We love Big Brother

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/04/we-love-big-brother

Citizen snitches

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8163587/PETER-HITCHENS-Great-Panic-foolish-freedom-broken-economy-crippled.html

Across the pond

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8138675/PETER-HITCHENS-shutting-Britain-REALLY-right-answer.html

What happens when you disarm the public

But the real problem lies in the police, that vast body of men and women, largely absent from the streets we pay them to patrol. In the last week, I have not seen one police officer on foot, anywhere, and I have looked out for them.

They have become a closed society, quite Left-wing, pursuing their own politically correct agendas, uninterested in their main job of deterring crime by being present on the streets.

https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2019/07/peter-hitchens-dont-be-duped-by-cheery-boris-johnson-its-your-duty-to-be-glum.html

Moral schizophrenia

In fact, most of this abuse involves homosexual assaults on pubescent boys, of the kind (not remotely connected with religion) that occurred at my private school. This fact is neglected at least partly because it is no longer respectable to disapprove of homosexuality as such, and many homosexual liberationists campaign for ever-lower ages of consent–which wold bring such offenses perilously close to being legal, especially given the feebleness with which the current age of consent is policed. Yet the [Roman Catholic] church is simultaneously criticized by  its foes for being against homosexual acts and for failing to act strongly enough against such acts… Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God (Zondervan 2010), 204.

Reasons of the heart

It's necessary that the Christian faith have a rational foundation. Necessary that there's available evidence to point to. 

That's different from saying it's necessary that every Christian's faith have a rational basis. God can bring people to the faith, or bring them back to the faith, through avenues that are personally meaningful rather than probative. Not everyone operates at a cerebral level. While it's important to have that as backup, it's not the only way, or even the usual way, that God reaches people. God can and does use a variety of human experiences that speak to the heart rather than the head. Christianity is not an elitist faith. It's not just for philosophers and intellectuals. 

And even Christian philosophers and intellectuals have an emotional side that has to be fed. They aren't angelic, disembodied minds. They have the same emotional makeup with the same emotional needs that everyone else has. This is illustrated in The Rage Against God, by Peter Hitchens:

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 (12).

During a short spell at a cathedral choir school (not as a choirboy since I sing like a donkey) I had experienced the intense beauty of the ancient Anglican chants, spiraling up into chilly stone vaults at Evensong. This sunset ceremony is the very heart of English Christianity. The prehistoric, mysterious poetry of the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimitts, perhaps a melancholy evening hymn, and the cold, ancient laments and curses of the Psalms, as the unique slow dusk of England gathers outside and inside the echoing, haunted, impossibly old building are extraordinarily potent. If you are welcome them, they have an astonishing power to reassure and comfort (26).

I briskly informed my preparatory school headmaster I was an unbeliever when I was about twelve…He asked the question expecting the answer he would get…He avoided argument and made a mild riposte about how the deaths of those I loved might later alter my view, which I scorned at the time but which I never forgot and later found to be accurate (41-42).

As a small child I had been rather interested in death, in graveyards and tombstones. They were not concealed from me as they would be now. The English parish churches of those days had generally not cleared away their graves, altar tombs, and gravestones and turned their churchyards into tactful gardens. (49). 

I can easily slip into the self-indulgent luxury of living in the past. I know it is purposeless, wrong, and self-deceiving, since the past is irrecoverably gone. I suspect that I do it now, as many others whose parents have died before they were old do, in the hope of finding a door into a world where my mother and father are restored to life and youth, and I can explain to them how I have at last grown up, and I can introduce their grandchildren to them. But no such door exists… (53).

At this point in my life I had already returned to Christianity, rather diffidently, having been confirmed into the Church of England about seven years before. My reasons had been profoundly personal, to do with marriage and fatherhood–a cliché of rediscovery that is too obvious and universal, and also too profound, private, and unique to discuss with strangers (92). 

I was shocked and (like Virginia Woolf) almost physically disgusted if any acquaintance turned out to believe in God. Now I was discovering that the secular faiths I held were false. I knew, rather too well, that what one believes–and does not believe–is important. I cannot imagine living without any belief of any kind. I was not capable of existing without a coherent view of the universe. But I was suppressing my loss of faith in a Godless universe, and my loss of faith in humanity's ability to achieve justice. My life was devoted largely to pleasure and ambition. 

