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The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith Paperback – December 24, 2011
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What if notorious atheist Christopher Hitchens, bestselling author of God Is Not Great, had a Christian brother? He does. Meet Peter Hitchens--British journalist, author, and former atheist--as he tells his powerful story for the first time in The Rage Against God.
In The Rage Against God, Hitchens details his personal story of how he left the faith and dramatically returned. Like many of the Old Testament saints whose personal lives were intertwined with the life of their nation, so Peter's story is also the story of modern England and its spiritual decline. The path to a secular utopia, pursued by numerous modern tyrants, is truly paved with more violence than has been witnessed in any era in history.
Peter invites you to witness firsthand accounts of atheistic societies, specifically in Communist Russia, where he lived in Moscow during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Peter brings his work as an international journalist to bear as he shows that the twentieth century--the world's bloodiest--entailed nothing short of atheism's own version of the Crusades and the Inquisition.
The Rage Against God asks and answers the three failed arguments of atheism:
- Are conflicts fought in the name of religion really just conflicts about religion?
- Is it possible to determine what is right and what is wrong without God?
- Are atheist states not actually atheist?
Join Hitchens as he provides hope for all believers whose friends or family members have left Christianity or who are enchanted by the arguments of the anti-religious intellects of our age.
- Print length224 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherZondervan
- Publication dateDecember 24, 2011
- Dimensions6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100310335094
- ISBN-13978-0310335092
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A Note from the Author
My book, like all such books, is aimed mainly at myself. All polemical authors seek to persuade themselves above all. I hope the book may also be of some value to others, perhaps to believers whose friends or family members have left Christianity or are leaving it now or are enchanted by the arguments of the anti-religious intellects of our age.
What I hope to do in these pages is to explain first of all how I, gently brought up in a loving home and diligently instructed by conscientious teachers, should have come to reject so completely what they said. I had some good reasons for refusing some of it. My mistake was to dispense with it all, indiscriminately.
I want to explain how I became convinced, by reason and experience, of the necessity and rightness of a form of Christianity that is modest, accommodating, and thoughtful — but ultimately uncompromising about its vital truth.
—Peter Hitchens
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Product details
- Publisher : Zondervan; Reprint edition (December 24, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 224 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0310335094
- ISBN-13 : 978-0310335092
- Item Weight : 9.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #262,742 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #741 in Christian Apologetics (Books)
- #1,243 in Religious Leader Biographies
- #7,935 in Memoirs (Books)
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About the authors
Peter Hitchens is a British journalist, author, and broadcaster. He currently writes for the Mail on Sunday, where he is a columnist and occasional foreign correspondent, reporting most recently from Iran, North Korea, Burma, The Congo, and China. A former revolutionary, he attributes his return to faith largely to his experience of socialism in practice, which he witnessed during his many years reporting in Eastern Europe and his nearly three years as a resident correspondent in Moscow during the collapse of the Soviet Union. He lived and worked in the United States from 1993 to 1995. Hitchens lives in Oxford with his wife, Eve. They have three children.
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So the ground was already prepared for the 1960s, with its unconstrained vision of how we could cast off all tradition, the collective wisdom and experience of past generations, and start from scratch without need of marriage, family, the capitalist state and economy, and especially the established Church of England. The C of E was associated with all things we wanted to overthrow--monarchy, tradition, conservatism (the established Church was sneered at as the Tory Party at prayer), and, of course, moral (especial sexual) restraint.
Hitchens describes well the utopian illusions of that period and their disastrous social consequences. It was a cultural and sexual revolution that was, among other things, a revolt of the young against the prospect of falling into the fate of their parents--an adult world not only of hollow forms and beliefs (if they were truly believed at all) but, materially, a world of suburbs, the paraphernalia of babies and the demands they make on one to be adult and responsible, confining and restraining the autonomous self. (No wonder baby boomer couples had so few children!)
