http://www.heraldsun.com.au/
This is the tale of two talented and opinionated brothers, born three years apart, who have become known as the Cain and Abel of the modern age.
Like most brothers, they had disagreements, but both were devout atheists.
Both became famous scribes, but then Peter Hitchens renounced his atheism and that led to a string of public clashes during which Christopher Hitchens described his brother as "an idiot" and Peter called his sibling an atheist "zealot".
Christopher and Peter Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens, a poster boy for the New Atheists and supporter of George W. Bush's war on Iraq, is author of several books including the best-seller God Is Not Great, which attacked what he described as the murderous quality of religious belief.
Younger brother Peter, who was a public opponent of the war on Iraq, is author of the recently released The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith. The book is a fascinating account of the disparity between the brothers and a journey of one brother away from and back to faith.
Hitchens the younger reveals that at 15, as a formal renunciation of Christianity, he set fire to a Bible on the playing fields of his Cambridge boarding school and notes "the book did not, as I had hoped, blaze fiercely and swiftly". Nevertheless, he became a youthful Marxist - "engaged in a full, perfect and complete rebellion against everything I had been brought up to believe" - who regarded marriage as "something to be avoided" and abortion as a necessity.
"I smugly congratulated myself on being able to be virtuous without hope of reward or fear of punishment. We were sure that we, and our civilisation, had grown out of the nursery myths of God, angels and heaven. We had modern medicine, penicillin, jet engines, the welfare state, the United Nations and science, which explained everything that needed to be explained," he writes.
For 20 years he hardly met a religious person, and almost all his peers shared in his unbelief.
His long dalliance with atheism began to erode when he was 30. He concluded a return to God was the only real hope for personal freedom and meaning.
One Christmas, he slipped into a carol service, diffident and anxious not to be seen. "I knew perfectly well that I was enjoying it, though I was unwilling to admit it. I also knew I was losing my faith in politics and my trust in ambition, and was urgently in need of something else on which to build the rest of my life," he writes.
Word spread around journalistic circles that Hitchens was "mixed up" in church matters. The rumours at first embarrassed him.
"I remember a distinguished foreign correspondent, with an incredulous look of mingled pity and horror on his face, asking: 'How can you do that?' "
Hitchens overcame his embarrassment amid growing attacks on Christianity, including those by his brother. "While I was making my gradual, hesitant way back to the altar-rail, my brother Christopher's passion against God grew more virulent and confident," he writes.
"As he has become more certain about the non-existence of God, I have become more convinced we cannot know such a thing in the way we know anything else, and so must choose whether to believe or not. I think it better by far to believe."
In God Is Not Great, Christopher argues that the human race no longer needs religion - the source of all ills - and calls for a "new enlightenment" that views religion as a creed only for the foolhardy.
Peter Hitchens believes his brother does not appreciate the reality of our existence and calls for rationality in the God debate.
He says: "I think it's fair to say that atheism led me to faith because so many people see atheism as the final station on the railroad.
That you arrive there, that you have been through everything else, that the argument is finished and that you have permanently rejected something that is restricted to childhood.
"From where I sit, it's not the end of the argument, but the beginning of the argument."
Hitchens writes that there is so much fury against religion because religion is the one reliable force that stands in the way of power of the strong over the weak.
"If you drive God out of the world you create a howling wilderness," he writes. "In an age of power worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power."
Hitchens believes his atheist brother, who claims to "loathe" believers, may one day arrive at some sort of acceptance that belief in God is not necessarily a character fault, and that religion does not poison everything.
"Believing what I believe and thinking what I think, it would be wrong of me not to hope," he writes.
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