But what were those pleasures? Two of the arts–architecture and music–move me more than any others, not because I know a great deal about them, but because I can feel their influence upon me, almost as if they were speaking to me…I recognized in the great English cathedrals and in many small perish churches the old unsettling messages. One was the inevitability and certainty of my own death… (100-1).

The most important time was when I stood in front of Rogier van der Weyden's great altarpiece [The Last Judgment] and trembled for the things of which my conscience was afraid (and is afraid)…I went away chastened, and the effect has not worn off in nearly three decades. I have been back to look at the painting since then, and it remains a great and powerful work. But it cannot do the same thing to me twice. I am no longer shocked by the realization that I may be judged, because it has ever after been obvious to me (104).

At about the same time, I rediscovered Christmas, which I had pretended to dislike for many years. I slipped into a carol service on a winter evening, diffident and anxious not to be seen. I knew perfectly well that I was enjoying it, though I was unwilling to admit it. A few days later, I went to another service, this time with more confidence, and actually sang(105). 

The service of Holy Communion is a perpetual reenactment of the night of the Last Supper…it chills the church building with fear and trembling and, in parts, seems to be written in letters of fire. Outside, not far away, are the Garden of Gethsemane, the chilly night of loss and betrayal, the rooster preparing to crow three times and the mob already stirring in its sleep for the show trial, the grotesque procession to the gibbet, and the judicial murder…Evensong in particular has a dreamlike quality, at the edge of both sleep and death. As soon as the opening words are spoken, the mind is drawn away from the daily and the ordinary and toward the eternal (107-8).

Back to paganism

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/10/vice-and-fire

Belated homecoming

https://paulkuritz.com/2012/07/thomas-hart-benton-the-prodigal-son/

7 types of atheism

https://home.isi.org/john-gray-spinoza-today

Reclaiming the Reformation

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/06/latimer-and-ridley-are-forgotten

Secular utopia

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2018/08/the-scandinavian-and-nordic-utopias-republished-a-year-later.html

Irish abortion referendum

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2018/05/its-hour-come-round-at-last-reflections-on-the-abortion-referendum-in-ireland.html

A tale of two Hitchens

https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/article/a-tale-of-two-hitchens/383/

Ear to the ground

I heard the first two minutes of an interview with Peter Hitchens. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7ZE_tsltm4

I stopped listening because Eric Metaxas is so obnoxious. There are two kinds of interviewers: those who showcase the guest and those who showcase themselves. 

Anyway, Hitchens said he spends lots of time in London because:

It's the capital city, I'm a national newspaper journalist. If I don't work in the capital I lose touch with events very quickly. You can pick up gossip and rumor and feelings about things... 

The reason I mention this is that critics of Bible history generally and the Gospels in particular constantly impugn the historicity of Scripture as if they know what really happened. Yet as Hitchens noted, there's a lot of information you can only pick up on site. You must be at that time and place or speak to people from that time and place, to fill in the gaps. 

Even though Hitchens lives in the age of the Internet, where there's such an abundance of real-time information his fingertips, that's still not enough to keep on top of national events. He must be at the epicenter of the events he covers to have the behind-the-scenes viewpoint that provides a connecting thread. 

Imagine how much less critics writing 2000+ years after the fact are in a position to correct the Bible. There's so much information that was never written down. Even if we had more surviving writings from that time and place, there's so much they'd leave out. So much linking material. So much contextual background information. Bible history gives us a synopsis. Many events are inexplicable in isolation. 

Advent

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2017/12/a-refection-for-christmas-and-advent-expanded-and-with-links-to-music.html

Peter Hitchens interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BDYffv_fmk

A Whitsun Address

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2017/06/a-whitsun-address.html

Peter HItchens on Brexit

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/06/boston-lincolngrad-i-saw-the-seething-resentment-now-it-is-time-to-finish-the-revolution.html

Festival of Dangerous Ideas

I'm going to quote from part of a debate between Christian journalist Peter Hitchens (brother of the late Christopher Hitchens) and homosexual activist Dan Savage:

http://jkdinale.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/QA-TRanscript-episode-40-Nov-4-2013.pdf

