In an earlier post, I used the phrase “God-centered,” and there was at least one challenge that concerned what I meant by it. Let me have a quick go at explaining. First, let me note what I do not mean. I do not some form of Stoicism, where we try to pretend that how it …
Vaclav Havel, Christopher Hitchens, and Kim Jong Il
On the death of Kim Jong Il, one wit tweeted that he liked to think that God had let Havel and Hitchens decide who would be the third one to go. That’s funny, but if ideas have consequences, and they do, then there are a few other considerations. We often say, when someone passes away, …
Champion of Our Freedoms
There is a crucial point to be taken away from Peter Hitchens’ last chapter in the The Rage Against God. This issue of whether God must be recognized by us collectively is at the heart of the culture wars, and culture means generations, and generations means that the education of the next generation is right …
Personal Not Private
Just a brief comment about Peter Hitchens’ next chapter, which addresses the bloody war on the church conducted by secularist revolutionaries. The end result was this: “The link between the people and their Christian inheritance — in custom, seasons, traditions, music, and belief — had been effectively broken, and Christianity had been reduced to a …
Superstitious Atheism
In his next chapter, Peter Hitchens compares the respective gullibilities of the believing Christian and the “scientific” atheist. Atheists believe this to be one of their strong points, which Peter appears to recognize. “How the materialists like to jeer at the naive faith of the peasant, fooled by relics, faith healers, and the general hocus-pocus …
If It Comes in a Bottle . . .
When pressed with the bad behavior of atheist regimes, one of the oddest (and funniest) answers that the new atheists offer is that Stalin (say) erred by having his regime take on religious attributes. Peter Hitchens puts it this way: “And so the escape clauses come thick and fast. If atheism in practice appears at …
A Moral Code Must Be Out of Reach
In Chapter 10 of The Rage Against God, Peter Hitchens nails down the loosest board on the side of atheism’s house. So to speak. Unfortunately for atheism, this does not repair the house, but rather causes the whole thing to fall down. According to Peter, the atheists “have a fundamental inability to concede that to …
The Trendy-Makers of Contempo-Evangelicalism
In Chapter 9, Peter Hitchens begins to take on some of the standard arguments advanced by the new atheists. The first, their Goliath taunting the armies of Israel, is the charge that religion is the source of endless conflict. If we want deliverance from strife and sectarian violence, we must have a secular state. And …
Atheistic Wrecking Balls and Bulldozers
The first half of Peter Hitchens’ book concludes with a short summary of how the Christian faith declined in England over the course of the last century or so. From here in the deep weeds of secularism, it is easy to forget that the two great industrial wars of the twentieth century were wars that …
The Prodigal Returns to a Ruin
In chapter 7, Peter describes his rediscovery of faith. But when he comes back to the Anglican church of his youth, he discovers the place greatly altered, and not for the better, because churchmen whose backbone had been carved out of a banana had been listening to the outside critics — critics who had shared …