RIP Christopher Hitchens

[Dagmar]

Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22, and began chemotherapy soon after. His matchless prose has appeared in Vanity Fair since 1992, when he was named contributing editor.

“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eye retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.

“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue. He died in their presence, too, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly.

[Rohirrim]

The world has lost a great wit, and a great fighter for freedom of speech.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/christopher-hitchens

[Smiling Assassin27]

Yeah, a guy that called Mother Teresa a 'fraudulent fanatic'. A bore and insufferable hack regarding religion, to be sure. To his credit, everything I read from him suggested a real concern for the human condition and that he loved his fellow man. At least he got the 2nd greatest commandment right.

May God comfort his family and have mercy on his soul.

[Tombstone RJ]

I read one of his columns in Vanity Fair about his fight with cancer and IMHO he was seriously questioning his atheism and even had some real nice criticism of Nietzche. He was a splended writer for sure...

[mosca]

I read one of his columns in Vanity Fair about his fight with cancer and IMHO he was seriously questioning his atheism and even had some real nice criticism of Nietzche. He was a splended writer for sure...
Gonna have to call BS on that - I've seen interviews with Hitchens and he has maintained that his atheism remained with him even through his struggle.

Here's a quote from this year: "Redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before."

[Dagmar]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/christopher-hitchens.jpg

We were friends for more than thirty years, which is a long time but, now that he is gone, seems not nearly long enough. I was rather nervous when I first met him, one night in London in 1977, along with his great friend Martin Amis. I had read his journalism and was already in awe of his brilliance and wit and couldn’t think what on earth I could bring to his table. I don’t know if he sensed the diffidence on my part—no, of course he did; he never missed anything—but he set me instantly at ease, and so began one of the great friendships and benisons of my life. It occurs to me that “benison” is a word I first learned from Christopher, along with so much else.

A few years later, we found ourselves living in the same city, Washington. I had come to work in an Administration; he had come to undo that Administration. Thirty years later, I was voting for Obama and Christopher had become one of the most forceful, and persuasive, advocates for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. How did that happen?

In those days, Christopher was a roaring, if not raving, Balliol Bolshevik. Oh dear, the things he said about Reagan! The things—come to think of it—he said about my father. How did we become such friends? I only once stopped speaking to him, because of a throwaway half-sentence about my father-in-law in one of his Harper’s essays. I missed his company during that six-month froideur (another Christopher mot). It was about this time that he discovered that he was in fact Jewish, which somewhat complicated his fierce anti-Israel stance. When we embraced, at the bar mitzvah of Sidney Blumenthal’s son, the word “Shalom” sprang naturally from my lips.

A few days ago, when I was visiting him at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, for what I knew would be the last time, his wife, Carol, mentioned to me that Sidney had recently written to Christopher. I was surprised but very pleased to hear this. Christopher had caused Sidney great legal and financial grief during the Götterdämmerung of the Clinton impeachment. But now Sidney, a cancer experiencer himself, was reaching out to his old friend with words of tenderness and comfort and implicit forgiveness. This was the act of a mensch. But then Christopher was like that—it was hard, perhaps impossible, to stay mad at him, though I doubt Henry Kissinger or Bill Clinton or any member of the British Royal Family will be among the eulogists at his memorial service.

I first saw his J’accuse in The Nation against—oh, Christopher!—Mother Teresa when my father mailed me a Xerox of it. He had scrawled a note across the top, an instruction to the producer of his TV show “Firing Line”: “I never want to lay eyes on this guy again.” W.F.B. had provided Christopher with his first appearances on U.S. television. The rest is history—the time would soon come when you couldn’t turn on a television without seeing Christopher railing against Kissinger, Mother (presumptive saint) T., Princess Diana, or Jerry Falwell.

But even W.F.B., who tolerated pretty much anything except attacks on his beloved Catholic Church and its professors, couldn’t help but forgive. “Did you see the piece on Chirac by your friend Hitchens in the Journal today?” he said one day, with a smile and an admiring sideways shake of the head. “Absolutely devastating!”

When we all gathered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a few years later, to see W.F.B. off to the celestial choir, Christopher was present, having flown in from a speech in the American hinterland. (Alert: if you are reading this, Richard Dawkins, you may want to skip ahead to the next paragraph.) There he was in the pew, belting out Bunyan’s “He Who Would Valiant Be.” Christopher recused himself when Henry Kissinger took the lectern to give his eulogy, going out onto rain-swept Fifth Avenue to smoke one of his ultimately consequential cigarettes.

