On the 27th November the former UK Prime Minister andA eponymous founder of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation met with the author, journalist and self proclaimed - anti-theist', Christopher Hitchens in downtown Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall to debate one of the defining questions of the last few decades and certainly TH E defining question of the post ...

Jill Henderson replied to Richard Joshua Parker's discussion 'Anti-theist Here'

Richard Joshua Parker added a discussion

Thanks to Michael for the link

Christopher Hitchens photographed at home in Washington, DC. Photograph: Jamie James Medina for The Observer

I wasn't sure what, or perhaps whom, to expect as the door opened at Christopher Hitchens's top-floor apartment in downtown Washington. The last time I had interviewed the renowned polemicist, author, literary critic and new resident in the medical state he's called "Tumortown" was in 2005. On that occasion, after a 5am finish to our extravagantly lubricated conversation, it was I who had felt the pressing need of hospital attention.

Since then there have been two dramatic changes in his circumstances. The first was the international bestselling success of his 2007 anti-theist tome God is Not Great. After decades of acclaimed but essentially confined labour, Hitchens suddenly broke out to a mass audience, becoming arguably the global figurehead of the so-called New Atheists. Almost overnight he was upgraded from intellectual notoriety, as an outspoken supporter of the invasion of Iraq, to the business end of mainstream fame. In America, in particular, he has reached that rare position for a journalist of becoming a news story himself.

Unfortunately the news, which provided the second personal transformation, was that in June he was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus, a malignancy whose survival ratings do not make soothing bedtime reading. As restraint is a quality for which neither Hitchens nor his critics are known, the ironies proved irresistible to many commentators. For the religiously zealous, the arch atheist suffering a mortal illness spoke of divine retribution – the unacknowledged irony being that belief in such a vindictive god served only to endorse Hitchens's thesis.

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In June Christopher Hitchens, the hard-drinking polemicist and atheist, met his toughest opponent yet when he was diagnosed with cancer. The question on many lips was: would his illness alter his beliefs – on Iraq, on Islam, on God? At home in Washington, with a large glass of Johnnie Walker to hand, he responds with characteristic combativeness

I wasn't sure what, or perhaps whom, to expect as the door opened at Christopher Hitchens's top-floor apartment in downtown Washington. The last time I had interviewed the renowned polemicist, author, literary critic and new resident in the medical state he's called "Tumortown" was in 2005. On that occasion, after a 5am finish to our extravagantly lubricated conversation, it was I who had felt the pressing need of hospital attention.

Since then there have been two dramatic changes in his circumstances. The first was the international bestselling success of his 2007 anti-theist tome God is Not Great. After decades of acclaimed but essentially confined labour, Hitchens suddenly broke out to a mass audience, becoming arguably the global figurehead of the so-called New Atheists. Almost overnight he was upgraded from intellectual notoriety, as an outspoken supporter of the invasion of Iraq, to the business end of mainstream fame. In America, in particular, he has reached that rare position for a journalist of becoming a news story himself.

Unfortunately the news, which provided the second personal transformation, was that in June he was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus, a malignancy whose survival ratings do not make soothing bedtime reading. As restraint is a quality for which neither Hitchens nor his critics are known, the ironies proved irresistible to many commentators. For the religiously zealous, the arch atheist suffering a mortal illness spoke of divine retribution – the unacknowledged irony being that belief in such a vindictive god served only to endorse Hitchens's thesis.

For more secular moralists, a different kind of cosmic accountancy was at work. The celebrated drinker and smoker who once claimed that "booze and fags are happiness" had succumbed to a cancer most often associated with drinking and smoking. Having previously gone so far as to promote the benefits of teenage smoking, he offered a public recantation of sorts. "I might as well say to anyone watching," he announced in a TV interview, "if you can hold it down on the smokes and the cocktails you may be well advised to do so."

Hitchens had already impregnated the story with preemptive meaning in his prologue to his recent memoir, Hitch-22, in which he meditated on the unpredictable incursion of death. One motivation to undertake the book, he confessed, was the need to do so before it was "too 'late'". As he wrote those words, he had no knowledge of the tumour growing in his oesophagus which has metastasised in his lymph nodes and lung. It was not until he was on a promotional tour for the book that he fell ill and was diagnosed.

There followed the minor spectacle of prayer groups invoking the unbeliever in their spiritual communications and even, in September, the informal designation of an "Everybody pray for Hitchens day". While avoiding any direct involvement, the writer professed himself touched by the attention. But for such an astute connoisseur of the form, these ironies were no doubt just a little too resounding for Hitchens to appreciate.

On top of which there was the distant thud of literary biography. One of Hitchens's great heroes is George Orwell, who no sooner produced his signature achievements (Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four) than was confronted with the prospect of his premature demise. Orwell cut a frail, bed-ridden figure towards the end of his short life, a fate that seemed to confirm his ascetic form of courage.

All very well for the man who nursed his TB alone in the damp reclusion of Jura, but infirmity was never going to be an image that sat well with Hitchens, a walking definition of the cosmopolitan bon viveur. The early post-chemo photographs and appearances were not encouraging. Without his trademark foppish fringe, he seemed to have undergone an Samsonian reduction. The few wisps of hair remaining mocked the mischievously boyish countenance that had duly withdrawn behind gloomy eyes. He looked old and battered. He looked like a 61-year-old man with stage-four cancer.

He'd told me by email that he had good and bad days. As I'd pushed him for the interview, it was with a certain trepidation that I stood clutching an effete bottle of white wine – I assumed that his usual tipple of whisky had been removed from the menu. At first, when he greeted me, I wasn't entirely convinced it was one of his better days. Although he looked fitter and sharper than he had in those earlier images, having lost a little weight and with his head now more flatteringly bald, the apartment was in darkness and he invited me in to watch the sunset. It all seemed rather forlorn.

If it triggered his cancer, burning the candle at both ends, as he recently remarked, also produced a "lovely light". The golden twilight over the American capital possessed its own illuminating charm, not least in the way that it seemed to recharge Hitchens. So it was that for a considerable part of the next 24 hours he held forth with unhesitating eloquence on a wealth of subjects, including the Iraq war and its likely aftermath, the global jihadist threat, his love of debate, romance, his illness and, of course, the persistently intrusive claims of religion.

When he initially became ill, Hitchens thought that he was suffering from exhaustion, brought on by overwork and age. "I knew something was wrong," he says. "I kept saying to myself, when the book tour is over I really will go and see a doctor."

He collapsed first on the New York leg of his tour, and had fluid drained from around his heart. Then an oncologist performed a biopsy. Most authors would have called off the rest of the dates at this juncture. But Hitchens went on to Florida, Chicago and Philadelphia, before collapsing again, this time at Boston airport, a venue he recommends for a speedy medical response.

The surgeons took a lump of tumour for analysis and opened what's known as a "window" in the pericardium to allow fluid drainage. Since when he's been undergoing chemotherapy at three-week intervals. The tumour has shrunk but not sufficiently for radiotherapy, and he was about to start a new course of a different cocktail of drugs. At the same time he's been having his genome sequenced and that of the tumour – though, since this sci-fi approach to cancer treatment is still in its infancy, it is unlikely to offer any help to Hitchens.

"The worst days," he says, "are when you feel foggy in the head – chemo-brain they call it. It's awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned. You don't have any motive, which is bad. You don't care what's going to happen to you. That lasts sometimes two days. And when that comes with nausea – even if you have eaten, you have to go and be sick – it's very upsetting."

But there are also some more favourable signs. For instance, he hasn't yet had any trouble swallowing, a problem frequently associated with oesophageal cancer. And his immune system remains strong: "I haven't picked up a sneeze or anything like that."

Which is just as well, because Hitchens was never going to be a natural candidate for a prune-juice and brown-rice lifestyle. He was grateful for my white wine, but only because that's what I drink and he was low on stocks. For himself he poured a generous measure of Johnnie Walker. None of his doctors, he says, has issued any kind of fatwa on booze, though you sense he probably hasn't demanded a ruling.

Whatever his health regime, it doesn't appear to have affected his work levels. The pugnacious weekly Slate column, the far-reaching literary essays for the Atlantic Monthly, and the Vanity Fair dispatches are all filed on time. And he continues to participate in public debates. Last month in New York he sliced through the Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan's problematising evasions with stinging precision, and later this month he's taking on Tony Blair in Toronto.

He disputes his industriousness on the grounds that he's not currently writing a book. "I spend a lot of time asleep or lying down." Yet the spacious apartment he shares with his wife, the writer Carol Blue, and their 18-year-old daughter, Antonia, shows few signs of recuperative comforts. With its bare floorboards, sparse furniture, baby grand piano and teetering stalagmites of books, it resembles something a Hollywood set designer might have come up with had she been asked to create an intellectual's lair.

He's said before that his life is his writing, which includes priority over his family, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that his life is an argument in which writing takes the lead role. It's notable that there's scarcely any mention of his wife or his children or former lovers in his memoir. He stated in the book that this was out of respect for others' privacy. If he had named one woman, he adds, he would have have had to go into detail about them all. "Couldn't do it selectively, it would lead to nothing but pain."

One of the women he didn't name was Anna Wintour, the legendarily glacial editor of American Vogue. They had a year-long affair in the mid-70s.

"It was transatlantic, very stormy, tempestuous, passionate," he says, "all of this enhanced by having to fly the Atlantic the whole time. Otherwise it might not have gone on for so long because really, although she's amazing, we didn't have much in common."

Other than fashion, I joke. Among his many struggles, the one waged against the tyranny of the pressed and laundered outfit should not be overlooked. Still, the absence of women in the foreground of his memoir leaves the impression of a life consciously determined by the intellect, rather than haphazardly shaped by emotions. It's an effect that's underlined in his writing by a Zelig-like presence at the great moments of history, as though they are the dots that join together to form an inexorable continuity.

