A few readers of my Prayers for Christopher Hitchens made the astounding charges that praying for him, and for his conversion as well as his deliverance from cancer — which are both forms of healing — is uncharitable or presumptuous. Among the realities these respondents missed is the fact that a Christian might be drawn to pray for Hitchens not because he’s a prominent atheist but because he is a certain kind of atheist.
Readers who admire Hitchens, as I do, will find of interest his New York Times review of Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (requires registration). It begins:
Belief in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth and belief in the virtue of his teachings are not at all the same thing. Writing to John Adams in 1813, having taken his razor blade to the books of the New Testament and removed all “the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests,” Thomas Jefferson said the 46-page residue contained “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” Ernest Renan, in his pathbreaking “Life of Jesus” in 1863, also repudiated the idea that Jesus was the son of God while affirming the beauty of his teachings.
In rather striking contrast, C. S. Lewis maintained in his classic statement “Mere Christianity”: “That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse.”
As an admirer of Jefferson and Renan and a strong nonadmirer of Lewis, I am bound to say that Lewis is more honest here. Absent a direct line to the Almighty and a conviction that the last days are upon us, how is it “moral” to teach people to abandon their families, give up on thrift and husbandry and take to the stony roads? How is it moral to claim a monopoly on access to heaven, or to threaten waverers with everlasting fire, let alone to condemn fig trees and persuade devils to infest the bodies of pigs? Such a person if not divine would be a sorcerer and a fanatic.
That’s the Hitchens who attracts Christians’ prayers: no Jeffersonian/Renanian avoidance of the question, no Dawkinsian/Harrisian generalizations that treat the questions as irrelevant, but a clear and pungent description of the real question. We will think his answer is quite wrong, and be unwilling to make excuses for his being wrong, but that kind of engaged atheism does draw the interest, respect, and even affection of people who are engaged in the same questions but on the other side.
July 15th, 2010 | 2:58 pm
Mr. Hitchens openly scoffs at all religions. He believes that the Christ of the Gospels was a lunatic or a fraud or mostly a literary invention. There are many among us who ask for prayers, perhaps family members or friends. I see no point in the “vanity crusade” of praying for CH. It seems no more than celestial name dropping. If God wishes to intervene in CH’s soul, He will do so and we are likely never to learn of it.
July 15th, 2010 | 2:59 pm
Until there are no christians affected by cancer, (or any other disease) it is uncharitable and presumptuous for anyone to pray for any cancer suffering non-believer. Take care of your own house first and stay out of ours.
July 15th, 2010 | 3:38 pm
Am I missing something here? When did prayer become a zero sum game? Christians are called to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them. It is easy to love — and pray for — those who love us but the measure of a Christian, surely, is to prayer for those who hate us. Remember, it was the prayers of St. Monica that converted the heart of St. Augustine…
July 15th, 2010 | 9:05 pm
“Am I missing something here? When did prayer become a zero sum game? Christians are called to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them. It is easy to love — and pray for — those who love us but the measure of a Christian, surely, is to prayer for those who hate us. Remember, it was the prayers of St. Monica that converted the heart of St. Augustine…”
—A. LaPerle
This.
July 16th, 2010 | 2:27 am
I find it simply astonishing that anyone would be “offended” at prayers offered for Hitchens. It seems to be a no lose scenerio for Hitchens. Why would any atheist protest? He could simply remind himself that if God does not exist, the prayers help, and hurt no one. But if God does exist, maybe Hitchens will be helped in some way. Heck, he might as well pray himself with these odds(as long as it’s sincere).
i think the protesters should read read the seventeenth century mathematician Pascal, and see how his wager is relevant here!
July 16th, 2010 | 11:29 am
For a very long time now I have accepted that nature is the source of my (our) existence. What an accompanying feeling of freedom, peace of mind, and relief. But what a difficult position to be in. How impossible it is to inform the “believer” that this existence, as far as we KNOW, is all we get.
Silence!
Hitchen is a “certain kind of atheist”… one that speaks loudly. Now that he is suffering from a very natural illness… he has become the poster boy to satiate the hunger for blood coming a very large collectivity of believers. There is a clamor for “God” to prove that He exist… to show off His power over Hitchen’s.
And God says: Hey Hitch… who’s right, who’s the Boss, now?
Still… in nature, there is life, there is death… but Hitchen’s cancer (cannot and will not) create a God.
July 16th, 2010 | 12:18 pm
cag, Albert,
What if I just pray for the good of all humanity, and since I know a particular detail of the particular man Hitchen’s situation, I pray for that particular detail?
July 16th, 2010 | 4:31 pm
I pray for the conversion of Christopher Hitchens for purely selfish reasons.
I want to sit in Heaven beside him, drinking single malt scotch, I smoking cigars, he, his cigarettes, while we discuss all the stubborn questions.
Wise up Hitch; in truth, atheists are being played for suckers. And no atheist wants be the one who’s been snookered.
July 16th, 2010 | 7:15 pm
cag, what is meant by: to pray for the good of all humanity? Is the illness (that of mr. Hitchen or of any one else) subjects to be prayed for? All that exist eventually dies.
