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Christopher Hitchens – An Intellectually Honest Atheist
December 17, 2011
There was something many Christians found likeable in Hitchens
There is a publicist’s maxim that goes something to the effect of “what pleases we forget, what irritates stays with us”. Few Christians could forget atheist Christopher Hitchens.
Hitchens’ caustic manner made the average nasty, intellectual snob appear quite companionable by comparison. And Hitchens always seemed to be at his irritating best when the subject was God and His pathetic, deluded followers. What other commentator would have gone after Blessed Mother Theresa, who Hitchens labeled “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud”?
Yet, there was something many Christians found likeable in Christopher Hitchens, as witnessed by the prayers of thousands offered throughout his struggle with cancer, and following the announcement of his death on Thursday. We believe it was simply the intellectual honesty of Hitchen’s atheism.
Unlike the obsessive self-professed atheists whose lives are wrapped up in endless “church and state” lawsuits, Christopher Hitchens maintained a live and let live attitude toward believers. In this clip from the closing scene from the documentary “Collision”, Hitchens appears to grudgingly admit to Pastor Douglas Wilson that belief may just have a place in the world.
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To a true, intellectually honest atheist, God should be a non issue. At worst, true atheists should view God’s followers in the same light as preschoolers who believe in the tooth fairy.
Novelist Anne Rice’s late husband, atheist poet Stan Rice, was an example of a true atheist. In 1998 Anne abandoned atheism to return to the Catholic Church. For her marriage to recognized as valid by the Church, Anne needed to remarry in a Catholic ceremony presided over by a priest. Stan agreed instantly. From a intellectual point of view, what could it possibly matter to him as an atheist? It just made his wife happy.
Yet some self-professed atheists seem compulsively obsessed with God. The mere possibility that they, or anyone else in American society, could be exposed to a reference to God, or a symbol of the Christian Faith, seems overwhelmingly unbearable to them.
But as we see in the clip, Christopher Hitchens never felt it to be atheism’s role to suppress those who do believe. Like Stan Rice, as a true atheist what damage could believers possibly do Hitchens?
We know that the salvation secured by Jesus’ death on the Cross remains open to us up to, and including, the moment of death. All we need do is accept it.
Like all of the Christians who prayed for Christopher Hitchens during his illness, we hope that he accepted salvation in his final moments. And his surprising admission in the clip – “if I could convince [everyone] to be a nonbeliever.. I wouldn’t do it” – gives us hope that he did.
Then we can all really rub in when we see him in Heaven.
Category: Atheism
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