Hitchens’s latest book, God Is Not Great, attacks the authority of every religious figure from the Lubavicher Rebbe to Martin Luther King, Jr. During a recent appearance at the New York Public Library, his very first utterance was a comment on Mother Teresa’s beatification: “The old bitch got it anyway.” In 2003, Hitchens met with a Vatican panel in an effort to stop a certain Nobel Prize–winning nun from achieving sainthood. Weekly writer put it, “capable of pissing into your grandmother’s fish tank.” Some would deem this an understatement. With his razor-sharp wit and blatant disregard for all things sacred, Hitchens seems, as one L.A. “I simply knew,” Hitchens would later write, “almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong in just two sentences.” In the green fields of England, an atheist is born.įast-forward half a century, and the child skeptic has grown up to be a formidable iconoclast. In His infinite kindness, she explains, He made the grass green, a color that would please and soothe the human eye.

On this particular outing, Christopher’s religion instructor, a kindly old widow, is using the natural surroundings to demonstrate God’s love for humankind.

By all appearances, God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world. Nine-year-old Christopher is excelling at school and has a special fondness for Bible studies.

Britain has won the war, the ruins have been repaired-the Dartmoor ponies are grazing, the grass is lush and verdant. It’s an image that could make the most hardened cynic smile: a miniature Christopher Hitchens, fair-haired and apple-cheeked, trotting across a meadow in ankle-strap sandals.

Christopher hitchens on god