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December 16, 2011

Quitting the Ghastly Circus: Reflections on the Late Christopher Hitchens, His Brother Peter’s Memoir, and Religious Rage

 

Christopher Hitchens passed away on Thursday, December 16, 2011. (For any who may not be familiar with Hitchens, he was a celebrated journalist, a bestselling author, and an outspoken atheist.) When I heard the news I turned with interest to the Zondervan-published memoir by Mr. Hitchens’ brother, Peter, titled The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith, where I discovered a slice of the brothers’ story that is especially poignant today.

 

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Below you’ll find Peter Hitchens’ reflections on a public debate on religion with his brother Christopher, a debate which Peter later described as a “ghastly circus.”

 

Unfortunately, “ghastly circus” apt describes some of the purportedly “Christian” discussion surrounding Christopher’s death. So I publish this post for three reasons. First, I want to respectfully say to Christopher’s family that I am praying for them.

 

Second, I am reminded by Peter’s thoughtful reflection that Christopher Hitchens was someone’s brother, someone’s son, and like every person loved or unloved by their fellows, Christopher Hitchens, too, was lovingly made in the image of his Creator.

And third, I challeng myself and anyone reading this far: follow the guidance of the Apostle Peter as we comment on the legacy of Christopher Hitchens: “Dear friends, I urge you … Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us” (1 Peter 2:11-12).
- Adam Forrest, Zondervan Internet Team.
Special thanks to Matt Saganski and Rich Tatum.

 

From Rage Against God

I end this book in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with some thoughts on the unsatisfactory debate that I had there in April 2008, with my brother Christopher, about the existence of God and the goodness of religion. I had decided before it took place that I would not take part in such a debate again, on this or any other subject.

 

Christopher and I have had over the past fifty years what might be called a difficult relationship. Some brothers get along; some do not. We were the sort who just didn’t. (Parents of such siblings will know about this.)

 

Who knows why? At one stage — I was about nine, he nearly twelve — my poor gentle father actually persuaded us to sign a peace treaty in the hope of halting our feud. I can still picture this doomed pact in its red frame, briefly hanging on the wall. To my shame, I was the one who repudiated it, ripped it from its frame, and angrily erased my signature before recommencing hostilities. In a way, the treaty has remained broken ever since, and heaven knows what happened to the sad little document.

 

I had already concluded, as my train nosed westward in the spring twilight through the lovely, wistful mountain and river country that lies between Harper’s Ferry and Pittsburgh, that I did not want to do anything of the kind. Normally I love to argue in front of audiences. This time I seemed to have no taste for it.

 

No doubt they would have been pleased or entertained if we had pelted each other with slime in Grand Rapids.

Something far more important than a debate had happened a few days before, when Christopher and I had met in his apartment in Washington, D.C. If he despised and loathed me for my Christian beliefs, he wasn’t showing it. We were more than civil, treating each other as equals — and as brothers with a common childhood, even recalling bicycle rides we used to take together on summer days in the Sussex Downs, unimaginably long ago, which I did not even realize he still remembered. And here is another thing. When our Grand Rapids hosts chose the date of April 3 for this debate, they had no way of knowing that it was the sixty-third anniversary of our parents’ wedding — an optimistic, happy day in the last weeks of what had been for both of them a fairly grim war. Not all the optimism was justified, and with the blessed hindsight of parenthood, I cannot imagine that our long fraternal squabble did much for their later happiness. They are, alas, long gone, but my brother and I had both independently become a little concerned at how we should conduct ourselves on such a day.

 

We had each reached the conclusion, unbidden, that we did not want this to turn into a regular traveling circus, becoming steadily more phony as it progressed around the circuit.

 

Perhaps I had begun to suspect that something had shifted during our evening in Washington. To my open astonishment, Christopher even cooked supper, a domesticated action so unexpected that I still haven’t got over it. It would be almost as unsettling to come across Mick Jagger living in a Florida retirement community or President Obama attending a meeting of the National Rifle Association. If Christopher is going to take up roasting legs of lamb at this stage in his life, then what else might be possible?

 

My brother had even given up smoking — a man who once smoked so much, so intensely and with such incessant dedication that one observer wondered if he was doing it simply to keep warm. I am not hoping for a late conversion because he has won a successful battle against cigarettes. He has bricked himself up high in his atheist tower, with slits instead of windows from which to shoot arrows at the faithful, and he would find it rather hard to climb down out of it. But I have the more modest hope that he might one day arrive at some sort of acceptance that belief in God is not necessarily a character fault — and that religion does not poison everything. Beyond that, I can only say that those who choose to argue in prose, even if it is very good prose, are unlikely to be receptive to a case that is most effectively couched in poetry.

