Another Christian has written a book to lie about Christopher Hitchens. This one is claiming that he and Hitchens were great good buddies, that Hitchens was sympathetic to Christianity, and that he may have converted on his deathbed (he doesn’t know for sure — he wasn’t there — but he’s going to sell a book with that claim).
He appeared with Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Monday night.
He read the book and he loved it,Taunton said of Matthews.He knew Hitchens, and he liked Hitchens. He thought it was a compassionate take on friendship. I don’t know if I can write anything ever again that gets universal praise from both the left and the right. This book is getting quite a reaction. The reception has been so kind, no nice. The atheist Michael Schermer loved the book.
Oh, now that’s a great recommendation.
So he’s making this untestable claim.
I discovered Christopher is not defined by his atheism,Taunton said.Atheism is a negative and you can’t build a philosophy around a negative. Christopher was searching for a unifying system of thought. They’re accusing me of saying he converted. I make no such claim. It’s not my claim that Christopher converted, it’s that Christopher was contemplating conversion. I think I substantiate it in the book.
Except…well, the only way anyone could believe that is if they haven’t read God Is Not Great, or read where his wife, who was there, said it didn’t happen, or perhaps heard his interview with Anderson Cooper, in which he directly addressed the issue of a deathbed conversion.
Cooper: There might be a moment when you want to hedge your bets?
Hitchens: If that comes it will be when I am very ill; when I am half demented either by drugs for by pain. I won’t have control over what I say… I mention this in case you ever hear a rumor later on, because these things happen and the faithful love to spread these rumors, I can’t say that the entity, that by then wouldn’t be me, wouldn’t do such a pathetic thing. I can tell you that: not when I’m lucid. I can be quite sure of that.
Cooper: If there is some story that on your deathbed…
Hitchens: Don’t believe it.
Or how about this interview, where he’s asked what he thinks of the concept of an afterlife.
I would say it fractionally increases my contempt for the false consolation element of religion and my dislike for the dictatorial and totalitarian part of it,” he responded. “It’s considered perfectly normal in this society to approach dying people who you don’t know but who are unbelievers and say, ‘Now are you gonna change your mind?’ That is considered almost a polite question.
As you know, there is a long history of fraud about this: people claim that Darwin had a deathbed recantation, they made up lies about Thomas Paine, it goes on all the time. It’s a very nasty little history, but there’s also a horrible undertone of blackmail to it. People like to say, “Look, you’ve got about one chance left now, aren’t you going to take it, I’m writing to you as a friend”.
Larry ALex Taunton is a contemptible liar. But isn’t it amazing how contemptible liars can just put on their loving Christian mask and fool the gullible?
I blogged about this too, on Monday. There just wasn’t enough eyeroll for this. How is anyone supposed to even consider this nonsense when it’s blatantly picking the bones of the dead to make a profit? It’s contemptible. It’s disgusting. It’s an all too common trait of so-called good Christians, too.
If Taunton was telling the truth, then he should have had the spine to write the book before Hitchens died, so there would at least be a full story, rather than half. Failing a whole book, why not an article? Or a column? Anything prior to Hitchens dying. Oh no, instead it’s wait for years after Hitchens’ death to declare the ‘not factual but really for realz deathbed conversion’.
I expect Taunton would go with a line of “protecting Hitchens’ reputation, that was so important to him”, but not important enough to stop getting rich on a conversion story.
In an alternate universe, we could have atheism and theism sufficiently resolved to have Hitchens claw out from his grave and eat Taunton’s .
—
not when I’m lucid
I think Joseph Welch’s statement to Joe McCarthy is apt here
Death bed conversion lies? You mean like Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor. Almost certainly bollox.
I didn’t think it was possible for my opinion of Michael Shermer to get any lower.
screechymonkey
we have reached bottomshermer
it’s all sideways ooooze from here
Not to defend Schemer…I have found much to detest about him, much more than this…but here’s Schermer’s actual statement from Skeptic magazine about the book:
This is at the end of a piece by Schermer on Skeptic titled, “Bike Crashes, Divine Intervention, and the Nature of Evil: An Open Letter to Larry Taunton.” Schermer takes issue with Taunton’s attribution of his recovery from a bike crash to prayers, et cetera. It’s fairly typical skeptic stuff: critique the claims, but play nice with the people. No one here has any ulterior motives. No sirree. No one’s hoping to make money selling a book rehashing and sanctifying Hitchens.
The essay suggests as does his recommendation, that Schermer considers Tauton a biking friend, biking being one of Schermer’s passions…you know.
I’m not sure what “contradictions” about Hitchens can be dissolved by hinting that he had faith questions. Was it Hitch’s hidden faith quest that led him to advocate war and Islamophobia? That’s the main contradiction about him that I’m aware of. If that were it, I don’t see a strong endorsement for the book, faith, or Hitchens for that matter.
Shouldn’t surprise anyone. Making claims about a dead guy is literally the foundation of Christianity.
“You’ve created a global reputation as an atheist, your fortune, your reputation is based on it. I can’t imagine how hard it would be to admit you were wrong. You created a prison for yourself.”
So this guy Taunton is saying Hitchens didn’t convert because he was a sellout? He thought that Hitchens had so little integrity, given a choice between speaking and writing from his own personal convictions and fame and fortune, Hitchens chose the latter. This guy sound less like a friend and more like a hagfish feeding off Hitchens carcass.
That monumental conceit too. That Hitchens was only thinking of converting because he had met an honest to goodness Christian when he met an evangelical, rather than those British Christians. Oh the narcissism.
Definitely my favorite sin
Ill doers are ill deemers.
