Posted on 12/16/2011 5:22:24 AM PST by markomalley
Cancer weakened, but did not soften Christopher Hitchens. He did not repent or forgive or ask for pity. As if granted diplomatic immunity, his mind’s eye looked plainly upon the attack and counterattack of disease and treatments that robbed him of his hair, his stamina, his speaking voice and eventually his life.
“I love the imagery of struggle,” he wrote about his illness in an August 2010 essay in Vanity Fair. “I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient.”
Hitchens, a Washington, D.C.-based author, essayist and polemicist who waged verbal and occasional physical battle on behalf of causes left and right, died Thursday night at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston of pneumonia, a complication of his esophageal cancer, according to a statement from Vanity Fair magazine. He was 62.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Yes, at the moment I am rather unhappy. You see, bad manners make me very unhappy. And the way Christians act when an atheist dies, well... it’s like Jersey Shore, but with crosses.
I was responding to a post asking why he had such disdain for Mother Teresa. His reasoning is from a different perspective than yours and has much validity. For example, I’m sure he, like many Catholics, had no use for NFP, which is often known as “Vatican Roulette.” He saw it as a way to keep women in their place. Plus, her bizarre notions like in her quote “You are suffering, that means Jesus is kissing you!” irked him to no end, as he saw nothing “noble” in the continued suffering in the rathole hospitals she founded in Calcutta and the little-used huge bank accounts.
Fraud or saint? Arguments can be made both ways.
... I mean, Jersey Shore, but with MORE crosses.
I think the things Hitchens said about those who did bad things in the name of religion, would pale in comparison to what God would have said about it.
You came on this thread in a negative way. Which came first? Seems you came onto the thread unhappy and argumentative...right there on post 10 of this thread.
Prayers for you. But, don’t be offended, as in your opinion I am just wasting my time. I hope things turn around for you, being unhappy is just so wrong. My God is LOVE itself, joy comes out of that relationship. I do want you to know this same joy. Good luck.
You are not “a perfect lady”, you’re a miserable old lady. Bitterness will get you in the end.
Why? Because it simply isn't true that Mohammed "was one of the many prophets." Allah is not the God of the great Judeo-Christian shema — "Hear O Israel, the Lord thy God is One God." For all I know, Allah is the figment of the demented, hallucinating imagination of a Bedouin warlord (Mohammed).... We never heard of Allah before the 7th century. He is definitely not the God revealed in Christian Holy Scripture.
Christianity is all about life and liberty; Islam is all about submission. The fundamental ethos of the two religions are mutually exclusive. Yet evidently you discriminate no difference whatever between them.
And that's the typical problem when doctrinaire atheists address themselves to religious topics: They really don't have a clue what they're talking about. But they don't let their ignorance stop them from saying all manner of garbage about Christianity and Christian believers.
JMHO FWIW
And what is Judaism about?
Can’t tell that from your post. Maybe you should review it yourself. I just cannot fathom that you are content going through life this cantankerous. There is joy in THIS life.
I notice others have called you out on your name. Not trying to pile on, but what gives? You are hardly the epitome of a happy atheist. Your posts reek of sarcasm and anger. As I stated before, I will pray for you.
Hmmm, perhaps that explains atheists trying to shut down Christmas displays....they are so miserable they want all of us to be that miserable. This season really seems to set them all off, could that be your problem? I have NEVER actually known an atheist. You are the first one I have engaged here on FR, and I do find your misery fascinating is a truly strange way. Hope that didn’t offend you. Just stating what I am feeling and thinking. Watching others have joyful lives and happily celebrating the holidays simply contrasts with an atheists empty life so they strike out at everyone with these senseless demands to stop “offending” them? Hadn’t really thought about it much.
Well, DH just walked in and I have to look busy! It won’t be Santa putting my new kindle fire or nook tablet under the tree.
Catch ya later.
Whatever. Your God is as fake as you and your mealy-mouthed well-wishing.
Have fun in Heaven with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and all the Catholic Socialists. I am an atheist conservative, not a marxist, and as such I make no effort to shut down Christmas celebrations. I like the pretty lights, and I'm glad there are Christians around to put them up for me and to take them down. I enjoy sitting back with a drink while you decorate. It makes you useful. And I'm grateful that, while America is second to your religion, some of you are at least willing to be fellow travelers along the true conservative path of individualism, American exceptionalism, and fiscal responsibility. As long as we let you pick on gays and pregnant women, you vote our way. Hey, it's a bargain.
