Why is peter hitchens so angry

The destruction or sidelining of religious voices was a key aim of the vilest 20th-century despots. Hitchens should nevertheless have been more open about the role of faith in fomenting conflict.

This would have placed him in a stronger position to emphasise that the remedy for bad religion is good religion, not no religion at all — especially as there is not the slightest prospect that faith will wither away anytime soon. Good religion promotes peace. Bad religion promotes discord. Jonathan Sacks rightly likens faith to fire — "and like fire it warms but it also burns". Hitchens's claim about a link between conscience and belief in God is more questionable. Conscience is reasoned judgment.

Most strands of Christianity have always maintained that good actions are good in themselves, not because God commands them. Perhaps the strengths and weaknesses of Hitchens's position come over most clearly when he writes that "the concepts of sin, of conscience, of eternal life and divine justice under an unalterable law, are the ultimate defence against the utopian's belief that ends justify means and that morality is relative.

They are safeguards against the worship of human power. Now, that conflict is made sharper still, by the alliance between political utopianism and the new cult of the unrestrained self. Secularists, especially, will protest that the Enlightenment is overlooked in this sombre world view. Much that is good about modern life derives from secular thought, as well as from Judaeo-Christianity.

And while applauding some of his arguments, many believers will jib at Hitchens's neglect of Jesus's social radicalism. Tabletalk : How does the death of a loved one challenge atheism at its core? Peter Hitchens: Death is the great reminder that this life is limited, and that it may not be the end.

For most of our lives, we behave as if this is not so. It is only when death touches those close to us that we are forced into this understanding, especially in a modern world where death is kept at a distance, ignored, undiscussed, and shuffled off into corners. Teaching Series. Conference Messages. Tabletalk Magazine. Gift Certificates. Ligonier Ministries. It claims—in literally so many words—that a man admired by many was in fact a hypocrite, a liar, and a coward, motivated primarily by vanity and avarice.

Privately, however, he was entering forbidden territory …. My private conversations with him revealed a man who was weighing the costs of conversion. His atheist friends and colleagues, sensing his flirtations with Christianity and fearing his all-out desertion to that hated enemy, rushed to keep him in the fold.

To reassure them, Christopher, for his part, was more bombastic than ever. But the rhetoric was concealing the fact that even while he was railing about God from the rostrum, he was secretly negotiating with him. Fierce protestations of loyalty always precede a defection, and Christopher had to make them. At least he had to if he was to avoid the ridicule and ostracism he would surely suffer at the hands of the very same people who memorialized him.

To cross the aisle politically was one thing. There was precedence for that. Churchill had very famously done it. But Christopher well knew that whatever criticisms and loss of friendships he had suffered then would pale in comparison to what would follow his religious conversion.

Hatred of God was the central tenet of their faith, and there could be no redemption for those renouncing it. And it is here that his courage failed him. In the end, however contrary our natures might be, there are always a few people whose approbation we desire and to whose standards we conform.

From Hitchens himself, however, there is only silence in the place where the supporting quotation or anecdote should have been. What Taunton offers in lieu of evidence are two lines of argument whose merits are … well, you decide for yourself what they are. After all, a real atheist must agree with Peter Singer that a human baby is of no greater moral significance than a piglet.

Since Hitchens did not agree with Singer, Hitchens must be moving toward agreement with Taunton. As for the first argument, it mistakes curiosity for assent. The off-stage Christopher Hitchens often paid respectful attention to points of view he thought partly or wholly mistaken. The anecdote runs as follows: Christopher Hitchens has just finished yet another round of debate with a religious opponent. Relaxing in a restaurant after the debate, that opponent had a complaint. Hitchens had unfairly used atrocity stories to win his argument.

I could add many more stories of my own to the ones you have told. But they are not the actions of genuine Christians. Now comes the punchline. I interviewed Taunton early on Memorial Day morning and put the question directly to him.

And so I walk into things—that I saw Christopher saying, that I saw him doing, and from that I draw certain inferences. People do communicate important messages non-verbally. That possibility requires us to consider other questions: How sensitive an observer is Larry Taunton?

And how reliable a narrator? It is from Taunton we learn about the supposedly close relationship between himself and Hitchens—and we learn it via the amazing efflorescence of compliments to himself that Taunton gathers in his pages. It's disquieting that Taunton acknowledges he seldom took contemporaneous notes of his conversations with Hitchens.