Letter: Holding out hope

THE late Christopher Hitchens was indeed entertaining and refreshingly forthright (your reports, 17 December), but, along with the other “New Atheists”, much of his output was irrational hate-mongering.

Irrational because he did not, as a rule, attempt to understand and engage with genuinely representative opposing views, assuming instead that atheism had a monopoly on reason.

Setting out to demonise all religious people by associating them with every noxious act by any religious adherent in the whole of human history is hate-mongering. Anyone who can label Mother Teresa an “Angel of Hell” has lost all sense of perspective, utterly consumed by a fierce hatred of religion.

I was intrigued to read that Mr Hitchens thought that finding he had a conscious existence after death would be a nice surprise. For all of his scathing dismissal of supernatural beliefs, he seemed to harbour a home-spun conception of a universal benign afterlife as the only possible alternative to annihilation.

Richard Lucas

Solas – Centre for Public Christianity

St Peter’s Street, Dundee