Peter Hitchens

From Srafopedia

Peter Jonathan Hitchens (born 28 October 1951 in Sliema, Malta) is a British journalist, author and broadcaster. A reporter for the Daily Express for most of his career, he left the paper in 2001 and currently writes for the Mail on Sunday.

Hitchens is an advocate of absolute moral virtues founded on religious (particularly Christian) faith. As a supporter of orthodox Christian morality, Hitchens opposes sex education in schools. He points out that the general introduction of sex education in schools has been accompanied by an increase in sexual activity among the young, with a resultant rise in pregnancies, abortions and instances of sexually transmitted diseases, the very things that sex education is intended to discourage. He believes that many of the measures which created the "permissive society" were mistaken or excessive and need to be re-examined, and he believes that homosexual relationships should not be granted legal parity with heterosexual marriage.

While Hitchens has described belief in evolution as a speculative theory, he does not subscribe to a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis either. In a review of God is not Great, written by his brother, fellow journalist and atheist author Christopher Hitchens, he stated that, "many decades have passed since I fancied the story of Adam and Eve was literal truth, if I ever did."

In the Mail on Sunday, 27th January 2002, Hitchens wrote about Philip Pullman:

Of his three famous children's books, the first two, Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife, are captivating and clever, but the third, which took the Whitbread prize, is a disappointing clunker with some gruesome and needlessly nasty scenes. This is probably because The Amber Spyglass - in which God dies - is too loaded down with propaganda to leave enough room for the story. None of the trilogy is a patch on any of the Narnia chronicles. You can't help wondering if the praise and the prizes ... are because of Pullman's views as much as his writing. For Pullman has said: "I hate the Narnia books, and I hate them with deep and bitter passion, with their view of childhood as a golden age from which sexuality and adulthood are a falling-away."
He knows perfectly well what he is doing. He openly and rightly believes storytelling can be a form of moral propaganda: "All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions... We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time and silence. "Thou shalt not" is soon forgotten."
Pullman has said many times that he thinks God is dead. Since he cannot know if this is true, it raises the question of whether he also hopes that God is dead.
'Is this the most dangerous author in Britain?' The Mail on Sunday, retrieved on 21 September 2006.