Decency and tolerance

I was excited to read Christopher Hitchen's brother's book - and a little concerned. My concerns turned out to be well-founded. It's not that the tone was bad; it just wasn't particularly warm or compassionate. And it's not that the cross was omitted; it was just that the health of societies seemed his greater passion. Oh, and he's not as fine a writer as his brother. But the book does include some smart critique of anti-theist thinking. Here are some good quotes:

[I]n all my experience of life, I have seldom seen a more powerful argument for the fallen nature of man, and his inability to achieve perfection, than those countries in which man sets himself up to replace God with the state.

. . . utopianism is dangerous precisely because its supporters are so convinced that they are themselves good.

Godless regimes and movements have given birth to terrible persecutions and massacres . . . . This is a far greater problem for the Atheist than it is for the Christian, because the Atheist uses this argument to try to demonstrate that religion specifically makes things worse than they otherwise would be. On the contrary, it demonstrates that our ability to be savage to our own kind cannot be wholly prevented by religion.

[S]ome of the arguments of atheists also lead them into a dangerous intolerance of Christian moral opinions, and of the Christian education of children, which do not sit well with their self-image as apostles of enlightenment and liberty. Like all foes of liberty, they are all for it except when they are really, really against it. (p119)

I say unequivocally that if a man wishes to bring his child up as an atheist, then he should be absolutely free to do so. I am confident enough of the rightness of Christianity to believe that such a child may well learn later (though with more difficulty than he deserves) that he has been misled. But it is ridiculous to pretend that it is a neutral act to inform an infant that the heavens are empty, that the universe is founded on chaos rather than love, and that his grandparents, on dying, have ceased altogether to exist. I personally think it wrong to tell children such things, because I believe them to be false and wrong and roads to misery of various kinds. But in a free country parents should be able to do so. In return, I ask for the same consideration for religious parents.

from P Hitchens, The Rage Against God (London: Continuum, 2010), pages 111, 101, 113, 152.