Jeremy’s latest is a review of Pete Hitchens’ The Rage Against God. You could read the review as a response to a certain famous atheist Peter knows quite well. Jeremy certainly does:

In [Christopher Hitchen's] telling, religion, not the love of money, is the root of all evil. In his best-selling book [God Is Not Great], Christopher argued that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was not really a religious figure and the Soviet Union was, in effect, a theocracy.

That’s one of a few arguments that Peter sets out to destroy. In Chapter 11, “Are Atheist States Not Actually Atheist?” Peter writes that “intelligent Christians must - if they are candid - accept that faith has often led to cruel violence and intolerant persecution. They may say, as I would, that this was because humans often misunderstood or misuse the teachings of the religions they follow. This is not because they are religious, but because Man is not great.”

And atheists, Peter suggests, “in return, ought equally to concede that Godless regimes and movements have given birth to terrible persecutions and massacres. They” - and for “they,” we may read “Christopher” - “do not do so, in my view, because in these cases the slaughter is not the result of a misunderstanding or excessive zeal. Utopia can only ever be approached across a sea of blood.”

For instance, one thing that Christopher has clung to stubbornly even as he has ditched most of his Marxist politics is his insistence that one great accomplishment of the Soviet Union was the creation of a secular Russia. But at what cost, Peter asks: The U.S.S.R. provoked conflict with and then brutally persecuted the Orthodox Church; it effectively forbade Christians from positions of power; it banned religious instruction for children. It even issued propaganda raging against Christmas trees.

Read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: Jeremy emails: “In honor of Christopher, I wrote this in a bar and did not hold back.”