Surely, I mean surely, this is either misattributed to Shermer, or it’s his attempt at irony gone off into Poe-land? What’s a “theist passionate about the truth” supposed to do except becoming an atheist ? Come on, I smell a lemon here.
@robro
Not quite. It wasn’t a deathbed conversion so much as a deathbed baptism — a common practice at a time when the norm was baptizing adult converts. Baptism is supposed to absolve one of all sins, and boy, did Constantine have sins to be forgiven! In any case, if he did it, it would be out of calculation rather than out of fear. He probably didn’t even grasp this idea of Christian exclusiveness, he just thought he’d give it a go.
As deathbed conversion stories go, the best one would be the one attributed to Voltaire. It is said that, when a priest asked him to renounce Satan on his deathbed, he replied, “Now is not the time for making new enemies.”
Almost certainly made up, but it would be the perfect line.
I don’t know what “praise from left and right” has to do with it. Hitchens was a one-time Trotskyite who converted to neo-conservatism. Like most such apostates, he became sneeringly, repulsively nasty about lefties. It got to the point where I really wasn’t sorry to see him go.
Caine: “picking the bones of the dead to make a profit”
They’ve been at that for centuries.
As Chaucer noted:
“And in a glas he hadde pigges bones.
But with thise relikes, whan that he fond
A poure person dwellynge upon lond,
Upon a day he gat hym moore moneye
Than that the person gat in monthes tweye;”
I hate Chris Matthews even more.
All one has to do is listen to 5 minutes of Hitch’s brother Peter to realize what a Christian Hitchens looks like *shivers*. Thankfully he never went there.
This will be a great book for people who’ve never heard of Christopher Hitchens
Religion poisons everything
LykeX, #8
“Making claims about a dead guy is literally the foundation of Christianity.”
That is the coolest comment I have ever seen.
alkisvonidas #12
We don’t really know what Eusebius of Nicomedia actually reported to Eusebius of Caesarea, or even if he reported anything at all. It’s not impossible that Eusebius of Caesarea made up the whole story.
We also can’t be 100% sure our sources for the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea weren’t adjusted after his death. As you probably know, Christianity didn’t become the official religion of the empire until 380 during the reign of Theodosius I, some 40 years after Constantine’s death. Theodosius imposed Nicene orthodoxy, and called the First Council of Constantinople to clarify the position. It was the time when Christian’s began persecuting pagans, destroying temples and writings, and erasing the pagan past. It is not impossible that in this time a lot of Christian writing was correcting to conform to the new orthodoxy.
But let’s assume Eusebius of Nicomedia did report something and he did use a word interpreted as “baptism,” rather than “conversion.” What did that mean in the 4th century? Among other cults of the day, conversion and the consecration rite (the initiation) were virtually synonymous. Ritual acts, and the price you paid for them, were the ticket to the cult secrets and the eternal bliss they promised, not professions of faith. Christianity of the period seems to be of the same ilk, though purportedly a cheaper alternative. If Constantine joined the cult before his death, including being baptized, why wasn’t that the story.
Incidentally, in the Roman world all conversions were adult conversions. Children, and generally wives I suspect, were converted with their father.
I only learned about Hitchens a couple of years before his death. I’ve never read any of his books, but from what I’ve seen of him on Youtube, he seemed a nasty piece of work who would throw anyone under the bus if it would get a giggle from his audience. So from my viewpoint, these new lies about him seem richly deserved. OTOH, putting words into a dead man’s mouth when he can’t defend himself is pretty contemptible, so a pox on both their houses.
#22 moarscienceplz says:
So from my viewpoint, these new lies about him seem richly deserved.
Please explain how anyone deserves to have lies told about them – and how those lies could be “richly deserved”.
I am always amused by how paranoid those who believe in phantasms are of anybody not following their delusions. They can’t imagine somebody looking at the world without phantasm colored glasses. Xian apologetics and lies about deathbed conversions are prime examples of their paranoia.
#22 moarscienceplz The fact that you make an opinion of somebody in a video you’ve seen on Youtube tells us more about you than your views of Christopher Hitchens. Never read any of his books? Why am I not surprised?
It’s The Lady Hope story all over again.
#23, #25, re #22: As one who, I’m pretty sure, read Hitchens back in the 1960s (in Oxford rags; I probably met him, and certainly we had friends in common) and definitely from the 70s on, I commend moarscienceplz for an astute evaluation on little evidence. Hitchens was a Gish-gallop third-rate polymath (he got a lousy degree) who figured he could get away with terminological inexactitude if he was witty about it. His columns were frequently amusing, if you took them as comedy, but God Is Not Great is a strong contender for the worst book I have ever finished, which I only did because a friend lent it to me and asked what I thought. (He had wanted to like it and was puzzled that he didn’t; we’re still friends.) It is indeed delightful that some, ah, entrepreneur should spread these, um, unlikely suggestions. “Richly deserved” seems about right.
#27 petesh History disagrees with you as do any learned reader of great works.
Care to show us examples of your complaints?
@28: History? Dude’s only been nailed to the perch for four and a half years. Rapidly heading for footnote status, thence to complete omission. As of course are most of us.
nailed to the perch is ever so much better than passed away
Petesh:
I disagree with you and moarscienceplz. It’s sleazy, slimy, and wrong for anyone to spread and publish lies about a person, especially when that person cannot defend against said lies; and it’s wrong for someone to do such a thing in order to make a profit from it, too. It’s wrong no matter who is wronged, it should not be condoned by the two of you (or anyone) because you didn’t like the person being lied about. That said:
roder51:
You’re a fucking idiot.
Larry Alex Tauton preys on those he prays with. Is he a psychopath?
I suggest Alex Tauton is a psychopath. He exploits death.
http://www.cbc.ca/doczone/episodes/the-psychopath-next-door