Posted on 01/15/2012 2:18:32 PM PST by rhema
This is sad.I always enjoyed Hitchen’s intellect.He will be greatly missed,
Hitchens is Dead - YHWH
Hitchens did not hide behind intellectual scorn..”
This makes one question whether Mohler has a reading comprehension problem. With respect to Christianity, Hitchens’ method of argument was the drive-by cheapshot and sneer.
Hitchens was a dishonest, supremely arrogant, nasty man. There is absolutely no reason to whitewash his life and persona. Eveidently, Mohler can’t overcome his “evangelical niceness”, which, if Mohler’s account of the origins of Hitchen’s disdain for Christianity is to be believed, is precisely the sort of thing that drove Hitchens away from Christ.
That, however, is probably a naive rendering of Hitchens’ motives. Like sodomites everywhere, Hitchens was almost certainly much more inclined to deny Christ because of Hitchens’ sexual perversions and appetites than the weak version of Christianity he encountered. That diluted Christianity in all likelihood just made it easier for him to do what he wanted to do in the first place.
There is nothing to celebrate in the life of Hitchens. A good electrician does more every day to improve the lives of others than a bus load of dilletantes with acid pens...and that is all that Hitchens was.
C.S. Lewis had a very similar experience (though I think he probably had much higher intellectual horsepower than Hitchens).
But he wound up ditching atheism, largely due to the influence of brilliant friends like Tolkien and Owen Barfield and Charles Williams.
I disagreed with him on many things, but I highly respected his intellect, and latter day conservative leanings.
I find it hard to admire anything about a man who sneers at 90 year old women who have dedicated their lives to helping the needy.
I don't think there is anything disreputable in refusing to have the same dreary arguments over and over with people with whom you can't even establish a starting point. It's an exhausting and pointless exercise, and Dawkins is wise to forego it. Hitchens enjoyed that tussle. Not everyone does.
“A good electrician does more every day to improve the lives of others than a bus load of dilettantes with acid pens”
Sigh...a shame one can have only one sig line at a time....
Yah, so Tom Brady can throw a football. Big feckin deal. Just about everyone I know can.
Holy smithers. You have nailed the essence of Hitchens to the wall for all to see. I was always put out with Hugh Hewitt’s attachment to the man, though I mean nothing obtuse or irregular. But Hewitt seemed always to celebrate Hitchens though I’m sure that he, Hewitt, would counter that he disagreed with most of what Hitchens had to say. Good writing and clear thinking—a good job, Sir. Hewitt should take a lesson from you.
You nailed it - very well.
Hitchens entire argument with Mother Theresa was that while people in her care were left to die (in dignity according to her), she herself, when desperately sick, sought the best medical treatment in the world. She also took contributions from some of the world’s worst dictators.
I actually admired Mother Theresa despite her flaws. And her sisters (who are located in a convent not far from me) are wonderful.
Of course, like that right wing dictator Ronald Reagan who Hitchens railed about gving Mother Teresa the medal of freeedom.
In fact his honesty is what led him to turn against the left in the last quarter of his life. He outed Sidney Blumenthal and Clinton during the Lewinsky fiasco, and visited a family whose son died in Afghanistan after writing about how Hitchens defense of the war inspired him to join the military and fight in the war on terror, also attending the soldier's funeral in the process.
You obviously don't know much about him.
Hitchens was wrong about a lot of things - although I was present at a speech Hitchens gave in which he said he supported Reagan’s Star Wars after Bill Clinton’s criminal support of giving China military/industrial secrets.
Mother Theresa took huge amounts of money from the horribly corrupt and murderous Duvalier family, the criminal Charles Keating and praised Albania’s evil dictator, Enver Hoxha.
I prefer to think she did it out of naivete and desperation; Hitchens believes otherwise.
Who lost here?
Hitchens is dead, believing, and burning.
God is still Holy and Rightous.
This is Chris Hitchens:
“It [World War I] had crucially undermined the autocracy, the Romanov dynasty. And I think it had very much discredited the Russian Orthodox Church, for which he [Lenin] had a particular dislike. But he was very willing to finish those jobs, all three of them, to wipe out the Romanov family, to rebuild the army, and under Trotsky’s leadership of the Red Army, and to seize the opportunity to confiscate church property and to dissolve, as far as possible, the influence of the church.
One of Lenin’s great achievements, in my opinion, is to create a secular Russia. The power of the Russian Orthodox Church, which was an absolute warren of backwardness and evil and superstition, is probably never going to recover from what he did to it.
The difficulty was that he also inherited, and partly by his measures created, even more scarcity and economic dislocation. The Bolsheviks had studied what had happened to the French revolution and they knew there was a danger of autocracy developing in their own ranks, and they were always on the look out for another Bonaparte. And the person who most looked like Bonaparte to them was Trotsky, who had flamboyance and military genius and charisma.”
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