Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Doug Hageman died on July 28, within spitting distance of his birthday, and those who knew him needn’t wonder how he managed that. He was an honest and good man and, as a thoughtful and active Republican in the land of Democrats, something of a wonder. Encountering Doug for the first time – as I did many years ago, at a net-working meeting held in the rooms of Associated Builders of Connecticut (ABC) in Rocky Hill – was a bit like catching a glimpse of a unicorn in a dark glade. First you saw the white flashing flanks, then the flowing mane, and then, shockingly, the improbable white horn.   And you thought to yourself – it CAN”T be. But it is.

Somewhere,  Fyodor Dostoyevsky  says the average life of a man is about three generations; that would be around 180 years. Why so long? Well, a man lives in the lives of his family, children and friends. The problem of death – real death, in the sense of obliteration and forgetfulness – begins after the third generation. By the fourth generation, a man is forgotten. Life has lost its grip on the human imagination, and the man is gone, utterly gone, at least on this side of death’s veil. For Christians who believe in the promises of the Living God, death is swallowed up in life everlasting. But not all of us have the courage – or the imagination -- to believe such things.

The pity of it is there is no one on God’s side to answer Christopher Hitchens , the author of “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” the latest and best in a long series of books recently published by ardent atheists. One thinks, almost involuntarily, of the cartoonish marginalia of William Blake’s poems, showing a long like of kings ending in a turd. Standing at the end of the line of distinguished atheist authors is the insufferably haughty Richard Dawkins, author of " The God Delusion ," who has suggested that atheists denominate themselves “brights,” so as to distinguish themselves from such "non-bright" thinkers as Blaise Pascal and Thomas Aquinas. “What an asshole,” Mark Warren commented on Dawkins in a review of Hitchens’ book in Esquire magazine. Brevity really is the soul of wit. Pass over Dawkins and “the wishfully thinking " The End of Faith ," by Sam Harris,” an atheist neuroscientist, Warren advises, but do not deny yourself the...