Hitchens is justly harsh about this brave new world of adolescent pride and self-absorption, the sacrifice of the needs of children to the freedoms of adults (a prevalent theme motif of those who still are undermining our most child-friendly institution, marriage). His central topic, however, is militant atheism, the rage of atheists against God.
In Part 2 of the book, Hitchens takes on three arguments circulated by his brother Christopher and other "new atheists." He shows how many conflicts fought in the name of religion are not about religion--for example, no-one in Northern Ireland believes that the Catholics and Protestants were fighting over religious differences about the Eucharist, the issue of "justification," or anything of the sort. He also points to the much higher level of unrestrained violence perpetrated by atheist regimes, from the French revolution to the Bolsheviks, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, and so forth. He argues that a non-relativist morality that goes beyond the Golden Rule depends on an absolute power above human society that is not subject to change at a tyrant's or totalitarian's whim. And he takes on the argument that the atheist states like the former USSR are not really atheist but depend on religious cults like that of Stalin.
The most powerful part of the book is his account of the difference in practice between an atheist state with a cult of the leader and a Christian society, where the command to love God and your neighbor as yourself has penetrated the culture and survives, even if exiguously, in post-Christian societies like England. He shows how militantly (and successfully) the Bolsheviks sought to extirpate all trace of Christianity from Soviet society, aiming especially at children. One of the very first decrees of the Soviet state in 1917 was to forbid the teaching of Christianity in schools and many more repressive measures followed. Tellingly, Hitchens draws vividly on his own experience as a reporter in Russia as well as showing, by way of his experience of complete political and social disintegration in Somalia, how he became convinced that his "own civilization was infinitely precious and utterly vulnerable and that [he] was obliged to try to protect it" (p.98).
Tellingly, Hitchens links this militant atheism of the Stalinists, this rage against God, to the efforts of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens to describe religious education as child abuse--a very serious charge, ludicrous as it sounds, that paves the way for more and more anti-Christian measures enforced by an ever more powerful state. For Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, the family and other institutions of civil society, including the churches, temples, and mosques, were a threat to the apotheosis of the state and its leader. All these regimes attacked the churches and the family, seeking either to extirpate them altogether or subordinate them to the state.
Hitchens notes that he, along with Christopher and many others (myself included, but also the philosopher and Catholic Alasdair MacIntyre) were at one time Trotskyists. We were fiercely opposed to Stalinism and the kind of totalitarian state built by Stalin and Mao, and insisted on the fundamental differences between true revolutionary socialism and Stalinism. Hitchens will have none of this. Unlike Christopher and MacIntyre (and me for that matter), he has completely rejected and settled accounts with that tradition, which he says, rests on the self-delusion that things would have turned out differently if Trotsky had won out in the struggle against Stalin. I won't take up the argument here, but simply note that many of us who have abandoned Trotskyism in any form have failed fully to come to terms with it despite its complete incompatibility with current commitments.
Another chord the memoir struck with me comes under the nice subheading, "The Prodigal Son Returns Too Late." He means that the Anglican communion he returned to was not the C of E he had left decades earlier. Even more than the Catholic Church in the West, the C of E had been infected with a liberal, secularizing modernism. Traditional teaching on faith and morals as well as liturgy, architecture, music and ancient practices and forms had been abandoned and the communion was falling into apparently irreversible decline. Hitchens deplores these developments, which include discarding some of the greatest literary treasures of the C of E and the English language--the King James Bible and Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer. But he gives no hint of finding a more orthodox home in the Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Church, a choice toward which faithful Christians still in the Anglican communion in the UK and North America are surely feeling pushed.
I will quote from Hitchens’ book (page 115): “Western Christianity has undergone several separate reverses and defeats in the modern era. It was permanently divided by the Reformation; it was weakened by the enlightenment and the bold claims of modern science; it did itself huge damage during modern wars by allowing itself to be recruited to opposing sides….”
