I have begun reading Peter Hitchen's new book, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith. Peter is the brother of the currently popular atheist author, Christopher Hitchens. It promises to be a very good book. Here is an excerpt from chapter one:
…I was actively angry and resentful at the catechism's insistence on rules I had no intention of obeying. By the time I was twelve, I had a sense, when I encountered this text, of a very old and withered hand reaching out from a dusty tomb-like cavity and seeking to pull me down into its hole forever.
The dark purity of the seventeenth-century language was also disturbing. It was the voice of the dead, speaking as if they were still alive and as if the world had not changed since they died―when I thought I knew that the world was wholly alterable and that the rules changed with the times. Now I am comforted greatly by this voice, welcoming the intervention of my forbearers in our lives and their insistent reminder that we do not in fact change at all, that as I am now, so once were they, and as they are now, so shall I be.
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