Christopher Hitchens question illumined from the view of the Early Eastern Christian Church

Christopher Hitchens once asked in a debate against Christianity what was it that he could not do that a Christian can. Or more precisely: Name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever.

No one in the crowd or the debater could answer him. So he asked it again. Still no answer.

 

If Christianity is another ideology or moral code, then the answer is most likely nothing since anyone can be moral or a good person even outside the Church. But the Early Church would have answered this question from a different (mystical) understanding and not scholastically or rational cause/effect: What you can’t do, dear brother, is that you cannot love God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul and become a Saint. And thusly, have the experience of real peace, joy, and love from the source of all true love and life, God: to commune with the Divine and receive the foretaste of the kingdom-come right in the here and now; and by God’s Uncreated energies receive gifts like clairvoyance, bi-location, read thoughts, fear nothing, want nothing, need nothing and be full. This is not the way the world understands fullness, peace, joy, and love which comes and goes never lasting and always offering its contraries, its dualities of good and bad, happiness and despair, peace and war, and life and death, etc. This is true fullness that is eternal because God shares Himself with those who strive and open their heart to receive His fullness and not the fullness of the “ego” or the “goodness of moral man.”

 

-Anonymous

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(However, we are not aiming at any earthly system to make it king. We are looking to commune with God through His mysteries. God can reach any man at any time: atheists and agnostics. Though a person may not follow the way of Christ through the Church militant, God may still be present in this person. It is hard to qualify this from mere teaching alone, but anything is possible with God. We humans make statements about this Way or that Way, but God is not limited by anything, reduced by anything... "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion." This is a riddle for us and we will leave it at that. At the same time it is dangerous to say that all ways lead to God, because there are various/many ways that are very difficult to reach a humble spiritual state and dangerous to pursue. So we would be wise to again leave it at that. And when we see a path that has produced countless saints, we can be assured that there is something holy and good there.)

P>S>
May Christopher Hitchen's memory be eternal.

   We always can not be sure why some men decide to be anti-theists. But it is definitely within possibility that the strange religiosity that affects people, and they as representatives of "Christianity", make the church of Christ a caricature and travesty. And it is such that those who would become Christians do not do so because of these foolish "faiths". Such men, who have wisdom, would then look at these so called Christians or so called churches and reject them, not because the message of Christ is bad, but because these teachings are so bad that the life of Christ is not even lived in them at all, not in the doctrines, not in the theology, and not, certainly, in the life of the people. Christ came to remove man from religion and towards the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
 

Orthodoxy is not a religion. Orthodoxy is the cure for religion.

~ Alexander Schmemann
(1921-1983)