Laigle’s Forum

Hitchens fails to rise to my challenge - or does he?

By Donald Hank

So far, Christopher Hitchens has not responded to my challenge to show how the fact that atheists sometimes perform “ethical” actions, just like religious people, proves the irrelevance of God.

Or has he?

A reader calling himself “Switters” writes:

“Unfortunately, your entire article is based on a flawed premise. Hitchens does not claim that ‘ethical actions by non-believers might somehow disprove the existence of God.’ His point is simply that proper moral behavior does not require a belief in a god.”

Me:
Switters, how is it that you have such insight into what Hitchens means when he talks or writes? Hmmm. I had challenged Hitchens and he sent his spokesman - or did he?
Switters continues (in a style strangely reminiscent of Hitchens’):
“In fact, at no point in any of his writing [my emphasis - DH] does Hitchens ever claim to disprove the existence of god. Rather, he simply points out the logical and rational flaws in the arguments for a belief in god.”
My goodness, someone takes Hitchens seriously enough to read everything the man has produced. Someone other than Hitchens himself? Is that plausible? And how can this person be so sure of what Hitchens actually means? I wonder if Hitchens would agree with him (with himself?).
And then:
“And Jan, to answer your question: ‘What evil empowers so called humans to want to erase a nation from this earth, and chop the arms and legs off women and children.’ The name of that evil is religion.”
Me:
Oh, is it religion?
Isn’t the name of that evil humanity? Aren’t limbs chopped off with tools made by humans, those horrible creatures? Must these awful creatures not be eradicated from the face of the earth?
Hitchens, er, I mean switters, if you really want to pretend that Muslims = Christians, then why not just look at the bigger category, namely, humanity? Now that is the problem, isn’t it? After all, the far Left, to which you adhere, has trumped us all, with a whopping 100 million innocent people slaughtered by your kind last century and with Kim Jong Il, your fellow atheist, making a respectable showing in this century. It seems that instead of combating the evil of “religion” your side has decided to compete.

Congratulations. You won the bloody contest!

Of course an intelligent fellow like you can see that comparing Christians and Jews to Muslims is like comparing conservatives to socialists and then blaming all the mistakes socialists make on conservatives because they are also politicians. Attack the larger category just in case you missed anyone. Is that a sign of a brilliant mind?
Well, of course, you can always say “I am switters, not Hitchens.”
That part was clever enough.

The runaway Right

by Olavo de Carvalho

If there is anything to be dismayed about, it is the difference, the abysmal disparity, between the multiplicity of fronts on which the activist Left launches its attacks against democracy, and the slavish modesty with which the advocates of democracy, while implicitly surrendering to the general strategy of their opponents, bind themselves to specific criticisms, if not to irrelevant aspects, thus losing ground even after history has favored them by proving the economic superiority of capitalism over socialism. This difference, which has already consolidated itself as an ineluctable journalistic rule - to break it means to risk being fired - represents the “asymmetric war” transposed to the battleground of culture and the media.

The immediate causes of the Right’s inferiority are twofold: a) the obsession of true liberals (e.g., libertarians) and conservatives with the economy; b) sheer ignorance. The first cause attests in itself to the ideological subservience to the enemy, inasmuch as it embraces, without further consideration, the - absolutely incorrect - Marxist premise that the economy drives history. The second is a pure and simple crime - with the only mitigating circumstance being that they commit it against themselves. The 2 causes are not independent: the passive admission of the Marxist premise shows deep ignorance about Marxism among liberals and conservatives alike. Since the death of  José Guilherme Merquior, who grew weak in the presence of the Left not because of ignorance, but out of mental subservience to his youthful coterie -, I do not know, at least in Brazil, of a single one of them who has dedicated enough time to study the works of Lukacs and Adorno, Korsh, Poulantzas and the like, not to mention Marxism’s latest developments in Europe and Asia, whose very existence they are completely unaware of. Although the intellectual superiority of the Left is but a myth when it comes to the great names of philosophy, literature and human sciences (where conservatives reign), it constitutes a plain truth for the run-of-the-mill “rightwing” spokespersons in the media and the talking classes in general: they’re so immensely uninformed that they suffer blow after blow and don’t even know where they’re coming from. And if we try to warn them in advance, based upon a serious and profound study, they feel their pride’s been hurt and beat up the messenger in order to avoid the news.

This is true of Brazil, and applies to developed countries only in a slightly smaller proportion.

