Atheism

In 2011, a terminally ill Christopher Hitchens faced death with droll stoicism: “To the dumb question ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: ‘Why not?’” he wrote. As his health declined and the end drew nearer, the skeptical Hitchens stuck to his atheist guns, clear-eyed in his confidence that death was final. Hitchens died in 2011, but his work and reputation live on. No paradox there, of course, but just how large Hitchens looms twelve years after his death would surely have surprised even this immodest author. It’s certainly a surprise to me, a reformed Hitchens fanboy. The face of twenty-first-century atheism is having quite the afterlife.

Man’s refusal to accept reality can take entertainingly paradoxical form. One of the more enjoyable is the New Atheists’ crusade (I use the term advisedly) against God — a battle with human nature which, like most battles with human nature, can never be won. God may never have appeared in a burning bush, but, he, she or they came to life in the brains of some ancient hominids, probably as a bug in a new pattern-recognition app. It was a bug with benefits, and as evolution is an opportunist, God has never gone away since. Tara Isabella Burton, who has a doctorate in theology, does not deal with the sources of religious belief in Strange Rites, Instead, she focuses ‘primarily on what a religion does’.

Winston Churchill looked forward to an expansive lunch. He was in his late seventies, prime minister for a second time, and this cabinet meeting was dragging on. It was nearly one o’clock and they were down to the eleventh item on the agenda, a memorandum on town planning. Wearily, Churchill said: ‘Ah yes, I know town planning, densities, broad vistas, open spaces...give me the romance of the 18th-century alley with its dark corners, where footpads lurk.’ It is possible to have this exact feeling watching cable news today. Somehow, you’re watching CNN or MSNBC, and some bloviating no-mark like Don Lemon or Chris Hayes or Ezra Klein is grimacing through air time.