He shakes his head. "Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can't make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands."

In America it's been suggested by some religious types that his condition could prompt a revision of his atheism. It's not a hypothesis to which he grants much respect.

"So now I know that there's another life in my body that can't outlive me but can kill me, it's the perfect moment to gratefully acknowledge that I'm a product of a cosmic design? Who thinks up these arguments? Actually it's an insulting question: 'I hear you're dying. Well wouldn't it be a good time to get rid of your beliefs?' Try it on them and see how they would like it. 'Christian, right? Cancer of the tits?' 'Well, yes, since you ask.' 'Well, can I suggest you now drop all that tripe?'"

In Britain, I say, the notion that he will undergo some kind of deathbed conversion has minimal traction. What you find more often here is the accusation that the New Atheism, as expounded by Hitchens and his fellow bestsellers, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, is a "militant" or even "fundamentalist" attack on the numinous and the unknowable.

Hitchens once wrote a line that has almost gained the status of philosophical epigram or even scientific dictum: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." Although it echoes Wittgenstein's famous injunction regarding the ineffable – "Whereof we cannot speak, therefore we must be silent" – Hitchens's version is less a "no entry" sign than a civic reminder to place rubbish in the bin.

In fact, you could say that in God is Not Great Hitchens ignored his own advice by conducting lengthy theological and historical research to assemble his case. His beef, in any event, is not really against faith itself, but against the way that all faiths are compelled to make irrational demands on believers and non-believers alike.

Hitchens dislikes the "New Atheist" title. "It isn't really new," he says, "except it coincides with huge advances made in the natural sciences. And there's been an unusually violent challenge to pluralist values by the supporters of at least one monotheism apologised for quite often by the sympathisers of others. Then they say we're fundamentalists. A stupid idea like that is hard to kill because any moron can learn it in 10 seconds and repeat it as if for the first time. But since there isn't a single position that any of us holds on anything that depends upon an assertion that can't be challenged, I guess that will die out or they'll get bored of it."

As for the notion that his brand of atheism is reductive or joyless, it's religion, he contests, that is "cosmically hopeless, as is all the related masochism that goes with it – you've got to spend your entire life making up for the vermin you are. What is that if not degrading? We don't do that to people. We say you may as well know you're a primate, but take heart, primates are capable of great things."

Nonetheless, Hitchens mentions a "narrow but quite deep difference" between himself and Dawkins. Unlike the evangelical biologist, he has no wish to convert everyone in the world to his point of view, even if it were possible. In other words, he savours the counterargument. Like John Stuart Mill, he is aware of the empty end of achieved objectives. The true satisfaction lies in the means. Although Hitchens is often seen as a provocateur or a contrarian, and both are indeed aspects of his character, at heart he's incurably in love with the dialectic.

He cut his teeth on dialectical materialism as a teenage Trotskyist, and it was the analytical method that eventually put paid to any allegiance, as it were, to the political madness. The past 40 years have amounted to a long and serpentine political journey. As he relates in his memoir, it started out at Oxford with his keeping "two sets of book", one for the puritanical group of revolutionary socialists with whom he campaigned against the Vietnam war, and the other for the conservative socialites with whom he caroused at black-tie balls. And it reached its furthest distance from origin with his support for George W Bush and the second Iraq war.

Along the way, he says, "I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness. Amazing. My conservative friends look at me and say, 'Welcome to the club. What took you so long?' Well that's what it took and I think it's worth recording."

The hinge events, of course, were the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. He had previously held positions that were unpopular on the left – preferring the British government to the Argentinian fascist junta during the Falklands conflict, and calling for American intervention to stop the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia – but his support for the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan proved to be a step too far for his anti-imperialist comrades.

Hitchens genuinely believes radical or jihadist Islam to be an existential threat to civilisation. First because it is a pronounced enemy of free speech and social liberty and has succeeded in intimidating and silencing civilians across "an extraordinary number of countries in Europe" and the rest of the world. And second, he says, "because it has potential access to weapons of mass destruction." In the end, he argues, there are no pain-free options. You have to choose which future regret you're going to have.

"I was at a Hezbollah rally in Beirut about two and a half years ago," he says. "Very striking. Everyone should go. But of the many things that impressed me about it, having the mushroom cloud as the party flag in an election campaign was the main one. You wouldn't want to look back and think, I wish I'd noticed that being run up. Now I can give you all the reasons that it's bombast on their part. Still, I know which regret I'd rather have."

There appear to be two main criticisms of this stance. Either people think he's a bonkers Islamophobe – though many who do were content enough to leave Muslims to their bloody fate in Bosnia – or they believe such antagonistic talk only serves to create the problem it seeks to prevent. Hitchens is contemptuous of the former, but scathing of the latter. He says that those who tell him to tread more softly believe that the price of not doing so is more violence. "Oh I see, so you're always aware when you're contesting the holders of this view of the threat that lies behind it? Would you care for their opinions if it wasn't for that? Or are you telling me you'd be reading their stuff just for the sheer pleasure of it. I don't think so. If you say that this looks like war, you're accused of liking it. Not true. Demonstrably not true."

Demonstrably? Certainly he can sound like he enjoys the conflict. He has said that he experienced "a feeling of exhilaration" while watching the World Trade Centre collapse on 11 September. "Here we are then," he later recalled thinking, "in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose."

He says the exhilaration was born of a sudden if overdue sense of clarity.

"What I felt is that we'd been suffering from all this for some time. And yet people's main interest seemed to be in ignoring it or denying it, or if they were politicians or soldiers, running away from it: abandoning Somalia, leaving Afghanistan to rot, trying to subsume Islamism into multiculturalism. I thought: until yesterday, they knew they were at war, and we didn't. And now we do: of course that's exhilarating. It was the feeling that the somnambulance was over. Of course it turned out to be a very brief wake-up call, followed by a very long nap: 'Turned over in bed briefly. It's 8.59? No, it can't possibly be!'"

If 9/11 was the decree nisi, then the divorce from the left was made absolute by the war in Iraq. He had been a persuasive opponent of the first Gulf war in 1991, arguing that Bush senior was not liberating Kuwait but simply restoring the status quo. Slowly he changed his mind, and he describes the process:

"I said that Bush [senior] may have used the rhetoric of anti-fascism but he didn't mean it. And then I said, yeah, but what if he had meant it? Would I therefore be obliged by my own argument to be in favour? The answer was 'yes'. And then I said, well what do you care how they argue? You should be arguing it yourself. And I found I couldn't get out of that."

It's an instructive piece of reasoning. For while it suggests he remained true to his dialectical word by examining the counterargument, it's also a kind of a first-principles assessment of principles. As such it could be applied to countless other situations. For example, should the west have intervened in Cambodia when stories first began to emerge of the genocide taking place there under the Khmer Rouge? "I don't think there was a policy," he says, a little lamely, "so I can't say that there should have been one. I don't think it's a real question."

His only major regret, as far as remaining silent goes, is what he didn't say about Robert Mugabe. "That makes me wince. More than wince. I'd met him a couple of times and I knew that he had in him a terrible capacity for fanaticism, absolutism, and I didn't say as much about that as I could have done. If I asked myself about why I didn't, I'm sure the answer is because I didn't want to give ammunition to the other side."

As an aside on Mugabe, he makes one of those observations that are so precisely to the point that you wonder why so few other commentators ever get round to coming to it. "Darfur, Zimbabwe, Burma, North Korea, anywhere that the concept of human rights doesn't exist, it's always the Chinese at backstop. And always for reasons that you could write down in three words: blood for oil."

But the problem with Hitchens's inductive reasoning about Iraq is that it didn't and couldn't take into account future outcomes – namely the relative likelihood of death and destruction. In the light of what unfolded in the wake of the occupation, these were the matters that I wanted to put to him the following day.

First, though, there was dinner. We walked to a local restaurant where Hitchens knows the barman and the barman knows what Hitchens drinks, and I asked whether his cancer diagnosis had altered his political outlook at all. He looked mystified at the question, but I explained that he used to say that he woke up angry, full of disgust at the world. Was it still possible to feel so strongly about external enemies when the internal one had taken such malevolent root in his body?

"It's the sort of alternative that doesn't present itself to you," he says. "You don't think, 'Why do I care when I could be thinking about my daunting nemesis?'"

The banality of cancer seems to irk him almost as much as its lethality. Lacking any dialectical substance, it affords few opportunities to escape platitude or avoid cliche. It's a big subject, but it's essentially small talk, and Hitchens's style requires the elevated registers of the epic and the ironic. Anything less is like asking a high-wire artist to perform his act at ground level.

Yet his engagement remains unusually engaging, in large part because with him it's never just about politics. His frame of cultural interests is far too large to be squeezed into the straitjacket of dogma and doctrine. He chided me a couple of times for not asking him about his first love, literature. "I wish people would put in a bit more of that because it's also what I think of when I say grand things like defending civilisation."

It's no coincidence that the political thinkers he most often references are also gifted writers: Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Thomas Paine, even Thomas Jefferson. The first two, like Hitchens, committed anti-totalitarians, and the second pair voices from the only revolution – the American – whose praises he continues to sing.

Hitchens's friend Ian Buruma wrote a damning review of Hitch-22, in which he noted that Hitchens displays "a tendency toward adulation and loathing [that] comes naturally with the weakness for great causes."

Was that fair?

"I think that probably is true of me, that I can be 110% for or against people," he says, pausing meaningfully. "I don't know whether that's meant as a criticism or not."

We repair back to the apartment for a nightcap or two, and I fear it is I, the ostensibly well one, who crashes first. The spare room had only recently been vacated by Patrick Cockburn, the distinguished foreign correspondent, old friend of Hitchens, and savage critic of the Iraqi occupation. Clearly the breach with the "other side" is not quite so decisive up close and personal as it might sometimes appear from afar.

