Saturday, December 17, 2011

Justin Taylor On the Death And Atheism of Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

UNBELIEF is one of the most common spiritual diseases in these latter days. It meets us at every turn, and in every company. Like the Egyptian plague of frogs, it makes its way into every family and home, and there seems no keeping it out. Among high and low, and rich and poor, in town and in country, in universities and manufacturing towns, in castles and in cottages, you will continually find some form of unbelief. It is no longer a pestilence which walks in darkness, but a destruction which wastes at noonday. Unbelief is even thought clever and intellectual, and a mark of a thoughtful mind. Society seems leavened with it. He who avows his belief of everything contained in the Bible, must make up his mind in many companies to be smiled at contemptuously, and thought an ignorant and weak man.

---J.C. Ryle

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TAYLOR WRITING AT THE GOSPEL COALITION:

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS DIED on Thursday night at the age of 62, after a 18-month battle with esophageal cancer.

He was a brilliant and entertaining man. He was enormously gifted, and in his final years he took those gifts and used them to mock God, using his considerable wit and sharp tongue to convince as many people as possible to do the same.


Read the whole thing, watch the video of Hitchens with  Doug Wilson.

You may know Christopher had a younger brother, Peter, who authored the book The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led me to Faith.

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