This is the last week of the Church year. The readings are from the book of the Apocolypse. For the Atheist, this is one of the most wildly incomprehensible and ridiculous books of the New testament.

Even if you don’t believe in its content, however, you can still love the poetry. Today’s reading:

And after these things I heard a great voice of much people in heaven, saying, Alleluia; Salvation, and glory, and honour, and power, unto the Lord our God:

For true and righteous are his judgments: for he hath judged the great whore, which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hand.

And again they said, Alleluia And her smoke rose up for ever and ever.

(Revelation 19:1-3)

Christopher Hitchens, one of our most prominent atheist commentators, was in the Times today. He has a very severe cancer. He has put his view of death rather nicely. He doesn’t fear death because he won’t know about it, but if he does wake up in an afterlife, he says it will be a pleasant surprise.

I once heard Billy Graham saying much the same thing: “I don’t fear death, only dying.”

Billy Graham has seemingly unconquerable faith. Christopher Hitchens may have little or none, but they are not far apart – and I am in the middle.