But no, I don't actually enjoy your company. So yes, go. You've said goodbye about three times now. Can you follow it up with an actual exit?
Not being a Jewish scholar, I am not the best person to ask. Having said that, I'll do my best.
What Judaism is "about" de minimis is utterly transcendent Being (G-d) drawing His chosen ones, who are finite beings, His "creatures," into direct, intimate, personal relationship with Himself. Moreover, the Pentateuch reveals the origin of the universe and all things in it as a divine act, "in the beginning." It is a revelation of the ground of Being and of natural and moral law that pervades and structures the created world, including man.
That's probably not the best description. I'll only add that Judaism is the indispensable foundation of Christianity, and that Pope John Paul II taught that the Jews are "the elder brother of Christianity."
I just can’t help myself....you are like a train wreck, it’s hard to look away. Wow. Such venom.
If this is Christopher Hitchen's view, than all I can say is it reveals far more about Christopher Hitchens than it does about Mother Teresa. To me it seems he started with a certain presupposition about her, and then collected/selected his "evidence" to make the presupposition "true." If it's "true" then the Church is lying to us. Which, I imagine, is the conclusion that Hitchens really wants us to draw.
Why do atheists like Hitchens expend so much time and energy in denying Spirit? Because it isn't "physical," or subject to direct perception? But that's nutz — lots of immaterial things are indispensable to the full understanding of Reality. The universal natural laws, for example. Now where did they come from, do you suppose?
FWIW I've been a long-time admirer of Hitchens — while recognizing what a fool he ever was, every time he treated religious topics. FOOL as in "nabal," the man who says in his heart, "there is no God." That is, Hitchens denied the very ground of his own being, of his own life and mind. Seems pretty foolish to me....
Hitchens was no fool. He merely found many religious superstitions such as anti-birth control positions as harmful to modern society. It’s all a matter of what angle you come at a situation.
For example, I have a particularly fundamentalist Christian friend who is quite the “everyone is going to Hell except for the people who believe like me” type. I point out to her that had she been born 300 years ago in India, most likely she would have been born, raised and died a Hindu and in her “Current” world-view she would be burning in the lake of fire because she wouldn’t have been able to have her “come to Jesus” moment. She’ll usually shut up for a while, but it’s hard to convince those with such limited perspective.
Your mileage may vary.
"...The benign "neurological breakdown" that naturally occurs with adolescence serves the greater evolutionary purpose of allowing the mind to re-integrate at a higher level of wholeness and unity. Indeed, this back-and-forth process of dis-integration and synthesis -- what Bion called PS<-->D -- is what makes the human mind unique among the animals, because it signifies a form of neoteny for life. In this sense, we are children for life, but only in the sense that we -- unlike any other animal -- are capable of limitless growth toward an implicit but transcendent end. But no growth is possible if we become arrested at -- and even idealize -- what should be a temporary stage of adolescent questioning and skepticism. ......
"I call any philosophy "of the left" if it denies the transcendent truth under- and overwritten by the logos of the One, because once the One is denied, all paths lead to leftism, whether it is materialistic scientism or the kind of bonehead atheism promulgated by phobosophical flaw firm of Harris, Dawkins & Hitchens. Just as all paths of truth lead to God, the denial of Truth is the "final common pathway" to leftist hell on earth.
"This is also why all philosophies and institutions that are not explicitly conservative (by which I mean embodying the principles of classical liberalism rooted in Judeo-Christian metaphysics) sooner or later descend into leftism. Moreover, this is why it is no mystery that the Republican Party should fall into a form of "leftism lite," because very few Republicans are explicitly conservative -- which is to say, they may be "conservative" as adjective but not "Conservative" as noun. Thus, when given power, they govern like slightly less intoxicated leftists.
"Mankind is sick. This we all know. We also know that there is a "treatment," but no absolute cure.