 

Christopher and I had been in public arguments before. We had had the occasional clash on TV or radio. We had debated the legacy of the Sixties, in a more evenly matched encounter than Grand Rapids, eleven years earlier in London. Not long after that, there had been a long, unrewarding falling-out over something I had said about politics. Both of us were urged by others to end this quarrel and eventually, if rather tentatively, did so.

 

When I attacked his book against God, some people seemed almost to hope that our personal public squabble would begin again. No doubt they would have been pleased or entertained if we had pelted each other with slime in Grand Rapids. But despite one or two low blows exchanged in the heat of the moment, I do not think we did much to satisfy them. I hope not. At the end I concluded that, while the audience perhaps had not noticed, we had ended the evening on better terms than either of us might have expected. This was — and remains — more important to me than the debate itself.

 

So I will say this. On this my brother and I agree: that independence of mind is immensely precious, and that we should try to tell the truth in clear English even if we are disliked for doing so. Oddly enough this leads us, in many things, to be far closer than most people think we are on some questions — closer, sometimes, than we would particularly wish to be. The same paradox sometimes also makes us arrive at different conclusions from very similar arguments, which is easier than it might appear. This will not make us close friends at this stage. We are two utterly different men approaching the ends of two intensely separate lives. Let us not be sentimental here, nor rashly over-optimistic.

 

But I was astonished, on that spring evening by the Grand River, to find that — in the middle of what was supposed to be a ruthless, jeering clash of opposed minds — the longest quarrel of my life seemed unexpectedly to be over, so many years and so many thousands of miles after it had started, in our quiet homes and our first beginnings in an England now impossibly remote from us. It may actually be true, as I have long hoped it would be, that “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

 

About Peter Hitchens

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. 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. Hitchens lives in Oxford with his wife, Eve. They have three children. Peter Hitchens has written on the passing of his brother here: “In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011″.

(This post does not represent the views of Zondervan or any of its representatives. The writer’s opinions are their own, and are shared for information purposes only. To receive new blogposts in your reader or email inbox, subscribe to Zondervan Blog.)

 

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Read alongside Peter Hitchen’s In Memoriam in the Mail http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/12/in-memoriam-christopher-hitche…

: Here’s an incredible letter written by a non-Jewish Scottish professor to his students who voted to boycott Israel.

This is a MUST READ article that needs to be disseminated in every university. If you have children or grandchildren in university please make sure they publish this important letter in the students’ rag or post it on the university bulletin board.

A Scottish professor responds to campus boycott. The Edinburgh Student’s Association made a motion to boycott all things Israeli since they claim Israel is under an apartheid regime. Dr. Denis Maceoin (a non-Jew) is an expert in Middle Eastern affairs. Here is his letter to those students. AN EDUCATED NON-JEWISH TAKE ON ISRAEL.

Dr. Denis MacEoin, a senior editor of the Middle East Quarterly, addresses The Committee of the Edinburgh University Student Association.

Received by e-mail from the author, Dr. Denis MacEoin, a senior editor of the Middle East Quarterly,

TO: The Committee Edinburgh University Student Association.

May I be permitted to say a few words to members of the EUSA? I am an Edinburgh graduate (MA 1975) who studied Persian, Arabic and Islamic History in Buccleuch Place under William Montgomery Watt and Laurence Elwell Sutton, two of Britain ‘s great Middle East experts in their day.

I later went on to do a PhD at Cambridge and to teach Arabic and Islamic Studies at Newcastle University . Naturally, I am the author of several books and hundreds of articles in this field. I say all that to show that I am well informed in Middle Eastern affairs and that, for that reason, I am shocked and disheartened by the EUSA motion and vote.

I am shocked for a simple reason: there is not and has never been a system of apartheid in Israel . That is not my opinion, that is fact that can be tested against reality by any Edinburgh student, should he or she choose to visit Israel to see for themselves. Let me spell this out, since I have the impression that those members of EUSA who voted for this motion are absolutely clueless in matters concerning Israel, and that they are, in all likelihood, the victims of extremely biased propaganda coming from the anti-Israel lobby.

