Christopher Hitchens Is Dead. Damnit.

American Thinker ^ | 12/16/2011 | James G. Wiles

[SeekAndFind]

How can a conservative commentator and an orthodox Catholic like me possibly admire Christopher Hitchens?

He hated the Pope, smeared Mother Teresa viciously. He even published a book four years ago defending his militant atheism called God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Then Christopher Hitchens debated around the world on that very topic. Then he co-wrote and edited a book about the debates.

In between those two books, there was a third one, about the war in Iraq and his support of it - which had caused him to break with many of the friends of his youth. All in all, Christopher Hitchens wrote 17 books, including his collected essays, Arguably, which was re-issued this year. He was 61.

I believe Hitchens' good deeds -- and if Hitchens was right, the only thing left of him now are his deeds -- more than compensated for his militant atheism and his occasional bad manners. Usually he was bitingly funny, even coruscating. Sometimes he was a good deal more than that.

Perhaps the best defense might be to say with Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then, I contradict myself.

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

First, there was the man's work ethic, already mentioned above. In fact, the book total doesn't do full justice to Christopher Hitchens' output. He was, for many years, a working journalist too. And a weekly columnist. After his move to the United States in 1981 -- and especially after the emergence of cable -- Hitchens also became a TV regular.

Then there's the quality of his stuff.

Christopher Hitchens was, in the best sense, a public intellectual -- but he was also un homme engage. Hitchens took part in the public controversies of his time.

[Mr. Silverback]

“The amazing thing isn’t that there’s only one way to salvation. the amazing thing is that God made a way at all.”—James MacDonald

[Mr. Silverback]

So, you believe the God of the Bible judges people with less insight into their personal beliefs than the DMV?

[Billthedrill]

I said a prayer for Hitch just now. Here was an atheist who, facing death, had the grace to thank those praying for him even if he didn't believe in it himself.

Almighty God, spare your idiot son. Because if you'll spare him, maybe you'll find a reason to spare me. Amen.

[Mr. Silverback]

Blah, blah, blah...500 years ago this, 500 years ago that...this atheist meme that crusades and witch burnings matter more than people getting killed right now for atheism in places like China or tens of milliosn getting killed for it last century, the meme where any reasonable person can see the vast difference between Pol Pot and Stephen Hawking but there’s no real difference between Augustine and Fred Phelps or C. S. Lewis and Osama bin Laden is just as much a bunch of gapped-tooth bigotry as any Westboro Baptist Church diatribe. Get over yourselves.

[Mr. Silverback]

Man didn't "fall" from anything. He's always been what he is.

Says who? Even if religion is all bunk, you don't know that. Interesting how people of science and reason are as certain about things that happened 200,000 years before their birth as any Southern Baptist preacher is about the Garden of Eden.

[Revolting cat!]

[Notary Sojac]

You would be correct in that.

[Notary Sojac]

(Calvin and Knox)...taught the doctrine that God had a right to damn us because he made us. That is just the reason that he has not a right to damn us.

There is some dust. Unconscious dust! What right has God to change that unconscious dust into a human being, when he knows that human being will sin; when he knows that human being will suffer eternal agony? Why not leave him in the unconscious dust? What right has an infinite God to add to the sum of human agony?

Suppose I knew that I could change that piece of furniture into a living, sentient human being, and I knew that that being would suffer untold agony forever. If I did it, I would be a fiend.

- Robert G. Ingersoll