God Is Not Great

Over the past dozen years or so atheism has enjoyed a wave of popularity throughout much of the English-speaking world. Through a series of best-selling books, interviews, and debates we have been encouraged to imagine a world free from the shackles of religion. If only we could rid ourselves of these myths and superstitions, we've been told, we would all sit down at the table of brotherhood and, unburdened of all the fanaticism that comes from faith, live together in peace.

The most entertaining of these "new atheists" was Christopher Hitchens. The British-born journalist became an American citizen in 2007. With an encyclopedic knowledge of the world he lived in, Hitchens wrote on a wide variety of subjects, and was never afraid to offend people on either the political left or right.

For the past few years Hitchens spent much of his time attacking religion, and anyone who had one. The title of his recent book, "God Is Not Great; How Religion Poisons Everything", is itself a glimpse into how this man operated: provacative, irreverant, and prone to exaggeration. His fans couldn't get enough; finally someone with his skill was publicly exposing religion for the sham that it is.

You could be forgiven for wondering why he expended so much energy battling a God who doesn't exist. It's because in Hitchen's world, religion is not just false, it is dangerous. Without religion there never would have been an Inquisition, or the terrorist attacks of September 11th. No, someone has to have the courage to say what all thinking people know: the physical world is all there ever was, or ever will be. Only science and reason can lead us out of this dogmatic wilderness.

But Hitchens never understood (though it was often pointed out to him) that by embracing atheism he had given away the store. If atheism is true, there's no way to justify the moral judgments that they make. It is only by "borrowing" morality from Christianity that atheists are then able to pronounce it evil.

I find myself a little conflicted about Hitchen's passing. Here was a man of rare ability; often witty, sometimes blasphemous, always thought-provoking. But his intellectual gifts should have led him beyond the physical world to the Source of all gifts. But they never did. Instead, like the dog who bites his master, he employed those gifts to rail against the One who had made him. And I find that to be very sad indeed.

Christopher Hitchens - dead of cancer at age 62.