“It’s the fags that’ll get me in the end, I know it,” he said once, at one of our lunches, tossing his pack of Rothmans onto the table with an air of contempt. This was back when you could smoke at a restaurant. As the Nanny State and Mayor Bloomberg extended their ruler-bearing, knuckle-rapping hand across the landscape, Christopher’s smoking became an act of guerrilla warfare. Much as I wish he had never inhaled, it made for great spectator sport.

David Bradley, the owner of The Atlantic Monthly, to which Christopher contributed many sparkling essays, once took him out to lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown. It was—I think—February and the smoking ban had gone into effect. Christopher suggested that they eat outside, on the terrace. David Bradley is a game soul, but even he expressed trepidation about dining al fresco in forty-degree weather. Christopher merrily countered, “Why not? It will be bracing.”

Lunch—dinner, drinks, any occasion—with Christopher always was. One of our lunches, at Café Milano, the Rick’s Café of Washington, began at 1 P.M., and ended at 11:30 P.M. At about nine o’clock (though my memory is somewhat hazy), he said, “Should we order more food?” I somehow crawled home, where I remained under medical supervision for several weeks, packed in ice with a morphine drip. Christopher probably went home that night and wrote a biography of Orwell. His stamina was as epic as his erudition and wit.

When we made a date for a meal over the phone, he’d say, “It will be a feast of reason and a flow of soul.” I never doubted that this rococo phraseology was an original coinage, until I chanced on it, one day, in the pages of P. G. Wodehouse, the writer Christopher perhaps esteemed above all others. Wodehouse was the Master. When we met for another lunch, one that lasted only five hours, he was all a-grin with pride as he handed me a newly minted paperback reissue of Wodehouse with “Introduction by Christopher Hitchens.” “Doesn’t get much better than that,” he said, and who could not agree?

The other author that he and I seemed to spend most time discussing was Oscar Wilde. I remember Christopher’s thrill at having adduced a key connection between Wilde and Wodehouse. It struck me as a breakthrough insight; namely, that the first two lines of “The Importance of Being Earnest” contain within them the entire universe of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves.

Algernon plays the piano while his butler arranges flowers. Algy asks, “Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?” Lane replies, “I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir.” And there you have it.

Christopher remained perplexed at the lack of any reference to Wilde in the Wodehousian oeuvre. Then, some time later, he extolled in his Vanity Fair column the discovery, by one of his graduate students at the New School, of a mention of “The Importance” somewhere in the Master’s ninety-odd books.

During the last hour I spent with Christopher, in the Critical Care Unit at M. D. Anderson, he struggled to read a thick volume of P. G. Wodehouse letters. He scribbled some notes on a blank page in spidery handwriting. He wrote “Pelham Grenville” and asked me, in a faint, raspy voice, “Name. What was the name?” At first I didn’t quite understand, but then, recalling P.G.’s nickname, suggested “Plum?” Christopher nodded yes, and wrote it down.
I took comfort that, during our last time together, I was able to provide him with at least that. Intellectually, ours was largely a teacher-student relationship, and let me tell you—Christopher was one tough grader. Oy. No matter how much he loved you, he did not shy from giving it to you with the bark off if you had disappointed.

I once participated with him on a panel at the Folger Theatre on the subject of “Henry V.” The other panelists were Dame Judi Dench, Arianna Huffington, Chris Matthews, Ken Adelman, and David Brooks; the moderator was Walter Isaacson. Having little original insight into “Henry V,” or into any Shakespeare play, for that matter, I prepared a comic riff on a notional Henry the Fifteenth. Get it? O.K., maybe you had to be there, but it sort of brought down the house. Nevertheless, when Christopher and I met for lunch a few days later, he gave me a tsk-tsk-y stare and sour wince and chided me for “indulging in crowd-pleasing nonsense.”

I got off lightly. When Martin Amis, his closest friend on earth, published a book in which he took Christopher to task for what he viewed as inappropriate laughter at the expense of Stalin’s victims, Christopher responded with a seven-thousand-word rebuttal in The Atlantic that will probably have Martin thinking twice before attempting another work of historical nonfiction. But Christopher’s takedown of his chum must be viewed alongside thousands of warm and affectionate words he wrote about Martin, particularly in his memoir, “Hitch-22,” which appeared ironically—or perhaps with exquisite timing—simultaneously with the presentation of his mortal illness.

