Ophelia has found a live one: a Christian zealot happily anticipating Christopher Hitchens’ deathbed conversion. He also claims to have diagnosed Hitchens’ cancer when he briefly met him months before his real diagnosis, which makes me wonder why the bastard didn’t take him aside and let him know.
Since Ophelia has dealt with him with a more than adequate curl of the lip, I’ll just mention one paragraph that annoyed me immensely.
I wouldn’t tell Christopher Hitchens that now is the time to get right with the Lord, or to pray or read the Bible. I wouldn’t try and convince him of the resurrection. I would only ask him to entertain the notion that love — the love he has for his life, his wife and his children, the love his readers have for him and the love that the doctors and nurses are showing him — is a real thing whose origins are worth exploring without glibness (sorry, saying “love for your fellow mammals” doesn’t require religion, as Hitchens did once, doesn’t cut it). It also can be done without Christophobia. I know that my discovery that I had cancer focused my mind on discovering the true nature of things, and I’m not talking about wishful thinking.
There’s practically nothing more supercilious and obnoxiously sanctimonious than a Christian deciding to lecture an unbeliever on love…because these prissy assholes all believe they have a monopoly on the One True Love™, which is servile obedience to a domineering tyrant. I trust that Hitchens knows love just as well as I do, and there’s nothing of gods in it — it’s between people, dammit, not fantasies. That is the way it always has been, and to taint it with the nonsense of religion and the slimy author’s submission to an imaginary lord is to diminish the reality.
Oh, the “true nature of things” on which the author, Mark Judge, focused after being diagnosed with cancer himself? Catholicism, that stodgy humbug and haven of horrible old men who think they’ve found love in the rape of children, that citadel of cowards who retreat from reality to find meaning in the dust and lies of antique theology.
Those who preach so much “Love” have no idea how pitifully that compares to honest hate.
I mean it’s the same thing but the freedom of being able to be honest with yourself lets a huge load off the chest.
Christianity: Come for the love, stay for the hate.
[meta]
I recommend Hitchens’ memoir (Hitch-22) for those who don’t think he loves.
Obviously he means Real Love, some idiotic thing that comes directly from God. Otherwise Hitchens already knows it, knows that it’s real, but doesn’t know that Real Love is Real for being Transcendent.
Just like everything else that anti-brain people want to be Real by not being real and explainable via discoverable causes.
Glen Davidson
Plus, it comes with Force lightning!
>>>Catholicism, that stodgy humbug and haven of horrible old men who think they’ve found love in the rape of children, that citadel of cowards who retreat from reality to find meaning in the dust and lies of antique theology.<<<<
————
come on tell us what you really think!
you new that there would be ass holes saying that kind crap. kind of gives the lie to all the "Love" don't it.
uncle frogy
@Ing:
Stop it. You’re making me feel tingly.
I remember when my father died, I couldn’t be with him. My mother told me that he was okay and “asked” for his last rights. I was disappointed that he took Pascal’s wager, knowing he was a non believer. I have ofter wondered if I would take the wager
Ten years later I found out my fater had never requested last rights, my sister called for the priest,
I thought “Christophobia” was the dread one experiences after realizing you’re about to debate Christopher Hitchens.
He’s not asking Hitchens to get right with God, but merely entertain the notion that God is behind every good feeling he’s ever had. Not so much to ask.
I hope, if I find myself in Hitch’s situation, that I’ll be less focused on “the true nature of things” and be thinking more about my life, my family and all the people I’ve loved.
See, this is the problem with redefining marriage. If we let two men who love each other get married, where will it end? Soon people will want to marry immaterial concepts, just because they “love” them! Eventually a fictional construct like God will have thousands and thousands of brides of every sex, because he “loves everyone,” and then what?
I’ll tell you what. The churches have been warning us for years: “Jesus loves the little children….”
You don’t really love someone unless you’re willing to torture them for eternity for disobeying an arbitrary rule.
Dear Mark
Amazing how different people respond to having and surviving cancer isn’t it? Congratulations on finding the true nature of things: God gives you cancer, but then he decides to let you live, ostensibly so that you could learn to better worship him. He does a kind of half-assed and bipolar job of working his mysterious ways, doesn’t he? But the important thing is that you learned a life lesson, and I’m sure that’s what surviving your cancer was all about. Oh, that and the opportunity to be a smug asshole.
