Christopher Hitchens on Being a Servant

I would like to continue responding to some of the comments Christopher Hitchens made in a debate with Frank Turek on the subject of the existence of God.

We looked at what we called the Hitchens question, I guess, in an earlier video.

Now I would like to look at some of the comments that Christopher Hitchens makes about this idea of being a servant, a slave of God, if we are in fact his creatures.

Let's take a look at what he had to say. Reason, common sense, decency, ordinary decency rebels against this kind of mind -forged manacle, however charmingly or humorously it's expressed.

Hell exists in the minds of several people I've spoken to just today on this campus in the intervals of other conversations.

For them it's real, and I don't say that it's not. What I want to show is that it can, if it does exist, nonetheless be abolished, like many other mind -forged manacles and man -made tyrannies that confront us.

In fact, this belief in a supreme and unalterable tyranny is the oldest enemy of our species, the oldest enemy of our intellectual freedom and our moral autonomy, and must be met and must be challenged and must be overthrown.

I want to argue for nothing less than that. There is no totalitarian solution to these problems.

There is no big brother in the sky. It is a horrible idea that there is somebody who owns us, who makes us, who supervises us waking and sleeping, who knows our thoughts, who can convict us of thought crime, who can do thought crime just for what we think, who can judge us while we sleep for things that might occur to us in our dreams, who can create us sick, as apparently we are, and then order us on pain of eternal torture to be well again.

To demand this, to wish this to be true, is to wish to live as an abject slave.

It is a wonderful thing. It is a wonderful thing, in my submission, that we now have enough information, enough intelligence, and I hope, enough intellectual and moral courage to say that this ghastly proposition is founded on a lie, and to celebrate that fact.

And I invite you to join me in doing so. Thank you. Abject servility, slavery, servitude.

This is what stands in the way of our intellectual and moral autonomy.

Yes, well, man definitely wants to be autonomous, does he not? Is this not the very essence of the rebellion of man, refusing to recognize his own created state?

But aside from the fact that it's rather obvious that this is what drives

Christopher Hitchens, that we are given a window here into this man's soul, and what he finds so tremendously repulsive, well, about his own created nature.

It must be horrible. I mean, think about it. From a Christian perspective, you can't—it's easy to think about getting angry with Christopher Hitchens or Dan Barker or with any of these men who attack the

Christian faith. But when you think about it, what must life be like?

You are created in the image of God. I always think of the potter and the pots, and stamped right on the bottom of that pot, created by God.

You can't get away from it. You may drink yourself silly to try to forget about it.

You may engage in any type of behavior to try to forget about it. It's still there. And in fact, you have to expend energy every single day to suppress this knowledge that's right there.

You can't escape it. There's no escaping that created -by -God mark.

It must be a really miserable existence, and it, over time, seems to create a tremendous amount of bitterness and unhappiness.

I don't know about you, but Christopher Hitchens does not strike me as a happy individual. Be that as it may, we do see into Christopher Hitchens' experience.

It's why I can't get angry with the man, in the sense that not only do

I think of the judgment that will be his, his many gifts that he uses to suppress the knowledge of God, but the miserable existence that must come with that.

That changes my attitude toward him, but we're also given this window into his hatred of the

Christian message, his hatred of God, that comes out in these words. But aside from all of that, we're really left to wonder, just a little bit, at the unstated assertion being made in this form of argumentation.

And that is that to be an autonomous creature, without God, is so much better than to be a servile slave.

Now, Christopher Hitchens has excellent skills in the utilization of the language, far better than I have.

But when we peel back the rhetoric and the use of vocabulary, what are we really saying here?

What is Christopher Hitchens actually claiming? I mean, let's think about it for just a moment. What he's saying is that it's horrible to be a servant of God.

Now, in the Christian understanding of this, which is what he was debating, to be a servant of God, yes, means that my life is not my own, that I am not autonomous, that I am the servant of my

Creator. But what it also means is there is transcendent meaning, there is purpose in all of life, including the difficulties of life, that the gifts

I've been given, I have been given to fulfill a particular purpose, and that, in fact,

I experience tremendous joy when I fulfill the purpose that God has for me.

Therefore, I can see beauty in the world, I can look out upon God's creation as His creature,

I see my place in this creation, I see His glory. I am fulfilled in serving and giving myself as a servant, because that's what

I was created to be. And if you don't fulfill the purpose you were created for, then you won't experience joy.

That seems to be what he's saying is terrible and horrible. But it's true, he does seem to limit this to what it means to be an atheist, who continues to reject his

God, his Creator. And that's terrible and horrible, because we'll be judged, and so on and so forth.

Well, yes, that's true. But what's the alternative, from his perspective?

This autonomous creature, with intellectual and moral autonomy, a law unto himself, a law unto himself in a universe that has no meaning, no transcendent value, every act of evil isn't really evil, it's just what we've said that it is.

There's no purpose in human suffering, only what we assign to it, if we choose to assign any meaning to it at all, any worth to it.

Everything that Christopher Hitchens stands for ceases to be relevant when he takes his last breath, breathes his last breath, utters his last word, which

I imagine he would like to be a cursing of God at the moment. No value, no meaning, no purpose, a universe destined for heat death, nothing more, nothing of any lasting value after he's gone, but he's autonomous.

He's autonomous. Is that really all that atheism has to offer?

Is just nothing but rank rebellion? Seemingly that is all there is to it.

All he can offer us is a random universe, molecules banging into each other, random energy in motion without purpose and without goal, but we just have to make the best of it.

But we're autonomous, and that's what's important. The more

I listen to atheists as they give vent in our day to their rebellion against God, the more

I am absolutely amazed at the first three chapters of the book of Romans.

I mean, think about it, from the perspective of these people, here is a man who, I mean, when you think about how they describe ancient men, and how they would really have a strong distaste for the apostle

Paul because he describes himself as a slave of Jesus Christ, and yet here is a man living all those centuries ago, long before all the modern discoveries and gadgetry we have today, and yet somehow, somehow he peers into Christopher Hitchens' soul.

Somehow, he peers into Dan Barker's soul, into your soul and mine, as different as we may be.

Somehow, he, in a small number of Greek words, describes the human condition to a

T. I don't know about you, but the more I study Romans 1, 2, and 3, and the more

I observe the world around me, it seems to be very strong evidence that Paul was speaking words his own, but not his own.

Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. That's the best description

I've ever heard of the nature of scripture, and the best reason, the best answer for how

Paul could have such insight into the rebellion that we see expressed by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Dan Barker, and all the rest in their public media appearances.