The following morning Hitchens rises late, as is his routine nowadays, and after working for an hour or two, reconvenes our discussion over lunch. We sit in the dining room with the window open on a distinctly chilly autumn afternoon. He's wearing just a thin shirt, while I shiver in a thick pullover. Not for the first time, I feel a twinge of pity for that tumour. Does it realise what it's up against?

A few days before we met, Tariq Aziz, Saddam's former deputy, was sentenced to death in Iraq for suppressing Shia religious parties during the Ba'ath rule. This surely wasn't the bright future for Iraq that the trenchant secularist and opponent of capital punishment had in mind back in 2003. He agrees that it's depressing news. Nor is he confident that things won't deteriorate after the coalition has departed.

"The best one can do is say that we've given the Iraqis the chance to produce a constitution, independent courts and a free press. They can keep it if they want but the parties of God may veto that. Unless we're directly requested by a functioning government backed by a functioning parliamentary vote to stay on, we have to leave it to them now."

So if the parties of God gain control, Iran's influence increases and human rights further decline, will it still all have been worth the loss of life and limb?

"Oh yes, I definitely think so," he replies without vacillation, "and not just for the humanitarian reasons. There are all kinds of reasons that don't get discussed and are harder to quantify."

He points out something he says opponents of the war always fail to mention: the success of an autonomous Kurdistan. But he also says that the discovery of oil around Baghdad has transformed the material basis for political control. "There's a petro-chemical reason for federalism now. If the oil laws were enforced properly by province, it could be as rich as Kuwait. The Saudis and the Iranians don't want a revived Iraqi oil industry because it will undercut them. You could have a modern Middle Eastern country or a parties-of-God failed state."

The point, I say, is that you can't make countries take the right path.

"No, again, since one is always going to regret something, you have to decide in advance what it will be. OK, I'm glad we're not having an inquest now, as we would be, into why we allowed a Rwanda or a Congo to develop on the Gulf, an imploding Iraq right in front of our eyes, a vortex of violence and meltdown, a whole society beggared and fractured and traumatised, waiting to fall to pieces."

The problem with this picture, of course, is that many people believe that it exactly describes what has taken place since the invasion. Hitchens maintains that the situation is better than it would otherwise have been, and to the extent that it's worse, the responsibility lies with al-Qaida.

"Trying to destroy the Christian community, strategy of tension, trying to start a civil war," he says, listing al-Qaida's nihilistic programme, "and people act as if those casualties should be on my conscience. I won't have that. For one thing, it absolves those who have done it of their guilt."

I try to argue that it overstates the case to suggest, as some of his more deranged critics claim, that he is somehow personally responsible for the tens of thousands of lost lives in Iraq. After all, had he not existed, would history have taken a different path?

To his credit, he refuses to accept that get-out. As he does in his memoir, he restates his role, along with people such as Peter Galbraith and Kenan Makiya (he insists Ahmed Chalabi's part has been "ridiculously exaggerated") in helping to persuade Washington of the need for regime change. But he also says that, even if he had negligible or no effect, "you should act as if your opinion might have made the difference. You don't have to be a megalomaniac to do that. And to say that you feel to that extent responsible, without making a parade of your feelings."

What's beyond doubt is that Hitchens's sense of optimism and purpose in 2002 in Washington was never going to be matched by the post-invasion plan in Iraq in 2003. He has no quarrel with the fact that the occupation was badly handled. "As Peter [Galbraith] said, you never get a second chance to make a good first impression. Tragic. But I mean tragic."

He leaves the room briefly to deal with a domestic issue and I take the opportunity to close the window. When he returns, he opens it with a knowing smile.

"I'll bring you an overcoat," he quips.

We continue talking for another couple of hours on everything from the Russian revolution to the Bay of Pigs, from the Spanish civil war to Tony Blair. In the end, it's only my need to catch a plane that brings the discussion to a close. With Hitchens, though, the argument will continue, first with himself and then, if need be, with the world. His intemperate style is not to everyone's tastes, but as he has often remarked, you can't produce light without heat. To those of us who admire his clarity of thought, if not always his conclusions, it is indeed a lovely light. And I'm pleased to say that on a cold November day in Tumortown, it showed little sign of fading.

Karl does not like karma. Now obviously, being the anti-theist that I am, I don’t believe that

My atheist 'sermon' in Westminster Abbey seems incongruous, but it shows good faith is more important than the right beliefs

Last Monday, I delivered an atheist "sermon" from the pulpit of Westminster Abbey. It was surprising enough that the chaplain of Westminster School had invited me to give a "thought for the day" to the assembled students, even more so when he suggested I talked about why I was an atheist.

The fact that this sounds strange, shocking even, tells us something important about how atheism is now perceived, and its relationship to faith. The problem is that while the word atheist itself means nothing more than "not-theist", it seems that for many, "a" stands for anti.

Of course, in one sense, anyone who believes anything can be described as being anti what they don't believe. But, for instance, we would not usually call a Christian an anti-Jew, or a Muslim an anti-Hindu. Why not? Because being anti suggests more than just disagreement; it suggests hostility, active dislike, the desire to eliminate the thing one is against. That's why anti-capitalists are rightly called, because they don't just disagree with capitalism, they want to destroy it.

If being an atheist meant being anti-theist, then I would not be one. I am an anti-dogmatist, an anti-fundamentalist, yes. But I have no hostility to theism as such, and have no desire to strip all theists of their faith. Of course I think theists are mistaken, but no one should be automatically hostile to everyone they disagree with. Hostility should be reserved for the pernicious, the wicked and the harmful.

Of course, there are plenty of atheists who do think that all religion is harmful, and that every person who believes in God is being hampered by a terrible illusion. Plenty of atheists are anti-theists. What is more, this breed of atheist tends to attract more attention, so for many, this is just what atheism seems to be.

But there are also lots of atheists like me. We simply do not believe in God because we see no good reason to do so. To invite us into the citadels of faith and ask us to explain what we believe is therefore not to bring the enemy though the gate, simply because we are not the enemy.

I would suggest that a far greater enemy to the kind of liberal Anglicanism that has prevailed in the Church of England, custodian of Westminster Abbey, would be a biblical literalist. But I do not imagine that the decision to allow such a person to talk in Westminster Abbey would raise as many eyebrows as the decision to let an atheist do so. Somehow, it has become received wisdom that the most important division is between people of faith and people of none. This is not only false, it is unchristian. Time and again in the gospels, Jesus argues that it is better to be a good gentile than a bad Jew. The Samaritan is more of a friend to the Christian that the Pharisee who walks by on the other side. What matters more than having the right faith is acting in good faith.

Dividing the world up into believers and non-believers, while accurate in many ways, doesn't draw the distinction between friends and foes. I see my allies as being the community of the reasonable, and my enemies as the community of blind faith and dogmatism. Any religion that is not unreasonable and not dogmatic should likewise recognise that it has a kinship with atheists who hold those same values. And it should realise that it has more to fear from other people of faith who deny those values than it does from reasonable atheists like myself.

So my time in the pulpit is not so incongruous after all. That it seems that way to many simply reflects two sad facts: that atheism has come to be seen as anti-theism, and that, perhaps partly in response, we expect people of faith to forge not-that-holy alliances with each other rather than far better unholy alliances with kindred non-believers. We should challenge both those assumptions, for the sake of values that good believers and good atheists alike hold dear.

By Anti-Theist Josh ~

This is not meant to offend anyone, or serve as an ultimate proof against theism, or against Christianity, but is merely my own personal experience with religion. Theism has been battered by more eloquent and qualified critics than myself and there isn't much I can add to the argument. People like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennet, John Loftus, George Smith, David Hume, Thomas Paine, Stephen Hawking, Bertrand Russell and Stephen Jay Gould have all done more than I could in this short testimonial. Suffice to say I am well read and somewhat well versed in the many criticisms of religion, though by no means an expert.

“Have you received Christ, son?” The answer held in my throat. I had received Christ three times up till now. Maybe a fourth time was in order, just in case? “Sure have, Pastor Tim.” He seemed genuinely relieved to hear it.

His shoulders sagged with relief, “That’s what we’re all about boy, telling people the Good News.” I felt guilty at that point; I hadn’t really been sharing the Good News to anyone. It seemed like some pretty Good News too. Believe in Jesus and you get to go to heaven!

Pastor Tim usually made the rounds during the greeting time. My dad (Dan), mom (Debbie), sister (Katie), and I were four services in, and I already knew the routine of everyone. The previous three churches had all experienced violent rifts, which had forced us here. We’d made the mistake of sitting in a regular's pew, which drew irate stares from the dislocated family.

This church seemed much the same as the last. A brisk, upbeat worship song would start us off. A song or two later an assistant pastor would stand up to make announcements. At this point greeting time would commence. This consists of shaking the hand of the person next to you and exchanging pleasantries over the weather. The Pastor would mingle among a different section of the church each week, being sure to contact everybody in each section. After greeting time, a slower song usually follows, with gradually more contemplative songs. At this point a few hands are raised in the air, and people bow their heads as the lights slowly dim. After the last slow, instrumental song the lead singer of the worship team would pray gently, “Dear Lord open our hearts (quietly strumming guitar) and let us hear the sermon we are about to hear.”

As Pastor Tim opened in the book of James, I began thumbing through my copy of the Bible. It was a newer version of the Macarthur Study Bible, replete with theological commentary below. Sermons were always boring to me. They typically built up to some easily seen conclusion that was a topic that could be explained in a few short sentences. And it was the over long sermons that kept me from having the traditional nice lunch after church.

