User:Jprw/RAG synopsis

Jprw/RAG synopsis

Author	Peter Hitchens
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Subject	Religion, autobiography
Genre	Religion, atheism
Publisher	Continuum (UK); Zondervan (US)
Publication date	15 March 2010 (UK); 1 May 2010 (US)
Pages	256
ISBN	1441105727 (UK); 0310320313 (US)
Preceded by	The Broken Compass

The Rage Against God (subtitle in US editions: How Atheism Led Me to Faith) is the fifth book by traditionalist conservative writer Peter Hitchens, originally published in 2010. Autobiographical and polemical, the book describes Hitchens's journey from the militant atheism of the far political left and bohemianism to Christianity, detailing the influences on him that led to his conversion, and is also partly intended as a response to a book written by his brother Christopher in 2007 entitled God is not Great. Hitchens, with particular reference to events which occurred in the Soviet Union, argues that his brother's verdict on religion is misguided, and that faith in God is both a safeguard against the collapse of civilisation into moral chaos and the best antidote to what he sees as the dangerous idea of earthly perfection through utopianism.

The book was described by Quentin Letts in The Spectator as "a magnificent, sustained cry against the aggressive secularism taking control of our weakened culture".

Background

In May 2009 The Rage Against God was anticipated by Michael Gove, who wrote in The Times:

I long to see [Peter Hitchens] take the next stage in his writer's journey and examine, with his unsparing honesty, the rich human reality of the division he believes is now more important than the split between Left and Right—the deeper gulf between the restless progressive and the Christian pessimist. This division, the difference between Prometheus and St Paul, the chasm that divides Shelley from T. S. Eliot, Lloyd George from Lord Salisbury, is nowhere better encapsulated than in the contrast between Hitchens major and minor.

In August 2009, Hitchens referred to The Rage Against God for the first time in one of his weekly colums, where he wrote, "Above all, I seek to counter the assertion, central to my brother's case and unsatisfactorily dealt with in the debate at Grand Rapids, that the Soviet regime was in fact religious in character. This profound misunderstanding of the nature of the USSR is the key to finding another significant flaw in what is in general his circular argument". Then, a week before the book's publication, Hitchens wrote: "It is obvious much of what I say arises out of my attempt to debate religion with him [Christopher Hitchens], it would be absurd to pretend that much of what I say here is not intended to counter or undermine arguments he presented in his book, God Is Not Great, published in 2007".

Synopsis

The book is made up of an introduction, three parts divided into chapters, and an epilogue. Each individual section is prefaced by a verse taken from the Book of Psalms from the King James Bible.

"Praying was a comical folly, hymns were so much wailing at an empty heaven, churches were absurd buildings in urgent need of conversion into something useful, or of demolition. Anyone could write a portentous book and call it scripture".

— The Rage Against God, Chapter One

Introduction

In the introduction, Hitchens explains that the book will not consist of a rebuttal of the arguments made by the new atheists, but will rather be an account of how he "became convinced, by reason and experience, of a form of Christianity that is modest, accomodating, and thoughtful—but ultimately uncompromising about its vital truth", followed by an examination of what he sees as "the fundamental failures of three atheistic arguments".