Did you go through treatment, like I did? Next time, why don’t you accept your god’s will that you have cancer and just let him decide whether you’ll live or die? Faith, man, faith!
11:
You’re joking, right? I’ve missed some hilarious subtext, it must be, because that makes no goddamn sense at all.
To all the fine Christian soldiers out there trying to save us poor souls, please understand, there is little that is more insulting to an atheist than to tell him he is incapable of love.
Or to put it more bluntly, fuck you Mark Judge. Atheists are just as capable of emotion as anyone else, and we don’t need to invoke god to explain it.
The distinction, I think, that marks gnu atheists is not simply a disbelief in the Christian god but an antipathy towards worshipping such a being. Hitch won’t convert on his deathbed even if he comes to believe in God because he won’t want to spend eternity with the Christian God.
Funny. Mark Judge harbors a fantasy that Hitchins follows a path that an other ex-communist followed to faith, Whittaker Chambers. He quotes from Whittaker Chambers’ autobiography.
It would seem that Mark Judge wants Hitchins to become some sort of creationist as well as convert. Just note
While I do not view Hitchins in the same light as many of the other regulars here do, I would never want him to fall so low that he ends up a Whittaker Chambers type person.
For shits and giggles, here is a link a an Amazon page for Mark Judge’s book, A Tremor Of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism and Rock ‘n’ Roll.
+1 to Ing for the Harlan Ellison quote.
I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream
Once again I get the distinct impression that the theist concept of love is deeply non-functional. Love is not a thing enjoyed between equals for them, but rather a twisted master/slave relationship, with the ‘lesser’ party offering complete submission to the point of entirely sacrificing their own identity and will. This is the only way that they can rationalise their god, as it is depicted, ‘loving’ them – it is the kind of ‘love’ that the abuser claims to have for their victim. It is no coincidence that no small number of religions extend such a definition of ‘love’ to marital relationships, where the wife is expected to unconditionally obey her husband even if he is capricious and violent. It is the same kind of ‘love’ supposedly expressed by their sociopathic, patriarchal deity myth replicated in microcosm.
And being theists, they naturally claim that their sick and broken version of love is the only ‘true’ love, and so look down on supposedly bitter, loveless atheists with all the prating, arrogant, unearned supercilliousness they can muster.
I have come to expect all of this from believers, but I never get used to their vulture-like tendency to hover over seriously ill atheists in the hope of being able to secure (or failing that, fabricate) a deathbed conversion. It is truly repugnant behaviour from those who seek to claim the moral ‘high ground’.
What I find most depressing is the near certainty thta no matter how well documented Hitchens’ last moments are that there will be slimy ghouls crawling out of the wood work to claim they ‘witnessed Hitchens death bed conversion’ to whichever brand of Christianity they subscribe to.
16:
That bit was really bugging me. Atheists don’t stop at Christianity, we doubt the existence of all gods.
I can’t speak for old-school atheists, but I find it hard to believe that the idea that no god is worth worshiping is a “gnu” concept. If god one day came down from on high and offered me irrefutable proof of his existence, I still wouldn’t waste the effort in worship him. I wouldn’t be an atheist, sure, but there’s nothing in the universe worthy of worship in my opinion.
What a scumbag. and people wonder why Atheists are angry.
Angry and wishing to punch things. Angry, wishing to punch things, and looking for some Johnny Walker black label to share with Hitch.
We could then laugh at the deluded idiot.
Hitch has of course addressed this topic already:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4cPe_YS8i8
Classic response to this nonsense.
In a nutshell:
“Because you can’t explain (Insert abstract principle or emotion here) easily without invoking (Insert magical bullshit here ) it must come from (Same magical bullshit previously inserted).”
Always plug in “God” for “magical bullshit” and plug in whatever you want for the other slot, and you will have an instant presuppositional / transcendental apologetics generator. Popular choices for first insertion: Logic, morality, love, beauty, consciousness. If you are feeling particularly tricky, insert “existence” to get the argument from design.
[meta]
knut7777, bloody excellent, that is!
(Fucking definitive, too)
Fundie xian love = hate
I figured this out on my own by observation.
It was noticed a century ago. It’s been noticed ever since. Bishop JS Shelby talks about it in some of his books.
This isn’t just internet rhetoric. As a theory, it is highly explanatory and incredibly predictive.
No hate = no fundie xianity.
