What Hemingway once said by somebody why his books were so easy to read, it's easy to read because it was hard to write. I grew up in a standard English middle-class home, as I think was quite common at the time when there probably wasn't very much discussion of religion. It was quite a lot of religion at school, but I don't recall it ever coming up at home and I don't think we would, for instance, generally go to church during the school holidays, but on the other hand, we would have religious sources every day at school. The formal renunciation of Bible burning incident, I suppose, I must have been 15. It's a moment when you start wanting to be separate from your parents and therefore you separate yourself, of course, from a lot of the things that your parents stand for or you think they stand for. And from in my case, most of the adults who don't learn influenced your life. So I had my life taken up with a pretty detailed and demanding secular faith. I didn't have any shortage of things to believe it. And then after that, I tried as many former Marxists do to make my peace with the world which I increasingly realised didn't need to be overthrown by revolution. I was originally a journalist because I was a revolutionary socialist and I wanted to serve the cause of the revolution by getting into journalism and using my position in newspapers to promote the revolutionary cause. And then I changed my mind. The moment you then go out into what might be called the normal world and a dealing every day with, particularly in my case, it would have been police officers, fire regaids and the kind of people who news reporters are constantly talking about, realising that they were not like me, they didn't believe what I believed. That they were people who had previously in many ways despised or seen as figures of useless or pointless authority and they weren't. And then you began to put together or rather not to be able to put together any more the things which you thought and the things which you experienced. And the terrifying thing about beginning to change your mind is that there is no stopping. It is metaphorically like falling through a floor which suddenly gives way beneath your feet and falling so fast that when you hit the floor below that gives way beneath you as well. And huge numbers of things which you did not question and not thoughts to be open to question suddenly become question. This is some hideous symbol of mother India, somewhere inside Bombay. These people behind me are bathing in the Ganges, guys in downtown Havana. If they were for the sunshine in the room I think they would all go mad. There is Becca Stone, one of the new dictatorships which is sprang up since the Soviet Union. This is the Islamic University of Dio band. This is Moscow, this is the new rebuilt cathedral of Christ of Savia, that is me in the Shweta Gampagoda. It is some British troops just outside the green zone in Baghdad. A defaced Saddam Hussein. The Mandalay oranguan expressed pausing at a small town in the Labbama and they make jokes about the regime. I won't say that the most terrific comedians I have ever heard but there are some of the bravest people I have ever seen. Being a conservative journalist has as many joys, not least you can write things other people, you can get close to the truth because conservatives do, but on the other hand in Britain particularly you get a lot of derision and personal mockery and abuse from people who would rather do that than argue with you. If you don't like arguments and intellectual combat then don't join but if you can take it and get any pleasure either. It will help. After a while you learn to take pleasure in being derided and sneered out and generally treated as if you were the lurs to the low. But the real purpose is to try and change the general state of opinion and also things so that the world can be changed for the better. I think it's important to say that atheism led me to faith because so many people view atheism as the final station on the railroad. That you arrive there, that you've been through everything else, that the eye-emote is finished and that you have permanently rejected something which is restricted really to the childhood of mankind. You can actually see from where I sit that far from being the end of the island is the beginning of the island. The story goes like this. There we were, a good lunch inside us, my then girlfriend and my wife and I wandering around the lovely town of Bone in the middle of Burgundy in France. Looks at the guidebook and it recommended particularly a work of art. And to look at it thinking, oh, another religious painting. And it was a painting of the last judgement by Michael Roger van der Leiden. And to my astonishment, the layers of time and distance which normally lie over old paintings were stripped away because the people in it were actually people just like me and the people I knew. And the shock of seeing this plunged me into a whole train of thought from which I have yet to escape that is to say the realisation of something that I'd always been taught and I had for many years rejected that I might myself be judged. I lived in the dying years of the Soviet Union in Moscow. I travelled extensively in the regions run by communism. I saw it and I know how very, very hostile it was to religion and why it was. And one of the things I want to communicate to people is how that hostility is now being reforged by a new atheist who in many cases have no idea of the forces they're trying to summon out of the ground and very little idea of the dangers of what they're doing. If you drive God out of the world then you create a howling willows. There is, as it were, a Hitchins brand. You are the brothers, you got them whether you want to have them or not. I'd pour farther to try to get a sign of these treaties. This book has come about because my brother wrote a book attacking God, Christianity and religion in general. There is an argument to be had. There are things that he says that are wrong. If he wants to write a Henry Kissinger then that's fine by me. I don't know or actually care very much about Henry Kissinger. But he doesn't know anymore about God than I do. Thinking what I think and believing what I believe that I would hope that my brother would change his mind. I make very limited claims for myself. I travel the world. I try and keep up with events. If somebody says have you read such and such and I haven't, I'll say no I haven't read it. I would think that most educated atheists are much more likely to be suddenly ambushed in the heart by poetry than they ever are likely to be converted by reasoned argument. A lot of what is conveyed by Christianity has to be conveyed in this form because words even the most beautiful words can't fully convey. The arts which have always had most effect on me. These things are immensely potent. I think that if people are exposed to them then they may find that the still small voices are wonderful. Young students start as writers say what do I need to do to be a journalist and I always say just before you do anything else, read Orwell's essay on politics in the English language. That's the absolute foundation of how anyone should approach writing plainly about the truth. This country ceased to be truly Christian in terms of people genuinely consciously and in an educated way believing in the Christian faith after the First World War. People still continue to behave as if their Christians. Society continues to function as if it's a Christian society for some time after it's gone. We've been living in the past 40 or 50 years in the afterglow of Christianism but eventually the darkness falls.