Part One: A Personal Journey Through Atheism

Hitchens begins Chapter One, The generation who were too clever to believe, by recalling an incident at boarding school when he burnt his bible—the thing which he then knew "was the enemy's book, the keystone of the arch I wished to bring down". He then quotes from W. Somerset Maugham's novel Of Human Bondage and writes that, like the hero of that novel, "I smugly congratulated myself on being able to be virtuous without hope of reward or fear of punishment". He then describes his own perceived failings over a period of many years as a "braggart sinner", including promoting "cruel revolutionary rubbish" to others, to his own deep regret. Hitchens then describes how his generation were sure it "had grown out of the nursery myths of God, angels, and Heaven. We had modern medicine, penicillin, jet engines and the welfare state, the United Nations, and 'science' which explained everything that needed to be explained...I knew all the standard arguments (who does not) about how Christianity had stolen its myths and feast days from pagan faiths, and was another in a long line of fairy stories about gods who die and rise again. Since all the great faiths disagreed, they couldn't all be right. Jesus was curiously similar to Mithras, or was it Horus? Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, easy as pie, not in the sky, and made still more facile by the way such youthful epiphanies are applauded by many teachers and other influential adults, and endorsed by the general culture of my country, which views God as a nuisance and religion as an embarrassment or worse". He then cites a letter written by Virginia Woolf in 1928 (concerning the conversion to Christianity by T. S. Eliot) as an example of the "widely accepted dismissal of faith by the intelligent and the educated". He also identifies that behind the "fear of submission to God" may have been a fear of becoming like their conformist who were being left behind by the events in the 1960s (a fear Hitchens describes as being captured well by A. S. Byatt in the novel The Virgin in the Garden).

  I had spotted the dry, disillusioned and apparently disintersted atheism of so many intellectuals, artists, and leaders of our age. I liked their crooked smiles, their knowing worldliness and their air of finding human credulity amusing. I envied their confidence that we lived in a place where there was no darkness, where death was the end, the dead were gone, and there would be no judgement. It did not cross my mind that they, like religious apologists, might have any personal reasons for holding to this disbelief. It certainly did not cross my mind that I had any low motives for it. Unlike Christians, atheists have a high opinion of their own virtue.

The Rage Against God, Chapter One

[[:Image:CKeeler1.jpg|thumb|right|100px|Christine Keeler in 1963]]In the second chapter, A loss of confidence, Hitchens explores further reasons for his generation's disillusionment, including the authorities' handling and evasiveness over the Suez Crisis—"this failure and dishonesty sapped and rotted everything and everyone from the local vicar and the village policeman to the grander figures in the nation", the funeral of Winston Churchill ("a cheap and second rate modernity was to replace the decrepit magnificence we had grown used to") and the Profumo Affair, whose effect of introducing Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies into national life meant that it "had gone rotten". Hitchens begins Chapter Three, The seeds of atheism, by recounting his experience of religious education as a school pupil in the early 1960s, and how by the standards of 2010 his Christian education was "intensive, purposeful, and single-minded", and that the "imagery of the Last Judgement was still powerful currency to us". He also recounts how at the age of 15 he fully accepted scientific explanations for the material universe, including evolution and the laws of nature, (and how "the use of the majestic word 'laws' curiously turned the mind away from speculation about whose laws they might conceivably be") and "longing for a world of clean, squared off structures, places where there was no darkness". He also recalls repugnance at "anything which suggested the existence or presence of death" and describes evocative moments in the novels Great Expectations and Moonfleet which had a profound effect on him in this connection. He then describes a shift in his moral positions, which became "fierce opposites of what had always been taught. I regarded marriage as something to be avoided, abortion as a sensible necessity and safeguard, homosexuality as very nearly admirable. I renounced patriotism, too, so completely that I would one day shock myself and my fellow revolutionaries with the chilly logical conclusion of this decision. I began embracing the silly pro-Soviet pacifism of nuclear disarmament, with its bogus claims of moral superiority". Chapter Four, The last battleships, is a lament for the Britain Hitchens grew up in—the "noble austerity" and security of his childhood; the pre-eminence and prevalence of the Royal Navy in public life;

HMS Vanguard, Evoked by Hitchens in Chapter Four of The Rage Against God to signify the once mighty and then fallen Royal Navy