PETER HITCHENS: Well, the first summary of my opinions is absolutely right but what that has to do with a world of black and white and a world of technicolour I'm not quite sure. You seem to be suggesting that somehow a world in which people don't fulfil their obligations to their children, desert their marriages, don't keep to the laws, are increasingly selfish and follow their own desires and abandon all kinds of ideas of self-restraint and patience is a better world than one where those things actually ruled, and I don't agree with you. The fact that the world is technicolour – the fact the world is technicolour and full of drugs and people who get drunk and people who abandon their husbands and wives doesn't seem to me to be an improvement and it strikes me that it's time somebody said that actually this isn't necessarily a turn for the better. But in any case, when you're discussing all these changes in our lives, you can't return to the past. It's futile to even attempt to. What we're always doing all the time is discussing what we're going to do with the future. At the moment we're very busily choosing the wrong future, in which some of us and all of our children are going to live.

PETER HITCHENS: Well, Christianity more or less collapsed in Europe after 1914 and the First World War and when it ceased to exist, all kinds of other things rushed in to take its place. But mostly what's rushed in to take its place is what I call ‘selfism’: the idea that we are all sovereign in our own bodies, that no-one can tell us what to do with our own bodies and that everything that we do is okay, provided we think we aren't harming anybody else. Quite often the truth is that we are harming other people but hiding it from ourselves.!

PETER HITCHENS: Where do you draw the line? You draw the line fundamentally, as far as I’m concerned, around about the Sermon on the Mount and those instructions given to us and I have absolutely no shame in saying that I believe that the Christian religion was the greatest possession which the human race had, which it's now, in large parts of the world, rather busily throwing away.

DAN SAVAGE: I'm a firm believer in do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I just think there’s more doing unto that’s possible in my philosophy than yours.

PETER HITCHENS: You do an awful lot of things unto other people and indeed yourself and that's your affair. But it’s not the same question.!

DAN SAVAGE: Consent matters and harm matters. Consent matters and harm matters. If there's consent and no one is being harmed it's no one's business what an individual chooses to do with his or her body.

PETER HITCHENS: No. No. No. It's so essential to answer this. The people who say that they're not doing harm are invariably deceiving themselves. The people who divorce and say the children are happier as a result, they're not.

DAN SAVAGE: And the government should rush in to prevent people from being self-deceptive if that’s indeed what they’re doing?

PETER HITCHENS: The teenager who takes drugs and becomes mentally ill and ruins his own life and that of his parents is doing harm to other people, but at the time they do these things they say "No, my body is sovereign. I am a completely autonomous person. I don't harm anybody else. " We lie to ourselves about this all the time. I lie to myself about it. You all lie to yourselves about it. You lie to yourself about. We know that we harm other people.

DAN SAVAGE: Well, they're very popular with gay men because gay men are men and men are pigs and also safer, generally. But, what? What are hook-up apps? Hook up apps are little things on your phone, where you can use GPS and you can say, “I’m here in this location at this time and you can see who is nearby and if somebody is of a like mind and would like to hook up with you you can hook up.

PETER HITCHENS: Do you want me to say anything, or not? It seems to me that when intimacy is something which is profoundly private and often, if people are mistreated when they're intimate with other people, they are severely damaged and the idea that sexual relations can be conducted in this casual and mechanical fashion is extremely cruel and crude and dismisses the concept of human love from a very important part of our relations and I think that's a pity. He doesn't think it's a pity. He wants a crude and, as far as I'm concerned, individualistic, unrestrained and a totally selfish world.!

PETER HITCHENS: What is all this stuff? Women have stormed every profession. Women run the BBC in Britain. I expect they run the ABC in Australia. They dominate huge areas of professional life. The struggle for equality in educational professions was won decades ago.!

KIMBERLEY ADLER: Do you think it's possible that the women's liberation movement has gone too far away from the primary role of women to nurture and raise their children? The current role of mothering is being performed by paid care-givers and my observations are showing me there's a direct correlation between narcissism rising in the population and early separation of mother and child. The women who can do it all tend to have children with narcissistic traits. We ship our kids off to strangers to raise them and wonder why everyone is tired and depressed. We are allowing narcissists to rule our world and – sorry. We are allowing the narcissists to currently rule our world, to tell us how to raise our children?!

PETER HITCHENS: Kimberley, you were fantastically brave. Be careful on your way home. The feminists will get you for that. But of course it's true. There's extraordinary pressure to hand over young children to paid strangers while their actual mothers are tripped off to work.

