Quote of the day: Peter Hitchens on the Christopher Hitchens Atheist Fan Club

‘For some of these people, since the very things they admire him for are the very things that I most specifically reject, the idea that I am closely related to him, have a similar education and background, is close to unbearable.  They admire him so much that it is close to reverence.  They would, if I were dead, or had no opinions, or agreed with Christopher, quite possibly allow me to have a share of that reverence, a member of the Holy Family. But oh dear, what is this?  I am not dead.  I do have opinions.  They are the wrong ones, the wrongest opinions, in fact, that I could possibly have.  Yet my voice is eerily similar to their hero’s and I bear the same surname.  Help!  There is no room in the atheist shrine for me.

Thus it would be better if I did not exist at all.  Why?  If I am related, and if I am intelligent, then that means that it is possible they may be wrong about God and the Self. And of course it is desperately important to them that they are right.  If God exists, and they do not have absolute sovereignty over their bodies, and their dull parents and pompous pastors and priests are correct, or may even have a point, then their whole choice and way of life, their whole rebellion against the previous generation, is open to question. They don’t even want to consider that possibility.  Thus they conclude that I must be stupid, and that it is impossible that my brother and I are really related, and (in some cases) that they wish I were dead.  I treasure the hope that these poor lost children will grow up enough, one day, to see what a sad, hopeless and deluded view of the world this is, and may come to realise — through this very process — that they may possibly be mistaken about greater things as well.’

~ Peter Hitchens