I am pleased to note that the online debate that Christopher Hitchens and I had over at Christianity Today is now going to appear as a small book. Many thanks to CT for sponsoring that thing in the first place, and to Canon Press for the fine work they have been doing in putting this together.
In case you forgot about it, here are a couple comments on that debate. The first is from a guy seated in my section of the bleachers.
“Hitchens’s public defenses of his thesis haven’t been much more successful. True, he bested the Reverend Al Sharpton in a televised debate — barely. But whenever he’s come up against serious opponents, it’s been ugly. Near the end of their exchange in Christianity Today, Douglas Wilson borrowed a line from Wyatt Earp in Tombstone to ask Hitchens, ‘You gonna do something or just stand there and bleed?'” — Jeremy Lott in The American Spectator
The second gives a different take. Jennie Rothenberg Gritz interviewed Christopher Hitchens for
The Atlantic Monthly, and our debate came up.
And it was also a major theme in your email debate with the Christian author Douglas Wilson at Christianity Today.
Weird guy.
Wilson insisted that if you took Jesus out of the equation, the words “right” or “wrong” would have no meaning. Thoughts in the brain would just be a series of chemical reactions, like bubbles in a soft drink. As he put it, “If you were to take a bottle of Mountain Dew and another of Dr. Pepper, shake them vigorously, and put them on a table, it would not occur to anyone to ask which one is ‘winning the debate.’ They aren’t debating; they are just fizzing.”
What he’s saying is that if he ceases to believe in Jesus, he’s going to instantly become an immoral person. It’s a terrible admission to have made! It’s an awful insult to human self-respect to say that. And they don’t seem to understand that they give themselves over in that way. It’s like saying that nothing would stop me from raping you now if I weren’t under the supervision of a heavenly dictator. And I have a higher opinion of myself than that.
Well, actually — not to set things off again — that’s
not what I was saying. But if you want a reminder of what that debate was actually over, you should make sure to get your pre-order in (what we in the publishing industry call “dibbies”).
