RELIGION | GAZA

My God’s Bigger Than Your God

Now that the war in Gaza has brought chaos to college campuses across the United States and in Europe too, whose God will bring the solution that works for everyone?

Charlton Heston as Moses in The Ten Commandments, 1956. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

In 2007, the New Yorker magazine published a cartoon that depicted a woman in an armchair reading a newspaper as a man with a gigantic lightning bolt stuck in his back flings open the front door.

“I told you not to write that book,” she says in the caption.

The cartoon was a direct reference to God Is Not Great, a bestselling book by British-American author, journalist, and educator Christopher Hitchens.

At the time, the cartoon was funny.

But just a few years later, it was not.

In 2010, while in New York to promote another book, Hitchens was rushed to the emergency room, where he was treated for a pericardial effusion, an abnormal accumulation of fluid around his heart. A short time later, he postponed his book tour to undergo treatment for cancer of the esophagus. By 2011, he was dead.

The once funny cartoon now seemed vaguely ominous, a portent of God’s retribution for the author’s blasphemous…