I disagree
> Hitch won’t convert on his deathbed even if he comes to believe in God because he won’t want to spend eternity with the Christian God. <
-I don't know why anyone would. Christianity says we're supposed to spend our entire lives on this planet in loving submission to god. For those who die and go to heaven, they are supposed to spend all eternity in loving submission to god. Why anyone would want to spend all eternity with no other purpose than loving submission to *anything* (let alone that hateful invisible man in the sky) boggles the mind. For that matter, why does god need people to worship him? Is he insecure? Does he need a 7 billion person hug to make his day go better?
Tony (you'd think god would have made animals on the same intellectual footing as humans; think of all the additional worship he'd have; perhaps then he'd be in a better mood)
Even without the evangelism, the hate is inescapable. The entire idea that humanity is inherently sinful is a hateful idea. The idea of hell is a hateful idea. The character of YHWH as described in the old testament is that of a hateful human-like being. The roots of all religions lie in in-group/out-group dynamics. Religious values are deliberately not universal. They foster division and exclusion. Christianity is a good exemplar of this.
Well Capnxtreme, perhaps disinterest is not new, but it seems to me that disinterest in worshipping god is now more emphasized. I specifically referenced the Christian god because Mark judge is talking about the Christian god and to make the point that the Christian god is not worth worshipping. I didn’t mean to suggest that gnu atheists only disbelieve in the Christian god. After all, disbelieving in most gods is easy – even Christians don’t believe in most gods. Atheists just take the next logical step. ,
Oh, and add my kudos to ING for the Harlan Ellison pastiche
Theists that believe that “love comes from god” by definition don’t know what love is. Because if they did, they wouldn’t need to have it come from god. They’d just make love themselves, like we happy atheists do, that know what love is.
Love is one of those things that humans create. Like art, which I maintain is the true meaning of life. You’re here for a limited time. You’ve got a canvas. What are you going to do with it? Which colors? What’s the story? Photorealistic or impressionist?
I allow myself a slight aesthetic appreciation of evil that way.
I find the prospect of a self-created world far more attractive than a world based on allegiance to some invisible tyrant. But then, I’ve always scored low on the authoritarian personality scale.
As distasteful as this is, it has no bearing on the truth or falsity of Christianity. Every single Christian could be a puppy-raping murdering fire-raiser and it still wouldn’t change whether the religion were true or not.
History, archaeology, text criticism, and perhaps to a lesser extent comparative mythology and philosophy are the keys. There are lots of assholes like this one, and while I admit few slobber over the prospect of an enemy’s demise (and none except Muslims over their eternal torment…seriously, what the fuck?), schadenfreude is a human universal.
“Christophobia”. I’ve seen a similar term, “Christianophobia”, bandied about in recent days.
Looks like the godbotherers are trying to take pages from the MRAs.
“Christophobia”? Really? Now we all have a phobia of something which doesn’t exist. I’m not afraid of the myth of Christ, however, I’ll go out of my way to avoid Christians like Mr. Judge (talk about an accurate surname).
Yes, there’s nothing quite as loving as telling a person they haven’t experienced love at all, not for realz, ya know, not until you buy into my imaginary overlord.
What a nasty person you are, Mr. Judge, just like that god of yours.
Marcus Ranum:
But, but…Marcus, what about agape!?
I skimmed the original article (not sure I could stomach reading the whole thing), but I’m left with the strong impression that the author just doesn’t understand his subject matter. He seems to think that Hitchen’s beliefs (or just beliefs of atheists in general) are dependent on the revelations of some revered authority figure. I think he just might be projecting a little. Hitchens’s taking issue with some cliché Nietzsche quote ≠ converting to Christianity.
I do have an honest question though for someone who knows more about this stuff than me. Is Nietzsche and his philosophy really so crucially important to atheism? I’ve only been an atheist for a couple of years, and I have tried to learn a lot about the history of atheism, but I’ve never had the impression that Nietzsche was overwhelmingly influential the way Mark Judge makes it sound. Even in Hitchen’s book, in the section about important freethinkers through history, he spends more time on names like Socrates, Espinoza, Hume and Einstein than Nietzsche. Am I missing something here?
A deathbed conversion is essentially an act of cowardice. Whatever you think of Hitchens, I don’t see how you could honestly claim he’s a coward.
