Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

This post will be considered untimely, as the death of Christopher Hitchens occurred last thursday. He will be remembered as a great writer, a great wit and, with Richard Dawkins, one of the great voices in what is dismissively referred to as the "New Atheism."

I have frankly not read as much of either as I would like. But it seems to me that Hitchens differs from Dawkins in his opposition to religion. What Dawkins attacks as an affront to science and rationalism, Hitchens' strongest and most eloquent assaults on the edifice of faith were moral ones. He argued, and persuasively, that the God of the Abrahamic religions differs only in its degree of relative power over the individual from human dictatorships in the vein of Hitler and the now-deceased Kim Jong-il. (The running joke, on Twitter, is that Hitch and Václav Havel got to pick the third of the trio.)

Because everyone understands, or thinks they understand, the fundamentals of morality, his rhetoric is to my mind more accessible than Dawkins', cloaked as it is to the layman behind what seems an unassailable wall of complicated science. By making the case that religion is essentially immoral rather than merely factually incorrect, shifty arguments against, for example, evolution, disguised with jargon to confuse the layperson, could find no footing in debate with him. This explains how he could be friends with many people of faith - they found common ground on issues of morality even if they disagreed with where Hitchens led those arguments. He could respect a person of faith who shared that common ground; that's harder to do when you think that a person of faith is necessarily intellectually deficient. He was a deep and complex thinker, and a hard man to agree with on every point.  I think he would disapprove of someone who did.

Hitch was famed as a fierce debater, called by some the "Lion of Atheism," and was always strident in his denouncements of both evil and idiocy, and contemptuous of those who embodied both, like Jerry Falwell. But those who knew him unanimously cite both his wit and charm, and as a writer and a public intellectual he had few contemporary equals. I think that it's as a writer, especially of a vast volume of sparkling essays, that I would best like to remember him.

About the First Church of Christ, Atheist

The title of this blog is deliberately provocative. It's meant to make you think about how it might be true yet self-contradictory on the surface. This blog is about God and belief, and about why we believe the things that we do. It is also about a spiritual journey. Mine, of course, but by reading and commenting you are taking part in it and perhaps, if I'm doing it well, I can help you take a step or two of your own.

It is also meant to be a place for respectful discourse on these things. There will be contentious issues discussed here: Christianity and atheism, as the title implies, but also evolution and science, abortion and crime, politics and the role of believers in the political process. I will say things that some readers may take exception to.

And that's okay. There will be arguments and disagreements, and some of them will be long-running. But it's all too easy for a discussion about strongly-held beliefs to degenerate into name-calling and name-calling and accusations of idiocy. That will not be tolerated here. I encourage readers to comment and put forth their thoughts and ideas, elaborately if necessary. But be polite.

I may as well stake out some positions to start with. I am not, by the strict definition of the term, an atheist, although I have sympathy for some atheist positions and am familiar with atheist thought and argument. Nor am I, strictly speaking, a Christian as some would define it, but I have a deep interest in the Bible and Christian history. I can't claim to have read the whole Bible, but I've read a fair bit of it. I was brought up by non-denominational, non-churchgoing believers, but spent my early years in Catholic grammar school. I can't say that I enjoyed that experience, but I can't say that it was spiritually stifling, either. Since then I have listened, talked and read a great deal about both religion and science.

I am trying to avoid oversimplifying in the hopes of elaborating at a later time, but I have at times called myself an "agnostic deist." I'll let you work out what that means for yourselves for the moment; a big part of what this blog is about is what it means to me. I do have a firm moral stance, although I won't promise that it lines up with anybody else's in particular.

I plan to post roughly weekly, and with my own content rather than news articles of interest; you may find some of the latter on my Goggle+ feed. Keep reading.