Rage Against God

The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith by Peter Hitchens, 219 pages

As a teenager, Peter Hitchens lost what little faith he had in God - he simply grew out of it, as one more step towards adulthood.  At the same time, he found a new faith in radical politics.  An education as a reporter in '80s Moscow lead to the death of that faith, as he learned that an atheist society could not, despite a mountain of corpses, produce an earthly paradise.  This experience was one of the factors which lead him to a reconsideration of, and then reconversion to, the Christianity he had smugly rejected as a young man.  It also shaped a new understanding of his former fellow travelers, most notably his older brother Christopher, and the motives which underlay their atheism.

This is both the strength and weakness of The Rage Against God.  It is not about the reasons for faith so much as an attempt to reveal that atheism is not a default position which must be reasoned out of, but is itself the product of hidden premises and desires, most often the desire to reshape the world in our own image.  His target is not atheists as a general class, but a certain class of atheists which included his more famous brother.  The autobiographical accounts are excellent, but Hitchens slips a bit when he tries to universalize from his experience.