CLS/Hastings update

The arguments were had before the Supremes yesterday, after my post and bold-if-not-foolish prediction.

Gordon Crovitz of the Wall Street Journal summarizes nicely here:

Presumably Gays & Lesbians for Individual Liberty do not share the CLS view of human sexuality. But they understand exactly where Dean Martinez’s logic is taking us.

“[U]nder Hastings’ forced membership policy, only majority viewpoints (or those viewpoints too banal to interest the majority) are actually assured a voice in Hastings’ forum,” argues their brief. “That is a patently unreasonable way to ‘promote a diversity of viewpoints.'”

Sadly, it appears that this is shaping up in the popular press as a case about the legal status anti-gay bigotry if religiously motivated. Few in the press note that the CLS sexuality standards bar from office unrepentant straight fornicators as well as unrepentant gay fornicators.

As well it should: so far, the sexual revolution and no-fault divorce have done a heckuva lot more damage to the formation of Christian consciences and the institution of marriage than has the gay rights movement.

To Change the (Barbarian) World

(This posting may be of limited interest to non-Orthodox readers.)

I just discovered a new Orthodox blog that looks somewhat promising, Koinonia. The owner/host has completed a very manageable 3-part series, Barbarians at the Gate, where he takes to task not the barbarians (he just identifies them fairly trenchantly), but the indifference or capitulation of the Orthodox Church to those barbarians. Part of his solution is that we cease and desist from bashing Western Culture and get down to the work of transforming it.

Our alliance with barbarism has happened because we have rejected the Christian roots of Western culture in a misguided effort to (1) keep the Church Greek (or Russian, or Arab, or Serbian) or (2) to distinguish “True Orthodoxy” from “false Catholicism” or (3) because, like Frank Schaeffer, we are simply cultural-despisers who have found that the Orthodox tradition is a convenient cudgel with which to continue waging our political or cultural battles. Whatever the reason, this amounts to a refusal to engage in any meaningful way with the cultural marketplace of ideas. As a result, it leaves the public square utterly naked – even as we moan and complain about it privately. Worse, it makes us the tools by which Nietzsche could proclaim that God was a non-factor (“dead”) in modern life. Itputs us in a position where we not only fail America – to be salt and light for our neighbor and our country – but also Christ and ourselves.

…

The spiritual genius of the Orthodox Church has always been the ability of the Church to take on and transform the dominate culture. This means that just as Jesus was the authentic Jew among Jews, the Church has been – in turn – authentically Greek among the Greeks, and authentically Russian among the Russians, so too we must be authentically American among the Americans. While have rarely done this perfectly, we have largely done this without sacrificing the Gospel or the communion of the various local or ethnic churches.

Is there any reason, other than sloth or despair, why we think we cannot do this in America as well?

It hit a nerve. My posts in the short life of this blog have been relatively heavy on culture-bashing. I bash because I really do care – like an inarticulate father who doesn’t know what to do with a sick child except to yell.

Part of the challenge in Barbarians at the Gate is that there are people outside the Church with whom we can and must make common cause. He suggests, among a handrul, the Catholic Church.

I suggest that James Davidson Hunter, author (coiner?) of the influential Culture Wars in the 90s, is also one with whom we can make common cause. I highly commend this paper he gave at Trinity Forum 8 years ago. That “briefing” finally has grown to a book of the same title. I am greatly looking forward to reading it (if I can moderate my blogging long enough to fit it in).

Davidson’s main points from the briefing eight years ago:

Culture is a resource, and as such, a form of power.
Culture is produced.
Culture production is stratified into a rigid structure of “center” and “periphery.”
Culture changes from the top down; rarely if ever from the bottom up.
World-changing is most intense when the networks of elits and the institutions they lead overlap.

Another with whom we can make common cause is Ken Myers at Mars Hill Audio Journal, who has been inspiring me for several decades now. I think we have some examples to emulate as well from the folks at Front Porch Republic.

The work at hand is not revolution, but the slow permeation of salt and the absorption of light. We need to be about it sooner rather than later.