My thumb slipped past Paul’s Epistles, III John, Jude and eventually landed on Revelation. Revelation always drew me in, but not because I enjoyed reading it. My parents told me these were predictions, prophecies that would actually happen. My Sunday school teacher had mentioned a few years ago how it was 2,000 years before Christ, and it was only a few short years until 2,000 years after Christ, and God sure does love symmetry. What if Revelation happened when I was alive? I was scared of Hell; it was a place of eternal damnation, torment and never ending gratuitous pain. I couldn’t grasp eternity, but an eternity doing the same exact thing, let alone being tortured was frightening enough. It is here the unsaved are cast off into a burning, smoldering lake of fire, where their entire flesh cracks and burns only to replenish eternally. I would lay awake at night wondering how someone could be sure their name was written in the Book of Life. What if you got up to heaven, God looked down at the Book and shook his head solemnly. Another sinful soul condemned to hell.

While sitting in that pew, and as Pastor Tim was entering the conclusion of his sermon, I began to wonder what happened to the people who weren’t evangelized. What about the people in China or the America’s who went hundreds, even thousands of years without hearing the Good News? And if it was such Good News, why wasn’t it more popular? I was scared though, that image of Sheol was like a looming red light over my head, it was always there, and something I couldn’t shake off.

I remember reading a small Bible track one day while waiting in the lobby for my parents to stop socializing so we could go to lunch. It was the story of a young rebellious teen having fun at a party. While there he is told by his born again friend how Jesus died on the cross for his sins, Salvation was his, if only he would repent. Scoffing, the young rebellious teen shut down his well meaning friend with some worldly wisdom. He would repent on his death bed, but in the meantime live it up, get the most out of life. The young rebellious teen was drinking heavily that night, and probably shouldn’t have gotten behind the wheel. A few of his friends were in the car with him. He neared a rail road crossing. The lights began to flash in the dark night. The young rebellious teen’s foot mashed the pedal to the floor; he wasn’t going to stop for anyone, even a train! The train neared the crossing; the car was hurtling towards the tracks. They converged, time slowed down; the car exploded into a sparking, shrieking, tangled puzzle under the train. The young rebellious teen slowly drew breath; he knew his time had come, but not enough time to repent. He looked down and saw an opening maw, with fire licking the edges.

All of a sudden all of my evidence, arguments, facts and real world experience didn’t seem to matter. It’s a pretty hard thing to disappoint anyone, especially your family. When you are driving, you have to look at where you are going. If you are looking at the telephone poll on the side of the road, odds are you are going to start drifting towards it. I kept looking at the young rebellious teen. I wasn’t overly rebellious as a teen. I attended Christian schools my whole life, my rebellion wasn’t drinking or drugs, though I did both. It was in asking questions. My parents were called to school on a regular basis. I was marked as a student who couldn’t be quiet in class. I’d ask questions of every history and bible teacher I could. I’d ask them all the questions that had plagued me. Were mentally ill people going to hell? What about young children? What about the unevangelized? What about good people in other religions? Why are there so many other religions? Why are there so many denominations? Why are there so many versions of the Bible? Why did God allow evil to happen to humans and animals on a daily basis? Why didn’t God reveal himself? Why weren’t women equal? Why didn’t God condemn slavery? Why was God against gay people? Why was God for genocide? Why don’t Christians perform miracles today? Why doesn’t prayer work? How could God be omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent? Why, how and who?

I’d question my youth pastor’s ontological arguments, my pastor’s teleological arguments, and my teacher’s cosmological arguments. None of it made sense, but the more I questioned the more that specter of an opening maw widened and darkened.

“Why don’t you go to church anymore?” My mom was sincerely concerned. Ever since moving out two years ago my Church attendance had tapered off to about once or twice a year. We were at Cool Hand Luke’s a kind of nice BBQ restaurant. My parents had offered to take me out for my birthday; free dinner is a hard thing to pass up when living paycheck to paycheck.

I knew this question had been brewing for some time. I almost felt it would be safer to just come out lie and say I was gay, rather than the real reason. “I’m not a Christian anymore, I don’t believe in a god.” Somehow that July heat chilled a bit.

“See this is what happens, he goes off to college takes a few classes from some liberal professor and becomes some flaming, godless atheist” My dad’s reaction was predictable. The hardest part in “coming out” was my mom’s. She couldn’t understand why I had rejected something as obvious as believing in Jesus. Jesus had helped her so many times in getting past her marriages problems, her hardships and her doubts.

“But, I don’t understand why not?” All of a sudden all of my evidence, arguments, facts and real world experience didn’t seem to matter. It’s a pretty hard thing to disappoint anyone, especially your family. How could I begin? How do you explain what equates to a mountain of reasons all in a hushed voice over dinner in a somewhat nice restaurant? This was a decision, an evolution really, that had taken years and years. How do you summarize that?

I left dinner that night feeling oddly disappointed but also invigorated. It was a feeling of severing ties with a past that was an anchor on my life. I remember sitting in the last church service I ever attended, thumbing through the bible provided in the chair before me and reaching the Book of Revelation. That familiar feeling of fear and guilt wasn’t there anymore. The words had no impact; they no longer conjured images of a gaping fire tinged maw with flailing arms reaching forth. The words and stories now seemed almost silly and juvenile. People actually thought this was best seller worthy material (Left Behind)?

I had escaped a feeling of impending doom, and instead found a feeling of invigoration and independence. There was no longer this intimidating sense of dread, this weight of so many heavy questions that overwhelmed me and my faith. My faith had been battered over the years not by outside sources but rather by myself. I always had a desire to know what and why I believed what I did. The reasons I found were not sufficient in the slightest. None of the reasons ever were, frightening though they had been.

In the time since I have met with three pastors and read every book my family has handed me. In every single one I have found not one good reason, but only backpedaling, semantics, and excuses, though often very eloquent. This relentless drive for the actual truth drives me towards one other goal in my life, the desire to seek out the reality of something, the desire to experience it, the desire to see something for truly as it is. This desire and passion gives me a drive to report things as they are, to write about things as they actually happen and to understand myself as much as possible.

I don't feel I know everything, or that there are experiences that can't be transcendental. My family so far has been somewhat accepting in my beliefs, and they usually state I am being prayed for by numerous bible studies and friends. I suppose that is nice in a way, but it also can be infuriating at the same time. In talking to various atheists, agnostics, deists, and non believers of every age I have found that those who are young and hold these beliefs are chalked up to youthful rebellion, a phase really. Those who profess a non-belief in the middle part of their lives are chalked up to a mid-life crisis. And those who profess non-belief the older they get are chalked up to senility. At first I was discouraged by the remarks and motivations ascribed to my non-belief but realized no matter my age (mid-twenties by the way) an excuse will be found.

This new intellectual freedom is liberating and I profess that finding new ways of thinking and reasoning is captivating. It's refreshing to read many different arguments and debates and weigh them for their merits and not against a framework of religion.

Thank you for taking the time to read my testimony, I would like to leave you with one of my favorite quotes.

"Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man." Bertrand Russell

(It's much more fun if you do your best Mary Catherine Gallagher moves when you say it.)

Today we're starting our yearly fundraising appeal -- the shiny marketing term for "beg for cash" -- for Scarleteen with some righteous month-long festivities and extras.

We aim to publish an in-depth advice column every single day from now through November 15th. Myself and Scarleteen's assistant director, CJ Turett, will be burning the midnight oil with answers, but we also have the help of some fantastically talented people to help this month, like Jaclyn Friedman, Hugo Schwyzer, Kate Bornstein, Susie Bright, Zaedryn Meade, Cory Silverberg, Petra Boynton, Justin Bish, Amanda Marcotte, Carol Queen, s.e.smith, Nona Willis Aronowitz and more! You can get started with Jaclyn Friedman's guest advice on getting sexual assault awareness started in your college right here.

All across the 'net there's also a month-long blogathon for us starting today, and we will be reprinting most of the entries right here on our own blog for you to enjoy. You'll be able to read posts from writers and sexuality activists like Anne Semans, Maymay, Shanna Katz, Elizabeth Wood, Angie the Anti-Theist, Thomas Roche, I, Asshole, Figleaf, Violet Blue, Clarisse Thorne, Twanna Hines, Liz Lee and a dizzying array of other excellent and generous bloggers. You can start today with this entry on parent/teen communication from Tess, and keep up with all the rest by following our blog or by using our RSS feed.

There are only a small handful of sites online that expressly serve young people, nationally and internationally, with comprehensive sex education that focuses on all the issues, not just one, and that aim to serve the wide diversity of young people there are: not just straight youth, not just white youth, not just middle-class youth, not just youth who aren't sexually active and not just youth who are, not just youth of any one gender or sexual identity. Fewer still do so through a learner-directed educational model like we do.

Founded in 1998, Scarleteen has stubbornly stood a long test of time for tens of millions of young people at this point, some of whom now are parents of children and teens they have already referred here or who want to refer their kids to in the future. We made it through the Bush administration and its abstinence-only mandates (not with our sanity fully intact, but that's okay). Some important baby steps have been made to turn that around, but they're going to be very slow going. Hopefully, access to quality, medically-accurate and inclusive sexuality education will keep improving, but all around the world, including right here where we're located stateside, comprehensive sex education still isn't available to millions of young people, both those attending school and the millions of teenagers and twentysomethings in the United States alone who aren't currently enrolled in school. Even when it is available, it's often missing key components of sound, fully accessible sex education, like the full inclusion of young people who are queer or who are gender nonconforming, who have already become pregnant or contracted an STI, who are already sexually active and want to be so, or who have all the bare basics, but want to know about some of the more complex parts of their sexual health, sexual lives and interpersonal relationships.

We've got a tenure that's incredibly long for anything on the web, let alone for an independent organization providing young people progressive, comprehensive sex education. We fully intend to stick around for as long as we're needed and as long as there's coffee to guzzle, but our tenacity, workaholism and caffeine-powered intellectual steam engine alone aren't enough to make that happen. While we provide our services for free, it costs money to make that happen, money that our teen and young adult users rarely have; money we hate talking about just as much as the next guy, but which we have to talk about if we're going to be able to stick around, keep doing what we do, and keep growing and evolving to best suit the needs of young people.

