Q & amp; A | Os Guinness Taking on the critics of monotheism

Western science comes out of the matrix of monotheism, the author says.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DALLAS -- Could monotheism be the root of all evil? Since Sept. 11, the idea seems to have gained some momentum. Los Angeles Times critic Jonathan Kirsch argues that monotheism has a "dark side" that can justify killing in the name of God. Gore Vidal has called monotheism "the great evil." Christopher Hitchens called Judaism, Christianity and Islam "the real axis of evil."
Author Os Guinness has been taking on the critics of monotheism. He spoke recently with the Dallas Morning News. Here are excerpts:
Q. To paraphrase some of its critics, monotheism by definition creates intolerance, rationalized by the idea that "My God is the one and only true god," with the events of Sept. 11 being the most recent in a long list of examples. Your response?
A. I think what's happened, you've got multiculturalism with its relativity, you've got postmodernism with its rejection of grand narratives, and you've got these two movements coinciding with 9/11, which was done ... in the name of Islamism. So it's all come together and given the idea that those who believe in one, true god are necessarily intolerant and evil.
I would say two things. On the one hand, in the last century, more people were killed by secularist regimes, under secularist intellectuals, in the name of secularist ideologies, than in all the religious persecutions and repressions in Western history combined.
Monotheism is the most innovative and influential belief in human history. Without monotheism, there would have been none of the great decisive Western ideas and institutions -- supremely, Western science, which comes out of a matrix of monotheism.
Rodney Stark has written a book, "For the Glory of God," which has a chapter on science and its rise that is absolutely stunning. And it's totally contradictory to Mr. Vidal and Mr. Kirsch.
Q. If I understand the historical basis of what they are saying, it's that before monotheism, pagans embraced all beliefs without being judgmental. Or more crudely stated, there wasn't the same kind of persecution when the polytheists were in charge.
A. Well, that's a terrible distortion of history. Take the history of the Aztecs and the pyramids of sacrifice and the priests disemboweling sacrificial victims by the thousands.
And if you look at our world today, take human rights. Human rights came from the fact of people are made in the image of God; the whole tradition of reforms in the West came from that. And you've got what the pope calls a culture of death sweeping in. Euthanasia and the acceptance of abortion are the direct fruit of rejecting God and replacing God with the "pitiless indifference of natural selection," to quote Richard Dawkins. And the fact is, modern secular liberals have no basis for human rights, because they're rejecting the views that undergird it.
Q. But we do know that evil has been done in the name of God and in the name of Jesus.
A. People say, the Christian faith -- Inquisition, Crusades. They were done by Christians, and they were profoundly evil. But let's keep them in proportion. Maybe 10,000 were killed in the Crusades overall. But 100 million were killed under atheistic millenarianism, which is what communism was.
Then you look at the positive side of the Christian faith -- the Western artistic imagination, or our Western culture of giving and caring and charitable philanthropy, or our Western culture of reforms from the elimination of infanticide to the abolition of slavery to civil rights. All of those were the fruits of the Gospel.
Then you see later on, things like the rise of science, the rise of Western human rights are all the direct fruits of monotheism. Indirectly, the rise of the universities, capitalism and democracy -- all of those are indirectly related to Jewish and Christian monotheism. So the balance sheet is incredibly unfair and, in its distortions, it's incredibly foolish. Because it's undercutting things that are basic to the very heart of the West.
Q. If that's the case, then why are people so confused?
A. We're in an "ABC" moment -- by that I mean "anything but Christianity." It's characteristic of a civilization, when it's reacting against its "old faith" -- that it will look at any weird, wild and wonderful thing except the old faith. Obviously, the old faiths in the West are Judaism and the Christian faith. We owe a lot to the Greeks and the Romans, but the fundamental ideas of the West are Jewish and Christian.
Q. You've written a new book, "Unspeakable: Facing Up to Evil in an Age of Genocide and Terror." Basically, you're positing that Americans are illiterate on the subject of evil. Why?
A. I think 9/11 hit Americans who were as unprepared ethically and intellectually as they were militarily. There's the irony -- the United States has the most radical view of evil at its core, in the notion of separation of powers in the Constitution. But ideas have flowed through America in the last 150 years that have made Americans weak and hesitant and confused about whether you can even talk of evil.
You've got progressivism, which says everybody's essentially good and getting better and better. You have postmodernism, with thinkers who feel it was worse to judge evil than to do it, which is extremely bizarre. People are so clear on the idea that you shouldn't be judgmental, everything's culturally relative, we had no right to judge other cultures and so on. It got to the extraordinary position that it was worse to judge evil than to do it, which is ludicrous.
President Bush said, "We have seen the face of evil." And a great deal of the educated world was up in arms, saying, "You can't use categories like that!" And his conservative supporters supported him. Then Abu Ghraib happened, and the conservatives were equivocating: "You couldn't use words like that, we weren't as bad as Saddam Hussein," and so on. But torture was evil. It was an American evil.
So I wrote the book to set out the steps to think it through, and to establish some moral realism in the public discussion of evil.