Ah, another one of those clever responses that make FR such a great place lately: “Don’t agree with me? You must be a liberal!”
How about the poster who called Christopher Hitchens did his research before calling someone a “homo” like a teenager would, with no evidence? I don’t have any problem with calling a spade a spade, but when you call someone something with no evidence, just making a personal attack, you’re not speaking like a conservative.
Go ahead, keep making conservatives look like teenagers sniggering about simple mistakes.
That being said, the Hitchen's central aversion to religion in general brings to mind the T. S. Elliot quote:
"The world is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time; so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and to save the world from suicide."Hitchens, as child of socialism, still attempts, while facing the collapse of communism, to apply the same Marxist dialectic and scientific rationality to all questions.
T.S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture
As conservatives, our first regard is to recognize the value of what we have inherited in western civilization. Hitchens begins without that predisposition and goes greatly astray.
Ex-stalinists Whittaker Chambers and Frank Meyers both came to admire the Permanent Things and became conservatives. Some, like Hitchens, just retreat to Trotsky and retrench the dogma. I am reading an intersting book on the myth of Che and his actual impact on decimating Cuba. It is revealing how many fawning quotes of reverence Che has had offered for him over the years by Chris Hitchens.
It is not necessary to be anti-religion, even if one is a non-believer, to understand the dangers of pure rationality to good government. Hayek is the perfect example.