I found this via Andy Webb on Facebook. It’s the wonderful article of Peter Hitchens, the less-known brother of Peter Hitchens, the atheist. The article gives his testimony of how he came back to Christ, after running for years. It also shows the long-standing feud that he and his brother had, even before Peter became a Christian.
Here are few quotes from the article:
Why is there such a fury against religion now? Because religion is the one reliable force that stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. The one reliable force that forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law.The one reliable force that restrains the hand of the man of power. In an age of powerworship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power.
Very good point. The left will use the ruse that religion stands in the way of progress in order to get rid of religion, or at least try to.
Another quote from his account:
I set fire to my Bible on the playing fields of my Cambridge boarding school one bright, windy spring afternoon in 1967. I was 15 years old. The book did not, as I had hoped, blaze fiercely and swiftly.
Only after much blowing and encouragement did I manage to get it to ignite at all, and I was left with a disagreeable, half-charred mess.
Most of my small invited audience drifted away long before I had finished, disappointed by the anticlimax and the pettiness of the thing. Thunder did not mutter.
This really hit home with me and reminded me of the time when I was home on leave from the Coast Guard in which I ate a page of the Bible in front of my brother’s wide-eyed friends. They were having a party, in which all manner of debauchery was taking place, and someone mentioned that I shouldn’t put my feet on a Gideon Bible that was on the coffee table. In a loud voice, I foolishly proclaimed that there was no reason to regard the Bible at all, because nothing would happen. I then picked up the Bible, ripped out a page, and began chewing it up. I didn’t swallow it, while my brother’s friends reacted in fear, I spit it out. But they thought I swallowed it.
I’m not proud of the act. It shows how depraved my own heart was before my conversion. God had every right to send me to hell on the spot, but in His grace He didn’t give me what I deserved. He just waited and worked on me, and I became a Christian some 7 years later. He is gracious, and patient. Be sure to read Hitchens article. It truly is inspiring and a bit ironic. God laughs at the atheist and saves his brother! Hopefully, the famous atheist will be broken some day as well… by God’s rich and abundant grace.
Here is how Peter views his atheist brother Christopher:
But since it is obvious much of what I say arises out of my attempt to debate religion with him, it would be absurd to pretend that much of what I say here is not intended to counter or undermine arguments he presented in his book, God Is Not Great, published in 2007.
I do not loathe atheists, as Christopher claims to loathe believers. I am not angered by their failure to see what appears obvious to me. I understand that they see differently. I do think that they have reasons for their belief, as I have reasons for mine, which are the real foundations of this argument.
It is my belief that passions as strong as his are more likely to be countered by the unexpected force of poetry, which can ambush the human heart at any time.
It is also my view that, as with all atheists, he is his own chief opponent. As long as he can convince himself, nobody else will persuade him. His arguments are to some extent internally coherent and are a sort of explanation – if not the best explanation – of the world and the universe.
He often assumes that moral truths are self-evident, attributing purpose to the universe and swerving dangerously round the problem of conscience – which surely cannot be conscience if he is right since the idea of conscience depends on it being implanted by God. If there is no God then your moral qualms might just as easily be the result of indigestion.
Yet Christopher is astonishingly unable to grasp that these assumptions are problems for his argument. This inability closes his mind to a great part of the debate, and so makes his atheist faith insuperable for as long as he himself chooses to accept it.
He goes on to say the following and more:
One of the problems atheists have is the unbelievers’ assertion that it is possible to determine what is right and what is wrong without God. They have a fundamental inability to concede that to be effectively absolute a moral code needs to be beyond human power to alter.
On this misunderstanding is based my brother Christopher’s supposed conundrum about whether there is any good deed that could be done only by a religious person, and not done by a Godless one. Like all such questions, this contains another question: what is good, and who is to decide what is good?
Left to himself, Man can in a matter of minutes justify the incineration of populated cities; the deportation, slaughter, disease and starvation of inconvenient people and the mass murder of the unborn.
I have heard people who believe themselves to be good, defend all these things, and convince themselves as well as others. Quite often the same people will condemn similar actions committed by different countries, often with great vigour.
For a moral code to be effective, it must be attributed to, and vested in, a non-human source. It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself.
Its most powerful expression is summed up in the words ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’.