Thanks to this phenomenon, it is no overstatement to say that in the entire western hemisphere, for more than half a century, the only historically active political force has been the activist Left, nourished by billionaire foundations. With the exception of the brief intermission of the Reagan era - when the episodic change of direction was due exclusively to personal leaderships without any further support from politics and business circles -, it was leftist activism that has shaped at will the course of world history. The fact that less than two decades after the fall of the USSR, the Left came to dominate so many countries in Europe, Africa and Latin America, and now the United States itself, should give food for thought for apologists of the inevitable triumph of capitalism. However, the depth and breadth of this process goes much further than what can be traced back in the last few decades. One must go back to the 60s to get a partial understanding of the almost absolute control that leftist activism exerts on the flow of information in the world, molding at its own convenience, and mostly unchallenged, the very mindset of its opponents.

Invariably, the many beliefs that intellectual and journalistic activism manages to prescribe as undisputed global truths are entirely debunked within three or four decades, when it is already too late to counter their devastating effects. Worse yet, the fabrication imposes itself on international opinion, in the heat of the moment, while its refutation, no matter how meticulous and precise it might be, can only make its way to some scholars and to a minimum segment of the interested public, thereby losing any political momentum and significance. I will convey here a small sample of the disinformation scheme that managed to impose on the world the most blatant twisting of reality, shaping countless choices and political decisions, be it by dint of public opinion or public authorities, and bringing forth such effects that continue to spread to this day.

1. As early as the 50s, the joint efforts of soviet disinformation and the American elite media had succeeded in imposing on the world the myth of  “McCarthyist persecution,” celebrated in innumerable Hollywood movies, to the extent that it immunized the popular psyche against the disclosure of the truth. The book by M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History (2008), restores things to their due place, with the added help of newly-disclosed soviet documents. But how can a single book neutralize decades of massive propaganda? Today we know that the “persecution” consisted of interrogating some dozens of suspects - none of them innocent - and sending them back home under the protection of the 5^th Amendment, while the USSR, in the same period, slaughtered no less than three million people, with the assistance of those “poor victims” oppressed by Senator Joe McCarthy. The universal use of the expression “McCarthyism” as a synonym for persecutory hysteria certifies the degree to which the laboriously fabricated fantasy overcame reality.

2. To this day, even in conservative circles, people firmly believe that the assassination of John and Robert Kennedy did not originate in any communist conspiracy, but either in a CIA plot or as the spontaneous effect of “American social violence,” associated with the “gun culture” and the “religious fanaticism” of the Right. How it could be that all this reactionarism ended up toppling two anti-communist leaders at the hands of a communist militant and a Palestine activist, is an indecent question that must not be uttered. The evidence in favor of the communist authorship of both crimes begins to prevail in scholars’ circles, but does not reach beyond them.

3. Although it is common knowledge that the Vietnam war, lost by the communists at the battlefield, was won back by them with the thoughtful help of the American media, student activism and the golden elite of show business, it is forbidden to imply that there could have been any crime of treason worth investigating here. The assumed impersonal fatality of the Vietnamese victory, a farce in all respects, is still accepted as an unequivocal historical truth.

4. The countless proofs in favor of Ernst Topisch’s thesis that the rise of Nazism was entirely an accomplishment of Stalin, are still ignored, to the extent that Nazism and Communism, in the vocabulary of academia and the media still denote the most extreme and irreducible pair of opposites.

5. When the USSR fell, it was obvious to the few qualified observers that, if the crimes of the soviet dictatorship were not investigated and punished, the communist leadership would simply rearrange itself in new forms of organizations, soon surprising its opponent with a display of renewed and prodigious power, which is exactly what happened. The entire American and European media, without exception, suppressed as long as possible the disclosure of the evidence of those crimes, which would keep popping up from the soviet archives, but is thus far accessible only to interested scholars and gets no public exposure. The “death of communism” was a farce in all respects. It only served to disguise the real casualty: anti-communism.

6. The most cursory comparison between the communist propaganda of the 50s and the anti-American discourse of the mainstream media in Europe, the United States and Latin American suffices to prove that the slogans disseminated by the KGB more than a half-century ago wound up embedding themselves in the popular mindset, to the degree that they received the stamp of conventional wisdom.

