After our last go-round, Peter Hitchens has posted a further reply. I encourage you to read it in full before reading my response, which follows below:

Once again, Peter Hitchens has utterly failed to address the point that even religious moral codes, allegedly based on the will of a perfect and changeless deity, have changed dramatically over time - in virtually all cases for the better. We no longer own slaves, as the Bible permits us to do; we no longer stone disobedient children or require rape victims to marry their rapists, as it commands us to do. The expansion of rights for women and minorities, the spread of democracy and secularism, the rise of science and the Enlightenment - all these unquestionably positive trends occurred in the teeth of fierce resistance from religious defenders of the status quo. In most cases, once this social progress was complete, those same religious authorities then stepped into the breach and pretended they had supported it all along.

It's no surprise that he won't come to terms with this point, since his entire position is based on the idea that clinging to God's unchanging word is the only way to prevent society from collapsing into chaos. That belief stands refuted by reality: we have departed in many ways from what the Bible commands, and we're better off because of it. (Need I point out the irony of a confirmed member of the Anglican church making this argument? You know, the denomination that was founded because one guy wanted to change a religious law about divorce?)

I simply dispute the assertion by our host that there is no evidence to support Christian belief. There is such evidence.

I don't intend to rehash that entire vast debate, so I instead want to draw my focus tightly around the one point that no one can deny, which is that there is no non-human moral authority. And that is correct. No matter the nature of your moral dispute, the only opinions you'll ever hear are from human beings. The archaeological evidence, or lack thereof, supporting a set of stories about an itinerant Jewish rabbi who did magic tricks two millennia ago doesn't change this. No divine beings are present in the world giving us commands. All we have to guide us are other human beings, some of whom claim they speak in the name of a deity.

An atheist in a society still governed by the Christian moral law has great personal advantages. The almost universal idea among the college-educated young, a sort of crude J.S.Mill belief that 'nobody has the right to tell me what to do' is a very powerful force in modern western societies, excusing as it does a great deal of sexual promiscuity and drug-taking which do immense damage and create huge unhappiness, for which those responsible often do not even realise they are to blame.

So, if I may paraphrase, Hitchens' argument is that people become atheists because they want to take drugs, have promiscuous sex, and indulge all their other selfish and hedonistic impulses.