"Is Christianity Good for the World" -- Review of Hitchens & Wilson's book

Is Christianity Good for the World?


A debate

This 67 page debate hosted by Christianity Today turned book and documentary Collision is foreworded by Jonah Goldberg, a secular Jew. Published by Canon Press whose review quotes “Put two contrarians together and shake well.” writes this about Hitchens and Douglas.

Christopher Hitchens is a popular journalist and the author of several books, including God is Not Great. A regular contributor to Vanity Fair, The Atlantic Monthly, and Slate, Hitchens has also appeared on The Daily Show, Charlie Rose, and C-Span’s Washington Journal. He was named one of the world’s “Top 100 Public Intellectuals” by Foreign Policy and Britain’s Prospect. Currently, Hitchens resides in Washington, D.C.

Douglas Wilson is a pastor of Christ Church (Moscow, Idaho) and a Senior Fellow at New Saint Andrews College. A prolific writer, he is the author of Letter from a Christian Citizen, Reforming Marriage, and Heaven Misplaced: Christ’s Kingdom on Earth, among others. He and his wife Nancy have three children and a myriad of grandkids.

The Captions under each of their pictures on the cover of the sister documentary Collision read this:

“Christianity is a wicked cult, and it’s high time we left it behind” (Hitchens)

 and

“There are two tenants of Aetheism. One there is no god. Two, I hate him.” (Wilson)

This book reads almost as quickly as the documentary but obviously is more dissectible in literary form…good thing too, both these guys are way out of my league. I watched the documentary and read the book as if I were hanging on the shirt tails of an Olympic sprinter. Both are extremely witty, intelligent and worth reading. As usual I will give only a few of my brief observations and the rest of the post will be some quotes from the book. In my humble but deadly accurate opinion Hitchens bit off a little more than could chew with Wilson. If you have seen Collision the book follows the same ol’ story that…the book is always better!

“I hope I may be forgiven for declining to believe that another human being can tell me what to do, in the most intimate details of my life and mind, and to further dictate these terms as if acting as proxy for a supernatural entity. This tyrannical idea is very much older than Christianity, of course, but I do sometimes think that Christians have less excuse for believing, let alone wishing, that such a horrible thing could be true.” (Hitchens pg. 25)

“Given your atheism, what account are you able to give that would require us to respect the individual? How does this individualism of yours flow from the premises of atheism? Why should anyone in the outside world respect the details of your though life any more than they respect the internal churnings of any other given chemical reaction?” (Wilson pg29)

“We are simply reluctant to say that , if religious faith falls—as we believe it must and to some extent already has—then the undergirding of decency falls also. And we do not fail to notice that a corollary is in play: The manner in which religion makes people behave worse than they might otherwise have done.” (Hitchens pg.45)

“What I want to know (still) is what warrant you have for calling some behaviors “good” and others “wicked.” If both are inated, what distinguishes them?...With regard to your retort that my “talent for needless complexity” has simply gotten me “God’s coexistence with evil,” I reply that I would rather have my God and the problem of evil than your no God and “Evil? No problem!”” (Wilson pg.55)

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