Being anti-Israel is not in itself objectionable. But I’m not talking about ordinary criticism of Israel . I’m speaking of a hatred that permits itself no boundaries in the lies and myths it pours out. Thus, Israel is repeatedly referred to as a “Nazi” state. In what sense is this true, even as a metaphor? Where are the Israeli concentration camps? The einzatsgruppen? The SS? The Nuremberg Laws? The Final Solution? None of these things nor anything remotely resembling them exists in Israel , precisely because the Jews, more than anyone on earth, understand what Nazism stood for.

It is claimed that there has been an Israeli Holocaust in Gaza (or elsewhere). Where? When? No honest historian would treat that claim with anything but the contempt it deserves. But calling Jews Nazis and saying they have committed a Holocaust is as basic a way to subvert historical fact as anything I can think of.

Likewise apartheid. For apartheid to exist, there would have to be a situation that closely resembled how things were in South Africa under the apartheid regime. Unfortunately for those who believe this, a weekend in any part of Israel would be enough to show how ridiculous the claim is.

That a body of university students actually fell for this and voted on it is a sad comment on the state of modern education. The most obvious focus for apartheid would be the country’s 20% Arab population. Under Israeli law, Arab Israelis have exactly the same rights as Jews or anyone else; Muslims have the same rights as Jews or Christians; Baha’is, severely persecuted in Iran, flourish in Israel, where they have their world center; Ahmadi Muslims, severely persecuted in Pakistan and elsewhere, are kept safe by Israel; the holy places of all religions are protected under a specific Israeli law. Arabs form 20% of the university population (an exact echo of their percentage in the general population).

In Iran , the Bahai’s (the largest religious minority) are forbidden to study in any university or to run their own universities: why aren’t your members boycotting Iran ? Arabs in Israel can go anywhere they want, unlike blacks in apartheid South Africa . They use public transport, they eat in restaurants, they go to swimming pools, they use libraries, they go to cinemas alongside Jews – something no blacks were able to do in South Africa .

Israeli hospitals not only treat Jews and Arabs, they also treat Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank. On the same wards, in the same operating theaters.

In Israel , women have the same rights as men: there is no gender apartheid. Gay men and women face no restrictions, and Palestinian gays often escape into Israel, knowing they may be killed at home.

It seems bizarre to me that LGBT groups call for a boycott of Israel and say nothing about countries like Iran , where gay men are hanged or stoned to death. That illustrates a mindset that beggars belief.
Intelligent students thinking it’s better to be silent about regimes that kill gay people, but good to condemn the only country in the Middle East that rescues and protects gay people. Is that supposed to be a sick joke?

University is supposed to be about learning to use your brain, to think rationally, to examine evidence, to reach conclusions based on solid evidence, to compare sources, to weigh up one view against one or more others. If the best Edinburgh can now produce are students who have no idea how to do any of these things, then the future is bleak.

I do not object to well-documented criticism of Israel . I do object when supposedly intelligent people single the Jewish state out above states that are horrific in their treatment of their populations. We are going through the biggest upheaval in the Middle East since the 7th and 8th centuries, and it’s clear that Arabs and Iranians are rebelling against terrifying regimes that fight back by killing their own citizens.

Israeli citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, do not rebel (though they are free to protest). Yet Edinburgh students mount no demonstrations and call for no boycotts against Libya , Bahrain , Saudi Arabia , Yemen , and Iran . They prefer to make false accusations against one of the world’s freest countries, the only country in the Middle East that has taken in Darfur refugees, the only country in the Middle East that gives refuge to gay men and women, the only country in the Middle East that protects the Bahai’s…. Need I go on?

The imbalance is perceptible, and it sheds no credit on anyone who voted for this boycott. I ask you to show some common sense. Get information from the Israeli embassy. Ask for some speakers. Listen to more than one side. Do not make your minds up until you have given a fair hearing to both parties. You have a duty to your students, and that is to protect them from one-sided argument.

They are not at university to be propagandized. And they are certainly not there to be tricked into anti-Semitism by punishing one country among all the countries of the world, which happens to be the only Jewish state. If there had been a single Jewish state in the 1930′s (which, sadly, there was not), don’t you think Adolf Hitler would have decided to boycott it?

Your generation has a duty to ensure that the perennial racism of anti-Semitism never sets down roots among you. Today, however, there are clear signs that it has done so and is putting down more. You have a chance to avert a very great evil, simply by using reason and a sense of fair play. Please tell me that this makes sense. I have given you some of the evidence. It’s up to you to find out more.

Yours sincerely,
Denis MacEoin

Please SHARE this important article with your friends and family, especially with students…

 

interesting…