged to do the same for Macbeth, he produced "The Dunsinane Reforestation" with hardly a flourish and barely a beat. After this it was plain sailing through "The Kerchief Implication," "The Rialto Sanction," and one about Caliban and Prospero that I once knew but now can never remember. [pp. 265-266]

    This chapter follows the one in which 9/11 figures prominently. And, in his chapter on Salman, there's much more to talk about in the way of theocratic religion. Hitchens, who I trust I've already demonstrated seems to have been on hand for everything politically major during his seniority, was dining with Edward Said one evening "in late 1987 or early 1988" when

a courier came bustling up from the Andrew Wylie Agency in Midtown. He bore a large box, which contained the manuscript of a forthcoming novel by Salmon Rushdie.... [p. 267]

    The note that came along with the manuscript asked Said for his view on what would be published as The Satanic Verses, for Rushdie thought that it might upset some of the faithful. My readers don't need to be reminded that the book's publication provoked Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwah sentencing Rushdie to death for blaspheming the Prophet Muhammad and his wives.
    My readers should be able to predict what Hitchens said to the Washington Post when they telephoned for his opinion about the fatwah.

I felt at once that there was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian member of another country, for the offence of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment of the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved... [ellipsis Hitchens's; p. 268]

I've been trying to think of a good example of the title word game. What The Satanic Verses would be called it if were Ann Coulter¹ who had the naming of it: "Blasphemy: Liberal Lies about the Religious Right"?
    Well, it's an example anyway.
_______________

1. Titles of her books:
   • High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton
   • Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right
   • Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism
   • How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter
   • Godless: The Church of Liberalism
   • If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans
   • Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America
   • Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America

Which is the best god book?

A recent interchange with my friend Ed started me thinking about divergent ways in which people regard truth. He and I were discussing the opposition between scientific knowing and religious faith, and he said:

You know, it's not that I disagree with you, or agree with you...it's that I don't believe anyone, you, me, or the Pope knows the truth of truths. Facts are used to make people believe in a point of view. However, if someone does not believe those facts; then your truth is not theirs. That doesn't mean it's not true, it only means it's true to the ones who believe those facts.

This seemed to me to express an extreme form of relativism, and the following classification occurred to me:

Religious Absolutism ("Only I have the truth")
Extreme Relativism ("Everyone has his own truth")
Scientific Knowing ("He who has objective evidence is more likely to be near the truth")

Note that Extreme Relativism seems to deny that anyone can actually know objective truth. Ed states that "facts are used to make people believe in a point of view," as though "facts" can just be made up to win an argument. (Of course, more than a few have!) Ed seems to deny that there's any objective basis for deciding what is or isn't a fact.
    Happily, I've been musing on something that provides a ready-made illustration of the classifications. The concept of the best god book occurred to me after my friend Kelley asked me what my ideal job would be, and I jokingly answered that it might be replacing copies of the Bible and the Qur'an with copies of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion. (Kelley quipped—equally facetiously, she assured me—that her ideal job might be replacing The God Delusion with the Bible or the Qur'an! "Or the Qur'an"; no religious absolutist is Kelley.)

Three books, three picks

The Religious Absolutist believes as a matter of faith that his religion alone is the repository of the truth. For the Christian, of course, it's the Bible; for the Muslim it's the Qur'an. And never the twain shall meet. As my Evangelical Christian friend Ina warned me a couple of years ago, when I told her I was trying to read the Qur'an, "The Qur'an is not the Word of God!"
    And many obedient Muslims (and what is a Muslim if not obedient?) no doubt lump the authors of The End of Faith, God Is Not Great, and The God Delusion in with Salman Rushdie, a call for whose execution was officially decreed by fatwā by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1988.
    Of course, Christians and Muslims adopted their religious affiliations from their parents. If they had been born to each others' parents, the Christians would be swearing by the Qur'an, and the Muslims by the Bible. That their religious faith appears to be a matter of faith more in whatever their parents believed than in god does not pass unnoticed.
    For many years, by the way, I felt that no particular religious view could be trusted (not even my own) because, as God said unto Moses, "I am that I am"; He didn't specify (to Moses on that occasion) what "that" was. Of course, the [rather horrifying] nature of the Old Testament god is abundantly clear from other Biblical passages, as Thomas Paine, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins, to name a few, have pointed out. It seems obvious to me now that my focusing on the "I am that I am" passage and ignoring all the rest was an unconscious effort on my part to try to preserve a version of my mother's belief in god.

The Extreme Relativist says that the three books are equally true. The Bible is true for Christians, the Qur'an is true for Muslims, and The God Delusion (and the other atheist books mentioned above) are true for people who don't believe in god. "True" here seems to be even more subjective than it is for the absolutists, who at least believe that there's a standard for their truth, namely "God" or "Allah." (Nevermind that they're supposed to be the same god. Muslims at least have the grace to allow that Jesus, too, was a prophet of god.)
    In "picking all," the Extreme Relativist essentially picks none. Earlier in our exchange, Ed had said:

I was referring to your belief in science as the truth [rather, as the way to get at the truth], while church-goers believe just as strongly that the Bible is [reveals] the truth. It was people of science who first said the earth was flat, and it was people of science who said it was round. What science proves today can be disproved by science tomorrow.

There doesn't seem to be much to distinguish Extreme Relativism from Radical Skepticism.

The Scientific Knower (at least not one who holds that Science and Religion have their own, non-overlapping "magisterial domains," but who believes that they coexist in the same domain) much prefers a book like The God Delusion, which by means of objective evidence and cogent argument establishes the extreme improbability of god's existence.
    While the Religious Absolutist's opinion is based on blind faith that his own, parochial book reveals the truth, the Scientific opinion is based on objective fact. If the Scientific Knower's parents influenced him, they most likely encouraged him to think for himself.
    Dawkins is my man.