"America's founders, who wanted to "relaunch" mankind in a new setting; not just a geographical setting, but an interior one of spontaneously ordered liberty oriented toward a spiritual telos. And they obviously achieved a smashing success, because America produced the finest and most decent and prosperous country the world has ever known. In fact, it is hard to even imagine what a miserable hellhole the world would be without America's beneficence.
"(Here is a simple test: what I just said is either immediately self-evident to you, or your soul is possessed by a demon.)"
"If anyone of you moonbats causes one of these little ones to reject Truth for the intellectual crack of leftism -- look at me, Chomsky, I'm talking to you -- if any of you little tenuremites eating away at the spiritual foundation of the West do this, it would be better for you to have a large millstone hung around your pencil neck and drowned in the depths of your own bullshit.
If you consider the natural irritation adults feel for impudence to be “venom,” I’d hate to see you try and process real anger.
Esophageal Cancer is nasty. www.ecan.org
The "'Intelligent Design' argument" does not argue for "the deistic origins of life." This characterization of ID is a most popular canard, but it is utterly baseless.
ID simply recognizes (in the words of George Gilder) that, "Wherever there is information there is a preceding intelligence.” The identification of this preceding intelligence is not the concern of ID. It simply acknowledges that the order of the universe, being intelligible, rules out any concept of the origin and evolution of the universe based on the accumulation of random, or "accidental" causes. What is of concern to ID is the fact that information cannot arise from "non-information," any more than life can arise from "non-life."
Or as Gilder put it,
Everywhere we encounter it, information does not bubble up from a random flux or prebiotic soup. It comes from mind.... the central dogma of intelligent design ordains that word is subordinate to mind. Mind can generate and lend meaning to words but words in themselves cannot generate mind or intelligence.Life is not reducible to material "chemistry"; it indispensably involves information processing. It recognizes that information is not the accumulation of random processes occurring in Nature. And that the very idea of "information" presupposes intelligence, or mind.
You wrote:
“Intelligent” — or “dumb”? Since we have nothing to compare it (life organisms) to, how do we know if it’s relatively ‘complex’? It is what it is, basically. Totally begs the question.Any living organism, even a single-celled one, is both astronomically complex and "orderly" in its functional behavior. You say you have "nothing to compare it (life) to?" Why not compare it to a box of rocks? Or even one single rock? Compared to even the simplest living (organic) system in nature, a rock is a comparatively informationally-impoverished "simple system"; a rock's specifying information is largely comprised in the ideas of initial conditions, plus the physical laws.
It should be plain to you that any living system is astronomically more complex than any inorganic system in nature, such as a rock. And from there to draw the conclusion that the difference between a rock and (say) an amoeba is the result of the differences in "information content" relevant to each.
It is this sort of thing that ID is interested in exploring. ID is NOT interested in "proving the existence of God." It is "agnostic" about the information source. It simply recognizes that information (from whatever source) appears to structure all existents in reality. And ID wants to understand how this happens — how the world is structured intelligibly.
It leaves the "why" questions to theology. Where they properly belong, IMHO.
As Robert Godwin points out,
... a year from now, ninety-eight percent of the atoms in your body will have been replaced, meaning that you are indeed word-made-flesh, a transcendent pattern of accumulated information, not the transient material which makes a fleeting home under the organizing principle of your unrepeatable genetic logo.Indeed, that "genetic logo" is the unrepeatable "information set" that specifies the "consistently you over the passage of time" that survives all the constant reshuffling of atomic materials that comprise your physical body.
There's nothing in Newton's laws that can help us understand this.
Which is why we need ID and information theory.
Just some thoughts. Hope they make sense to you. Thank you for writing, 4Liberty!
This may, or may not, provide a clue:
"He was born Christopher Eric Hitchens in Portsmouth, England, on April 13, 1949. The elder of two sons, he had a cool relationship with his father, Ernest, a commander in the British Royal Navy, but a warmer one with his mother, Yvonne. ..."
"In 1973, when he was 24 and living in London, his mother committed suicide with her lover, ____a defrocked vicar____, during a trip to Greece.
Years later, he discovered one of her secrets: She was Jewish, which made him Jewish. "My initial reaction, apart from pleasure and interest, was the faint but definite feeling that I had somehow known all along," he wrote in a 1988 essay, "On Not Knowing the Half of It." But he remained anti-religion and anti-Zionist. ...."
bttt
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