Celestial North Korea?

I was watching a panel discussion between William Lane Craig, Jim Dennison, Lee Strobel, another Christian guy I don’t know and Christopher Hitchens (you can see the whole thing here) and something that Hitchens said struck me. Not because it was especially profound (it wasn’t) or deep (it wasn’t) or even insightful (again, it wasn’t). What he said really summed up his entire presentation, and it seems from Bill Craig’s newsletter that he presented the same material in his debate at Biola a few weeks ago (I want to buy a copy of that, but Biola still doesn’t have any… :( ). Basically his whole point was that he didn’t want to be told what to do. That’s what it all boiled down to. He sounded a bit like a petulant child, actually… .

Anyway, what he said was this: when discussing God making a world with rules and punishing us for breaking those rules he likened such a world to a Celestial North Korea, with (presumably) God as Kim Jong-Il. Now the thing that really struck me about this statement was how shallow this idea is! Hitchens himself is a father, and I’m sure he set rules for his kids and punished them when they broke them. He probably knew they would fail to meet his expectations, and he set the penalties and meted them out accordingly. So my question to you is, Mr Hitchens, what makes God a tyrant when you do the same things? Things every parent must do? What the government must do? I don’t think he is an advocate of a society that has no laws or punishments for breaking them, but he objects to God making rules! “You can’t tell me what to do! You can’t set rules that I must obey and then punish me for breaking them!” The arrogance of this position is flabbergasting! But, then, what can you expect from a worldview such as his, a worldview where man is the top?