If you already support Scarleteen with your wallet or your words, thanks! We can't tell you how much we appreciate you and how much what you give helps. If you don't donate to us, or haven't in a while, we hope you'll consider it.

To donate to Scarleteen, click here. To find out more about donating first, check out this link.

To find out more about what we do, why and how we do it, and why we think we're worth supporting, take a look at:

• About Scarleteens
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• What is Feminist Sex Education?s
• The Scarleteen Staff & Volunteers
• Who's been talking about sex education at Scarleteen?

Want to participate in the blogathon? We've got a great lineup so far, but more is always merrier! It would be particularly fabulous to hear from those of you in your teens and twenties, whose voices we all need hear more of, and who are the most impacted by all of the issues around sexuality education. To find out about how to take part, drop our coordinator, Laura, a line at: aagblog@gmail.com

I... Well I don't know what to say! I signed up because my girlfriend (Nitz :heart: ) said I'll like this forum. We'll see about that, wont we now? :D I haven't read any of the rules or those things yet... I will tomorrow (Today more correctly) because I just don't have time right now. Quick description: Metaphysical Naturalist, Methodological Naturalist, Anti-Theist, Rational, Intelligent, Pompous, (Didn't see that coming, did ya?) Pretentious, (That too?) Constantly accused of being a know-it-all for correcting minor mistakes, Overly-honest, Cheesy, Romantic, Skilled at photography, Skilled at video filming and editing, Hopeless-romantic, (That's what you call all those that are all about soul mates and constantly doing sappy cheesy and corny stuff together with your relationship partner, right?) Overweight and lastly, TALL. That's my... Introduction I guess. Oh and I might have NVLD... I display symptoms... But during diagnosis I was told I have nothing wrong with me. ...

He's come out: Behe's son has abandoned Catholicism and is an atheist.

It's actually a bit sad: he comes right out and says that he's an anti-theist, but that he's never told his parents (I guess the news is out now!). It also sounds like he's a bit estranged from his father, saying "I really dislike my father". He's still living with them, but is "quarantined" in the basement so he doesn't contaminate his brothers and sisters with his weird godless ideas.

It's a very interesting discussion, but I just have to say that seeing fathers and sons unreconciled, even if the father is a bit squirrely, is rather depressing to me. I simultaneously want to praise the younger Behe for being smart and articulate, and also urge him to make peace with his family while he can.

Read the comments on this post...

Noh Name added a discussion to the group Anti-Theists

Leon replied to Joyce Dowling's discussion '"Atheism" vs. "Anti-theism" & marginalization of atheists'

John Jubinsky replied to Marc Draco's discussion 'Or are we Dancer?' in the group ORIGINS: UNIVERSE, LIFE, HUMANKIND, AND DARWIN

‘St. Augustine instructed that our love is our weight, best exemplified by the overwhelming remorse he experienced at the death of his beloved mother, Monica. If so, the weight of Chambers’s love was directed towards liberating men from the worship of ideological gods.” So writes Richard M. Reinsch II in his first book, Whittaker Chambers: The Spirit of a Counterrevolutionary. Reinsch’s look at Chambers argues for his impact on the Cold War era and for his continued relevance today. A program officer at the Liberty Fund, Reinsch talks to National Review Online’s Kathryn Lopez about Chambers, the book, and some NR history.

 

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: How was Whittaker Chambers a counterrevolutionary?

RICHARD M. REINSCH II: He states that effective opposition to Communism will not come from modern liberalism and that political freedom can only be understood in light of the Christian reading of man’s nature and destiny. I think the most interesting aspect of Chambers’s writing, which goes beyond Witness, is his sense that modern liberalism, the inevitable output of the continental Enlightenment as he sees it, appeals to the same desiccated humanism that informs Communism. However, in appealing to a similar anti-theist humanism as Communist ideology, modern liberalism was unable to articulate a positive response to the Communist system. Inherently, modern liberalism discounts man and does not tell the truth about who he is. Remember John Paul II’s words in Havana in 1998, when he told Cubans that they were more than Marxists told them they were. A similar sentiment is found in Chambers’s writing.


#ad#LOPEZ: Chambers famously said he left the winning side for the losing side. You’re all about that. How are we the losers? Didn’t we win the Cold War?

REINSCH: That’s exactly it; the statement was so manifestly wrong. Obviously, in retrospect, Chambers, like Solzhenitsyn, overlooked the reserves of liberty and spontaneity that were still present in liberal democracies. Chambers also failed to grasp the superiority of free markets. He was, however, not alone in these failures.

Consider the following anecdote. In November of 1952, Chambers was hospitalized in Baltimore after a heart attack and met a Passionist monk named Father Alan. Chambers asked him whether it was too strong a statement to say that the West was doomed. Fr. Alan’s response was quite revealing: “Who says that the West deserved to be saved”? Implicit in this answer was the notion that nothing was guaranteed to the West, because it had jettisoned its foundational truths. Chambers’s idea was that the West had adopted a materialism comparable, in many respects, to the intrinsic workings of Communist ideology and was therefore unable to engage in the deep metaphysical and religious reflection necessary to renew itself. We won the Cold War, but much of our confusion remains with us. There’s another reason why triumphalism is a strange response to our Cold War victory, and that is our demographic winter. Is a civilization that vanquishes its foe but can’t even reproduce itself one that has the answers correct?


LOPEZ: Is that what the tea-party is about, at least in part?

REINSCH: The tea-party movement, which is certainly one of the best political developments for conservatism in decades, will, I hope, continue to wage war for the first principles of constitutional government. It is a manly attempt to reclaim the ground of self-government. I think the parallel with Chambers’s boldness is that the tea partiers want the truth; they want to tell the truth and be told the truth.

We forget, but when Chambers stepped forward and told the truth about Hiss, he knocked the bloom off the rose of American progressivism. It really was the first time that an American conservative was able to deeply resonate with the American people about the challenge progressivism was issuing to constitutional government. I think the tea-party movement builds on this Chambers moment and sees the severe material deformations that have resulted from progressivism since then.

#page#LOPEZ: What exactly are the “strange and jealous gods of the West”? Are they the same today as when Chambers protested them? 

REINSCH: These are the gods of our own making that certain intellectual leaders in the West began to construct once the tragic dimension of life was dismissed. Chambers is brilliant on this point in his essay “Faith for a Lenten Age.” He moves through the writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Sören Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, and Reinhold Niebuhr to recall man’s dichotomies and the existential torment man must face. Chambers’s judgment was swift: There are no Promethean shortcuts. He saw modern liberalism urging man to believe himself beyond original sin and rushing headlong towards perfection, but for Chambers, the pursuit of perfection is disastrous, because it relies on an anti-theist and ultimately anti-human humanism. Ideology constructs upon reality a system that removes man from his existential limitedness; no longer conceived as a being between two eternities, a denatured man assumes godlike status, projecting truth on empty matter and demanding its transformation. Thus ideology compels obedience from all competing understandings of the human predicament.


#ad#LOPEZ: How important is God -- and in particular the Cross -- in the life and thought of Chambers?

REINSCH: Much of what Chambers does is really incomprehensible without his conversion to Christianity; his understanding of Christianity is total and existential, and, as I argue in the book, he sees himself as a victim-soul in his manifold witnesses. He decried the comfortable decadence of mainline American Protestantism, and he was right; look at those churches today. The differences for Chambers were original sin, pride, and anxiety: These were the parts of man that Christianity spoke to in a way superior to any other set of ideas. (Of course, Christianity is not an idea.)

I think his best thoughts on Christianity’s meaning are in his description of his confused state after leaving the Communist underground: “What I had been fell from me like dirty rags. The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern mind -- the luminous shroud it has spun around the spirit of man, paralyzing in the name of rationalism the instinct of his soul for God.”


LOPEZ: You compare Chambers to St. Augustine. Isn’t that a bit much?

REINSCH: I’m not arguing that Chambers bears the same significance as St. Augustine. The comparison is that both men intended for their religious conversions to be exemplary. Also, both were converting away from what they regarded, correctly I think, as intellectual heresy. This cognitive unlearning was a tremendous part of the conversions of both. They didn’t merely shed their respective errors -- they shed vital parts of their self-understanding.

Chambers also came to understand Augustine’s notion that love is our weight. We become what we love. This is why intellectual error is so disfiguring to man.

#page#LOPEZ: Would Chambers recognize the Left of today?

REINSCH: In certain respects, yes. The Left of today has obviously shed its belief in the necessity of comprehensive planning -- although Donald Berwick’s speeches, assuming they are representative, cause us to reconsider the conventional wisdom. But the Left certainly retains an existential belief in planning.

#ad#Chambers would recognize the Left’s fundamental disloyalty to the dignity and nature of man, as well as its great confusion about liberty, its objects and purposes. The inability to think through the implications of biotechnology, human sexuality, and the issues underlying the culture of death remain with us, and they pour out of the Left’s confusion about man.


LOPEZ: The Right?

REINSCH: Oh, sure. However, one of the most perplexing things about Chambers, at least to me, is how few of the Right’s certainties he shared. (This comes up in his correspondence with William F. Buckley over the prospect of his joining National Review.) Appeals to a purist capitalism left Chambers uninspired. He also thought that Frank Meyer, Frank Chodorov, and Russell Kirk -- these early conservative lions -- were too abstract from political realities. They wanted to roll back the state, undo the New Deal, return to another era, whereas Chambers was more pragmatic. For him, politics is not a direct moral judgment or preference for the good, but is an attempt to think coherently about the goods we have put in common. He’s almost Aristotelian in this regard. He understood the complexity of political reality. I think he anticipates the Reagan coalition and the need conservatism had for such a grouping in order to exercise power in a modern republic.


