Your antagonist has to be able to do the following thing: he has, or she, to name a moral action performed or a moral statement made by a believer that could not be made or performed by an unbeliever.
I’ve been doing this for months now, it’s been on the Christianity today website, it’s been on Sally Quinn’s wonderful site I hope you visit, OnFaith, Washington Post Newsweek, and many other places, and I haven’t yet had one reply. Except in junction to love your ennemies, which I don’t think is a moral one. Do I love the theocratic suicide murderers? No, I don’t. I dislike them. I wish to encompass their defeat. They wish to be martyrs? Okay, I’m here to help. But it would be positively immoral to say that one loves them. It would be disgraceful, cowardly and masochistic – and there, three words you have the roots of Christianity. And that’s why, I suppose, no Christian leader took the occasion of the theocratic barbaric assault on our civil society to say that now was a moment to declare our love for these fashistic goons.
So, my challenge also has a corollary, and you can try this on an audience, too: please can you think of an immoral statement made or an immoral, wicked action performed by someone who could only have been religious. Very strange, noone has any difficulty coming up with an answer right away to that.
They can’t answer the first and they can’t avoid the second. I wouldn’t say it’s a q.e.d., but I think it’s very suggestive.
Christopher Hitchens
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