DEBATE: Hi there. I haven’t been here as much as I ought to be, I know, but that was due to reasons beyond my control and I fear that this screed isn’t going to be very long, either. I found this article courtesy of the Arts & Letters Daily and thought that you might want to take a look at it, too. In the article Christopher and Peter Hitchens do rhetorical battle, with the former brother denouncing the latter’s religious faith in particular and religion in general with all the enthusiasm a passionate atheist can summon up. I have a lot of respect for both men, and I must say that I really admire Christopher Hitchens’ willingness to denounce his erstwhile comrades on the Left for their willing blindness to the evils of Islamic fanaticism and the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.

But in many ways, Christopher Hitchens remains a man of the Left and no more so than when he denounces religious belief. He pours scorn on his brother’s Anglicanism, but either cannot or will not see that his own longstanding Marxist views are simply religious faith in secular guise, although why anyone would want to replace Christianity with Marxism is a mystery to me. I do not understand why anyone would turn away from the soteriological benefits of religious faith, where in return for a life lived in accordance with the wishes of God, one gets to spend all eternity in the presence of the Almighty, from whom all good things come, in order to follow a discredited 19th century economic philosophy that didn’t work in any country that tried to implement it, usually at a horrific cost in human suffering. That confuses me, but then, I am easily confusable, or at least this is what people tell me.