Peter Hitchens has written two further comments on my previous post, in one of which he states that he'll be bowing out of the debate from this point on. So be it; there are, of course, many respects in which we disagree, but I appreciate the time and effort he's put into this conversation. That being said, I still intend to have the last word.

The fact that men professing to be Christian believers try to rewrite or reinterpret the laws of God does not get rid of the idea that, to be true moral laws, those laws have to be beyond the power of man to alter. That is, it has to be possible to discover, and state, that men have departed from them.

Since Mr. Hitchens has left the discussion, this question will probably have to stand as rhetorical, but I'll pose it anyway: How does one "discover" God's will? If you're interpreting it wrongly, how could you find that out?

I'll return to a point I raised earlier, the case of slavery. The forced servitude of human beings is condoned throughout the Bible, both in the Old Testament and the New (where Jesus works slavery into a parable as if it were the most natural thing in the world, favorably comparing God to a slave owner who beats his slaves for disobedience, and where Paul tells slaves that it's blasphemous for them to disobey or rebel against their owners). In antebellum America, preachers cited these verses as proof that slavery was a divinely sanctioned institution. Were they wrong to do this? How could a Christian know?

As it happens, I do believe there's an objective morality, just as Peter Hitchens does. But the difference between us is that mine is an empirical standard: it's based on happiness and well-being, which are qualities that exist in the real world. Based on these principles, I can construct an argument against slavery by showing how it's destructive to human life and happiness. But Hitchens' moral code is based on an otherworldly standard - the will of God - which doesn't seem to be based on anything that we can observe. And as I've said many times throughout this discussion and as he, finally, acknowledges, there is no divine moral authority active in this world, giving commands and telling people when they're displeasing him. All we have to rely on are human beings, each of whom put forward their own varying beliefs about what God wants. What is the process, if any, by which we can determine whose interpretations are right and whose are wrong?

I was the one who pointed out that Japan, a highly civilised and in many ways admirable country, was pretty much devoid of religious belief. What I do say is that the particularly lovely form of civilisation achieved in a very few states in recent centuries, that of ordered liberty under the law without a strong state, is only attainable when Protestant Christianity is embraced and followed widely. Japan, for instance, relies very heavily on oppressive conformism and hierarchy, and much less on the individual conscience freely operating.

That all sounds like a very high-minded and noble ideal - "ordered liberty under the law without a strong state". The only problem is that Hitchens plainly doesn't believe it. How do I know this? Just look at his words immediately following:

And I would not be surprised if almost all of the above atheist examples disagreed with me on the following litmus subjects (I could come up with many others): divorce (I think it should be much more difficult); drugs and alcohol (I favour deterrence of drug abuse through severe criminal penalties imposed for possession, and the reintroduction of severe restrictions on the sale of alcohol); crime and disorder (I favour the due punishment of responsible persons, and regard 'community penalties' and 'rehabilitation' as futile)...