St. Eutychus

Peter Hitchens and Christopher Hitchens both have books hitting the shelves at the same time. I’ve posted on their famous disagreement before… Peter is a Christian journalist, his older brother Christopher is an atheist journalist. It’s almost providential really. That the perfect foil for one of new atheism’s most vocal advocates comes from the same genetic pool and has the same predisposition for communication.

Anyway, Hitchens’ (the younger) new book is reviewed in a piece from the Centre of Public Christianity, published in the Sydney Morning Herald. Here’s what Peter Hitchens has to say about the dangers of the rise of atheism.

“His experiences living and reporting from Russia and eastern Europe profoundly shaped his view of the world. Having lived in Moscow at the close of the Soviet era, and having witnessed other atheistic regimes in full flight, he refuses to accept his brother’s evasion of what he sees as an organic link between atheism and the most notorious modernist experiments of the 20th century.

It is this experience that appears to shape his concerns for society. He believes Christianity is under attack today because it remains the most coherent and potent obstacle to frightening and ruthless idealism: “The concepts of sin, of conscience, of eternal life, and of divine justice under an unalterable law are the ultimate defence against the utopian’s belief that ends justify means and that morality is relative. These concepts are safeguards against the worship of human power.”