The paradox of the self-denying mind

I jokingly said on FaceBook a few weeks ago that I thought I’d lost my need for certainty over the last decade, but I wasn’t sure. One of the areas which no longer move me to indignation very often is the “Creation/Evolution” controversy.

As if by force of habit, however, I do still read about it when I stumble onto something. I probably have 3-4 unread books in that general area, as well as having read a dozen or more over the years – and a dozen is probably a gross underestimate.

I’m not really competent enough in the hard sciences to rely on primary sources sources, but there are some accounts for intelligent non-scientists that seem to be at a fairly high level. I take them all with a grain of salt, however, as (1) it has become clear that everybody has an ax of some sort to grind – else they wouldn’t be writing about it and (2) one side sounds pretty good until I revisit the other side.

There are Christians whose integrity and intelligence I respect (it is because I respect and read them that I stumble onto articles and books on the controversy as often as I do) who are adamant foes of evolutionary theory and proponents of Intelligent Design. But I don’t share their visceral passion. They may be right and I may be wrong. I was wrong once. (Thought I was a second time, but I was wrong.)

Here’s my full bona fide, extemporaneous disclosure of what ax I have to grind – I who can go weeks at a time without thinking about the controversy:

“I believe in one God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible.” (Nicene Creed)
I.e., I believe there is an invisible creation, which conventionally is called “supernatural” but is in fact just as created as the visible, “natural” created world. The key distinction is not nature versus supernature, but created versus uncreated. And only the Holy Trinity is Uncreated.
The uncreated Holy Trinity is impenetrable by science or reason generally, but has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. That’s Himself. Not scientific detail about the past. (And not – cover your eyes, Hal Lindsay and Tim LaHaye – details of earthly life that are yet future.) The Old Testament preeminently reveals Christ typologically; secondarily, it reveals God’s dealings with earthly Israel and its neighbors. If there’s tertiary purpose – and there probably is – it doesn’t come readily to mind.
Although there are Orthodox Christians – including Father Seraphim Rose, who was no intellectual slouch – who adhere to something like a full-throated Creationism® (used as a term of art for creation in 6 days of 24 hours about 6,000 – 10,000 years ago), I do not by any means understand that to be obligatory. My own position, very lightly held except for the preceding points, is generally Intelligent Design rather than Creationist®.
Whatever else you can say about it, the theory of evolution has been scientifically fruitful. So, I’m told, was the theory of alchemy. If you can get the whole Guild on the same page, it tends to make things interesting and productive even if the theory later collapses. So evolutionists have not been dogmatically hanging onto a delusional and unproductive theory just because it reinforces a prior commitment to metaphysical naturalism (though one of their own famously said he’d prefer any natural explanation to any supernatural explanation because of such a prior commitment).
I do not understand Darwin to have said anything about the origins of life – only about The Origin of Species.
I don’t think neo-Darwinism has much more to say about the origins of life than did Darwin – except, perhaps, a few just-so stories.
I believe in what Wesley J. Smith calls “human exceptionalism.” Regardless of the origin of the human species in evolutionary terms, there’s within us a microcosm of the one in whose image we are made.

Believe it or not, that’s all preliminary. The actual occasion of this posting is my discovery (if I’d read it before, I had forgotten) of an essay by polymath George Gilder, titled Evolution and Me. Gilder does not diminish the importance of others’ work in Intelligent Design, but takes his own path away from any materialistic reductionism through Information Theory:

I came to see that the computer offers an insuperable obstacle to Darwinian materialism. In a computer, as information theory shows, the content is manifestly independent of its material substrate. No possible knowledge of the computer’s materials can yield any information whatsoever about the actual content of its computations. In the usual hierarchy of causation, they reflect the software or “source code” used to program the device; and, like the design of the computer itself, the software is contrived by human intelligence.

The failure of purely physical theories to describe or explain information reflects Shannon’s concept of entropy and his measure of “news.” Information is defined by its independence from physical determination: If it is determined, it is predictable and thus by definition not information. Yet Darwinian science seemed to be reducing all nature to material causes.

As I pondered this materialist superstition, it became increasingly clear to me that in all the sciences I studied, information comes first, and regulates the flesh and the world, not the other way around. The pattern seemed to echo some familiar wisdom. Could it be, I asked myself one day in astonishment, that the opening of St. John’s Gospel, In the beginning was the Word, is a central dogma of modern science?