7. Any attack that can be imputed to the Right, no matter how insignificant and without any proven authorship, is aggressively exhibited and explored in newspapers and movies, for decades on end, with the strength of a world publicity campaign. When it was indisputably proven that the attack against Pope John Paul II was the work of the KGB, the so-called “bourgeois,” “revolutionary,” “imperialist” media publicized it with the utmost circumspection and neither in Brazil nor in the rest of the world was a single speech by a conservative politician denouncing the crime of the century heard. Everyone conceded and still concedes to the Left the monopoly on the right to reopen old wounds.

These seven samples suffice to underscore the fact that communist indoctrination, amidst the full surge of capitalist triumphalism, constitutes the dominant ideology, hegemonic in all aspects. In the face of this insurmountable dominance, the timid apologies of the market economy, followed by inaction in the cultural and psychological field, are pathetically impotent. In Brazil, capitalism is transforming itself increasingly into a transient State concession, but businessmen strive more to avoid accidental faults of etiquette than to restrain the incoercible progress of capitalism’s enemies. They simply don’t understand that verbal violence is the last effective weapon of the persecuted minority. The validity of this weapon has been demonstrated many times by the communists themselves. But classic liberals and conservatives stick to a stilted politeness just to feign peace of mind and optimism, while the enemy, fully aware of the disparity in power, amuses himself with these affectations of self-assurance, because he knows he can send them to prison any time he pleases, and he’s got plenty of fiscal gimmicks for that purpose, all of them apolitical and innocuous looking.

Olavo de Carvalho, b. 1947, is a Brazilian writer and philosopher who has taught political philosophy at the Catholic University of Parana, Brazil, from 2001 to 2005. He currently resides in the U.S., working as a correspondent for Brazilian newspapers. The author of a dozen books on philosophical and political matters, he is a respected weekly columnist with a wide following in his native Brazil and an increasingly popular public speaker in this country. He has spoken before the Hudson Institute, the Atlas Foundation and the America’s Future Foundation.

Cancel everything you know

Donald Hank

Soon I will be posting an article by Olavo de Carvalho entitled “The runaway right,” which describes the abject unwillingness of conservatives (or “classic liberals”) to defend against the most outrageous and transparent lies and distortions of the Left. At the beginning, the author lists names of Marxist activists who have introduced their ideas into Western culture. These are not household names. Just as the destination and origin of the bailout trillions are not known, we aren’t supposed to know who controls either our minds or our finances. But when you consider that these men have strongly influenced western culture and thinking- your and my thinking - for decades, it behooves us to pay attention to all the clues as to how they have succeeded in duping so many for so long, even posthumously through their willing disciples in media and education.

Too often the average American mouths opinions that came from the media or schools and universities, most of which are steeped in Marxist thought, and he or she actually believes this thought represents the product of an educated mind when in fact, it is the product of indoctrination. I will go further and say that the beliefs and attitudes of the average American today (even the average “Christian” American) are largely the product of leftist indoctrination.

Many believe, for example, that having borders is no longer a good thing, or at least that in our case, the border with Mexico should not be closed but should be opened to admit those wonderful people “looking for a better way of life” or “willing to do jobs Americans won’t do.” (This became so widely accepted a “fact” that no one even mentioned illegal immigration and border security in the last presidential election).

Many also believed that not voting for far-left stoutly pro-partial-birth-abortion Barack Obama was racist, even un-Christian.

They believe that the bailout of banks and the auto industry was necessary and the bank crisis was due to unknown causes centered around a lack of regulation - hence, the “need” for more regulations (even though the regulations that are in place are not being enforced or worse, regulations that enabled banks to use good banking practice are banned — by bad regulations!).

And, of course, they believe marriage is between any two (or maybe more?) people regardless of sex (and age? And family relationship?).

Many also believe that politicians calling themselves “conservative” are justified in nationalizing our banks and industry “to save our economy.” Many believe the justification for this is a revelation of Divine Will to our beloved President.

They believe without question that FDR “got us out of the depression” when in fact he prolonged it and aggravated it, for example, by paying farmers to slaughter livestock in an insane attempt to raise farm prices during a depression.

Where do you think these absurd notions came from? The Left originated essentially in Europe and spread not only ideas but also mind control techniques developed by activists from Pavlov to Gramsci to the Frankfurt School. Gramsci taught activists to use fear and intimidation - name-calling for instance (the modern version includes racist, homophobe, sexist, to name the most effective ones) - to force people to accept otherwise unacceptable ideas. He called this technique the “psychic iron cage.” What troubles the few conservative observers aware of this technique is the extent to which these threadbare scare tactics actually work, even now when the public could - and should - be fully aware of them and should have developed means to combat them.