I don’t doubt the validity of Hitchens’ claims, but I fear that Christianity labors under the weight of more serious and insurmountable weaknesses. I refer mainly to that religion’s reliance upon theological convictions that are repeatedly proven to be extraordinarily dubious from the perspective of modern scientific and scholarly research. First of all, it needs to be understood that Christianity was largely founded by the Apostle Paul. And Paul’s theology relies heavily on his conviction that Adam and Eve were the first human beings, and that it was through their disobedience to God that sin entered the world. Once the world of humanity was tarnished by being tainted with the sins of Adam and Eve, the solution to this tragedy was to have Jesus in perfect righteousness die for human sins, thereby making reconciliation between God and human beings possible.
The problem with this theology, apart from the absurdity of having guilt passed to offspring who played no role in generating the guilt, is the fact that Adam and Eve cannot credibly be regarded as ever having lived as the first two human beings. The evidence for biological evolution overwhelmingly vitiates the claim that human beings were created in one day some six to ten thousand years ago. In addition to the difficulties faced in trying to support Paul’s theology, one is also confronted with the awesome amount of scrutiny of the gospel accounts of Jesus’ life that contain fairly numerous inconsistencies, if not outright contradictions.
In addition to such woes that beset modern Christianity, one also can see, with proper perspicacious observation, that Paul’s arguments in favor of faith being the means through which salvation is achieved open wide the door to the conviction that good works are no longer required for salvation, which, in turn, means that one is fairly much free to live (including living in sexual licentiousness) how one desires, just so long as one ACCEPTS Jesus as Savior. Onto those dilemmas is added yet the set of contradictory claims by Paul, namely that one is responsible for one’s salvation or lack thereof, but that at the same time, God is the absolute sovereign Ruler over all reality, and that He predestines exactly who will be saved and who will be damned. Entire books could be written about the unthinkable horrors of a god who would produce a creation of robots, most of which he would condemn to eternal (yes, UNCEASING) torments. If predestination held true, our Creator would be accused of being such an indescribably cruel sadist.
In short, Peter Hitchens’ mention of modern weaknesses in Christianity scratch only the surface of deep and pervasive logical problems inherent in some of the founding principles of that religion. Having said all this, let me mention that I regard Christianity as, generally, the greatest religion (NOT the ONE TRUE religion – with all others being false) humanity has yet been privileged to witness. Nevertheless, religion needs to learn from the growth of human knowledge, including scientific and scholarly knowledge. Religion is NOT transferred directly from the Creator God to humanity in a perfected state. Religions get their impetus from the inspiration of the Divine, but the religions are still human achievements, limited by human understanding of reality, and bound to contain any number of errors, false teachings, and deficiencies. Religion ought to grow toward maturity somewhat as science grows through its system of self-correction. Religion differs dramatically from science with respect to the fact that science is strictly limited to human understanding of the physical universe, whereas religion gets tremendous amounts of inspiration, insight, and even revelation from the Infinite Divine.
With respect to the book being reviewed, a potential reader of it should not expect any really good arguments in favor of God’s existence, because, as I see it, the book does not even set out to effectively argue for the merits of theism versus atheism. I’ve not read any of Christopher Hitchens’ books, but as the infamous atheist brother of Peter Hitchens, I would expect his writing skills to be impressive. I will conclude this review by quoting Peter in the discussion of his “argument” with his brother, Christopher (page 10):
“But since it is obvious that this book arises out of my attempt to debate religion with him [Christopher], it would be absurd to pretend that much of what I say here is not intended to counter or undermine arguments he has presented in his own book on this subject….”
This is an extremely well-written book, but not persuasive in such a sense as offering any viable theodicy or even an effective set of arguments in favor of belief in God. My trust in the Creator is based upon realities that are much more personal to me and much more persuasive than anything Hitchens has to say.
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I read this book in 7 days..writing style is somewhat offbeat but still delivers powerful message to readers...