War in Heaven: Hitchens Meets D'Souza on Home Turf

Meredith Bryan — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 17:25:06 -0400

Last night at the Society for Ethical Culture, the big question was: whose body count is bigger? Atheism's or Christianity's?

In one corner was Christopher Hitchens, a leading contributor to American intellectual dyspepsia and the author of God is Not Great; in the other was Hoover Institution and former young Reaganite Dinesh D'Souza, author of What's So Great About Christianity. (If the war between the two were to cause any collateral damage, a look around the packed auditorium put the number of civilians in the line of fire in the hundreds.)

The Salem Witch Trials killed just eighteen, said Mr. D'Souza. And the Inquisition killed only 2,000 in 300 years! Whereas atheists could claim Stalin, Mao... his list went on.

"Atheism, not religion, is responsible for the mass murders of history," he declared triumphantly. "I think Hitchens by the end of the day should be chanting ‘Thank God for Christianity.'"

Earlier Mr. D'Souza had opened the debate, sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and The King's College on the topic "Is Christianity the Problem?" on a rather more lighthearted note.

"I don't believe in unicorns," he said drily, "but I haven't written a book on the subject." This was a dig at the "militancy" of the "new atheists:" Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Mr. Hitchens.

He charged that the values claimed by atheists-individual dissent, personal dignity, equality, antipathy to oppression, compassion as a social virtue-actually "came into the world from Christianity," thank you.

Mr. Hitchens took the podium with a plastic glass of dark-colored liquid and thanked the "alarmingly polite and wholesome faculty, staff and students of King's College."

(His alarm no doubt partly consisted in speaking before this particular audience: The King's College's mission is to educate its students from a "commitment to the truths of Christianity and a Biblical worldview.")

To Mr. Hitchens, those truths have a deeper origin even than that, because "human solidarity predates monotheism."

God, as Christians describe him, he said, is a "celestial dictator" who will "continue to judge and persecute us even after we are dead."

It is "very fortunate," he concluded, "that we posses no evidence of this." read more »

NY Observer > Dinesh D'Souza

War in Heaven: Hitchens Meets D'Souza on Home Turf