In raising this question I was not affirming a religious stance. At the time it first occurred to me, I was still a mostly secular intellectual. But after some 35 years of writing and study in science and technology, I can now affirm the principle empirically. Salient in virtually every technical field — from quantum theory and molecular biology to computer science and economics — is an increasing concern with the word. It passes by many names: logos, logic, bits, bytes, mathematics, software, knowledge, syntax, semantics, code, plan, program, design, algorithm, as well as the ubiquitous “information.” In every case, the information is independent of its physical embodiment or carrier.

I wont go much beyond that teaser about any details. Gilder speaks for himself, and you’ll find him persuasive or not for yourself.

But I do want to say this: I have difficulty seeing this as a “breakthrough description of the case against Darwinism” (Discovery Institute blurb) in any way that should affect non-scientists like me. Perhaps it really is a breakthrough scientifically (don’t expect to see white flags waving, however), but I’ll relegate that question to the scientists themselves.

For non-scientists like me, Gilder’s argument is cumulative evidence that there’s more going on in humanity, if nowhere else, than that which can be explained materially. The proverbial “bottom line” is kind of old hat:

Materialism generally and Darwinian reductionism, specifically, comprise thoughts that deny thought, and contradict themselves. As British biologist J. B. S. Haldane wrote in 1927, “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” Nobel-laureate biologist Max Max Delbrück (who was trained as a physicist) described the contradiction in an amusing epigram when he said that the neuroscientist’s effort to explain the brain as mere meat or matter “reminds me of nothing so much as Baron Munchausen’s attempt to extract himself from a swamp by pulling on his own hair.”

Analogous to such canonical self-denying sayings as The Cretan says all Cretans are liars, the paradox of the self-denying mind tends to stultify every field of knowledge and art that it touches and threatens to diminish this golden age of technology into a dark age of scientistic reductionism and, following in its trail, artistic and philosophical nihilism.

Anyone who has taken philosophy knows that the “meat machine” is – well, a philosophical possibility. But I can’t live that way. And every word the materialist says to prove materialism to others says that he can’t live that way, either.

As I lose my need for absolute factual certainty, that’s evidence enough for me.

Conscientious Objector to the Culture Wars

(This may be the most controversial and polemical thing I’ve posted. I’ll tell you in advance, and in conclusion, that I’m disinclined to be dogmatic about most of it. Your mileage may vary.)

* * *

One of the minor irritants in my life is Franky Schaeffer. I’ll go long spells without thinking of him, and then I get a catalogue from his publishing company, or maybe he pops up in the news (having once again found limelight). And I seethe.

But lots of people love limelight. Why does he, of all people, irritate me? Probably because his life is so parallel to mine, through all the twists and turns.

Evangelical: Check.
Produced the movie Whatever Happened to the Human Race; watched the movie as a turning point.
Now Orthodox: Check.
Religious Right activist: Check.
No longer Religious Right activist: Check.
60-something years old: Check.

But he’s too strident and angry. He’s sort of a Christian James Howard Kunstler (another approximate contemporary of mine) but without Kunstler’s ubiquitous F-Bombs. Kunstler acknowledges that his speeches are a form of theater (listen to Kunstlercast #103 here); I think that’s true of Schaeffer, too, though he’d probably deny it.

I sense, too, that my reasons for dropping out of the culture wars are different than Schaeffer’s. I sense that partly because he seemingly just changed sides, now inveighing against his former friends, writing screeds, kiss and tell books, dubious fiction (his Calvin Becker fiction trilogy was quite calculatedly ambiguous about the extent to which it was autobiographical), paranoid apologies for Barack Obama, and sucking up to media personages who call him things like “a former leader of the anti-choice movement.” (They just love to get some sound-bites from an angry ex-whatever.)

But I really dropped out because:

The culture wars are unwinnable on the present terms.
I suspect that the strident tactics make most things worse rather than better.
I don’t really trust my former allies.
I don’t really trust the candidates we’re supposed to vote for.
I still don’t trust my former adversaries.
If I’m a prominent culture warrior, it will spill over harmfully into other areas.
Maybe I’m just a worn out old hippie pacifist.

