{"id":3893,"date":"2010-05-14T13:06:24","date_gmt":"2010-05-14T02:06:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/?p=3893"},"modified":"2010-05-15T19:35:51","modified_gmt":"2010-05-15T08:35:51","slug":"peter-hitchens-the-rage-against-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/2010\/05\/14\/peter-hitchens-the-rage-against-god\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Hitchens: ‘The Rage Against God’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018It\u2019s Bolshevism for the Home Counties\u2019<\/a>\u00a0 Interesting interview with the brother of Christopher Hitchens of ‘God is not Great’, fame. Peter Hitchens tells Ed West of The Catholic Herald, 30 April 2010,\u00a0that the New Atheism promoted by his brother, Christopher, is corroding our culture. He concludes:<\/p>\n

\u201cWho is Dawkins\u2019s main opponent? Himself. Who is my brother\u2019s main opponent? Himself. The fact that he is interested suggests to me he is at least open to the possibility.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here is a potted biography of this very English, Englishman:<\/p>\n

At the age of 15 Peter Hitchens burned his Bible, leaving the Holy Book a \u201cdisagreeable, half-charred mess\u201d and the teenager with a sense of anti-climax. It was his \u201cyear zero\u201d, and he went on to develop, throughout his late teens and 20s, the typical \u201cenlightened English person\u2019s scorn for faith\u201d, a feeling he characterises by Virginia Woolf\u2019s words upon hearing that T S Eliot had become a Christian: \u201cHe may be called dead to us from this day forward.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Christianity was one of the \u201cnursery myths\u201d that the progressive post-war generation had put behind them as they built a glorious new future and overturned the old order.<\/p>\n

They were very successful: today the post-war cultural revolution is complete, but Hitchens is its most notable critic. It would be wrong to call him a \u201cborn-again Christian\u201d, for he\u2019s far too English for that. Neither did Hitchens have a Damascene moment as such; rather, in his early 30s he began to feel drawn back, despite the social disapproval. But it was while gazing at Rogier van der Weyden\u2019s Last Judgment, a 500-year-old painting that shows in graphic detail the torment of sinners in hell, which he saw while on a cycling holiday in Burgundy, that he realised he was a Christian again.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Rage Against God: Why Faith is the Foundation of Civilisation<\/span> is published by Continuum, priced \u00a316.99.<\/p>\n

See also Atheist Hitchens’ atheist brother becomes a Christian<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018It\u2019s Bolshevism for the Home Counties\u2019\u00a0 Interesting interview with the brother of Christopher Hitchens of ‘God is not Great’, fame. Peter Hitchens tells Ed West of The Catholic Herald, 30 April 2010,\u00a0that the New Atheism promoted by his brother, Christopher, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3893"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3893"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3996,"href":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3893\/revisions\/3996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/imaginarydiocese.org\/bishopjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}