As many Jews and others know, tonight is the first night of Hanukkah. Presents will be unwrapped by the (low) millions and candles will be a blazin. So how fitting it is for atheist extraordinaire Christopher Hitchens to come out with an article bashing Hanukkah today.
Hitchens uses ancient history to blast the celebration and that the First Amendment would be a winner if menorahs were not hoisted in public areas. What a bunch of holy shit. If he really believed in the First Amendment, he would be happy to let everyone celebrate any holiday they chose, even if it was bowing to a pile of manure. Of course, as Daniel Radosh points out, Hitchens is more a fundamentalist atheist than someone that believes in freedom of...or from religion.
From The Huffington Post:
Rather what I mean is that Hitchens' ideas about the religious faiths he rejects are based entirely on fundamentalist interpretations of those faiths. For him there is only one true form of any religion -- the one handed down by God as transmitted by ancient religious authorities. Any variation on that is a false or deluded form of religion worthy only of dismisal. That's just what the fundamentalists say.
So when it comes to Hanukkah, Hitchens tells the true and rarely heard, during this season, story of the Maccabean revolt and concludes that, "The display of the menorah... has a precise meaning and is an explicit celebration of the original victory of bloody-minded faith over enlightenment and reason." [emphasis mine] He outright rejects liberal rabbi Michael Lerner's reinterpretation of the holiday.
But here's where Hitchens' own powers of reasoning fail him. Hanukkah has never had a single precise meaning. No religious holiday -- hell, no religion -- ever has. As an atheist, Hitchens must affirm that religion is a human construct that evolves according to human needs. To traditionalists who say, "but that's not what God meant," the response is simple: God doesn't make the rules. Hanukkah provides an ideal demonstration of this phenomenon. It began not as Hitchens claims, with the Maccabees, but earlier, as a winter solstace celebration, Nayrot, that was probably little different from the celebrations of the surrounding cultures of the era. Later, this merged with the celebration of the Maccabees' victory and became Hanukkah. Six hundreds years after that, as Jewish society had become more theistic and introspective and less militaristic, the supposed supernatural intervention of Yahweh became the most important thing about the holiday-- as seen in the newly evolved story of the miracle of the lamps. In the 19th century, Zionists adapted Hanukkah to their nationalistic idea of Judaism. In 20th century America, Hanukkah became, for all intents and purposes, the Jewish Christmas -- or more precisely, the secular Jewish alternative to a secular Christmas. In some ways it came full circle -- a winter solstace celebration once more -- but the millennia of history now attached to it made it all the more rich and more meaningful.
There is much more to Radosh's post and I suggest you read it, but these three paragraphs point out just how evangelical Hitchens is in his atheism. Hitchens is too narrow minded to look at a comprehensive history, of how the three large monotheistic religions used old zodiac customs to shape their own holidays and symbols. Hitchens is too obsessed on tearing down people's faith using strict interpretation of biblical and other religious documents. If he could open his mind perhaps he could see that people observe and celebrate in many different ways than what was contrived by elders thousands of years ago.
