After reading Christopher Hitchens’ convincing impression of a dead armadillo flattened by a semi in what passed for his “debate” with Doug Wilson, I found it difficult to believe his book would be positively reviewed. Naturally, the New York Times managed to find someone whose brain is even more pickled than Hitchens to talk it up:
Religious leaders from all the major faiths, who disagree on some of the most fundamental questions, managed to put aside their differences to agree that Rushdie had it coming. (Elsewhere, Hitchens notes tartly that if any one of the major faiths is true, then the others must be false in important respects — an obvious point often forgotten in the warm haze of ecumenism.
Really? All the major faiths? I don’t recall hearing about the Pope’s call for Cardinals Ximinez, Biggles and Fang to start heating their irons on Rushdie’s account, or the Dalai Lama urging his monks to fling Rushdie from a Himalayan peak. And the Rev. Ted Haggard was obviously too busy with the crank and the rentboys to bother whipping Evangelicals up into a lynch mob.
And no doubt it’s because Christians are so prone to forgetting that Jesus Christ claimed to be The Way, the hard and narrow path, the only way to the Father, that atheists are always accusing us of being too bloody tolerant.
UPDATE: Charles H. Darwin on a popsicle stick! I was wondering who could have possibly written this steaming pile of handicapablist drivel and it turns out to be MICHAEL KINSLEY. Now that’s mordantly funny and more than a little sad, as I wrote that pickled brain comment before knowing that the review was written by a man suffering from Parkinson’s Disease.