This question will be answered according to the words spoken by Jesus Christ himself at the end of this article.
There's an old saying, "There are no atheists in a foxhole."
It presumes that, in the shock and noise of combat, when faced with the terror of one's extinction, a soldier reaches into his psychic mess kit and utters a prayer to the deity he has previously neglected.
Reaching for God in a tough spot is not just reserved for soldiers, of course. It can be the respite of anyone faced with the recognition that life itself is an existential endnote.
I raise this because of the clamour surrounding the announcement by the well-known writer Christopher Hitchens that he has cancer of the esophagus and that it has spread to his lymph nodes.
In case you need reminding, "Hitch," as he is called — including by himself in a recent memoir, Hitch-22 — is a celebrity atheist as well as a pugnacious critic, journalist and left-wing turncoat who supported the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and has employed his most sinewy and clever rhetoric in its defence ever since.
He may be best known for his polemic God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
And, of course, now that cancer is poisoning his body, all those people who read, love or hate him can attend to the ironies of his existential situation on the blogosphere.
A model patient
Love Hitch or hate him, you must admit he is a stalwart.
With his hair falling out from the chemo treatments, he is still writing and pontificating.
Indeed, it is a marvel to see him speak, as he does with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic magazine, in such a savvy and wry manner about his own illness, as if he were a well-tempered character in a novel.
If it can be said that, in the right circumstances, our vices are our virtues, Hitch's immense pride is serving him well, at least for now.
These are early days, but he comes across as a model, brave patient.
Then, of course, there are the responses to Hitch's cancer.
In his Atlantic interview, Hitchens tells us he has received many missives from religiously minded readers and that they can be divided broadly into three categories.
First, there are good Christians who are praying for him and for his recovery. These are Christians who want God to heal the atheist, no strings attached.
Another group is praying that Hitchens, in his suffering and pain, will see the light and finally find God, like the proverbial soldier in the foxhole. This group comprises Christians who want him to become a soldier in the army of Christ.
The third group of religionists are praying for his demise, for his punishment
This attention is not just confined to Christians. Included in this intemperate lot, apparently, as reported in the National Post, are contributors to a Canadian Muslim website, Hitchens having been a ferocious critic of radical Islam.
Straight to hell
This third group of Hitchenites apparently sees his cancer as retribution for his religious and political sins. They welcome the demise of his body and the dispatch of his soul to hell.
Hitchens tells us that he appreciates and is touched by the first group, those believers who pray for him, no strings attached. He is, of course, disdainful of those who wish him ill.
For those who want him to convert, he has a more sophisticated argument.
He admits that when the cancer advances and he enters a land of pain and dreamy narcotic, he just might find himself babbling that he has finally discovered the God he has renounced for so long.
But if he succumbs in this way, Hitchens says that won't be the real Christopher Hitchens speaking. Perhaps, we can call this creature the un-Hitchens?
No cringing worm
It might be said that, in his brave, funny and British public-school way, Hitchens' stoicism touches on the hallmarks of the religious character, as outlined in a thoughtful column by Damon Linker in The New Republic.
Linker tells us that not everyone facing earthly demise discovers God. Some remain just as agnostic as before, including the Italian writer Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz.
Then there are all those soldiers or accident victims who, rather than finding God, lose their faith instead.
Most of us have probably known or read about those who have come back from the killing fields of war with no possible theological justification for the carnage they've beheld except the unsatisfactory cliché that God works in strange ways.
The Nobel Prize-winning writer Elie Wiesel emerged from the death camps of the Second World War a religious man of a sort, but also a morally wounded and uncertain one.
Linker, who used to be an editor at the religious journal First Things, tells us that Hitchens' stance is that of the proud, thoroughly complete person, the cool, rational being in full command of his faculties.
This is a person filled with sober confidence and endowed, for the moment, with excellent health.
But Linker goes on to say that the man or woman trembling before God, a person undone by suffering, is not simply a befuddled, cringing worm. For a believing Christian — and this works for other faiths, too — the experience of suffering discloses an essential truth.
Our own foxholes
This truth is that we are fundamentally weak, needy and anxious creatures who desperately need a god to soothe us.
This may sound like weakness to the atheist or even to an agnostic. Certainly many agnostics, such as Sigmund Freud, can die bravely and in pain without succumbing to religious inclinations, which to a Freudian would be characterized as projection or hallucination.
But a genuinely religious person understands that human weakness is not a form of moral depravity. It is, rather, an insight into his or her moral condition.
Human beings are not at their best when they deny their own fragility. The human condition alone is not a self-sufficient one, according to the religious.
What's more, religious souls can open up to the world rather than simply becoming the fanatics portrayed in Hitchens' polemic, God Is Not Great.
At the outset of the interview with The Atlantic, Goldberg asks Hitchens how he is doing.
Hitchens responds, bemusedly, that he is dying. We're all dying, he says, it is just that he might die sooner than expected.
Which is too bad, he suggested. He has so much more work to do, so many plans and books to write.
You don't have to be a famous author to be there, with Hitch. At some point we are all soldiers in our own foxholes.
But we can watch this unfolding drama without necessarily taking sides, but for a glimpse into how one plucky, though at times intemperate, soldier chooses to die.
So what were Christopher Hitchins final words before dying?
Christopher Hitchens remained a committed atheist right down to his last breath. A witness who was by his bedside Steve Wasserman and others stated that as Hitchens laid dying he asked for a pen and paper and tried to write on it. After a while he finished, held it up, looked at it, and saw that it was illegible. What's the use Hitchens said to S. Wasserman. Then he dosed a little and then roused himself and spoke a couple of words that were close to inaudible. Mr. Wasserman asked him to repeat them. There were only 2 words:" CAPITALISM AND DOWNFALL".
The Hitch Has Landed - The Dish
So according to God's word what was Mr. Hitchin's final judgement?
John 3:16-18:
16 For
God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever
believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18 Whoever
believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands
condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s
one and only Son.
"He who believes in the Son has eternal life; and he who does not obey the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God shall remain on him". Jesus Christ John 3:36.
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