Surrender

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A Form of Love

From ummagumma: 

 

Not Burning in Hell, Either

Steve M. is not mourning Christopher Hitchens, and for good reason.

Glenn Greenwald also honors Hitch by giving him, in death, the same no-respect-for-motherfuckers treatment Hitch himself gave the recently deceased who deserved it. Again, I agree with all of it.

But I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Hitchens because of his public, aggressive and unapologetic atheism.

PZ Myers writes "Hitch is not in Heaven":

The great ferocious talent of Christopher Hitchens is gone — he died last night of complications from esophageal cancer. We knew him well; that is, he was one of those people who opened himself up so thoroughly, who expressed himself so excellently, who had a personality so strong, that millions of us can hold him in our mind’s eye. I can see him now — there’s a glass in his hand, his eyes are calm and steady, and he’s speaking in measured tones and with flawless English sentences with passion and reason perfectly intertwined. Even if I didn’t agree with him, I’d be standing awed and respectful before his clarity and elegance.

But I do not say farewell to Hitch. I do not say “rest in peace”. I definitely do not say that he has gone to a better place. I actually find myself already bracing myself for the next sign of deep disrespect that is destined to appear soon: the hackneyed political cartoon that draws him standing at the pearly gates.

Hitch is dead. We are a diminished people for the loss. There can be and should be no consolation, no soft words that encourage an illusion of heavenly rescue, no balm of lies. We should feel as we do with every death, that a part of us has been ripped from our hearts, and suffer pain and grief — and we are reminded that this is the fate we all face, that someday we too will die, and that we are all “living dyingly”, as Hitch put it so well.

As atheists, I think none of us can find solace in the cliches or numbness in the delusion of an afterlife. Instead, embrace the fierce strong emotions of anger and sorrow, feel the pain, rage against the darkness, fight back against our mortal enemy Death, and live exuberantly while we can. Confront mortality clear-eyed and pugnacious, uncompromising and aggressive.

It’s what Hitch would have wanted of us.

It’s how Hitch lived.

Refuting the Proselytizers: Hitchens Shows the Way

It's Zombie Worship Eve for the freakazoids, so as a public service we bring you Christopher Hitchens demolishing a pathetic proselytizer.

Courtesy PZ Myers at Pharyngula:

I have encountered this pathetic rhetorical game so often…it's one of Ray Comfort's favorite tools. Christian goes up to a stranger, and says he'd like to play a "what if" game with you. What if there was a god, and the ten commandments were his rules? Do you agree that if they're real, you'd deserve to go to hell? But look, Jesus says you don't have to, if you believe in him! Isn't that nice of him? It's all a stupid con — they ask you to hypothetically accept their premises, then lead you through a script which they demand that you answer in agreement at every step, and then at the end of their absurd, comical series of weird demands, they tell you that you've agreed that Jesus is your savior. Every year at our county fair they have their "Are you going to heaven or hell" booth that tries to bamboozle kids with this spiel, and I thoroughly detest and despise them.

Todd Friel, one of those glassy-eyed glad-handing used-car-salesmen of the soul types, tried to pull this same routine on his radio show…on Christopher Hitchens. Listen as Hitchens simply refuses to follow the script, and keeps on bringing up objections to the sloppy logic of the radio show host. Friel can't cope; he's like a dumb robot who can't comprehend anything outside the narrow scope of its programming, and keeps trying to shoo the Hitch back onto his preplanned track. Friel sounds like a fool, which is great, since he is one.

Part One:



Part Two:



Thanks to PZ commenter Frank Voeth, here's the interview on MP3.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Video of the Year

Christopher Hitchens, apologist for the Iraq catastrophe and the Smirky/Darth maladministration in general, who has specifically pooh-poohed the idea that waterboarding could possibly be considered torture, recently got himself waterboarded for Vanity Fair.

No, I haven't watched it. Much as I have pined for Hitchens to get his richly deserved comeuppance, based on the descriptions given by people who have actually experienced it, I wouldn't wish waterboarding on anyone - even Hitchens.

Spencer Ackerman's description of the video is harrowing enough.

It took bare seconds for a desperate Hitchens to give the signal to stop the torture. But here's the real question: how long is it going to take Hitchens to recant?

h/t TPM

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.