"improbably distant" foreign lands; and the beauty and magnificence of steam railway locomotives. Hitchens writes that he "lived at the end of an era that is now as distant and gone as the Lost City of Atlantis". Chapter Five, Britain's pseudo-religion and the cult of Winston Churchill, is an exploration of what Hitchens views as the pseudo-religion of the greatness surrounding Winston Churchill, and the perceived glory of World War Two heroes, whose central ceremony was the annual commemoration Remembrance Sunday, at which was sung "Oh God, Our Help In Ages Past", "a hymn which seemed which seemed to have been carved from granite". Hitchens describes this as a "great cult of noble, patriotic death" for which symbols can be found everywhere, including the Cenotaph in Whitehall; a sculpture of an infantryman by Charles Sargeant Jagger at Paddington Station;

Detail from Jagger's Royal Artillery Memorial, Platform 1, Paddington Station

sculpted bronze children in the garden city of Port Sunlight; and the Metropolitan Railway memorial at Baker Street Station. Hitchens writes that the "only comparable cult of heroic death is Russia, or to be strictly accurate, the former Soviet Union". Hitchens then expresses great respect for the fallen of the wars, but adds "the wars in which they were asked to die do not, once examined, seem as noble and pure as they did when I first learned about them. And the proper remembering of dead warriors, though right and fitting, is a very different thing from the Christian religion. The Christian Church has been powerfully damaged by letting itself be confused with love of country and the making of great wars". In Chapter Six, Homo soveticus, Hitchens recalls the grimness of his time as a foreign correspondent in the Soviet Union, and a terrifying trip to Mogadishu. The experiences convinced him that "his own civilisation was infintely precious and utterly vulnerable, and that I was obliged to try and protect it. When you have seen a place from which the whole apparatus of trust, civility and peace has been stripped, you are conscious as never before about the value of such things—and more curious than before about their origins, not in wealth or power, but in the mind of man and of the better angels of his nature". In Chapter Seven, A rediscovery of lost faith, Hitchens charts his return to Christianity after becoming disillusioned with what he calls the secular faith of revolutionary socialism. He describes as part of this process a particularly powerful episode in which during a visit to Beaune in the South of France he comes across the Rogier van der Weyden painting The Last Judgement: "I gaped, my mouth actually hanging open. These people did not appear remote or from the ancient past; they were my own generation...I had a strong sense of religion being a thing of the present day, not imprisoned under thick layers of time" and "I had absolutely no doubt that I was among the damned". Hitchens then recounts a series of subsequent events that reinforced his refound faith: rediscovering Christmas, singing Carols, getting married in a church, and his wife's baptism. In Chapter Eight, The decline of Christianity, Hitchens explores a number of reasons for the diminishing of Christianity in British life, including the leaders of churches lending their support to the war policies of politicians ("People had gone to war for things they completely believed in, and had been completely betrayed"); the Church relinquishing control of many of its secondary schools to the state; a "commitment to social welfare at home and liberal anti-colonialism abroad became—in many cases—an acceptable substitute for Christian faith; the secularisation of schools; and the BBC undergoing "a transition from official Christianity to official religious neutrality".

Part Two: Addressing Atheism: Three Failed Arguments

  In their attempt to argue that effective and binding codes can be developed without a deity, atheists often mistake inferior codes, of 'common decency', for absolute moral systems. The Golden Rule, or doing as you would be done by, is such a code. But the fact that men can arrive at the Golden Rule without religion does not mean that man can arrive at the Christian moral code without religion. Christianity requires much more, and above all does not expect to see charity returned.