The jacket of his next book, a collection of breathtaking essays, perfectly titled “Arguably,” contains some glowing words of praise, including my own (humble but earnest) asseveration that he is—was—”the greatest living essayist in the English language.” One or two reviewers demurred, calling my effusion “forgivable exaggeration.” To them I say: O.K., name a better one. I would alter only one word in that blurb now.
Over the course of his heroic, uncomplaining eighteen-month battle with the cancer, I found myself rehearsing what I might say to an obituary writer, should one ring after the news of Christopher’s death. I thought to say something along the lines—the air of Byron, the steel pen of Orwell, and the wit of Wilde.

A bit forced, perhaps, but you get the idea. Christopher may not, as Byron did, write poetry, but he could recite staves, cantos, yards of it. As for Byronic aura, there were the curly locks, the unbuttoned shirt revealing a wealth—verily, a woolly mastodon—of pectoral hair, as well as the roguish, raffish je ne sais quoi good looks. (Somewhere in “Hitch-22,” he notes that he had now reached the age when “only women wanted to go to bed with me.”)

Like Byron, Christopher put himself in harm’s way in “contested territory,” again and again. Here’s another bit from “Hitch-22,”a chilling moment when he found himself alone in a remote and very scary town in Afghanistan,

in a goons’ rodeo duel between two local homicidal potentates (the journalistic euphemism for this type is “warlord”; the image of the goons’ rodeo I have annexed from Saul Bellow). On me was not enough money, not enough food, not enough documentation, not enough medication, not enough bottled water to withstand even a two-day siege. I did not have a cell phone. Nobody in the world, I abruptly realized, knew where I was. I knew nobody in the town and nobody in the town knew (perhaps a good thing) who I was, either…. As all this started to register with me, the square began to fill with those least alluring of all types: strident but illiterate young men with religious headgear, high-velocity weapons and modern jeeps.

His journalism, in which he championed the victims of tyranny and stupidity and “Islamofascism” (his coinage), takes its rightful place on the shelf along with that of his paradigm, Orwell.

As for the wit … one day we were talking about Stalin. I observed that Stalin, eventual murderer of twenty, thirty—forty?—million, had trained as a priest. Not skipping a beat, Christopher remarked, “Indeed, was he not among the more promising of the Tbilisi ordinands?”
I thought—as I did perhaps one thousand times over the course of our three-decade long tutorial—Wow.

A few days later, at a dinner, the subject of Stalin having come up, I ventured to my dinner partner, “Indeed, was he not among the more promising of the Tbilisi ordinands?” The lady to whom I had proferred this thieved aperçu stopped chewing her salmon, repeated the line I had so casually tossed off, and said with frank admiration, “That’s brilliant.” I was tempted, but couldn’t quite bear to continue the imposture, and told her that the author of this nacreous witticism was in fact none other than Christopher. She laughed and said, “Well, everything he says is brilliant.”

Yes, everything he said was brilliant. It was a feast of reason and a flow of soul, and, if the author of “God Is Not Great” did not himself believe in the concept of soul, he sure had one, and it was a great soul.

Two fragments come to mind. The first is from “Brideshead Revisited,” a book Christopher loved and which he could practically quote in its entirety. Anthony Blanche, the exotic, outrageous aesthete, is sent down from Oxford. Charles Ryder, the book’s narrator, mourns: “Anthony Blanche had taken something away with him when he went; he had locked a door and hung the key on his chain; and all his friends, among whom he had been a stranger, needed him now.”

Christopher was never a “stranger to his friends”—ça va sans dire, as he would say. Among his prodigal talents, perhaps his greatest was his gift of friendship. Christopher’s inner circle, Martin, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, James Fenton, Julian Barnes, comprise more or less the greatest writers in the English language. That’s some posse.

But in leaving them—and the rest of us—for “the undiscovered country” (he could recite more or less all of “Hamlet,” too) Christopher has taken something away with him, and his friends, in whose company I am so very grateful to have been, will need him now. We are now, finally, without a Hitch.

The other bit is from Houseman, and though it’s from a poem that Christopher and I recited back and forth at each other across the tables at Café Milano, I hesitate to quote it here. I see him wincing at my deplorable propensity for “crowd-pleasing.” But I’m going to quote it anyway, doubting as I do that he would chafe at my trying to mine what consolation I can over the loss of my beloved athlete, who died so young.