Thanks not so much to the success of the Left but more to the abject failure of the right to defend itself (see Olavo de Carvalho’s article “Shadow diplomacy”), the door is wide open for anarchy, of which we have already had a taste (ACORN, bullying banks into making suicidally high-risk loans, for example, Black Panthers terrorizing conservative voters, and Joe Six-Pack turning a blind eye to this, afraid to be called a racist for caring about his family’s safety). They will almost definitely experience this anarchy in massive doses very soon, thanks to gullible Americans who have willingly turned over their minds to mind-control experts of the Left.

Now tell yourself the truth: do you warm up to the idea of wearing a psychic iron cage? I doubt you do, despite the fact that a staggering number of Americans wear them.

Therefore, if you have a vague - or even distinct - sensation of having been bullied at any time into accepting ideas that were not your own or that ran counter to your culture, your common sense, your religion or your upbringing and if you have acquiesced mostly out of peer pressure, shame, fear of rejection, retaliation or the like, you need to find a technique to resist this unfair assault on your freedom of conscience.

None of the aforementioned motivations are legitimate reasons for you to change your beliefs. Nor are the following ones.

You should not change your beliefs because someone suggested you are not intelligent or scientific if you believe in intelligent design or creationism. Many great scientists have believed, and still believe, in creation.

You should not change your beliefs because the activist Supreme Court challenged them, for example, in Wade v Roe or in the Dover School Board case banning all challenges to Darwinism in public schools.

You should not change your beliefs because someone told you you are a homophobe or intolerant if you believe in traditional marriage as opposed to “gay” marriage. The recent spate of homosexual-perpetrated vandalism, threats of arson and church burning and the outrageous arrests of Christians perceived as “homophobic” in Europe and Canada simply for pursuing their beliefs prove that homosexual activists are the ones who are intolerant. And the Left’s refusal to tell the truth about male homosexuality and AIDS is incontrovertible proof that they are the real homophobes.

You should not change your beliefs because someone told you you are narrow-minded if you believe the Bible. Jesus said “narrow is the way,” and you have an unalienable right to believe that and act upon it without compromise.

Nor should you start believing that nations should open their borders or allow illegal immigration, even if church leaders try to sell you this malarkey by telling you Christ endorsed open borders or discouraged people from loving their homeland. He didn’t.

And you should not stop believing in the free market because someone - talking heads in media, for example - suggested that that capitalism is outdated. Even communist countries are sustained by a healthy black market based on capitalism. Socialism does not work, anywhere or ever.

I asked Mr. de Carvalho if he could shed light on the leftist authors he lists as prime movers in the movement to brainwash the West, and he recommended 2 books:

“Roger Scruton gives a brief but efficient summary of Lukacs’ ideas in his book ‘Thinkers of the New Left.’ Lukacs’ texts are heard to read without a previous knowledge of the entire Marxist tradition and also of the Wilhelm Dilthey school to which Lukacs was attached before becoming a Marxist. A good starting point for such a study is Leszek Kolakowski’s ‘Main Currents of Marxism.’  I believe this book should be mandatory reading for every conservative. [my emphasis -- DH]

Lukacs is a very interesting type, a kind of romantic spiritualist who lost his way and fell into Marxism, becoming a docile pet of stupid Stalinist chieftains.”

So what to do when the Left tries to bully you into accepting its ideas, calling you a bigot, a racist, a homophobe, a wing-nut, a sexist, a nationalist or whatever the insult du jour is?

Try turning the tables and saying:

“Wow, you really enjoy bullying people, don’t you?”

“Bullying” is one of the PC terms used pejoratively against their enemies. This should change their tone and shut them up at least long enough for you to make your exit. And it will give them something to think about.

They may even start respecting you.

Shadow diplomacy

Olavo de Carvalho

Diário do Comércio, December 22nd, 2008

“Monroe must be rolling in his grave,” remarked Julia Sweig, director of the Latin-American program of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), upon learning that the USA was locked out of the Latin America State leaders’ summit in Costa do Sauípe, Bahia, Brazil. The famous 1823 doctrine, which placed the continent out of the range of European powers and made it a sphere of influence of the USA, is dead and buried.