The Rage Against God, Chapter Ten

In Chapter Nine, Are conflicts fought in the name of religion conflicts about religion? Hitchens examines one of the main criticisms of religion by its detractors: that religion is a source of conflict—which he labels a "cruel factual misunderstanding", and analyses a number of wars and conflicts that are ostensibly religiously motivated—including The Troubles and the Arab–Israeli conflict—to contend that the conflicts were tribal in nature and "over the ownership and control of territory". Hitchens asserts that "those who blame religion for wars tend to do so only when it suits them to do so, and without paying much attention to the details". Chapter Ten, Is it possible to determine what is right and what is wrong without God?, is an exploration by Hitchens of the issue of whether morality can be determined without the concept of God. Hitchens believes that this represents a crucial weakness in the arguments of atheists: "They have a fundamental inability to concede that to be effectively absolute a moral code needs to be beyond human power to alter". He also takes issue with what he sees as Christopher Hitchens's flawed assertion in God is Not Great that "the order to love thy neighbour 'as thyself' is too extreme and and too strenuos to be obeyed". Hitchens quotes atheist Thomas Nagel's writing in his book The Last Word that "there might still be thought to be a religious threat in the existence of the laws of physics themselves, and indeed the existence of anything at all—but it seems to be less alarming to most atheists" as a rare example of an atheist not "denouncing all religious belief as stupid". Hitchens concludes the chapter by writing "in all my experience in 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". Hitchens begins Chapter Eleven, Are atheist states not actually atheist, by asserting that "those who reject God's absolute authority, preferring their own, are far more ready to persecute than Christians have been and are growing more inclined to do so over time. Each revolutionary generation reliably repeats the savagery". He then historically lists French revolutionary terror; events surrounding the Bolshevik revolution; Holodomor and the Soviet famine of 1932–1933; the attendant barbarity surrounding Stalin's five year plans, repeated in the Great Leap Forward in China; atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge; and widespread Human rights abuses in Cuba under Castro. Hitchens then quotes the Hungarian communist George Lukacs "Communist ethics make it the highest duty to accept the necessity of acting wickedly. This is the greatest sacrifice the revolution asks from us. The conviction of the true communist is that evil transforms itself into good through the dialectics of historical evolution". Hitchens then quotes the positions taken by Nikolai Bukharin, who viewed "ethics as useless, fetishistic, survivals of old class standards", and Leon Trotsky, who wrote in Their Morals and Ours "Whoever does not care to return to Moses, Christ or Mohammed; whoever is not satisfied with eclectic hodge-podges must acknowledge that morality is a product of social development; that there is nothing invariable about it; that it serves social interests; that these interests are contradictory; that morality more than any other form of ideology has a class character".

Part Three: The League of the Militant Godless

Leon Trotsky

Vladimir Lenin

Hitchens begins Chapter Twelve, Fake miracles and grotesque relics, by contrasting a peasant's naïve belief in relics and faith healing with the "materialist intellectual's gullible open mouthed willingness to believe anything. The biggest fake miracle staged in human history was the claim that the Soviet Union was a new civilisation of equality, peace, love, truth, science and progress. Everyone knows that it was a prison, a slum, a return to primitive barbarism, a kingdom of lies where scientists and doctors feared offending the secret police, and that its elite were corrupt and lived in secret luxury". To support this contention, Hitchens cites Walter Duranty's denying the existence of the great Ukrainian famine, "though he knew, directly and personally, that it was taking place" and refers to Sidney and Beatrice Webb's book Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation as a "mass of self-deceiving lies" which included an acceptance that the 1937 Moscow show trials under Stalin were "genuine criminal prosecutions". Hitchens asserts that people who would have apologised for Stalin in his day today promote a number of causes, including the cultural and sexual revolutions, introducing democracy in Muslim countries, and "the intolerant and puritan secular fundamentalism that gathers around the belief in man made global warming". Hitchens writes that "these beliefs allow their supporters to feel superior to others and pursue a heaven on earth whose righteousness reflects on them". Hitchens then examines the suppression of religion in the USSR, and in particular Christianity. This intolerance of religion—which was originally instigated by Lenin, "the absolute atheist, lover of violence and begetter of the 1917 putsch—included banning the teaching of religion to children (which was punishable by the death penalty), the building of hundreds of anti-God museums, the creation of a antireligious organisation of Soviet workers, and the mass executions, incarcerations, exile, and persecution of Russian Orthodox priests. Hitchens begins Chapter Thirteen, Provoking a bloody war with the Church, by quoting William Henry Chamberlin in 1935 in the Christian Science Monitor: "In Russia the world is witnessing the first effort to destroy completely any belief in supernatural interpretation of life". Hitchens writes "Chamberlin compares communism with religion, describing it a 'faith without God'. But he stresses the difference between the two: 'What distinguishes Communism from the fanatical authoritarian religions with which it has so many points in common is of course its rigid, dogmatic and uncompromising exclusion of any element in life lying outside the confines of the present material world...truth and objectivity are of minor importance. The main purpose is to defame and denounce in every way.'" Hitchens then charts the consequnces of rthis exclusion: hostility towards Christmas, breaking the continuity of tradition and prayer, "systematic, cunning malice" towards religion, secular intolerance and terror, and imprisonment and executions at the Solovetsky concentration camp exposed by Frederick Arthur Mackenzie in his 1930 book The Russian crucifixion: the full story of the persecution of religion under Bolshevism. Hitchens asserts that throughout the USSR's history "the regime's institutional loathing for the teaching of religion, and its desire to eradicate it, survived every doctrinal detour and swerve" and that "this Godless emptiness helps to explain why post-Communist Russia has struggled so hard to cope with unaccustomed liberty". In the final chapter, The great debate, Hitchens analyses a number of arguments and statements made by his brother, Christopher. Hitchens remarks that the "coincidence in instinct, taste, and thought between my brother and the Bolsheviks and their sympathisers is striking and undeniable" and then proceeds to examine Christopher's:

• Nominating the "blood-encrusted putschist conspirator and apostle of revolutionary terror" Leon Trotsky for an edition of the BBC's radio series Great Lives;
• In a discussion in 2009 with Robert Service, praising Trotsky for his moral courage;
• Stating that "One of Lenin's great achievements, in my opinion, is to create a secular Russia".

Hitchens writes "It would be crude and false to identify my brother as some kind of fellow-traveller of the Bolshevik regime...Yet is there perhaps a vestigial sympathy with the great experiment, and a far from vestigal loathing for those things it extirpated—monarchy, tradition, patriotism and faith?" Hitchens asks whether "some sentimental belief that socialism might have succeeded under other leadership still lingers in my brother's mind", and then takes issue with his brother's belief that the personality cult surrounding Stalin was itself a religion, and that religion is a form of child abuse, a view shared by Richard Dawkins. Hitchens contends that "to use the expression 'child abuse' in this context—of relgious education by parents or teachers—is to equate such education with a universally hated and despised crime. Such language prepares the way for intolerance", and is propaganda and not based on reason. Hitchens then examines what he sees as the new atheists exhibiting a totalitarian intolerance towards religion. He ends the chapter by giving an overview of the state of religion in contemporary Britain and the emergence of a "new and intolerant utopianism", concluding that "The Rage Against God is loose".

Epilogue

In a short epilogue Hitchens describes how after a debate with his brother in Grand Rapids in 2008 "the longest quarrel of my life seemed to be unexpectedly over", and how he held no hope of converting his brother, who he describes as having "bricked himself up high in his atheist tower, with slits instead of windows from which to shoot arrows at the faithful".

Critical reception

In the wake of its UK publication in March 2010, the book received a number of mostly favourable reviews in both left- and right-leaning media publications.

Christopher Howse, reviewing the book in The Daily Telegraph, concentrated on the moral arguments in the book, and agreed with Hitchens that "to determine what is right and what is wrong without God, is difficult", as well as with Hitchens's observation that "God offers authoritative moral laws, and judgment upon those who knowingly break them. The folly is to suppose that because their breach seems to go unpunished, the laws no longer exist". Also in The Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore wrote that the book "tries to do two things at once. One is to bash up modern militant atheism with all the author's polemical skill. The other is to give an autobiographical account of how, in our time, an intelligent man's faith may recover" and that "it is also a key part of Christian understanding that truth is not necessarily discerned by an intellectual elite alone...Peter Hitchens's case is that militant atheists dimly sense this truth, and this is what makes them so angry. If God does not exist, after all, why the rage against Him? God's really unforgivable characteristic is that He is alive and well and quite impervious to the assaults even of people as brilliant as Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens".

