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It is true that the triumph of atheism in the West need not necessarily produce what the triumph of atheism produced in Russia -- mass murder and cultural devastation on a scale previously unimaginable. But we already have before us cultural devastation of a different sort, the result of the very assault on faith -- both faith in God and faith in our past -- that Christopher Hitchens wants to accelerate: a culture centered around self-gratification, with comfort its highest aim; a high culture devoted to ugliness and degradation, and a mass culture marked by tawdriness and vulgarity; a loss of morals and a coarsening of manners, with notions of duty, self sacrifice, and restraint seen as anachronisms at best and tools of oppression at worst. As Waugh wrote, “It is no longer possible, as it was in the time of Gibbon, to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis on which it rests.” It is time to fortify the admittedly thin and tenuous roots still connecting us to Christendom, not to tear them up and hope for the best. No civilization worth the name has ever been defined by atheism; we are unlikely to create the first. http://www.takimag.com/454/