1. The culture wars are unwinnable on the present terms. We may get a majority vote for the “right” side on this issue or that, but that will not end the war. There will be other battles. There will be guerilla warfare. There will be no peace, and there’s only a minimal chance for the “Right” to win. Not until the Right’s own culture changes.

Changing culture is the work I’m about now – feeling my way rather than barreling ahead. That’s much subtler work than culture war. I’m not sure how good I am at it. But I’m convinced, to take just one Culture War example, that we won’t stop abortion until we change the toxic combination of unchastity and avarice that gets women pregnant and then justifies aborting the innocent child to maintain prosperity (greater or lesser).

The Right is not with us on that. Fox Radio recently aired an ad, between Glen Beck and Bill O’Reilly, for an online service for married men seeking adulterous affairs. (I didn’t hear it, but read about it from someone who didn’t note the incongruity of this appearing on a putatively conservative news source.)

Whaddya think? I’m betting that the ad wasn’t there for the 13 liberals who were eavesdropping on Fox that day, but for the red-meat, red state regulars.

TownHall.com syndicated columnist pages every day have ads for “conservative” slogan t-shirts draped on attractive young lasses, selling conservative politics, like everything else, with sex. Today there’s a sexy avatar for some video game, too. It’s all a racket.

This could as well go under the caption “I don’t really trust my former allies.” But on present terms I think the idiocy of modern pseudo-conservatives belongs in this “unwinnable” category, if only because their position on the sexual side of the culture wars seems to be “anything goes, so long as it’s not gay.” That’s a losing position long-term as well as being a sign of untrustworthiness.

2. The Culture Wars are unwinnable on present terms partly because stridency and contempt beget stridency, contempt and alienation.

Whichever side of the Culture Wars you’re on, think about the fundraising letters you get. Are you edified by their tone? Do you appreciate the sober, educational emphasis? Do you find yourself walking away with something of substance to ruminate on?

If so, I’ve got bad news for you: you’re an idiot. (Shall I write that slower? You. Are. An. Idiot.)

The groups who used to send me fairly sober letters have gone strident. The groups that used to send me strident letters are now frothing at the mouth. And I’m sure the other side is doing the same. Shrill is the new green.

I don’t care who fired the first volley. That’s lost in the mists of history like the instigation of the Hatfields versus the McCoys. I’d like the shooting to stop. I’d like artificial divisions to end. I suspect there’s more common ground than either side presently will admit because of how things have been framed. Let’s tone it down a bit and then explore what the real divisions are. The more we insult the other side, the more we paint both sides into corners from which dialog, let alone truce, is impossible.

3. The culture wars are unwinnable on the present terms, too, because there’s darned little difference between the two sides on some of the deep presuppositions.

They’re both, ironically, secular. One side is secular because they don’t believe in any divine rules. You know which side I’m talking about. (Hint)

The other side – my side – is mostly secular because they functionally believe that God’s only presence in the world is His rules. They “honor” Him by keeping his rules – sort of the way a rank amateur “paints” by number. That’s why I don’t really trust them. The tranformative significance of the Incarnation: God the Son, Who took on our flesh forever – qui sedes ad dexteram patrem (who sits at the right hand of the Father) in resurrected human flesh – is lost on them. God is up to something more than commandment monitoring and forgiving transgression of the commandments. The incarnation changes everything.

“Love God and do as you will” would strike them as modern relativism. They’re very anti-relativist. Except on Ecclesiology. Then they’re apt to utter Babbitry like “Isn’t it swell that there’s a church for every taste!”

At the other end from the relativist “conservatives,” there’s a Protestant Church in my home town that produces a disproportionate share of Religious Right activists. Several of them have been elected to public office. But they’re theonomists, or more specifically Reconstructionists. If they had their way, there would be 18 Old Testament Capital Crimes in our law books – including sassing parents. They’d shut down my Church and desecrate its icons. They might, for all I know, execute me for one of those 18 capital offenses for the icons in my home prayer corner.

