Get well soon, Christopher Hitchens

Esophageal cancer is painful and it looks like Hitchens has late-stage. I saw his interview with Anderson Cooper, and he sounded like he wasn't too hopeful; however, that's what you get when you smoke and drink continuously. His dad died of the same disease at 79, so he should have hade enough since to get check-ups. I hope he gets better, though, and I'm sure the Hannity's, Coulter's, and O'Reily's of the world are just beaming at the news.

I love Christopher Hitchens. If he dies, I will be terribly sad. And if he is buried in DC (where he lives)... here's hoping he has a public memorial. I will come down there to show my respects. Truly a remarkable man.

Yeah, I seldom if ever agree with Hitchen's stands on stuff, but he's always been a funny and thoughtful writer, and certainly one of the more inteligent voices in many of the debates he's tackled. Lewis is right that Hitchens could've taken better care of his health, but fuck it, someone had to carry on the tradition of hard drinking blustery british writers.

At least he seems to be at peace with himself, and doesn't have any regrets as to 'burning the candle at both ends.' This opens up another can of worms for atheists everyehere -- I for one have told my wife and family that if something happens to me that I don't want a funeral service, viewing, or any religious nonsense involved. I want to be treated as the insignificant heap of cells that I'am. I hate funerals.

What do you guys think?

I'm an athiest and I hate funerals too, but since I don't have to attend my own, I left it to my wife if she feels she needs one. I just asked that she spend as little as possible on it. Leaving your loved ones in debt due to an expensive funeral is dumb ass. I have specified cremation for that very reason.

To go back to Hitchens for a sec; he's one of those guys I'll miss like Carlin or Zappa, or the Amazing Randi when he goes.

"Fearless" is the word you're looking for.

Yep. The courage to tell people things they don't want to hear or just pushing them out of their comfort zone.

Tangent time:

My dad passed away recently. He lived in a deeply catholic village. Even though he was a pretty militant atheist, mum and me decided to give him a catholic funeral, because there were a lot of religious people he lived alongside with and who cared about him. A funeral isn't really for the corpse - it's for the people left behind. Of course, if you believe that religion is intrinsically something that only leads to destruction, you might feel more strongly about this, but to us it was like, we don't really care, he wouldn't have either, and it gave some people peace of mind, so why not?

There is also something in having a ceremonial farewell to a loved one that you don't have to believe in an afterlife to find therapeutic.

Plus, the priest brought heavy lols with his "though some of us might claim to be atheists because it's fashionable or it looks cool, we all have the spark of christ in us" nonsense, which was some well needed comic relief in a time of crisis, so there's that.

for someone so smart, how was he too dumb not to get checked for throat barrets?

a barrett is basically what you get before you get cancer. They are super easy to find. Almost like pollups(?) in the colon.

Basically, if you smoke, drink heavily, or have a form of acid reflux, get checked...

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall when those two were young and hitting the bars.

I'm trying to figure out how you arrive at "Dick Cheney" as the logical counterpoint to Hitchens, given that they've pretty much been on the same side in terms of foreign policy for the last 10+ years. One could make the argument that, outside of Tom Friedman, Hitchens provided more intellectual cover for the Iraq War than any other public figure.

Also, Hitchens would famously disagree with Cheney i/r/t waterboarding.

my mom is an RN who works with the doctors who do upper GIs, so I've heard alot about barrets, and why we should get checked for them.

I just wanted this permanently recorded and I am not sigging Kate.

Yeah, kinda restating what I said upthread - gotta love those drunken writerly brits.

sorry, but I find that incredibly ironic.

Ever read Amis' Experience? His account of having his rotten teeth yanked out will make your balls recede for a while.

Like Denis Leary said: "Anti-smokers say 'Well, smoking takes ten years off your life.' Yeah, the ones at the end. The adult-diaper-wearing years. You can have those years, we don't want 'em!"

Hitch has said something like "You might want to go easier on the smokes and cocktails," which isn't quite the same as a Yul Brynner "I'm dead now. Don't smoke" PSA.

I don't like the guy at all. He's a war-supporting Right-Wing asshole and an arrogant smug blow-hard about his atheism(And before anyone says anything, I don't like arrogant and smug religious blow-hards either), but this is a tough break for him and I wish him well.

I don't think the guy qualifies as right-wing, though. He generally stays out of public policy, and when he does say something about it, he's usually pretty liberal.

And, yeah, he's wrong about Iraq, but at least he's wrong for the right reasons. I respect someone who is that anti-totalitarianism. Sad that he's going, but at least he's going out like a man.

Also: He's British, he can't help seeming smug. Though he is smug.

Somebody ignored the fact the fact that I said I didn't like religious arrogance either....

I don't think atheists have the higher ground to be annoying and smug.

Religion isn't holding humanity back, humanity is. Religion can be used to justify any and all human behavior, both good and bad. If you go into any given place of worship you'll find the same collection of goodie, baddies, douche bags, sweet hearts and miscreants that you will at work or at school or any other place where more than three people gather. The notion that if religion was eliminated we would be all better is a myth like any churchgoer would cling to. Without god based religion, people would just find some other cover story.

People use belief to give their life order and purpose. It's like the Dewey decimal system: an artificial construct created to give the illusion of order. On a personal scale religion can have it's uses. The problem is that humans, being social primates, tend to want to share and congregate (congregation). Beliefs take hold among one group. Then you have leaders that can manipulate these belief for their own purposes. To not follow the experts means to threaten disorder. That's why believers hackles get raised when you even say "I'm an atheist."