This is the inevitable result of President George W. Bush’s policy of trying to seduce the Latin American “moderate left” and make it a containment wall against the avalanche of revolutionary leftism. There was virtually no one in high Washington DC circles, American big media and the CFR itself who would not consider this policy the pinnacle of universal diplomatic wisdom. The Democrats only complained - a bit - that it was not leftist enough. Republicans reacted with contempt and impatience at any attempt to point out its fundamental flaw.

Since I arrived to the USA in May 2005, I have made speeches in several conservative institutions and handed out dozens of articles to politicians and opinion makers, telling them that ignoring the deep unity of the Latin American left, betting on the possibility of pitting one country against the other by means of trading advantages, was an enormous act of stupidity, if not of deliberate treason that the leftists in the Department of State were nourishing and that the right-wing lackeys refused to see.

Celebrated by the left as a display of “independence,” the distancing of the continent from the USA is far from that: it is wholesale and overt submission to the expansionist strategy of the Russians, Chinese and Iranians. In recent years, the Chinese President Hu Jintao spent more time in Latin America than George W. Bush, increasing trading and diplomatic relations with several countries on the continent. Mahmud Ahmadinejad already has an invitation to visit Brazil and Russian warships are sailing merrily about in joint maneuvers with Venezuelan warships in an area where such would have been unthinkable some years ago. It is impossible to gauge Russian and Chinese encroachment in Brazilian business through an infinity of frontmen, but, as a rule of thumb, where you read “Spain” construe that as “Russia.” The reintegration of Cuba in the Latin-American community, with no concessions whatsoever in the human rights area in exchange, was celebrated by President Lula as a chief motivation for the summit, even if nothing else would be settled there.

Lula, of whom George W. Bush had high expectations as an essential instrument of American diplomacy to stop the advance of continental communism, is himself, just as much today as since the foundation of the São Paulo Forum in 1990, the great mastermind of Latin-American subversion, something that this summit made clearer than ever.

If, at the same time, he nourishes market economy and international free trade, he follows in this the same guidelines of the Russians, the Chinese and of all the international communist movement: to postpone sine die the socialization of the production means and use capitalist growth itself as a means to build global leftist political power. What Lenin did in Russia is now being applied on a worldwide scale: seduction of capitalists with smooth talk while the political power of the communist movement is increased to the utmost limits.

Accustomed to making the most accurate analyses and predictions and see them received with scornful grins and affectations of Olympic superiority - a classic emblem of ignorant unpreparedness - I recall that as early as 2005, fifteen years after the founding of the São Paulo Forum, by then the almost absolute lord of continental policy, the most enlightened council of the CFR would refuse to believe in the very existence of this organization. One day, some thirty or forty years from now, we shall know whether this display of blindness was the fruit of genuine stupidity or the clever action of enlightened intellectuals. Politics, of course, is a game of disguises. But one cannot handle disguises if one does not keep away from them, firmly anchored in reality. At the end of the day, those who get accustomed to living from disguises end up contaminating themselves with an abhorrent terror of reality: their vain boasting of realism, maturity and pragmatic wisdom is a grotesque pantomime that conceals its own total incapability of effective action. While granting them the illusory power of manipulating shadows within shadows, it changes them into shadows themselves.

Olavo de Carvalho, b. 1947, is a Brazilian writer and philosopher who has taught political philosophy at the Catholic University of Parana, Brazil, from 2001 to 2005. He currently resides in the U.S., working as a correspondent for Brazilian newspapers. The author of a dozen books on philosophical and political matters, he is a respected weekly columnist with a wide following in his native Brazil and an increasingly popular public speaker in this country. He has spoken before the Hudson Institute, the Atlas Foundation and the America’s Future Foundation.

My challenge to Christopher Hitchens

by Donald Hank, redeemed agnostic

The article “How atheism is being sold to America” by David Kupelian, author of the best seller The Marketing of Evil, discusses how atheism is being sold by well-known atheists like Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, to name a few authors whose books have been hot items lately.

A quote from the article:

…. Hitchens boasts in Vanity Fair that on his nationwide book tour he says to his audiences: “My challenge: Name an ethical statement or action, made or performed by a person of faith, that could not have been made or performed by a nonbeliever. I have since asked this question at every stop and haven’t had a reply yet.”

Not surprisingly, considering what the Bible says about atheists, Hitchens got it backwards by suggesting that ethical actions by non-believers might somehow either disprove the existence of God or prove God is irrelevant. And he chose to use the word “ethical” rather than “good,” indicating he does not believe in good or evil. Actually, an atheist cannot believe in good vs evil because those are religious concepts, so if that is the case, he is at least being honest.

