“The Best Mind of the 18th Century” 

      In a review of Hitchens’ recent bestselling God Is Not Great:  How Religion Poisons Everything, Dr. Benjamin Wiker writes, “One is tempted to quip that Christopher Hitchens is certainly one of the best minds of the 18th century, but that would be to give Hitchens too much credit as an equal to Voltaire in wit.  He is not, and his God Is Not Great presents little of substance beyond what one would hear murmured in Enlightenment salons.”  He continues: 

Perhaps I am not being fair, or more likely, I have best-seller-atheist-book fatigue after reviewing Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, and finding in Hitchens nothing new and a lot more of it.  Given the tedious similarity of Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation, Dawkin’s The God Delusion, and Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, I am beginning to think the triumvirate hatched its literary blitz after a club meeting and all used the same outline. 

      There is something consoling, though, about Hitchens’ efforts, and that is the revelation from his arguments of just how desperate some atheists are to make their case.  Hitchens uses the stock arguments of the 18th century French philosophes, who decried all the evils of the Church even as they paved the way for the guillotine of the French Revolution, which culminated in what is now called “the reign of terror.”  And that revolution was the mother of so much else to follow in the 20th century.  But the crimes of last century’s atheists Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot are passed over by Hitchens with the assertion that these murderous leaders were acting in the “spirit of religion.”  That’s a bold claim – very bold, since its success depends on the unlikely supposition that most of the readers of Hitchens’ book are stupid.  But Hitchens is undeterred; he goes so far as to say that “totalitarian systems, whatever outward form they may take, are fundamentalist and, as we would now say, ‘faith-based.’”  Yet, what could be more “faith-based” than Hitchens’ own “epiphany” that there is no God?  Hitchens’ brother, Peter, relates the event:  “Christopher describes how at the age of nine he concluded that his teacher’s claim that the world must be designed was wrong. ‘I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong.’"  Sounds like “revelation” to me.  No refutation of the classic philosophical arguments for the existence of God, just... well, some “higher authority” Hitchens was found worthy to be in touch with.

      One admits, true enough, that in some sense totalitarianism is indeed fundamentalist and “faith-based” – grounded on a few fundamental abstractions with added-on “faith” that society, freed from belief in God, could attain to a perfect construction.  Well, that’s been tried, tried more than enough times for us to be wary of yet another plan for our ultimate happiness in this world.  But to return to God Is Not Great:  Is it true that “religion poisons everything”?  That is another very bold claim, chiseled into the very title of Hitchens’ book.  Has religion, specifically the Catholic religion, poisoned art, music, architecture, and the establishment of orphanages, hospitals, and universities?  Let’s face it:  no tourist saves up money in order to take a tour of the accomplishments of the atheist regimes of a Stalin or a Mao.  People do not travel to Albania to gawk at atheist architecture; they do not journey to Warsaw or Moscow to take pictures of the drab, gray cities built as monuments to communism. But they do flock to concerts of sacred music, European cathedrals, and to museums packed with Christian art.  That’s one example among many that should give all budding atheists pause:  their cause has produced little more than ill-written books such as Hitchens’ and sorrow piled on top of sorrow.  Which, theism or atheism, is really poisonous?

      Recently, Christopher Hitchens’ brother, Peter – a believing, practicing Anglican – reviewed his brother’s book in an article in the English Daily Mail.  The contrast between the two brothers is telling... and, for many perhaps, surprising.  Peter is far less dogmatic, is ready to own that even though he believes in God there is much that is mysterious about Him.  But Christopher is all black-and-white:  “"I’m a materialist and he [Peter] attributes his presence here to a divine plan. I can’t stand anyone who believes in God, who invokes the divinity or who is a person of faith."  In fact, Christopher Hitchens is so dogmatic about atheism that he proposes it be considered child abuse for parents to teach religious faith to their children.  (Seems yet again that atheism, because it is weak in its arguments and deep down so very unsure of itself, must be forced on people by all kinds of “new” – that is Sovietesque – restrictions, threats and police actions.)

      All this inspires in me, in my imagination, a kind of dream:  what if the likes of today’s “bestselling” atheist authors Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris (and other modern, ranting atheists) were to sit down to dinner with some select Christians, let’s say, Shakespeare, Dante, Michelangelo, and our own contemporary Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Russian Nobel Prize winner for literature and one who suffered so much under the Soviet atheists) – who would be the shining lights at such a gathering?  Would Hitchens inform these great artists that he “can’t stand anyone who believes in God...”?  Would, one has to ask, Hitchens and his companions-in-arms be even much noticed, much less listened to for any length of time? 

      Shakespeare, to single out one of these luminaries, wrote his plays as if gazing at the world from the very eye of God, so say some critics and almost anyone who has really studied this genius’ work.  The results of such a perspective are the greatest dramas ever written in any language.  Meanwhile, Hitchens writes a book that purports to tell us “how religion poisons everything.”  Hitchens is, I think it obvious, the fundamentalist, a man grown so narrow in his godless view, that whatever he experiences in this world is judged by the standard of his angry atheism, a very little world in which to “live.”