The other part is that if you have something that you see as THE TRUTH and there is another group that claims to have a different THE TRUTH, then both groups threaten the others stability. It would be great if we could be all "And what gods do you pray to." like Conan and Subotai, but that's just not in most of us.

Something else: I would say that it's undeniable that there are good religious people. They may be delusional, but that doesn't make them immoral or amoral, just delusional. Despite common belief there are good atheists. I try to be one.

There are also evil religious leaders and evil atheists. So that brings up a thought: what change, if any, does belief or lack of belief, cause in human behavior. Wouldn't they be the same people either way?

I partially side with each position here. I think that's mainly because I think the argument hinges on the wrong question. It isn't the belief itself - it's the impact that belief has on the world and believers of faiths outside of your own.

I don't believe that a belief in a god or no god is the problem. Where all faiths fail is that they require their believers to act in certain ways consistent with their belief system. I have no problem with someone being a Christian, but I do have a problem when they act in certain ways I find to be incredibly offensive. A Catholic faith may not offend me when held by an individual, but the Catholic Church's stance against birth control and condoms in Africa is a terrible, inhumane position to take.

I don't think the world would be a worse place if everyone believed in God, but I think the world would be a terrible place if everyone acted in accordance with their religious faith. I'm not suggesting people should not act with piety, but I do believe that each religion has a lot of "bullshit" within it that does hurt the progress of humankind.

Then the future has no room for you.

Yes we would. You severely underrecognize the fucked up human capacity to rationalize bullshit activities for whatever reason.

I have no love for religion, and generally think the argument that good people are often religious (an indisputable fact) is kind of a cop out in terms of the larger argument, but, all that being said, it's absolutely ridiculous to think that if all religion was gone people would automatically start treating each other better.

Even Hitchens has never been that smug.

It saddens me no end to say so but this kind of thing would happen with or without religion, organised or otherwise.

On the upside, though, there are also acts of great kindness and generosity perpetrated every day by secular-minded types.

The human race is a spectrum of behaviour. The construct of 'God' can play a part in that but eliminating it from the equation isn't gonna change a whole lot.

The thing about this is that in divorcing religion from any negative consequence you rapidly argue it into total insignificance. If religion is a totally arbitrary trait that is no more indicative of someone's personal character than their hair color or whether they like pickles, then why exactly is it so important to respect and preserve it?

If you're going to argue that religion can have a positive influence on people's lives, that it can inspire charity and togetherness (and maybe even the occasional handjob on an overnight Hebrew school outing, why not?) amongst its adherents, you also have to accept that it's capable of having a negative impact as well.

Even assuming the underlying assertion is true, "religion doesn't really have any effect on anyone's lives anyway" is about the weakest, most backhanded defense I can imagine. Not to mention that even if you agreed that religion didn't really inspire any of the wars and so on it has been tied to throughout history, you could still make a rather strident case for getting rid of the Big Excuse that thousands of years' worth of assholes have used to obfuscate their shitty agendas. I'm sure that's a point Hitchens himself has made many times with much greater detail, eloquence, and BAC than I just did, but it still bears mentioning.

My point was that human faults run far deeper than any belief system. As an atheist, believe me when I say I was not defending religion. Think of the personality as the liquid and religion as the glass.

At best religion provides a rationalization for bad behavior such as racism, sexism, nationalism, plain, mindless ignorance etc. This goes far back in our history, before gods were invented. I'm talking about both social and anti-social behavior here. It's hardwired in our psyche.

The three worst, most murderous totalitarian regimes of the last century had nothing to do with religious beliefs. In fact, they were anti-religion: Nazi Germany, Stalinist USSR, Pol Pot's Cambodia. At least 750,000 people maybe as many as three million died in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Hitchens was a cheerleader for an unnecessary invasion, which caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands people, because he was blinded by his crusade (ironic, isn't it?) against religion.

Saddam's Iraq was also secular by the way.

Yeah and Hitler believed in evolution SO THERE!

Firstly, to say that Hitler was anti-religion is to ignore reality:

Quote from Hitler:

"Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."


Other examples can be found here: http://nobeliefs.com/Hitler1.htm

and do I really have to mention Godwin's Law.

Also, a definition of religion:

a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects

that covers any belief system including Naziism, Christianity, Buddhism, Scientology, etc.


Do you believe that everyone on these boards and elsewhere who are atheists are also advocating genocide? This is a stupid argument.

But, and this is the main thing, this proves my point. Religion or any over-arching and irrational belief system is used to excuse any bad human behavior. The seeds for Naziism were already there before the movement started. The same can be said for Stalin or Mao or the Inquisition or The Crusades. What would have happened if the Crusades had access to the technology that Hitler or Staling had? What would their body count have been?

Again, it's human nature that is the issue.

Yes it would. Group behavior is part of animal behavior. Isolating those that aren't part of the group is also animal behavior. Skapegoating, despite it's religious origins, goes deeper than the veneer of religion. Something bad happens, no one knows the cause (ignorance) then they blame the different. In this case their own children. Look at our own culture, see: beatniks/hippies/punks/gangstas/goths.

As the article mentioned the reasons for picking children is unknown. Maybe something bad happened at the same time a kid did something. This stuff usually takes place due to the correlation is not causation fallacy. Again, religion is just a thin layer covering human nature. If religion were somehow eliminated our inner natures wouldn't change.

There is truth in this. I think of the South Park episode where Cartman goes to the future to get a Wii, overshoots, and winds up in a distant future where religion is gone but people go to war based on what to call their atheist organizations.

I think otters are involved as well.