LOPEZ: What does the Republican revolution of 1994 have to do with Chambers and your book?

REINSCH: I note the ’94 revolution at the beginning of the book because it was a central part of my early political formation. Being on a college campus in its aftermath was exciting; its final undoing in the years of George W. Bush led me to this book. I thought politics was the summum bonum of conservatism. I was wrong.

I wrote the preface of the book in the early days of Obama, when the problems and weaknesses of American conservatism stood revealed, and I kept thinking that conservatism makes its arguments too often from a utilitarian standard or with rather crass appeals to middle-class comfort. We don’t see into the heart of democratic man at this moment and understand the full scope of our problems. Chambers understood these problems well.

#page#LOPEZ: What lessons might Chambers offer in 2010, should Republicans win?

REINSCH: I’m not sure Chambers gives definite answers in this regard. I think he has a broad understanding of conservatism as creating spaces for liberty to flourish. Chambers thought the Taft-Hartley Act was critical in this regard, because it defanged labor unions, allowing for freedom of contract and the mobility of labor to still happen in certain states.


#ad#LOPEZ: How significant was his relationship with Bill Buckley to his thought and life?

REINSCH: Chambers remarked to his wife that Buckley was a “man born not made.” He held him in high regard. I think it fair to say that Chambers was probably a part of Buckley’s own political learning, even though Buckley seemed to discount this in later years. Buckley moves away from an Albert Jay Nock–style libertarian philosophy because of Willmoore Kendall, but also because of Chambers, who, I think, was his conscience on political matters in the 1950s. This isn’t to say that Chambers said it to Buckley and out it came, but that he was an anchor. Their correspondence on the broken West, the bruiser Joseph McCarthy, the Catholic Church in Poland and Hungary, and the direction conservatism needed to take indicates that a substantial conversation occurred between these men.


LOPEZ: Can one read your book without having read Witness?

REINSCH: Sure. I hope it leads people to Witness, which remains one of the best American autobiographies. The intensity, the literary and philosophical allusions, his understanding of modernity, of man -- these things make it timeless.


LOPEZ: Why is your book relevant to hard-working Americans who don’t work in politics or media? After all, they don’t have a ton of time.

REINSCH: We must be citizens. It presents the complete Chambers, provides pointers in the right directions for those who want more, and locates us as Americans in a different way from what many conservatives write.


LOPEZ: How can a policymaker or candidate benefit from your book? 

REINSCH: How can you govern if you don’t know the men and ideas that profoundly shaped our present? If you want to understand the follies of planning, then you should read Hayek, of course, but also Chambers. He offers psychological and spiritual insights that go to the bleeding heart of your opponents. So, heed him before you go on the hustings.


LOPEZ: How long did it take you to write Whittaker Chambers: The Spirit of a Counterrevolutionary?

REINSCH: A year and a half.

#page#LOPEZ: What is your favorite of Chambers’s writings?
 
REINSCH: An essay he wrote on the classically trained performer Marian Anderson, entitled “In Egypt Land.” Anderson was a brilliant performer who experienced segregation as a black woman in the 1940s and 1950s, which led her to perform Negro spirituals, to keep time with the deprivation imposed by Jim Crow laws. Chambers notes that this kind of problem will never be solved by the law alone, but only through forgiveness and self-limitation. The essay is Chambers at his best.


#ad#LOPEZ: What is your favorite of Chambers’s pieces for NR?

REINSCH: The Rand takedown. Commissioned by Buckley, Chambers’s essay “Big Sister Is Watching You” serves notice that Rand’s vision in Atlas Shrugged, while capable of being seen as a heroic depiction of entrepreneurs responding to collectivism, involved a flattened humanism. In 1957, when the piece was written, conservatism was in flux; the battle for its center and for its commanding heights was not settled. Chambers put paid to the notion that the American Right would be defined by Randian rational egoism, which he regarded as a heresy: not wholly wrong, but wrong enough in its distortion and rejection of foundational truths.

For Rand, man was never truer to himself than when acting in pursuit of self-interest as Rand defined it; modern liberty, capitalism, and unbounded individualism were the markers of man’s existential happiness. The clue for Chambers, apart from Rand’s suffocating ideology, was the prominence of sexual adventurism and the relative absence of family and children in her writing. Chambers understood that love unlocks the real purpose of our being -- self-gift, not incessant self-interest, would reveal to man his own nobility and capacity for greatness.

The piece stands as a testament to Chambers’s wisdom. He is the preeminent conservative.


LOPEZ: What’s your most fun fact about Chambers?

REINSCH: He once climbed a fire escape in New York to see Calvin Coolidge.

-- Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

---

‎1) Choosing a kind of world to create is a moral decision. 2) A morally perfect being cannot knowingly choose something less good than another possible decision while maintaining moral goodness. 3) A morally perfect being cannot knowingly choose to create a less good world than another possible world. (1 and 2) 4) God is a morally perfect being. 5) God created this world. 6) God cannot knowingly choose to create a less good world than another possible world. (3 and 4) 7) God is all-knowing. 8 ) God cannot create a less good world than another possible world. (6 and 7) 9) If no less good decisions exist, then the choice is the best possible choice. 10) God has to create the best possible world. (8 and 9) 11) God only created one world. 12) This is the best of all possible worlds. (5, 10, and 11) (now to finish out an anti-theist argument, for kicks) 13) Better worlds are conceivable. 14) Contradiction between 12 and 13 means one or more premises are flawed. 15) Premises ...

Nikki Bluue commented on T. Duker's group 'Atheists Who Don't Hate Religion or Religious People'

By Rudy --

Why do I read and write about atheism every day? Why do I love to find and collect bible verses that demonstrate that the character God is a sadistic, murdering, baby killing, slave promoting, misogynistic, and jealous jerk? Why do I spend hours every day on the computer reading and posting atheistic content, much to the chagrin of my wife and consternation of my non-atheist Face book friends?
I think it is because I am still unconsciously afraid of Hell.

I do not consciously believe in Hell, but I must still be unconsciously shivering in my boots about Hell; otherwise I would not need, want, and love to devour anti-theist readings. It is my passion. It is my drug.

I compare myself to a rocket trying to get out of the powerful gravitational pull of the planet religion. Every time I feel I have reached an easy cruising orbit, I feel like I am falling back down and I need another rocket boost of heretic heathen literature. When will I ever be in orbit, just cruising?

Although I have been an atheist since 1977, I have only had my boosters on for about six months. For 33 years, I have been flying around in an airplane at low altitude. I have read from other Ex-Christians that it can take a few years of deprogramming to eliminate the haunting doubts of my fear based childhood brainwashing.

In a way, I am enjoying this attempt at getting into a comfortable atheist orbit, because atheism is something about which I feel passionate and I have not experienced such an intellectual stimulation on one topic for this long. Part of me wants to continue firing my booster rockets, but without the Christian thoughts that haunt me.

Like, say, the right to refuse to do your job but get to keep it nonetheless:

A Texas bus driver has filed a lawsuit against his former employer, claiming he was fired for his religious beliefs after refusing to transport a client to a Planned Parenthood office, court documents showed Wednesday.

Edwin A. Graning worked for the Capital Area Rural Transportation System (CARTS) near Austin, Texas, for less than a year before he was let go in January. At the time, he told his supervisor that, "in good conscience, he could not take someone to have an abortion," according to the lawsuit.

...Graning's last day of employment was the same day he refused service.

He is seeking reinstatement, back pay, and compensatory damages for pain, suffering and emotional distress.

Calls to CARTS seeking comment on the lawsuit were not immediately returned.

"It's only because he voiced his religions beliefs that he was canned," Edward White III, Graning's lawyer, told CNN. "Employers have a legal responsibility to at least attempt to accommodate an employee's religious beliefs. ... CARTS clearly violated Mr. Graning's religious freedom."

Bullshit. A Christian who doesn't like abortion doesn't have the right to refuse to take someone to Planned Parenthood any more than an anti-theist would have the right to refuse to take a Catholic to mass. The job is taking people where they want to go. Some of them will be going places where they will be doing things with which their driver may disagree.

I wonder if Mr. Graning asked every one of his passengers exactly what they were planning to do once he dropped them at their destinations, to ensure it was in keeping with his personal beliefs. Something tells me that's a special thing he did just for his pregnant female passenger heading to Planned Parenthood.

I'm also curious how he knew that she was going there for an abortion. Did she really volunteer that information, or did he just assume because he's an ignorant fuck who doesn't know that Planned Parenthood also provides health services to pregnant women?

Btw: WTF CNN? "Planned Parenthood, a health care provider that offers a range of medical services to women, including those related to abortion, often draws the ire of anti-abortion groups in the United States, where the procedure is legal but fiercely controversial." Eat me.

Angie the Anti-Theist responding to atheist YouTube user dprjones and his video What Does Atheism Have to Offer? ;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWkLaT-j9Dc
What I do and don't miss about being a Christian, theist, believer.

Björn Lindström replied to Andrew Wallace's discussion 'The state of atheism in Sweden' in the group Svenska ateister

I am new here, and after being a self-labeled Atheist (other people labeled me as much less cordial names), I have recently found out through a cousin of mine that I am actually an Anti-Theist. For those of you whom are unfamiliar with Anti-Theism, please read the following..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitheism

Essentially, it states that One opposed to belief in the existence of a God per the English Oxford Dictionary.…

Angie the Anti-Theist reading a passage from my work-in-progress memoir. Often people will tell me that religion provides comfort. That wasn't my experience at all. ;
Read more on my blog at http://angietheantitheist.blogspot.com
Please like and subscribe :)

The peerless polemicist, who has never refused a fight or a drink, left the literary world on both sides of the Atlantic shocked by news of his cancer

Recently, Martin Amis noted, half-jokingly, that becoming a grandfather was like receiving a telegram from the mortuary. If so, then the news last week that his closest friend, Christopher Hitchens, has cancer of the oesophagus is more like getting a generational summons from the grave.

