My purpose in debating Christopher Hitchens on the afterlife

Is atheism necessary for religion? Rabbi Zusya would say yes.

The great Russian Hassidic Rabbi, who lived more than two hundred years ago, was one day teaching his students when he emphasized the necessity of atheism and agnosticism. His students were aghast. Had the master lost his mind? He proved his point. “Say you’re walking down the street and you see a hungry man or a homeless woman. If you’re certain there is a G-d you’re reaction might be, ‘I need do nothing because G-d will provide.’ But if you don’t believe in G-d, or if you doubt his existence, then there is only you who can provide.’”

Religion is the most powerful tool known to mankind. It is capable of inspiring the artistic wonders of the Italian Renaissance and the reliefs of Michelangelo, and it is capable of inspiring nineteen young men to fly airplanes into buildings. It can lend mankind a vision of a perfect world in which ‘the wolf lies down with the lamb’ and it can impart to the world a vision of people needing to be burned at the stake as infidels.

Without intelligent and earnest critics of the faith the heavenly vision of religion can easily spill over into the hell on earth. Hence, the necessity of atheism and agnosticism. I would argue that religion learns more about itself from its critics than it does about its admirers.

I have debated many atheists in my time, from Richard Dawkins to Daniel Dennett to Sam Harris to Christopher Hitchens. Of them all Hitchens stands alone. He has by far been the most formidable and the most interesting opponent, the one I have most loved and the one that has most gotten under my skin. Religious people have no real interest in Dawkins whom they find extreme, clinical, mechanical, and monolithic. But Hitchens is passionate, utterly unpredictable, contrarian, and fluent. And while he has been, at times been, in my opinion, highly unfair in his criticism of religion, he redeems it all by being all too human. It is his most likable quality. He is also supremely entertaining.  Read Article

By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach