Hitchens Brothers
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Hitchens Brothers
The Hitchens Brothers were raised as Christians as their father had converted to Christianity. The father died while on a British Royal Navy Mission in a ship. The mother to these brothers is said to have committed suicide. While Peter is a strong Christian who believes in the existence of a Mighty God, Christopher does not believe in the existence of any deity. The difference between Christianity and Atheism lies in the faith; Christians believe in the existence of God the creator whereas Atheists believe there is no such a thing as God or religion. The Hitchens brothers came from the same genetic pool, but proved to be different in their beliefs vastly.
Peter Hitchens, an author and foreign correspondent, was born in October 1951 and later begun his life as a Trotskyist International Socialist. He became extremely disillusioned and left the left wing when he visited the countries of the Warsaw Pact in the 1980s. He found something he considered bad as a Labor Party member. Currently, he is writing for the British the Mail on Sunday and calls himself a Burkean conservative. As a former Moscow based and later Washington based correspondent, Peter continues to perform the duties of a foreign reporter occasionally while appearing in the British media frequently (Hitchens 52).
Peter started on the left of the spectrum prior to his moving towards the right wing. He studied political Science at New York University up to the year 1973. Being a Trotskyist International Socialist member from 1969, he dismissed the revolutionary rubbish he termed a Trotskyist poison. He once attended a lecture, and when the reason for his lateness was enquired, he claimed to have been caught up starting the revolution. Peter, however, denied the story repeatedly, saying that he has never attended lectures. Moreover, the source of the story has never been in any seminar or tutorial group with him.
Like his brother Christopher, Peter once practiced atheism, but converted to become a staunch Anglican. He also started advocating for morals founded on Anglican faith as well as social institutions like marriage; he argues cultural Marxists and social liberals have undermined the institutions since the 1960s. Peter defends the act of using the Book of Common Prayer as well as the King James Version of the Bible in the Anglican Church in 1662. Concerning the Biblical version, he suggests it has not just been translated, but has been given a poetic translation. Christians should read it aloud in an attempt to lodge the contents in their minds while disturbing the temporal by haunting it with this sound. Among Peter Hitchens’ works are The Abolition of Britain, The Broken Compass, A Brief History of Crime, and The Rage against God as well as The War We Never Fought: The British Establishment's Surrender to Drugs.
C.S. Lewis, just like Peter Hitchens, converted from Atheism to Christianity. The Chronicles of Narnia were a series of his 7 works. The Lion and The Witch and the Wardrobe were the first releases. In the series, the narratives focused on siblings who walked to enter Narnia, a magical world. The land had talking animals and mythical creatures. However, the first major work he published was The Pilgrim's Regress, which narrated his journey to Christianity. Other publications followed, and won acclaim for him, both as an author of religious books as well as academic works and popular novels. The Great Divorce is another piece of his works that is quite memorable (Hitchens 85).
Brian Leftlow has staunch Christian beliefs that are similar to those of Peter Hitchens. He states that a person may believe rationally that Christianity is one hundred percent true, with objections. His family did not support him because of his divergent views. They disapproved of the religion he practiced and tried to punish him financially as he refused to practice Judaism. In his work, God, and necessity, he offers a new theory he calls the possible and the necessary, where God plays a principal role. His argument the existence of God is quite new.
Christopher Hitchens was born in April 1949. He was the English who wrote American books. He was also an author, literary critic, and a journalist. He has contributed to Vanity Fair, World Affairs, Nation, Atlantic, Slate, and Free Inquiry. Christopher was an analyst of politics and an observer. God Is Not Great is his best-selling book, which has turned him into a staple of lecture circuits and television talk shows. At the Hoover, he was a media fellow. In addition, Christopher was an intellectual and polemicist. People identified him historically with the political left of the Anglo-American radical, but political left he is said to have embraced right-wing causes during the Iraq War. He was a former fixture and Trotskyist in the publications of left wing in both the United States and United Kingdom. He departed the political left grassroots in the year 1989 after calling European left’s "tepid reaction". This followed the issue of Ayatollah Khomeini of a calling for the assassination of Salman Rushdie. Nevertheless, in a Charlie Rose show in August 2007, he stated he was a democratic socialist.
The attacks of September 11, 2001 are known to have strengthened Christopher‘s embrace of a foreign policy of interventionist nature. The vociferous criticism he adopted and dubbed ‘fascism whose face was Islamic’ remained until he died. He admired George Orwell ardently. He also loved the ideologies of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. To Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, and Henry Kissinger, he was an excoriating critique (Hitchens 54).
In recent times, Christopher Hitchens has turned into an atheistic champion and secular liberalist. He is extremely famous for a book entitled God is not great – how religion poisons everything. Recently, he went to Australia solely to promote a memoir he called Hitch-22. The release has been waited for a long time and is one reader-enticing prospect. However, the only readers who get enticed are those that know a few things about the extraordinary life he has been fond of leading. Other than the obvious character traits associated with most orators, Christopher has extra traits: wit and good command of the English language. In fact, in a one-to-one interview on the Lateline of ABC, Christopher confessed he feared being boring greatly.
Christopher made a decision of the folly of the religion whose doctrines he would follow when he had an extremely tender age. This enables us see why off the early Christianity experience he got turned him. His parents sent him to a distant boarding school when was aged 8 years. In the Tom Brown School, the world was apparently a place where a Spartan and sadistic regimen would come to be closely linked with the institution’s religious trappings. In the school, there was only one accepted culture where the churches, empire, cricket field, monarchy, and the war memorial were considered sovereign. It was not entirely mesmerizing that Christopher did not find much to commend in the Christianity experience he acquired at that time. The liberal theology of the post-war period had found its way into the Church, rendering it a bleating sheep.
