The central critique here is not that all atheists...

The central critique here is not that all atheists are ready to burst forth into unrestrained licentiousness, given the slightest provocation. Many atheists, atheism and all, don’t want to be raving criminals, and that is find with me. I am not saying Hitchens is a serial murderer, or that he ought to be. I am not saying that civilized atheists are just pretending to be ethical. I know that Hitchens expresses genuine moral outrage, and I am glad he does. It shows that he still is carrying the image of God […]

This critque is not aimed at his unrighteousness, but rather at his unsupported self-righteousness. The issue is not what Hitchens himself wants to do. The issue is whether he can get his god reason to rebuke a completely different atheist who was more of Stalin’s frame of mind. The issue is not that atheism requires an atheist to starve millions in the Soviet province of Georgia. It does not, and so Hitchens doesn’t have to. But it does necessitate that consistent atheists stand by mute, with nothing whatever to say, when others (theists and atheists alike) make choice that they personally would consider abominable and outrageous. This is because Stalin has no god, including Hitchens. The disapproval of Jehovah meant nothing to him, and the disapproval of Hitchens would have meant just as little. And Hitchens has no reason whatever that could possibly make Stalin see it differently. That is the issue. It is not whether Hitchens is Stalin. Of course he is not. The issue is whether Hitchens has anything whatever to say when Stalin is being Stalin. And he does not.

So whenever Hitchens condemns the moral behavior of anyone else, he is not proving that atheists can be moral too. He is proving, instead, that he is incapable of following his own premises out to the end of the road. He is proving that he is blissfully unaware of the blatant contradiction in his system where no one can impose his morality on another. But then Hitchens begins dispensing moral judgments on others, and he does so with a snow shovel. So this critique is directed at an intellectual failure of atheism, not at a moral failure. The subject is morality, but the failure is a failure in reason. This is unfortunate for them because it is a failure of their god.