One of the natural process of death comes through illness(es). Nature constructs and deconstructs all of its forms. No exception. Prayers cannot eliminate the laws of nature. Now as human forms, we have the ability to delay or alleviate, through medecine and other therapies, the effects of illnesses.
Is prayer an effectve therapy? And if it were… it would not be because of the intercession of a God… but through some natural physical forces acting from a distance. So, yes pray… but it may do you as much good as it will mr. Hitchen.
Pastor Spomer… the atheist is far better prepared to die than the religious person. we have no illusion. we die. What happens after?
is simply this: (?)
July 17th, 2010 | 1:51 am
I have another objection to prayer for Hitchens. If someone is moved to pray for Hitchens, that is all very well. But that such encouragement should happen in the public square, so to speak, seems like another symptom of the celebrity society.
Why not pray for those whom it is, by the most obvious criteria, your _responsibility_ to pray? And when you’ve done that, pray for the person you passed by in the street today who, unbeknownst to you, is teetering on the edge of faith, one way or the other.
Do you pray enough for those whom, you know, you should be praying for? I don’t. I’m very slack in my prayer, and I suspect most are. So I urge all who read this, if they are about to pray for Hitchens, to pray for all those others first, and, when and if they feel they have discharged this responsibility, then pray for Hitch. But wait, at that point, you will always be able to think of another who is not a Celebrity Prayee and who needs your prayer.
Rest assured that this publicity has generated huge numbers of prayers for a man who has chosen not only to reject Christ, but to do everything in his power to turn others away from Him.
Perhaps we can look forward to Lifeprayers for the Rich and Famous, or maybe a spiritual reality TV show called Big Father, which will address the problem of atheist celebrities who have not been disparaging enough of the faith to attract the call to saving prayer.
July 17th, 2010 | 9:47 pm
I cannot fathom why any Christian could think there is something amiss in praying for Hitchens. Some of you miss the point that Hitchens *is* someone we know, though only through his writings, and that there is some affection mixed in with our annoyance. He’s someone I know who is in need of prayer. It’s as simple as that.
July 18th, 2010 | 11:54 pm
Albert, you wrote: “Pastor Spomer… the atheist is far better prepared to die than the religious person. we have no illusion. we die. What happens after?
is simply this: (?)”
I disagree. If you think the properties of your physical self give rise to the self-conscious, knowing, understanding, truth-recognizing properties of your soul/mind/intellect/rationality, you are laboring under an illusion. As Aquinas argued, these cannot be seen as corporeal properties of bodies, or even emergent properties of bodies. If we can recognize these non-corporeal features of the self, it seems plausible that they survive corporeal death.
Maclin, you wrote, “I cannot fathom why any Christian could think there is something amiss in praying for Hitchens. Some of you miss the point that Hitchens *is* someone we know, though only through his writings, and that there is some affection mixed in with our annoyance. He’s someone I know who is in need of prayer. It’s as simple as that.”
It certainly seems that simple to me, too. What’s up with these comments?
July 19th, 2010 | 1:30 am
Maclin, Craig,
We know Hitchens the way we know Michael Jackson or the President of the United States. That is, we don’t. We know the image on the screen or the words on the page. It’s almost the definition of celebrities – people whom we think we know, but don’t, and whom we can be certain don’t know us.
What’s wrong with praying, instead, for someone you do know, or even for someone you passed in the street, or the person unknown to you, but known to God, whom you are inspired to pray for? Worse comes to worst, you can pray for me, and for the people on my prayer list who have cancer. I’ll send you some names if you like.
I think I can guarantee you that Heaven has been bombarded with prayers for Hitchens. He’s a celebrity, after all.
July 20th, 2010 | 7:10 am
Will any of the gods grow back a severed limb? Will they repair the damage to a child with a burned face? If a god will not help an abducted child who has been kidnapped and tortured then who will the god help? Its obvious there is no supernatural being intervening on our behalf. We do love Christopher however, and I wish him well.
July 21st, 2010 | 8:46 am
Dear Johnboy:
Okay, just for the sake of responding, and then I’m out of here:
(1) I’m not really too interested in what “the gods” do, so I’ll stick with God: If God grew back a severed limb or healed a burned face, and you heard about it, you wouldn’t believe it anyway, right? Or are you demanding that God do something like this especially for you so you would then believe in Him?
(2) However, then you have the second example, that of the kidnapped child. So what is it exactly you want God to do? Not allow this to happen? Not allow, in other words, for free choices on the part of abusive people? Do you want Him to eliminate completely the good of free will, or just to eliminate free will when people make bad choices?
(3) Which brings us back to # 1: Wouldn’t it be better, on your view, if God never allowed the severed limb or burned face to happen in the first place? In other words, wouldn’t it be better, on your view, if our choices and actions had no bad repercussions at all, and nothing bad ever happened?
Wouldn’t it be better for us if we were robots and could never make any bad (or good) choices at all?
P.S. Not only do we desire the best for Hitchens through Christ’s love, but we also desire the best for you. May God bless you, help you through your problems with Him, and bring you to Himself.
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