Christopher Hitchens, is gone

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Christopher Hitchens, is gone

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Christopher Hitchens, Author and Television Personality, Dies at 62

By JOEL SIEGEL
Dec. 16, 2011
Christopher Hitchens, the maverick essayist, unabashed atheist and cable television gladiator whose long list of targets included Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and even Mother Teresa and organized religion, has died from pneumonia, a complication of esophageal cancer. He was 62.

Hitchens died Thursday at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, according to a statement released by Vanity Fair late Thursday night.

"There will never be another like Christopher. A man of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar," Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter said in the statement. "Those who read him felt they knew him, and those who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls."

Born in Britain April 13, 1949, and educated at Oxford, Hitchens authored more than a dozen books. He achieved his greatest notoriety with the 2007 best-seller "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," in which he dismissed faith as wish fulfillment and religion as "the main source of hatred in the world."

With its publication, Hitchens became the public face of atheism. Critics assumed his cancer diagnosis, in 2010, would lead Hitchens to relent and embrace God. But he remained a proud non-believer to the very end, as he made clear in an early October 2011 speech at the annual Atheist Alliance of America convention in Houston, as he accepted the Freethinker of the Year Award.

His body gaunt from the ravages of cancer, Hitchens said, "We have the same job we always had: to say that there are no final solutions; there is no absolute truth; there is no supreme leader; there is no totalitarian solution that says if you would just give up your freedom of inquiry, if you would just give up, if you would simply abandon your critical faculties, the world of idiotic bliss can be yours."

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Re: Christopher Hitchens, is gone

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Vanity Fair covered his passing as will many other publications in the following days:

In Memoriam

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Christopher Hitchens Has Died

Post by yogaphish »

Last night, Dec 15th, we lost one of the greatest anti-theist minds of our generation. After his long "resistance" (in his words) to cancer, Christopher Hitchens, has passed away. He will be immortalized by all of the brilliant literature he left behind. A sad day for all of us.


Here's a link to the news story.

Edited by Savonarola 20111216 1906: moved topic, added URL tag
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Re: Christopher Hitchens, is gone

Post by L.Wood »

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Gene Lyons- I had a Sunday brunch with Hitchens once in 1998, in the course of which he drank three double scotches and smoked at least a half dozen cigarettes. It's a failing of mine that people deliberately committing slow-motion suicide make me uneasy. He was a mean drunk with a caustic wit. I'm not his equal as an essayist, but it seemed to me that for all his brilliance, he never learned (or acted as if he did) the elementary lesson that his kind of cleverness is as morally inconsequential as the ability to solve algebraic equations.
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Re: Christopher Hitchens, is gone

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Re: Christopher Hitchens, is gone

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The sixteen Hitchens quotes we read at our February meeting:

1) By trying to adjust to the findings that it once tried so viciously to ban and repress, religion has only succeeded in restating the same questions that undermined it in earlier epochs. What kind of designer or creator is so wasteful and capricious and approximate? What kind of designer or creator is so cruel and indifferent? And—most of all—what kind of designer or creator only chooses to “reveal” himself to semi-stupefied peasants in desert regions?

2) “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”

3) “Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction."

4) Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody… had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge... Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion.”

5) Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.

6) Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.

7) Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.

8) “If you gave Jerry Falwell an enema… he could be buried in a matchbox!”

9) …if I was told to do what all monotheists are told to do and admire the man who said, “Yes, I’ll gut my kid to show my love of God,” I’d say, “No. Fuck you.”

10) Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to be able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard—or try to turn back—the measurable advances that we have made.
…religion offers either annihilation in the name of god, or else the false promise that if we take a knife to our foreskins, or pray in the right direction, or ingest pieces of wafer, we shall be “saved.”

11) “How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.”

12) “Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.”

13) “Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins and astrology ends, and astronomy begins.”

14) To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.”

15) My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass.

16) Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.
"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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