On Christopher Hitchens

After 60 plus years on this earth and in this ether, I haven’t found my way yet. In spite of very real and close calls with spiritual experiences and enlightenment, other miseries and delights have kept me down at the ground, toying with atheism, nihilism, and writhing in ignorance and occasional optimism. I might very well be going to hell when I leave this earth or just simply return to the ether that surrounds it.

Christopher Hitchens, the acclaimed and often controversial author, took on many topics throughout his prolific career. He condemned religion, hypocrisy, and the Vietnam war and other stupidity. His best known work was and remains titled ‘God Is Not Great’. In his last work, ‘Mortality’, he chronicles his ordeal with his illness.

Hitchens died of pneumonia as a complication of his conventional treatment for esophageal cancer in December of 2011.

He died in a hospital.

Prior to that he smoked and drank a lot.

He could be really funny.

His wife says her husband remained cognizant and in good spirits until hours before he died. She says that he remained optimistic that he would survive despite his months-long battle with illness.

From the Hitch :

Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God.

The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.

We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.

Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.

My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can’t prove it, but you can’t disprove it either.

MT [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.

When I meet people who say – which they do all of the time – ‘I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,’ and so forth, I switch off quite early.

People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of ‘race’ or ‘gender’ alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things.

In some ways I feel sorry for racists and for religious fanatics, because they so much miss the point of being human, and deserve a sort of pity. But then I harden my heart, and decide to hate them all the more, because of the misery they inflict and because of the contemptible excuses they advance for doing so.

A sample :