PETER HITCHENS: Anybody who’s been involved in raising children knows that women are better at it.!

DAN SAVAGE: And remember all of those movements, the antiwar movement, the feminist movement, women's liberation movement - those were sort of generative. They came about when people became supremely uncomfortable.

PETER HITCHENS: All revolutionaries claim to be fighting against the oppression of other people when, in fact, they're fighting for their own personal advantage.

PETER HITCHENS: Dan [Savage] is absolutely right about one thing, which is that heterosexual marriage has been redefined to the point where it is dying very rapidly in western societies. It's become easier to get out of a marriage than it is to get out of a car leasing agreement and, as a result, many people are not getting married in the first place. I don't know what the statistics are here but in my own country marriage is dying out as a thing which people do and increasingly it has been sidelined and it is the crucial issue of the modern western world as to whether marriage will survive as a relationship at all. I think it should. They probably think it shouldn't.

We’re moving towards a position where the only people interested in getting married are lesbian clergy women and I look forward to the day when the female Archbishop of Canterbury is married in a lesbian marriage to the female Archbishop of York.

PETER HITCHENS: Well, hang on a minute. First of all revolutionaries are tremendously authoritarian. It’s revolutionaries who build gulags and set up the KGB. Revolutionaries are far more authoritarian than I am. But the fundamental reason why I no longer hold the infantile views which held in my late teens and early 20s is precisely that: that I grew up. The thing which astonishes me is that so many of my generation did not grow up and still, while they're drawing their pensions, they have revolutionary opinions and attend Rolling Stones concerts. What is wrong with these people?

PETER HITCHENS: I gave that up long ago. It would only make me miserable. I know that you people have won. All I seek to do is to tell the truth about you and what you want while it’s still allowed to do so because you are so fantastically intolerant.

I mean the cultural revolution. I mean the cultural and moral revolution which has swept the western world since the collapse of Christianity.  It changed our societies, as anybody who has lived through it knows, out of all recognition in the course of 50 years and in my view for the worst. He's part of it.

DAN SAVAGE: You're paranoid and you’re projecting by saying we are intolerant. You have...

PETER HITCHENS: See, this is the intolerance. Because I hold an opinion different from his, he has become suddenly a qualified psychoanalyst who can tell me – who can tell me that my opinions which I am entitled to hold.

DAN SAVAGE: You're entitled to your opinions. You’re not entitled to your smears.

PETER HITCHENS: But are a pathology. And this is the absolute seed bed of totalitarianism. When you start believing that the opinions of other people are a pathology, then you are in the beginning of the stage that leads to the secret police and the Gulags.

You’ll have the whole world to yourself soon. You can't imagine anybody else is entitled to hold a view different from yours without having some kind of personal defect. That's what's wrong with you.!

PETER HITCHENS: You said this is very personal. This is very personal. I’ll reply to it. I am a very rich and fortunate person. I can - and I'm coming towards the end of my life anyway. I can personally escape many of the consequences of this but most people can't. They can't afford to and leave aside some of the things you've mentioned but a society in which the use of illegal drugs is widespread and unrestrained is one in which everybody is affected by the consequences, whatever they themselves do. It's like that ridiculous bumper sticker "Don't like abortion? Don't have one," to which my reply has always been: "Don't like murder? Don't commit one".

PETER HITCHENS: We have - those of us who oppose the cultural revolution and think that it’s a mistake are entitled to say so for the moment.

DAN SAVAGE: You’re entitled to say so.

PETER HITCHENS: For the moment.

DAN SAVAGE: Population control. There's too many goddamn people on the planet. And I don't know if that’s a – you know, I'm pro-choice. I believe that women should have the right to control their bodies. Sometimes in my darker moments I am anti-choice. I think abortion should be mandatory for about 30 years.

PETER HITCHENS:  The most dangerous idea in human history and philosophy remains the belief that Jesus Christ was the son of God and rose from the dead and that is the most dangerous idea you will ever encounter.!

I can't really leave it there? Because it alters the whole of human behaviour and all our responsibilities. It turns the universe from a meaningless chaos into a designed place in which there is justice and there is hope and, therefore, we all have a duty to discover the nature of that justice and work towards that hope. It alters us all. If we reject It, it alters us all was well. It is incredibly dangerous. It's why so many people turn against it.

Intolerance and spite

http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/8852611/intolerance-and-spite/