Christopher Hitchens has passed away. It is a tragedy that a man so intelligent and gifted used what God gave him in rebellion against Him.
It's a bit like the prodigal son who took all the father gave him and turned away from the father in rebellion - the son was using the resources of the father to run from him - the father was funding his journey! I saw this so clearly with Christopher Hitchens - he used reason and he made moral judgments, but in his reasoning and condemning he was using borrowed capital - his worldview simply cannot provide a basis for reason and morality. On his worldview we are nothing but matter moving around, chemicals colliding - there is no reason, there are just chemical reactions going on in our heads, yet he acted as if reason and rationality existed. On his view of the world there is no morality, there is no objective standard, there are no moral obligations, there is no transcedent law, yet he acted as if these things did exist, because he knew they did - we all do. If you can't live consistently with your worldview then it shows your worldview is false - it doesn't match reality.
This was evident in many statements he made which were blatently contradictory. For example, he would speak of the doctrine of substitutionary atonement as being immoral, but the question is, by whose standards? If he says it's immoral, and I disagree, why should his opinion mean anything to me? This is atheist idolatry - when you reject the true God you replace Him with another, in Hitchens' case it was himself - his moral pronouncements were issued as though they authoratative.
But the blatent contradiction is seen in a conversation he had with the Christian, Doug Wilson (seen in this video initially at the 1 hour mark, then on to 1:07:26), in which Wilson was trying to make Hitchens see the moral bankruptcy of atheism. Wilson sketched a scenario in which you had a grumpy, mean Christian, a loving, kind Christian, a grumpy, mean atheist, and a loving, kind atheist. Wilson asked Hitchens which of them is living contrary to their worldview, and Hitchens admitted quite openly that there's nothing in the evil atheist was living that was inconsistent with atheism - and that's the point! Atheism provides no grounding for any morality. You just pick your desired aim and shoot for it. If that desired aim is human solidarity, as Hitchens' was, then atheism says nothing to stop you, but if your desired aim is human destruction, once again, atheism has nothing to say to stop you.
Christopher Hitchens has been unhitched from his body and from this world, and has taken his flight to eternity. We can only hope he came to his senses and turned to Christ before it was too late.