So first, let me remind you, Mr. Hitchens, that religion is not about ethics. It is about good and evil, and since you can’t define that and could not believe in the concept, you are disqualified to challenge anyone to “name an ethical statement or action, made or performed by a person of faith, that could not have been made or performed by a nonbeliever,” because you don’t define “ethical” the way we do. It is apples and oranges and is irrelevant.

Let’s look at “ethics” as interpreted by your kind: Peter Singer, a professor of “bioethics” at Princeton, says it is ethical to kill infants after they are born if they have birth defects.

Obviously, ethics in the eyes of atheists has nothing to do with standard traditional ethics or morality and it is misleading for someone like you to use it in a comparison with religious people because it suggests we would accept such nebulous usage, which of course we would not. You are using words randomly, without definition, and even if you defined them, other “ethicists” would certainly eventually challenge your definition in favor of their own. But if you are asking your audience to look at the world through an atheist’s eyes, then anything can be defined as ethical, so your challenge is meaningless, like your terms.

The real challenge is defining ethics in such a way that the definition sticks and can’t be manipulated at the hands of evil people. You would no doubt say “define evil,” whereupon I would say “define ethics. You used the word without definition.”

When you don’t believe in God, then all is in flux, eternally, and nothing could ever have a stable definition. Your definition of an ethical action today may not be the same as your definition tomorrow.

My challenge to Mr. Hitchens: First, define ethical, and then show how the fact that non-religious people can perform “ethical” actions, is evidence that there is no God.

The fact that non-religious people also do good is in fact hard evidence of what Paul wrote about the heathen following God’s laws spontaneously and taking their cue from the very universe to see and understand Him (Romans 1:18-20). You can ban the Bible but you can’t ban the universe, and it will proclaim Him.

The fact that non-believers are less altruistic (e.g., give less to charities) is hard evidence that religion is a better source of goodness than atheism.

Thus people who advocate atheism are undermining the greatest source of good known to man. Hitler’s strongest opponents were leaders of the Confessional Church and also a few courageous Catholics, some of whom were martyred for their stand.

Now, how does undermining the greatest source of good (or ethics) make people good (or ethical if you insist)?

Now it is clear that you refuse to use the word “good” and no doubt think that word is for the uneducated or superstitious.

If so, then in using the word “ethical” you are attempting to postulate an ethical society parallel to the good or godly society conceived of by ordinary people. But in that case, despite your great sophistry and excessive wordiness, you are in fact only imitating what godly people have already discovered 4,000 years ago.

Which leads to the question: If we religious folk are so inferior to you, why do you so slavishly imitate our concepts, going to great pains to rename them? I therefore further challenge you to construct a philosophical system that does not use parallel terms like “ethical,” in imitation of our term “good.” Go find your own way. Cut the umbilical cord once and for all. Your writings indicate we are irrelevant in your eyes. Prove you believe that. End this slavish obsession with the religious people whose vocabulary you despise.

I admit it troubles me greatly that the people you may influence to adopt your nihilist views may, like you, adopt a fluid definition of “ethics” (fashionably turning up their noses at the word “good”) and wind up believing that foolish men can reinvent goodness and godliness simply by renaming them and replacing them with what we have always deemed as evil. Honestly, don’t you ever find yourself as tedious as others do?

But I tremble when I realize that some of your forebears and sharers in your worldview are: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, to name but a few, whose salient contribution to mankind so far has been over 100 million innocent lives sacrificed at the altar of sophisticated atheistic constructs remarkably like yours. I tremble at the thought that perhaps you attribute to them a kind of “ethical” conduct of your own invention. After all, nothing stands in the way of doing so should you so choose.

Mr. Hitchens, here is my most important challenge for you: distinguish yourself, if you can, from these your fellow atheists enumerated above. You trumpet the fact that no one ever rose to your childish challenge, which was hardly a challenge because it was predicated on the laughable assumption that completely undefined “ethical actions” performed by non-believers are somehow proof that God is irrelevant, and that the “ethics” of an atheist could be morally equivalent to the goodness of a godly person. Now, accept my challenge, which trumps yours. Show me that your definition of “ethics,” is any different from that of the above cited bloody butchers. I daresay you cannot and I predict that you will pass on trying to respond.

Finally, Mr. Hitchens, in the name of all that is good and holy, I challenge you to wake up and abandon this senseless pursuit of evil!