Christopher dedicates a few areas of his Hitch-22 to Peter, whom he beliefs has an uncharacteristic gentleness. He attempted dismissing the arguments of Peter because of that reason. However, this was seen as being too hasty. The literary quarrel-like argument he held with Peter brought into the limelight a number of important counter-arguments. Through the experiences, he got from the Soviet Union, Christopher come up with profound warnings and observations about a so-called civilized culture, which banishes God from public life completely.
There is a thing in Christopher’s personal story that becomes quite evident in Hitch-22. However, Christopher retains his complex personality and consequently defies obvious psychoanalysis. He suggests he does not have to be supernatural to find purpose; rather he is after a life that partakes gladly even in a little humor, friendship, irony, literature, love, parenthood, and music, as well as the opportunity to participate in battles in a bid to liberate other people. These are noble, worthy objectives. Peter, the younger sibling had no problem agreeing with some of these views. Nonetheless, he added communion with one’s creator in order to round out this picture.
Since childhood, Marx remained an atheist. The atheism he practiced was both practical and theoretical. He attributed his theoretical atheism to philosophical as well as political, historical, and social reasons. He proclaims that God’s existence cannot possess meaning in a country with reason. In criticism of religion, he called it opium of the people. He challenged people to take their gods to a place where people worship other gods. He believed they would be proved victims of abstractions and fancies. Indeed, people who came to Greece with a migrant god found the non-existence of such god, as for the Greek it did not exist. Furthermore, Marx saw religion as a tool that rulers use to discourage any form of rebellion (Schaeffer 54).
Though borne of the same parents, Christopher and Peter have two different beliefs. The two held public debates on television where they laid out differences between the religions each confessed. Christopher, the atheist, claimed that it is possible for civilization to survive even if God did not exist. He noted that millions of people in the modern society are in a society that can be referred to as post-religious. He initiated the talk by describing the term ‘Christendom’, which means the world of Christians. However, this concept has since gone out of the scene. He insisted an individual in the post-religious society does not lead a less civilized life compared to his or her predecessor.
Peter, the younger of the two Hitchens, is a staunch, conservative Anglican. Peter utilized his time during the debate to point to society that is decaying in this post-Christian world. Specifically, he suggested that gangs have now overrun the England neighborhood in which he was brought up. Peter Hitchens attributed the rapid deterioration of the British society partly to the decline in the country of Christianity. He claimed an unusual combination of order and liberty only occurred in societies where people took self-restraint messages into their hearts without developing mutual advantage. Notably, mutual advantage is integral to Christianity.
On a quiet Tuesday morning, popular journalists thronged the large-sized meeting room in the District of Columbia’s Public Life and Pew Forum Religion office to listen to the Hitchens brothers’ discussion of the controversial question whether it is possible for civilization to survive if God did not exist. This was not going to be the first public debate the brothers were holding about the opposing views they had concerned God and other issues of religious concern. Such issues included the Jihad war in Iraq and Afghanistan. At times, however, circumstances have estranged these two siblings from each other. For instance, Peter Hitchens declined to debate about his brother formally in public from 2008 onwards, citing such an act would create enmity rather than resolve things.
During the debate, Peter suggested he found it quite objectionable for individuals attacking Christianity in the United States and Britain to dismiss what religion had achieved for them. In an argument that sounded serious, Peter lashed out at atheists, demanding they suggest a way of turning the hearts of disobedient people just to wisdom without using religion. Nevertheless, Christopher was resolute; he said he could not be persuaded that the thousand-year-old sacrifice of human being redeemed people vicariously from their sins. He claimed he found it contemptible for some individuals to think he would convert to Christianity because of the state in which he was now of battling with cancer. There was a general assumption that Christopher had not yet contemplated about this controversial question: God’s existence (Cottee and Hitchens 321).
Peter Hitchens was unfazed Christopher’s strong defense regarding faith, and he commented quickly that civilization might survive even if God did not exist, but wondered about the kind of society in which people would be living. He singled out the tremendously conformist Japanese society as well as China’s police state as illustrations of the way civilization without religion are like. Peter then observed that both the Christian and atheist fear God exists, but the former go a step further to hope He exists (Markham 100).
In spite of the strongly opposing points of view, the Hitchens debate was rather amicable that Tuesday with each respecting the other person’s point of view. The debate went down in history as the longest quarrel Peter had ever had in his life. By the year 2008, Peter had already lost hope of converting his brother, Christopher. He described Christopher as one who had himself bricked up in the atheist tower. Rather than possessing windows, this tower had slits from which one could shoot arrows easily at the Christians. Following that heated debate, the two began regarding one another as very different individuals, having different lives, and living in distinct continents; Peter lives in Europe while Christopher is a North American resident. Age wise, the two separate by 2.5 years. Indeed, Peter contends in an interview that the two would not know one another had they not been brothers.
Recently, Christopher has been diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. It was not established immediately how the cancer diagnosis in the elder brother will affect the relationship of the two siblings. It was in June that Christopher Hitchens’ announcement that he had come down with cancer to which his father succumbed came. Christopher’s cancer has since invaded the lymph nodes located along the esophageal tract.
In spite of being brothers who grew up together, Peter and Christopher confess distinct faiths. Their coming from the same genetic pool does not cause either to influence the other to convert to his faith.