Smart lad to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

[Rohirrim]

On Mother Teresa (under the title "Mommie Dearest" ;D:
This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT 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. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?
The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for "the poorest of the poor." People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the "Missionaries of Charity," but they had no audience for their story. George Orwell's admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/mommie_dearest.html

[Tombstone RJ]

Gonna have to call BS on that - I've seen interviews with Hitchens and he has maintained that his atheism remained with him even through his struggle.

Here's a quote from this year: "Redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before."

I said that is what I got out of the article, he was questioning it, I never said he disclaimed it, and in the end he was clinging to his writing.

[DenverBrit]

RIP Hitch.


<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/SMdRiLVmbco" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

[Rohirrim]

“What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.”

[Rohirrim]

"Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you."

[Requiem]

R.I.P. Hitch.

[mosca]

I said that is what I got out of the article, he was questioning it, I never said he disclaimed it, and in the end he was clinging to his writing.
At what point did he question it? Can you provide a source on that?

[Smiling Assassin27]

On Mother Teresa (under the title "Mommie Dearest" ;D:
This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT 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. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?
The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for "the poorest of the poor." People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the "Missionaries of Charity," but they had no audience for their story. George Orwell's admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/mommie_dearest.html

More about Mother Teresa:

“The woman was a fanatic and a fundamentalist and a fraud, and millions of people are much worse off because of her life, and it’s a shame there is no hell for your bitch to go to.”

The words of a wretched and very frightened man.

[Tombstone RJ]

At what point did he question it? Can you provide a source on that?

I said that is what I got out of the Vanity Fair article, that was my personal interpretation, my "opinion."

However if you care to read this it provides some good perspective: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/decemberweb-only/christopher-hitchens-obituary.html?start=1

[Armchair Bronco]

Very sad news. Just saw this on Drudge.

Hitchens was one of my favorite commentators on NRO, along with VDH. His analysis of the Iraq war "A Long Short War" should be required reading.

http://www.amazon.com/Long-Short-War-Postponed-Liberation/dp/0452284988/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1324073495&sr=8-3

He was a gifted writer.

[TonyR]

Here's some classic Hitchens.


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[Rohirrim]

Here's some classic Hitchens.


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Ha! Did you catch the very last line as Hannity was trying to demagogue over Hitchens? "If you gave Falwell an enema you could bury him in a matchbox." :rofl:

[ant1999e]

Quote:
“The woman was a fanatic and a fundamentalist and a fraud, and millions of people are much worse off because of her life, and it’s a shame there is no hell for your b**** to go to.”

I'd say he got what he deserved.

[Atwater 27]

I don't agree with his atheistic views, but he is dead on about the threat radical Islam poses to the world.

[Bronco_Beerslug]

More about Mother Teresa:

The words of a wretched and very frightened man.

The rest of the quote from the conservativeunderground.com (http://www.conservativeunderground.com/forum505/showthread.php?p=469363).
For people who don't know Indian culture, it is compulsory for women to churn out babies at the will of the husband.


Mother Teresa spent her whole life saying [that what Calcutta needs] is a huge campaign against family planning. I mean, who comes to that conclusion who isn’t a complete fanatic? She took—and I would directly say stole … millions and millions of dollars and spent all the money not on the poor, but on the building of nearly 200 convents in her own name around the world to glorify herself and to continue to spread the doctrine that, as she put it—when she got her absurd Nobel Peace Prize—that the main threat to world peace is abortion and contraception. The woman was a fanatic and a fundamentalist and a fraud, and millions of people are much worse off because of her life, and it’s a shame there is no hell for your [w]itch to go to.

Christopher Hitchens

[Dagmar]

Quote:
“The woman was a fanatic and a fundamentalist and a fraud, and millions of people are much worse off because of her life, and it’s a shame there is no hell for your b**** to go to.”

I'd say he got what he deserved.


"he got what he deserved" Cancer? Very Christian of you.

http://rlv.zcache.com/i_like_your_christ_i_do_not_like_your_christia_bum per_sticker-p128446950324886114trl0_400.jpg

[ant1999e]

"he got what he deserved" Cancer? Very Christian of you.

http://rlv.zcache.com/i_like_your_christ_i_do_not_like_your_christia_bum per_sticker-p128446950324886114trl0_400.jpg

Never said I was a perfect Christian. It is funny how you people mock our religion until you can attempt to use it against us.