That is not to overstate the seriousness of Hitchens's diagnosis – although oesophageal cancer is indeed a grim condition – but simply to recognise the legend of an indestructible constitution that has long attended the celebrated journalist, polemicist, author, anti-theist and bon vivant. And no less to acknowledge the vitality habitually displayed by Hitchens in the dissemination and discussion of political and cultural ideas.

While history's recent tectonic movements have left the co-ordinates of Hitchens's politics subject to fierce debate, few would argue that for more than three decades he has consistently occupied the position of the hardest-working, hardest-living man of letters on either side of the Atlantic.

The author of 11 books (and co-author of six more), including the bestselling God Is not Great, and four pamphlets and four collections of essays, Hitchens is also a columnist for Vanity Fair, lead book reviewer for the Atlantic Monthly, has a weekly column with the online magazine Slate, and is a contributor to countless other publications. Taking his former friend Gore Vidal's advice, he tries never to decline an invitation to appear on TV, where he is a familiar presence on American cable politics shows. He is a formidable participant in public debates, a regular on the lecture circuit and he has also been a visiting professor at the New School in New York and Berkeley in California. In between, he makes a point of going somewhere "dangerous or difficult" each year, usually a war zone or some military dictatorship.

It says something about the gravity of his current setback, therefore, that Hitchens has cancelled the remainder of his book tour for his memoir, Hitch 22. For it is not in his nature to shy away from the spotlight, still less to retreat from his audience. A typical public engagement will see the 61-year-old writer in convivial exchange with acolytes and adversaries for hours after the event has finished, as long, that is, as there is a drink to hand.

On occasion, Hitchens has voiced his resentment at the attention paid to his capacity to drink, seeing in it a wilful neglect of his even greater capacity to work. Yet in Hitch 22 he does not play down his vices. He says that it was poet James Fenton who introduced him to the charms of alcohol and tobacco. "This is to give you no idea of how much I improved upon his initiation ceremonies", although he does go on to give the reader some idea. Of his early days in journalism, he writes: "It wasn't all that easy to get a reputation for boozing… in old Fleet Street, where the hardened hands would spill more just getting the stuff to their lips than most people imbibe in a week, but I managed it."

In the past, he has also been a vocal defender of smoking, including teenage smoking, and staunch opponent of smoking bans. Smoking and drinking, he once wrote, do not bring happiness: "Like money, booze and fags are happiness." Many commentators have now pointed out that they are also the main causes of squamous cell carcinomas, one of the two types of oesophageal cancer.

Despite his conviction that nicotine delivers the "intense short-term concentration" required for writing, Hitchens stopped smoking in 2008. But as recently as six weeks ago, he got through two packets of cigarettes during a newspaper interview.

In truth, it is almost as hard to imagine Hitchens without a cigarette as it must have proved for him to be without one. Rare are his book jacket photos that do not feature a half-consumed cigarette and a nimbus of tobacco smoke swirling around his broodingly tumid features.

Although he can never be accused of a fixation on personal image, Hitchens none the less does have an image: at once resolute and dissolute, well-spoken but not quite well-groomed. The New Yorker described him as "looking like someone who, with as much dignity as possible, has smoothed his hair and straightened his collar after knocking the helmet off a policeman".

And for most of his working career, it's this vision of the slightly raffish, anti-establishment figure that made him a pin-up boy for the left. It began at Oxford, where he earned a name as a street-corner socialist and a high-end socialite. Friends later joked that the sentence least likely to emerge from Hitchens's mouth was: "I don't care how rich you are, I'm not coming to your party."

In Hitch 22 and elsewhere, he writes of "keeping two sets of books" when it came to political purpose and social ambition. According to Hitchens, when he was a child, his mother told his father, during an argument over whether they could afford to send him to private school: "If there is going to be an upper class in this country, Christopher is going to be in it."

His mother, to whom he was close, took her own life when he was 24. She had run away to Greece with a defrocked vicar and they killed themselves in a lovers' pact. It's one of the few areas of emotional autobiography into which Hitchens has ever strayed, even in his own memoir.

And just as his great hero, George Orwell, managed to file reports from wartorn Europe after learning that his wife had died, so did Hitchens write a piece for the New Statesman from a junta-governed Greece on the point of revolt while ostensibly on a trip to identify the body of his mother.

The Statesman enjoyed a golden period in the Seventies, with Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and James Fenton among its contributors, who also formed the thrusting literary gang of which Hitchens was a voluble part. But he had wearied of British politics, particularly Old Labour-style, by the end of that decade, and in 1981 he relocated to New York and the Nation magazine, something like an American equivalent to the Statesman.

There followed occasional disagreements with the left – for example, Hitchens took the side of Britain against the Argentinian fascist junta in the Falklands conflict – but his pinpoint polemical assaults on figures such as Henry Kissinger and Ronald Reagan were enough to ensure his continued residence in radical circles.

That all changed, though, after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. Hitchens saw "a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate" and became perhaps the most outspoken opponent of "Islamic fascism". The breach with the left was completed with the Iraq war in 2003, for which he actively campaigned.

The accusations of defection, betrayal and neocon conspiracy were many and vitriolic. But Hitchens responded with characteristic gusto. Of his critics' vented spleen, he said: "It washes off me like jizz off a porn star's face." Not the sort of comment one would expect from, say, Andrew Marr or Polly Toynbee.

That's the thing about Hitchens; for all his vast learning, erudition and advancing years, there remains an unpredictable, dangerous quality – part ironic, part Byronic – to both his words and actions. Last year, on a visit to Beirut, he came across a poster for the Syrian Social Nationalist party, a Nazi-style group with a fondness for armed henchmen.

Finding it impossible to tear down the poster, he took out a magic marker and defaced it with some frank and unflattering graffito. Moments later, a group of thugs tried to wrestle him into a car. In the ensuing attempt to flee, he was punched, bloodied and knocked to the ground.

This kind of behaviour and Hitchens's unapologetic support for military intervention against bellicose tyrannies has led some observers to speculate on his deep-lying psychological motives. A common conclusion, and one even reached by his wife, Carol Blue, is that it all stems from his postwar upbringing. His father was a commander in the Royal Navy who had a "good war", and the suggestion is that living through a period of extended peacetime in the west, Hitchens felt he had failed to test himself as his father had.

In a recent interview, Hitchens appeared to lend some credence to this judgment. "One of the things I've realised, writing the book [Hitch 22]," he said, "is that it has to be true." Whatever their provenance, physical and moral courage are qualities that Hitchens has never lacked. Nor is he likely to be in want of them now.

Angie the Anti-Theist responding to comments on my video "Was I Ever Saved?" ;

Angie the Anti-Theist reading hatemail I received in response to my Abortion video ;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59Ud3g2ymOM

Recent events in Wrong Planet's Politics, Philosophy, and Religion subforum have rocked the community of persons with Asperger's syndrome who are atheist. We have had an election of Most STRIDENT atheist with Awesomelyglorious winning a majority of the vote. Although I was somewhat taken aback by the tone of stridency among the candidates, I considered it to be a necessary evil in campaigning; I even felt this stridency, this fighting spirit, could come of use against the forces of hate and ignorance. Yet we have recently discovered our "Plus Alpha-Atheistic anti-theist" Most Strident Atheist Awesomelyglorious holds crypto-theist views . My fear is this man will lead us straight into the arms of the Pope! I myself never campaigned for most STRIDENT as I have yearned for a more civil discourse. This is why I am asking for the commonsense atheists of this forum in union with the agnostics of this forum to caucus with me for a real unbelieving alternative to Awesomelyglorious's ...

Angie the Anti-Theist responding to LudditeRomantic and his topless video "On Anti-Theism, AngieAntiTheist & Being Anti-AngieAntiTheist" ;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri5vZ3AHokU

The prize is ego-gratification and shares in my Greek bonds (I kid, I kid). The contestants are ( witht he percentages and total votes when on the primary poll when I last measured it) ): Awesomelyglorious 30% DentArthurDent 20% ruveyn 10% Sand 30% [ 6 This poll is limited and about an hour and forty five minutes late (I said I'd do it at 8:00 PM Canadian Central Time, it is about 9:45 PM Canadian Central Time. My dearest apologies!). The reward is a position on the Wrong Planet Not Necessarily Marxian or Anti-Marxian Society of the Godless . Three spots are available: Plus Alpha-Atheistic anti-theist Minus Alpha-Athestic anti-theist Plus Beta-Atheistic anti-theist THE POLL IS OPEN FOR 7 DAYS!!! We will decide winers by this Votes Needed to win = (Valid Votes Cast/3) + 1 Once a candidate reaches a certain threshold, the rest of his ballots will be distributed to the voters "second choice". This will be a single transferable vote. The winner with the most number of first choic ...

Angie the Anti-Theist explaining why I spend so much time talking to people about their faith, and what's in it for me.

Angie the Anti-Theist reading an excerpt from my (still-in-progress) autobiography on my childhood in the Home in Zion cult led by my grandmother, retired nurse and author Carol Balizet. ;

If you listen to my music it's not that different from my personality and my beliefs. Nine times out of Ten in my experience ones personality matches their music. I find it funny if someone listen to Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails or Nirvana when their Christians. All of the previous named band are not only atheist, but anti-theist. I find it hilarious when someone is what some would call promiscuous and they listen to mainly gospel. If someone very dark and negative and they listen to someone like the All American rejects or Lady Gaga. My ex was a key example she was all bubbly, happy and positive, but she listen to Mudvayne, Disturbed and Deftones. Question is does your music reflect you and do you think you can guess who someone is through their music taste or guess their music taste by who they are?

Some you might have seen, but there are a few you might not have.  Everyone have a great weekend and stay safe!  Quotes.