In a positive review in Standpoint magazine, Michael Nazir Ali wrote that the book "is a rattling good read. It is also personal testimony. Having effectively analysed our current malaise, it sets out a programme for redressing the problems" and that "One of the abiding canards nailed by Peter Hitchens is that religion causes conflict. He does this by showing that so-called "religious" wars had many other elements to them, such as greed for territory, political ambition and nationalism. His repeated references to Soviet brutality reveal that secular ideologies have caused more suffering in recent times than any conflict associated with religion". Like Howse, Ali also picked up on the moral issues explored in the book, stating "The question is not whether atheists can be moral but from where the moral codes come to which we seek to adhere."

In a more critical review in The New Statesman, Sholto Byrnes wrote that "Hitchens makes his case forcefully, passionately and intelligently" but "makes too much connection between the ill deeds of atheists and their atheism" and that "If you want to argue, as Hitchens does, that atheists' crimes stem from their atheism, you lay yourself open to the polar, and matching, opposite: that religion is to blame for the evil acts of the religious." Byrnes at the same time conceded that "In as much as the absence of God leaves any system of morality floundering when it comes to unarguable proof of its truth, Hitchens is on to something. An atheist society does not have the in-built defences against the will of a tyrannous majority that religion would supply, for instance". Byrnes also reviewed the book in The Independent, where he wrote that there is "much to provoke and to treasure" in the book, but also questioned the validity of a number of conclusions reached by Hitchens, for example, that "atheists 'actively wish for disorder and meaninglessness'".

In a sympathetic review in The Guardian, Rupert Shortt wrote that "Hitchens does not seek to mount a comprehensive defence of Christianity. He is wise to avoid deeper philosophical and theological waters, because his strengths lie elsewhere. His more manageable aim is to expose what he holds to be three major fallacies underlying God Is Not Great: that conflict fought in the name of religion is really always about faith; that "it is ultimately possible to know with confidence what is right and what is wrong without acknowledging the existence of God"; and that "atheist states are not actually atheist". Shortt contends that Hitchens largely succeeds in these aims, but questions his assertion that there is a link between conscience and a belief in God: "Conscience is reasoned judgment. Most strands of Christianity have always maintained that good actions are good in themselves, not because God commands them".

In The Spectator, Quentin Letts claimed that the book represented "a reaction against the boastfulness of mortals who, with their big state and their soundbites and their stratagems, promise far, far more than they can deliver. Hitchens is a caution against the sinful pride of today’s politicians, of whatever stripe".

Release details

The book was first published in the UK on 15 March 2010 by Continuum Publishing Corporation, and is due for release in the US on 1 June 2010 by Zondervan, with the additional subtitle How Atheism Led Me to Faith.

Bibliography

• Hitchens, Peter (2010). The Rage Against God. Continuum Publishing Corporation. ISBN 1441105727.
• Hitchens, Christopher (2007). God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Twelve Books. ISBN 1843545748.
• Nagel, Thomas (2001). The Last Word. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195149831.
• Chamberlin, William (2007). Russia's Iron Age. Little, Brown. ISBN 1406768200.

See also

• Christian apologetics
• Religious conversion
• Criticism of atheism
• USSR Anti-Religious Campaign (1917-1921)
• USSR Anti-Religious Campaign (1921–1928)
• USSR Anti-Religious Campaign (1928-1941)
• Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union

External links

• Video interview with Peter Hitchens produced by Zondervan, the US publisher of The Rage Against God
• Peter Hitchens interview in The Catholic Herald about The Rage Against God
• Peter Hitchens appearance on Premier Christian Radio in which he discusses The Rage Against God with Adam Rutherford, an atheist scientific broadcaster and writer

Category:2010 books Category:Criticism of atheism Category:Books about atheism Category:Books critical of communism and communists Category:Christian apologetics