The following is from a review of Goan Dinesh D'Souza with "The Dartmouth
Review" (TDR). The web-link to the interview was recently provided by Goanet
news. I thought some abstracts from that interview may be of interest to
Goanetters. Looking at this renowned author, would suggest we-goanetters tend
to look at issues, at best in a superficial way and at worst by demagoging the
facts. The only way a topic / thread stays alive and of interst on Goanet is
if it becomes controversial - not intellectual.
Regards, GL
TDR: What do you believe the proper role of religion in a liberal arts
education ought to be?
D'Souza: I think this assumption in society that somehow religion should be
left out of democratic debate is a ludicrous one. It's based on a wrong view of
history that somehow sees religion as inherently dangerous. Now, the reason for
this myth is that we've been subjected, in the last hundred years or so, to a
form of atheist propaganda, mainly the idea that history shows that religion
has been a toxic and dangerous force in Western if not world history. The
record doesn't actually bear this out. The greatest crimes of religion are
minute compared to the crimes of atheist regimes which are, in fact, far more
blood-thirsty and have perpetrated offenses that are far more recent and that
still are going on.
The greatest offense of religion and the Christian religion would be something
like the Inquisition. That's what comes to mind when you think of the crimes of
religion. And yet, if you look at the historical scholarship on the
Inquisition-I'm thinking here of Henry Kamen's study of the Spanish
Inquisition, which was the worst-over about 350 years the Spanish Inquisition
killed about 2,000-3,000 people. That would factor to about 6-10 people per
year, which is hardly a world historical crime. You have these atheists crying
crocodile tears about theses crimes of religion that have occurred three
hundred, five hundred, sometimes in the case of the Crusades a thousand years
ago. Yet these people ignore the crimes of atheism perpetrated in the 20th
century, and I'd say in some cases still continuing. People say that we have to
avoid the perils of religious theocracy or religious persecution, but there's
been nothing like that in American history.
So we are tilting here against imaginary demons. All of this is a way of saying
that I think there's an unnatural fear of religion that I think has been
implanted in the American psyche. All of this is behind the idea that not only
should the government not install an official religion, which I think is not
only a sensible idea but a Christian idea, but more than that the idea that if
we engage with religion it becomes the prelude to theocracy.
The bottom line of it is, I think God and religion should be a vein of open,
uninhibited inquiry. There's no reason that this topic should be kept off
limits. I would like to see in American intellectual life a revival of the kind
of the theological debates that were once commonplace in American universities,
and even in American public intellectual life.
TDR: Whom are you reading these days?
D'Souza: Today, my interests are as much theological as they are political. I'm
reading a philosopher, Charles Taylor, and would recommend in particular his
book Sources of the Self. I'm also reading the Great Atheists. I see the New
Atheists, people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris as
Lilliputian front men for the Great Atheists of a hundred years ago. I'm
thinking of figures such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, to some degree
Marx, Bertrand Russell, and even Jean-Paul Sartre. Ultimately, I think as
Christians there's a need to confront those atheists and the arguments that
they make.
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