I don’t think it’s any secret that I am contemptuous of Christopher Hitchens’s intellect as well as his capacity for constructing a rational argument about religion. And yet…
Maryiln Sewell: “The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make and distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?”
Christopher Hitchens: “I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.”
So, what does it say about liberal Christianity that its representatives don’t even rise to the intellectual and theological level of the New Atheists?