Hitchens vs Hitchens | the Daily Mail If we are weak and poor, we can all summon up self-interested decency, behaving in a kind way, in public, towards those from whom we hope for decency in return.

But as soon as we have the power to do evil, we generally do. What is to stop us, unobserved, doing and planning acts of selfish unkindness against others, as so many of us do – for example – in office politics?

What is to stop us, in the privacy of the home, taking advantage of the goodness of others more generous than ourselves? Who will ever know?

Who would have thunk it that the person to get closest to this whole New Atheism would be the right-winger Peter Hitchens of all people, writing in the Hitler-supporting Daily Mail of all rags. He skirts the issue of 'Atheism is just another kind of faith' rather artfully, perhaps thanks to the privileged access he has to the other Hitchens' background, but he gets it right about the constant debate what is a greater source of 'evil' faith in God or no God. (It, of course, is 'faith' in general. It is rather hard to commit evil without faith in one absolute or another, the occasional psychopath notwithstanding. One of the more deadly absolutes seems to be the faith in the sanctity of human life, probably because of the definitional indeterminacy of both 'human' and 'life' (and 'sanctity' too when it comes to it).

But P. Hitchens even hints at the much more interesting source of faith and religious action, viz social cohesion (more but not that much more than peer pressure). All religion has a social dimension, and, as Milgram has shown so incisively (also see Bauman on the holocaust), it is with reference to social authority that unpleasant acts find their most inventive representations.

Not to be too nice about Hitchens, he does resort to the annoying kind of middle-class agnosticism that declares uncertainty about the less palatable sections of the scripture while spouting the sickeningly sweet belief in something greater and better out there.

For all I know, Christopher is absolutely right – my prayers are pointless and a meaningless oblivion awaits. But if he is right, what a dispiriting, lowering truth it is.

This kind of polite agnosticism is no good to anyone. Personally, I am a complete atheist with respect to any possible God so far or yet to be conceived by the religious mind. There is no faith or reason involved in this, the possibility of faith in the flying spaghetti monster simply displaces the possibility of any seriously revered deity (the only good argument Dawkins and his buddies bandy about). I am, however, agnostic when it comes to science. I am pretty sure that 2+2 is indeed 4, but I wouldn't stake anyone to the cross over saying that it is really 6. The mathematical regularities ('laws') of the universe are too neat for my taste and I know too much about the processes of scientific discovery to sacrifice at its altar. I am even more agnostic about what I see with my own four eyes or conceive of with my brain. If somebody wants to find a circularly defined God(dess) in this space of doubt, be my guest.

And finally, my world coming slowly to the upside up state I prefer it in, Hithens cannot help but descend into the nasty Daily Mailism that makes me instinctively recoil from the gentle elderly couples I see sharing pages of this rag on trains hurtling through this sceptered countryside.

They [inner city thugs, termed practical atheists] would never behave like that, surrounded as they are by the invisible web of ten centuries of Christian law and morality, which still protects the nicer parts of our country.But it is the application of what they preach, the worship of self and power.

Faith and belief can be and often are restraints on this arrogance of power. They offer the possibility of justice where human society fails to provide it – as it almost always does fail.

It is almost as if he hadn’t read himself. Faith is no good as a restraint of action (didn’t he say the same thing only a few paragraphs before). With respect to evil, the only safe inner conviction I know of is utter moral relativism. Proper moral relativists have no time for evil on a grand scale because they are too busy working out all the variables of difference. It is when they glimpse shimmering fata morganas of certainty that the world is in real danger. (As to the interesting small evil of petty self-interest, moral relativists are probably no better than anyone).

What he speaks of nicer parts of this country he is referring to the savagery of conformity that places everyone in their place (foreigners with tans preferably on the outside of it) defined by the social propaganda of fiction found in Wodehouse, Dad’s Army and other faded reminders of post-Edwardian aesthetic.

If you do not worship God, you end up worshipping power, whether it is Kim Jong Il, Leon Trotsky or the military might of George W. Bush. In which case, God help you.

This 'faith-vacuum' cliché is a fitting conclusion to this journey of near self-discovery Hitchens undertakes.  It is not, on its own, an uninteresting hypothesis. Is there something in the human make up that requires certain mental, bodily and social configurations typically described as faith? If so, what do they look like, what is there purpose and are some faiths better than others in fulfilling that purpose? But even if we postulate some sort of 'faith universal', it is still not a good argument for the existence of God. It is merely an instance of Voltairian hypocrisy: "I don't need to believe in God but I like it that my servants do lest they steal from me." A world built on this premise may lend itself better to idyllic depiction but seems of no deeper virtue than the "pre-medieval savagery" dispensed in the "harsher parts of our great cities" by the "strong, violent people" whose darker complexion and difference is so instinctively afeared by many of Hitchens' readers (if not by himself).

The problem, to repeat myself, is the reliance on virtue, goodness, and life as transcendent absolutes (of God or upbringing) rather than a considered choice. It may not result in much real-world difference and possibly in no difference at all but I would prefer that those who matter make a conscious decision to consider others less human as a matter of practical expedience rather than spend time justifying that denying someone’s humanity (in the sense of equal rights to those one expects of herself; in the same sense that armies justify killing) as part of an absolute truth. If for no other reasons than that the parameters of expedience are more easily changed than faiths on which individuals and nations have staked their sense of self-worth.