“And what more shall I say? For the time would fail me to tell of …” the folks I encountered who dreamed of kingdoms, feigned righteousness, broke promises, shot off their mouths, tried to set fires, escaped the edge of euphemisms …. (Cf. Hebrews 11:32-34) These are the folks with whom I’d be a “co-belligerent” (Francis Schaeffer’s coinage to distinguish temporary and unreliable political friends from reliable “allies”) were I to continue in the culture wars. And they outnumber many-fold any well-formed Christians of historical and liturgical bent.

We Orthodox have been here before. After the attempted union with the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Florence (see also here), the Orthodox decided they’d risk rule by Sultan over rule by Pope.

That is not a throw-away line: I’m not so sure a secularist regime would be worse than what Christian Reconstructionists would bring upon me and my fellow Orthodox Christians that I’m willing to be bedfellows with Recontructionists.

4. In the current terms of the Culture War, the highest form of involvement, other than sending money in response to strident or frenzied letters, is to vote for Republicans. Any Republican.

In 2000 and 2004, it was Dubya. He was, we were told, a good Evangelical Christian. He cited Jesus as his favorite philosopher. He talked about America walking humbly in the foreign policy world.

Then 9-11 came, and he turned into a fierce Commander In Chief. And, oddly, Imam-In-Chief, as he assured us that “true Islam is a religion of peace.” (Well I’m glad he cleared that up!)

And then came, too, the second inaugural, when he declared as U.S. policy the eradication of tyranny from the world and the planting of democracy. If you don’t understand how delusional that is, read it again: eradicating tyranny from the world. As national policy.

Many Religious Right figures in 2008 backed Mitt Romney, Mormon and heir of a 50s moderate Republican, George Romney. Mitt was, deep down, one of us – despite his left-leaning administration as governor of Massachusetts – they assured us. Now they’re pushing Sarah Palin, about whom I’ll not say much except that I do not now support her and see no sign that she has the goods to gain my support later. (I don’t even think she’s all that “hot,” for whatever that’s worth.)

I’m not gonna play Charlie Brown the placekicker to the GOP’s Lucy Van Pelt any more.

5. I still believe pretty much what I believed before on what makes for good living and a just society. I’ve even kept a hand in the debates by writing letters to the editor on a few hot-button issues. Those letters are far less demonizing of the opposition than the sort of letters I used to write. But I check the online comboxes and see that the other side has no lack of equally-but-oppositely mad partisans of its own, leveling vitriolic attacks on me, no matter how reasoned my argument, just because I reach conclusions they don’t like.

But even at more elite levels than smalltown cyberpaper comboxes, I’m still convinced that the other side is untrustworthy. One occasionally will catch one of them committing candor, as has Chai Felblum of Georgetown law school. Imagine a constitutional case with this issue:

Whether the inferred right to marry a member of the same sex, which is inferred from the right to engage in homosexual sodomy, which is inferred from the right to privacy, which is inferred from penumbra of he 4th, 9th, 10th, 14th and other consitutional amendments, is of sufficient constitutional gravity to warrant compromise of the explicit constitutional command against laws prohibiting the free exercise of religion?

Chai Feldblum would answer “yes.” I’m not making up her response (though I did make up the highly tendentious – but brutally accurate – faux issue statement). I appreciate her candor.

But her candor tells me that there’s no home for me in the left where Frank Schaeffer has seemingly pitched his tent.

The Orthodox Wedding service includes, for just one example, “grant unto these Your servants …a peaceful life, length of days, chastity, love for one another in a bond of peace, offspring long‑lived, fair fame by reason of their children, and a crown of glory that does not fade away.” You can’t pray that with integrity over a same-sex coupling, whatever you might think of it otherwise.

So while the Chai Feldblums of the world might not smash my icons like the Reconstructionists, they’ll soon enough take away my Church’s tax exemption, or otherwise put on the squeeze, because they’ll consider us a hate group for continuing the two-millennia-long practice of connecting marriage to procreation.

