Maggie's Farm

Grabar takes on Hitchens' atheism at TCS. Q quote:

How odd, then, for Hitchens to invoke literature as he does:

"We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books."

But Hitchens must be banking on a readership that has not read Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. These Christian authors dramatized the themes and stories of the holy book that Hitchens disparages. Shakespeare has Iago explain the materialist origins of his wickedness:

"Virtue? A fig! 'tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens."

For Shakespeare, the sociopath emerges from a materialist conception of the self, from the rejection of the spiritual -- specifically, Christianity.