by Mike Gray

In 2007, Christopher Hitchens wrote in the Washington Post during an on-going debate he was having with Michael Gerson:

. . . it is [Gerson’s] own supposedly kindly religion [Christianity] that prevents him from seeing how insulting is the latent suggestion of his position: the appalling insinuation that I would not know right from wrong if I was not supernaturally guided by a celestial dictatorship, which could read and condemn my thoughts and which could also consign me to eternal worshipful bliss (a somewhat hellish idea) or to an actual hell.

Three and a half centuries earlier, John Milton wrote:

All is not lost; th’ unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate
And courage never to submit or yield,
And what is else not to be overcome;
That glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me: to bow and sue for grace
With suppliant knee, and deify his power.

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Christopher Hitchens is the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, available here.

John Milton is the author of Paradise Lost, available here.