6. If I’m a prominent culture warrior, it will spill over harmfully into other areas of life. I was reminded Sunday how diverse my parish is. We have Romanians and Russians who were born, or even came of age, under communism. We have Greeks who think that 2nd Amendment mania is barbaric (in at least one case with justification that I can’t gainsay – a family member gunned down in cold blood by someone who went postal). We have young people and middle-aged academics who lean left. We have demographically unknown visitors most Sundays. I have something to learn from some of them.

Just as I don’t want someone to ask me “why are you here since you’re not Greek?,” I don’t want people of Right-leaning disposition to come up to me at Church and make some dismissive remark, which they assume I’ll find hilarious or profound, about a Left-leaning idea that may be held by another parishioner within earshot. I don’t want there to be ethnic, racial, socio-economic or political barriers to people. Political trash talk about trifles at Church is apt to drive people away though we have a faith in common and should be together on Sunday.

7. Maybe I should try a bit more empathy. Maybe I’m not angry because, unlike Frank Schaeffer, I have a day job, with a comfortable living, and don’t have to raise a fuss to sell my newest book. Maybe a brain or personality disorder prompted Franky to call Barack Obama’s election “miraculous” and to prophesy epochal political healing on Obama’s watch.

Maybe Frank’s suburban Boston parish (I think he’s in Brookline, Michael Dukakis‘ hometown) has a leftist litmus test and he caved in. Or maybe he’s rebelling against his upbringing in neutral Switzerland as I declare myself a Swiss-like neutral in the Culture Wars.

Or maybe I’m not angry, by and large, because I’m a child of the 60s, a former Conscientious Objector to conventional war, and now old enough that I’m kind of tired of fighting of all sorts – worn out, if you will. Maybe we really need young, testosterone-crazed Christian guys (and gals crazed by whatever crazes women) who still are eager for a fight. I see my role as one to ask questions of any such young hotheads from the perspective six decades gives. Such as the ones implied by what I’ve just written.

* * *

So who am I hangin’ out with these days if not with the Alliance Defense Fund and the acolytes of R.J. Rushdoony? Check the bloglinks to the right* – Especially Front Porch Republic (“Place. Limits. Liberty.”), Distributist Review (guardedly). Small Is Beautiful has taken on new meaning for me. (My benighted generation got a few things right before we sold out or got complacent – and appreciating E.F. Schumaker was one of them).

I can’t even rule out Father Stephen. Nothing he writes is “about politics,” but everything he writes is about sane, human and humane living, which surely connects up somehow.

Basically, I’m going back and rethinking all things political and cultural. I’m wisdom-hunting. I read Wendell Berry essays and poetry, Bill Kauffman books, Russell Kirk’s Conservative Mind, Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, Scott Cairns’ Poetry, W.H. Auden (“For the Time Being” is now on my list for every Advent).

My conversion to Orthodox Christianity started it in a way. I soon realized that the Church has not always prevailed, and has produced martyrs in every century. And that’s okay. Better we should lose honorably than win by selling our souls.

(Note: When I changed my blog theme, the sidebar went away and anachronistically renamed my blog, which was “Tipsy Teetotaler” when this was written.)
Update 6/14/24: I opened with “I’m disinclined to be dogmatic about most of it,” but I re-read it today and it stands up awfully well. It meanders, stream-of-consciousness style, but I still feel the same way. And, by the way, I don’t consider Trumpist ascendancy a “win” for what I considered the Right when I wrote.

“New Atheist” Christopher Hitchens’ Christian Brother, Peter

Tip of the hat to Ross Douthat for his link to Peter Hitchens’ How I found God and peace with my atheist brother.

The article is more interesting, in my estimation, than Douthat’s excerpt, interesting though that is. I was prepared from that excerpt for a manifesto of dubious orthodoxy. What I found instead was a sketch of a pilgrimage from banal atheism to thoughtful Christian faith.

Having never gone through an atheist or agnostic phase myself, I would commit stereotyping if I uttered this, but Hitchens has earned the right to name it:

We were sure that we, and our civilisation, had grown out of the nursery myths of God, angels and Heaven. We had modern medicine, penicillin, jet engines, the Welfare State, the United Nations and ‘science’, which explained everything that needed to be explained.
The Britain that gave me this self-confidence was an extraordinarily safe place, or at least so it felt to me as a child.