Poetry News: ... and being a burgeoning anti-theist to boot, I got into a spirited debate with them over the use of irony in Frost's poetry. They insisted that I was "thinking too much" about the poem and that I needed to "read it from the heart." Then they formed a ...Link!

Poetry News: ... and being a burgeoning anti-theist to boot, I got into a spirited debate with them over the use of irony in Frost's poetry. They insisted that I was "thinking too much" about the poem and that I needed to "read it from the heart." Then they formed a ...Link!

By The Lion --

About a month ago, my mother brought home a newsletter from her church because there was an ad for a job she thought I'd be interested in. I took a few days to hem and haw about the implications of an atheist (who's borderline anti-theist) helping a church promote its religion. After a couple weeks of phone/e-mail tag, I eventually caved in and met with the pastor who placed the ad.

Image by Ewan-M via Flickr

Now, my mother told me not to mention my atheism (why would I?!) but I knew the pastor was going to ask about my church attendance since that's obviously his job as a pastor. I was bashful about outright saying I was an atheist and he put me at ease by saying he was just curious. Long story short, he was more interested in what I had to say about God and the Universe than my portfolio. Go figure.

In a stranger turn of events, he invited me to speak next week about my personal background with atheism and arguments for it to roughly 100 of his flock (including my mom). I'm pretty confident in my ability to present my argument since Unemployment has graced me with the Gift of Entirely Too Much Free Time and I've been browsing web sites related to atheism and religious debate for a while now.

Some things I plan to go over:

define atheism/dispel misconceptions
offer alternative answers to the questions religion supposedly addresses (ie. ethics, origins, science)
my issues with the Christian doctrine


I don't proclaim to be an expert by any means, but the main reason I'm so confident about this speech is because I'll be talking to evangelicals. I can't think of easier arguments to knock down than the ones proposed by bible literalists. I'm not expecting to change minds necessarily since evangelicals are also very stubborn, but I think if I appear knowledgeable and reasonable enough I can plant that first seed of doubt.

The reason I'm sharing this with you is that I'm not an ex-Christian and I could use some insider information. What are some of the things that made you start questioning your faith? What other topics should I touch on? Is there a certain way I should approach this situation? Are there topics I should stay away from?

The pastor mentioned there will be a discussion after my speech where audience members get to ask me questions. He wants my arguments to make his flock think. I want my arguments to make his flock think themselves right out of their faith, never to return.

by VorJack Alright, let’s have this out … In your opinion, what is the difference between an atheist and an agnostic? Feel free to throw in any other terms you feel are important, i.e. non-theist, anti-theist, etc.

Hello gang!

I'm a musician and music teacher living in South Hadley, MA with my wife and two sons.  I've been a member of www.reddit.com/r/atheism for 2 years, which is what brought me to Atheist Nexus (after following a link that was posted there).  I joined the nexus last year, but haven't really had time to spend here and I hope to change that.

I'm what you call an anti-theist.  I believe that all theism is worthless and should n…

Anti-theist Christopher Hitchens and Christian Dinesh D'Souza may initially appear to have nothing in common.

Hitchens argues the merits of evolution, while D'Souza argues for the existence of a supernatural power. In the absence of evidence, Hitchens doubts, while D'Souza defers to faith.

More on The Midwest

If someone had shown this to me when I was younger, I would’ve become a Christian *immediately*.And by Christian, I mean atheist. Or anti-theist. Or whatever else is as far away from Christianity as possible.I mean, seriously, what the hell was that? And who among the Christians is letting this happen? [...]

19 Vote(s)

Who knew that a simple garment could become the focus of a heated national debate, implicating freedom of expression, along with the very question of what it means to be a citizen of this country? The niqab (also known as a burka) achieved this dubious distinction in the last few weeks, with scores of readers weighing in on its place in modern Canada.

“Discussions about freedom of religion, and freedom of choice in personal dress, just distract people from the real issue,” wrote R. Petlock. “Why is Canada so politically correct and so afraid of being called racist that we let our immigrants define what it means to be Canadian? If you want to be embraced and accepted as a Canadian, learn to speak English and/or French -- and don’t wear a burka.”

His letter was prompted by a Quebec law that would block the provision of government services, including education and non-emergency health care, to fully veiled Muslim women. That idea was opposed in a National Post editorial, which stated: “We are deeply suspicious of any government effort to ‘ban the burka.’ In the modern Western liberal tradition, a person’s dress falls into the sphere of individual autonomy.”

This position did not sit well with many readers.

“Why should people expect to be treated as ordinary when they walk around with their faces covered in the name of religious freedom?” asked Ted Scott. “The National Post is way out in left field on this issue. It should be illegal for anyone to conceal one’s identity or wear a disguise in public.

“If I see someone coming toward me wearing a mask, you can bet that I’ll soon be running in the opposite direction,” he added, “unless it is the Lone Ranger or Spiderman.”

--  Accusations of political correctness also flew thick and fast in regards to two other stories this past week.

“Every day, newspapers bombard readers with stories of political correctness that are enough to turn the stomach,” wrote Jeff Ansell. “The front page of Tuesday’s National Post reported on the two-page apology from the Alma Mater Society of Queen’s University [in Kingston, Ont.] for racist and dehumanizing behaviour. The crime? Dressing someone up in a Sumo wrestler suit. The other story was about a lesbian who took a B.C. comic to that province’s Human Rights Commission, because he offended her. Enough already! Political correctness is ruining our way of life.”

--   Four Post readers commended one of our columnists for a clever word play that skewered campus activists. Here’s one of those notes, from Gerald Bouchard.

“I want to nominate George Jonas to whatever journalistic award is given for insight, for penning the following description of university activists: ‘Many are educated beyond their intellectual means; all concern themselves with matters beyond their maturity. They’re the collateral damage of higher education.’

“For some time I have been thinking about how best to define political correctness and its cause,” he added. “I think this comes pretty close.”

--  The Roman Catholic Church has fallen under intense scrutiny during the last few weeks, with many stories, columns and even editorial cartoons focusing on sordid tales of child abuse involving the Church. The Letters page has been inundated with notes from readers on this issue, with most demanding that the Vatican be more aggressive and transparent in dealing with this situation. But some readers feel the media coverage has been unfair to the Church.

“The constant negative bombardment of the Roman Catholic Church by the Post in the past few weeks ‹ beginning with the hard-core atheist Christopher Hitchens, letters from the weak in faith who want to leave the Church, and then the rude cartoonist Gary Clement, who profanes the Church’s most Holy Week of the year ‹ can be disheartening to Catholics, but should not be surprising and certainly not despairing,” wrote Andrew Caruk.

“Christ Himself endured the most virulent type of slander and the most vicious death imaginable Š Pope Benedict XVI, Christ’s present successor on Earth, and all other Christians can expect to fare no better. Those in the Catholic Church who cannot stand the imperfections of others should realize that just as light passes through a dirty window untainted, so do God’s many graces pass through the hands and mouth of the priest with all his weaknesses. The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

--  Considering the 200-word limit we generally impose on letter writers, it is understandable that most stick to one topic. But there are always exceptions. Here’s one that covers at least seven topics, with a few words to spare.

“I support free speech. The letter from the [University of Ottawa] provost advising Ann Coulter that she better watch what she says in Canada was appalling,” wrote Barbara Bogdanow.

“It was great to see a column by Mark Steyn in the Post,” she added. “I hope he becomes one of your regular editorialists again. Rex Murphy is a tremendous addition to your editorial section. I enjoy most of your editorialists, but Conrad Black and George Jonas are particularly excellent, along with Charles Krauthammer.

“Christopher Hitchens can be interesting but when he gets on his anti-theist hobby horse, he is irritating and tiresome,” she noted. “He doesn’t seem capable of understanding any religion.

“Barack Obama’s policy towards Israel is offensive and potentially very harmful,” she continued. “Leaving Benjamin Netanyahu waiting while he ate dinner was puerile and totally unfitting of a major world leader.

“As a divorced single mom, I had to work while my son grew up,” she finished. “If I had had an option, I would have stayed home with him, working part time. Kids belong with their parents, not in state-run institutions. Anyone remember the communist Soviet Union?”

Paul Russell is the letters editor of the National Post.

Although it's drawn from ancient Greek mythology, the new movie is a humanist and anti-theist retelling of the myth.  It's what all myths should be like: they should be about criticizing the vanity of the gods and glorifying human ability to advance civilization without them.  Watch the movie!!

She returns to the room, looks over my list and says to me, "You have obsessive compulsive disorder." All my life I'd avoided getting a medical diagnosis - avoided hearing any "words of death" spoken over me that would give power to the ...

Angie the Anti-Theist talking about my faith healing childhood & why I think fundamentalism makes more sense than moderate religious faith.

Please visithttp://www.petition2congress.com/2/25...

Angie the Anti-Theist reading an excerpt from my memoir "Birth & Death: Life of a Newborn Cult"

You can read more stories about growing up in a cult on my blog athttp://angietheantitheist.blogspot.com

I am currently reading a book called Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. Red Mars is the first book in a trilogy regarding the colonization and transformation via terraforming of Mars, but it is not just about the cool scientific aspect. Instead, it also has to do with social politics of the colonists... Blarg. To add to that, there is unnecessary sexual garbage and anti-theistic propaganda. ... why can't it just be about the cool science involved in space flight and terraforming? Why does it have to have an admixture of fecal matter included? Oh well, I suppose everything has some type of fault. ...

I don’t know if anyone has caught the news, but Angie the Anti-Theist used her blog and twitter profile to share the circumstances of her pregnancy and her decision to abort. She live-tweeted her experiences with RU486 and the whole world exploded into a banal debate about abortion, murder, and Jesus. I talked to a few [...]

Mother slammed for graphically documenting abortion live on the web. But Angie Jackson says "it's not that bad".