[Requiem]

^ ? LoL.

[TonyR]

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[Dagmar]

http://i.imgur.com/qW1ZC.png

[Swedish Extrovert]

There was so much more to Hitch than his Atheism. He made a name for himself as a literary critic, and as a political pundit.

So... quick story. I met Christopher Hitchens at Bowdoin College in 2009. He was smoking an American Spirit and drinking a glass of Merlot. After I told him of my exploits, he said, "Well, I'd say you're doing God's work, but then I'd be out of a job." ... RIP Hitch ... I'm worried that the gentleman is dying in our society.

Always a witty character, Hitch also complained that God - who spys on us all the time - cannot be approached, calling him the "celestial Kim Jong Il."

Sure, he was combative, and I disagreed with much of his philosophy and theology. But he had prosaic discourse about him. At the end of the day, he might have called you a "tawdry simpleton" or an "incomplete primate" - he'd still shake your hand and have a glass of scotch with you.

[mhgaffney]

I don't agree with his atheistic views, but he is dead on about the threat radical Islam poses to the world.

Total BS.

Hitchens did a flip flop -- sold his soul -- basically followed the money train.

[DenverBrit]

Total BS.

Hitchens did a flip flop -- sold his soul -- basically followed the money train.

This from the turd who tries to make a buck off the backs of the 911 victims.

[Rohirrim]

Total BS.

Hitchens did a flip flop -- sold his soul -- basically followed the money train.

Why? Because he realized that Islamofascism was a threat to the West? Oh, I forgot. For you, Islam is the religion of peace and it was the Mossad that carried out all these terrorist attacks against us.

[epicSocialism4tw]

God is just, and God offers salvation for free to any who accept it.

Hitchens received that offer just as anyone else does.

He will meet God, and he will have to account for his life.

Its very sad that any man refuse to enter and share the glory of God.

[epicSocialism4tw]

Always a witty character, Hitch also complained that God - who spys on us all the time - cannot be approached, calling him the "celestial Kim Jong Il."

That's not the God of the Bible.

The God of the Bible fills even our own world with impressions of his character. He promises to hear even our smallest concerns and have interest in the most menial and banal facets of our existence.

[NUB]

Hitchens refers to the basis of thought crime that exists within Christianity: condemnation for thoughts.

If you didn't know, thought crime is totalitarianism 101. Regimes like those that were in Iraq or are now in North Korea are so oppressive that the very idea of doing something wrong scares people. They're afraid it might slip out, or that someone will point them out for it. This also comes in other ways. For example, original sin. Born sick and instructed to heal. That is inherently wicked, but it is a tool of many totalitarian regimes particularly through their education systems. How about coerced "love"? North Koreans love their leaders! Maybe that's because of the threat of execution and torture. Christians love their God! Maybe that's because of the threat of hell. I've certainly met the type.

[Bronco_Beerslug]

He will meet God, and he will have to account for his life.
Its very sad that any man refuse to enter and share the glory of God.

What is sad is people are so afraid in their lives, that they live under these man made threats for their entire lives, brainwashed by people telling them every Sunday morning that this is .... "the glory of God".

[Rohirrim]

Hitchens was right. Time for humanity to move beyond superstition and gods.

[TonyR]

A James Madison quote from the Tebow article I posted on the main forum:

During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7369021/fair-game

[DBruleU]

Hitchens was right. Time for humanity to move beyond superstition and gods.

He'd disagree with you now. :wave:

[BroncoInferno]

He'd disagree with you now. :wave:

No, he wouldn't. He no longer has an opinion on anything...he's dead. He's entered into oblivion - just as you and everyone else will upon death. Your childish wish-thinking isn't going to change that fact.

I do find interesting, though, how gleeful Christians like you get at the thought of others rotting in hell.

[mosca]

He'd disagree with you now. :wave:
Thanks for the tip. You are of course, an authoritarian expert on the afterlife.

[barryr]

A James Madison quote from the Tebow article I posted on the main forum:

During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7369021/fair-game

Glad you are over your Tebow-religion obsession. Get a hobby.

[epicSocialism4tw]

He'd disagree with you now. :wave:

Nobody's comfortable with the idea that they have to account for their decisions in front of God.

Some peole are so uncomfortable by that proposition that they absolutely refuse to believe that it could possibly happen.