One of the good things about Rick Warren’s appearance at the impeding inauguration is that it has upset just about everyone. Including Christopher Hitchens, who appears to be descending rapidly into amusing but outlandish rhetoric.

If we must have an officiating priest, surely we can do better than this vulgar huckster.

if someone publicly charges that “Mormonism is a cult,” it is impossible to say that the claim by itself is mistaken or untrue. However, if the speaker says that heaven is a real place but that you will not get there if you are Jewish, or that Mormonism is a cult and a false religion but that other churches and faiths are the genuine article, then you know that the bigot has spoken. That’s all in a day’s work for the wonderful world of the American evangelical community, and one wishes them all the best of luck in their energetic fundraising and their happy-clappy Sunday “Churchianity” mega-feel-good fiestas. However, do we want these weirdos and creeps officiating in any capacity at the inauguration of the next president of the United States?

[…..]

I would myself say that it doesn’t need a clerical invocation at all, since, to borrow Lincoln’s observation about Gettysburg, it has already been consecrated. But if we must have an officiating priest, let it be some dignified old hypocrite with no factional allegiance and not a tree-shaking huckster and publicity seeker who believes that millions of his fellow citizens are hellbound because they do not meet his own low and vulgar standards.

Hitchens appears to wander unawares into the old fallacy of thinking that the idea of one religion alone being true is bigotry;  the obverse – which he doesn’t believe either, of course – is that all religions are equally true, an absurd notion, since they all contradict each other to some degree. In fact, Hitchens is a member of  the Church of Transcendent Atheists whose  sub-rational aphorisms are fiercely  proclaimed through the obligatory alcoholic haze.

Once again, Hitchens presents us with a cacophony of insults (happy-clappy Sunday “Churchianity”; weirdos and creeps etc.) rather than the rationality of which he claims to be a champion. Dawkins isn’t too different when pushed: in one of his diatribes he quoted an acquaintance who said, “if you don’t like science, you can fuck off”. Very Darwinian.

Hitchens’ last paragraph is instructive. When it comes to religion, apparently dignified hypocrisy is to be preferred over crass honesty; appearance over reality; the shaman over the priest.

To Hitchens, as to all unbelievers, the biggest affront is the claim that hell exists and that they have freely chosen to be its occupants. I can’t help wondering, though, whether Hitchens on his deathbed will do a Lord Marchmain and make the object of his lifelong mockery a last gesture.