Dear Greg:
Hitchens graduated from an English boarding school and Oxford, but he never went to graduate school-or
at least he never got a graduate degree. He was probably too smart for that. On the strength of his fierce
and sometimes devastating polemical writing, he teaches occasional classes at Stanford, Berkeley, City
College and other places. I think he's actually a professor somewhere now. I'm not sure if he's an atheist
or an outright God-hater-maybe both, though it's hard to see why one would spend one's time hating
something that doesn't exist. (Maybe the hatred for God atheists feel is a proof of God's existence.) He
quit The Nation and now writes reviews for The Atlantic, and he has long written for Vanity Fair. I've
seen him refer to himself at different times as a Marxist and a libertarian-I'm not quite sure how that
works!
First I learned French (while I was in the Navy). That was a bridge to Latin-I took a class at a junior
college in northern California when I taught in the California State University system. Once you get a feel
for Latin grammar, Greek is a little easier. I sat in on a Greek class at a prep school I taught at in Texas,
and am sitting in on another one at the university now. I've also studied Welsh for about 12 years. It's a
ridiculously difficult language. I also dabble in Anglo-Saxon (Old English).
What's your dissertation title? I tried to find it on the Internet but only found tributes to you from your
international fan club.
Have fun at the gig in Denver.Peace,
Preston
Dear Preston,
My dissertation probably hasn't been microfilmed yet. If you want to wait, I can send you a copy when I
get home in a couple weeks. The title is "Monism, Atheism, and the Naturalist WorldView: Perspectives
from Evolutionary Biology."
I sat on my bed and said to God... You haven't got me yet. I know Your cunning. It's You who take us
up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You're a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I
don't want Your peace and I don't want Your love.... With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness
as a harvester ruins a mouse's nest. I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.Graham Greene, novelist, The End of the AffairAlthough it is a chuckle to read your idea that hating God might be evidence of God's existence, it is
misleading to believe that such a behavior could imply God's existence. Science requires more than that,
as I am sure you are aware. It would be a great trick by God, however.
I cannot understand the concept of hating God.I neither love nor hate the universe, so it seems odd that some people rail so heavily against the
inevitable. What is difficult for me-and I find myself intolerant at times-is that people can so blindly
believe in God. For the average citizen, it is because of their fear and lack of reasoning capacity or