Just read something that makes me too angry for words, which does not mean I’ll not try to put it into words. I was reading Peter Hitchens’ blog and came across the following:
I obviously haven’t bothered with the people who write ‘Peter Hitchens is a ****ing ****’, or who say, imagining this is original and clever, that I should have died instead of my late brother – a version of this appears about once every ten days, or more often if I have recently been broadcasting.
Let me leave aside the snide, petty meanness of this stuff, the rotten character it shows (I’ve written elsewhere about when anti-religion is bigotry), and let me also leave to one side that I think I know exactly the sort of words that the Hitch would have had about comments like this; there aren’t enough asterisks on the planet to cover them.
For the moment let me put the following: I wonder who, exactly, people who go in for this stuff think that they are convincing? Or what makes them think that this is frightfully clever?
As I have warned people, atheists are outnumbered about a thousand to one. The one thing we have going for us is the ability to change people’s minds. When Mandela and the ANC were banged up in Robben Island, they had a rule to treat the guards with maximum courtesy and answer all their questions as rationally as possible. They managed to convince even some of these hardened, calcified racists to change their minds (one apparently said that the ANC plan “makes a lot more sense than what the national party says”). That is something worth remembering.