But I can appreciate how “the old unsettling messages” became a wedge that gradually opened his mind and heart:

I no longer avoided churches. I recognised in the great English cathedrals, and in many small parish churches, the old unsettling messages.

One was the inevitability of my own death, the other the undoubted fact that my despised forebears were neither crude nor ignorant, but men and women of great skill and engineering genius, a genius not contradicted or blocked by faith, but enhanced by it.

…

I also knew I was losing my faith in politics and my trust in ambition, and was urgently in need of something else on which to build the rest of my life.

I don’t think the inevitability of my own death was a sufficiently conscious concern of mine until I found Orthodoxy (which coincided, of course, with my aging and the consequent, undeniable physical infirmities), but I was very aware that believers of old were not crude or ignorant and that politics and ambition were inadequate foundations for life.

Peter (I call him that not from faux familiarity, but because the other Hitchens is better known) pulls no punches in identifying the covert locus of much of today’s anti-Christian rage, and the culprit he fingers appears guilty to me:

[I]n recent times it has grown clear that the Christian religion is threatened with a dangerous defeat by secular forces which have never been so confident.

Why is there such a fury against religion now? Because religion is the one reliable force that stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. The one reliable force that forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law. The one reliable force that restrains the hand of the man of power. In an age of power-worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power.

But unlike Peter, I think the urge to power has an accomplice: the sort of facile faith that finds science a threat – a faith I once held, knowing no better way to live out devotion to Christ – and whose fear of The Other is expressed in demonization – of which I was mercifully guilty less often than many on the religious right. Facile faith invites facile atheism. Demonization invites counter-demonization. I think Peter may intuit that, as here:

I do not loathe atheists, as Christopher claims to loathe believers. I am not angered by their failure to see what appears obvious to me. I understand that they see differently. I do think that they have reasons for their belief, as I have reasons for mine, which are the real foundations of this argument.

Peter and I diverge stylistically about the utility of arguments over morality:

He [Christopher Hitchens] often assumes that moral truths are self-evident, attributing purpose to the universe and swerving dangerously round the problem of conscience – which surely cannot be conscience if he is right since the idea of conscience depends on it being implanted by God. If there is no God then your moral qualms might just as easily be the result of indigestion.

Yet Christopher is astonishingly unable to grasp that these assumptions are problems for his argument. This inability closes his mind to a great part of the debate, and so makes his atheist faith insuperable for as long as he himself chooses to accept it.

One of the problems atheists have is the unbelievers’ assertion that it is possible to determine what is right and what is wrong without God. They have a fundamental inability to concede that to be effectively absolute a moral code needs to be beyond human power to alter.

On this misunderstanding is based my brother Christopher’s supposed conundrum about whether there is any good deed that could be done only by a religious person, and not done by a Godless one. Like all such questions, this contains another question: what is good, and who is to decide what is good?

I do agree with Peter that a binding moral code needs grounding. Maybe there’s a gene for altruism, as the evolutionists recently seem to postulate. But what if I don’t have it, or mine’s mutated or unexpressed? What if I act the sociopath as a result? Society, made up of a majority where the gene is present and expressed, may have the raw power to squash me, but they cannot logically utter any moral condemnation – though they assuredly would do exactly that.

But Christopher Hitchens likely will never appreciate that unless he’s first blindsided by something else – maybe Rogier van der Weyden’s 15th Century Last Judgement (which blindsided Peter) or “the unexpected force of poetry, which can ambush the human heart at any time” (as Peter notes).

Finally, I really appreciate Peter’s succinct putdown of a stupid, stupid, canard that can only be uttered by somebody who didn’t notice the savagery of pagan Nazis and atheist Communists in the bloodiest damned century the world has ever seen:

Another favourite argument of the irreligious is that conflicts fought in the name of religion are necessarily conflicts about religion. By saying this they hope to establish that religion is of itself a cause of conflict.

This is a crude factual misunderstanding. The only general lesson that can be drawn is that Man is inclined to make war on Man when he thinks it will gain him power, wealth or land.

Amen, brother Peter. Only brother James – one of those crude and ignorant folks from 2000 years ago – rivals your brevity (James 4:1-2).