What Does Atheist Christopher Hitchens Have in Common With Your Average Ill-Educated, Bible-Thumping, Backwoods Protestant Fundamentalist?

Good, old-fashioned anti-Catholic bigotry, that's what.

See here:

.... The presence of this superb text in everyday idiom is not a coincidence, and nor is its implied association with irony and violence -- two of the resources of the oppressed. For many centuries, it was exceedingly dangerous to try to translate the Good Book into a language that the people could understand. Like the secret work of Emmanuel Goldstein in ''Nineteen Eighty-Four,'' the Bible was the possession of an inner-party elite, and its arcana were part of the stage management of priestcraft. The Protestant Reformation, assisted by the spread of printing, built on the banned 14th-century English manuscript translation by John Wycliffe, and made steady efforts to disseminate the Word in intelligible form. Miles Coverdale and William Tyndale (such Hawthorne-like names) were the 16th-century pioneers: Tyndale was strangled and burned by the clerical authorities for his pains in 1536 (he had been especially hounded by ''Saint'' Thomas More, that persecutor for all seasons), and his friend and deputy John Rogers was sent to the stake by Queen Mary. But successor editions were produced by English Calvinists in Geneva and -- perhaps so as not to be outdone -- by English Catholics in Reims and Douai. (The Geneva one was the version borne by the Pilgrims to Plymouth Rock.) ....

The emphasized text is simply a lie. Not true. Never was. A plain & simple lie. Just one of the innumerable anti-Catholic slanders that Catholics have had to put up with from Protestant polemicists for nearly five centuries. (See, for instance, Versions of the Bible: English Versions.)

I'm sure the irony has escaped Hitchens' notice. A couple of years ago, I wrote something about this peculiar similarity between atheists and fundamentalists:

.... Among them, any lie is to be believed: any lie — no matter how outrageous, no matter how mundane, no matter how clever, no matter how stupid — any lie is to be believed, and excused, as long as it is told about the Catholic Church....

(I forget whom to thank.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 05/20/03 11:37:37 AM
Categorized as Most Notable & Religious.