Uh, sorry, what? If some version of Christianity were true, that god would exist. I very strongly doubt any of those subjects could establish the existence or non-existence of a god. Indeed, the order you put them in suggests you think “the truth or falsity of Christianity” means something else entirely. Granted, if we found Yahweh’s remains somewhere in the Middle East, archaeology could do it, but I can’t imagine any of the others could possibly help.
Is Nietzsche and his philosophy really so crucially important to atheism?
No
Agape: the expression on one’s face upon the realizing how deeply goddists despise themselves, other human beings, and reality.
Nietzsche who? The answer is no.
I’ve tried a few times to figure out what Nietzche and the Nihilists were trying to say. It was so opaque, nothing ever really came out of it.
If you can’t summarize your main point in a few sentences, forget it, you don’t know what it is.
Xianity = jesus is god and you are going to hell if you don’t believe that.
Oh c’mon. He isn’t a scumbag. Mark Judge is a ghoul, an eather of dead bodies. He is simply hanging around Hitchens, waiting for him to die so he can grab a decent meal.
The distinction that marks gnu atheists is that the media has suddenly noticed we exist.
Hitchen’s recent bit about Nietzsche seems to have set some godbotherers all a twitter. In the piece Hitchens doesn’t find himself in full agreement with Nietzsche and spends the article tearing apart one of his more popular aphorisms. The godbotherers somehow interpret this to mean he is converting to christianity. Ridiculous doesn’t even begin to cover it. Why does an atheist have to agree with Nietzsche? Why do they assume Hitchens was ever in total agreement with Nietzsche in the first place?
What I do take away from the attack is this is how he will continue to be attacked from now on and when he is no longer around to defend himself. They’ll quotemine, reinterpret his words in dubious ways. All to pretend he converted at the last moment. That’s what they crave above all else and they will twist every word if they have to to achieve it – in their own imagination. I have no doubt it will happen and it will be pathetic to behold.
Is Nietzsche and his philosophy really so crucially important to atheism?
Yes.
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Gee…that sounds a lot like the arguments heard every day in the posts and comments on Freethought Blogs!
Oh–and so much for Nietzsche being a nihilist.
If you can’t summarize your main point in a few sentences, forget it, you don’t know what it is.
1) Nietzsche is from a very different era, where ideas are explored in depth and at leisure. If you look at the writings of his contemporaries in Europe, there is this same excruciating detail in everything looked at or touched on. Anthony Trollope is a good example of a contemporary to Nietzsche, and he could take more words than you could imagine to describe a woman putting her hand on a sofa. This was how writing was done in the mid-19th century.
What’s scary is that Nietzsche isn’t as long-winded as he could have been. I think his Anti-Christ “book” is 130-150 pages, tops. That’s very short for such an influential philosophy book!
2) One of Nietzsche’s “tics” as a philosopher is his thoroughness in trouncing a particular argument. He doesn’t like to give a bad argument any wriggle room, or any escape hatches, or any ambiguities to take advantage of or hide in. So he addresses each of their arguments, taking you down some weird side roads of them, even, before tying them up and going back to the main thread, over and over and over again. This can be maddening to those of us in the modern world. It goes here for a while, then over there, and then you come back to the main row until it’s time for a new one, then it’s up and over and back and forth and round and round…
It can get exhausting, no doubt about it, unless you’re the kind of person who can find amusement in someone arguing himself into knots, and then arguing himself out of them.
The Hitch has foreseen this.
Jeffrey Goldberg talks about it on The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/on-the-possibility-of-christopher-hitchens-finding-jesus/249950/
I had a more lengthy response written, but realized I could summarize it in seven words:
What an asshole. Jesus must be proud.
When I was in middle school (junior high), a girl/young woman that I knew had a boyfriend who was about 5 years her senior (he was a senior in high school, she was in 7th grade (and yes, the part of Maryland in which I lived found this acceptable)). One day, she came to school with a fat lip. When asked, she explained that she had strayed (she talked to another boy on the phone) and her boyfriend showed that he was the one who really loves her. Another time, she had a small shiner. She had failed to answer the phone on a Friday night and her boyfriend showed that he really does love her. That was her phrasing — her boyfriend equated violence, inflicting pain, and verbal abuse with loving her. Every time I hear Christians talk about the love of their version of gods, this young woman, this abused child, is what comes to mind. The Abrahamic gods are the ultimate abusive boyfriend — love me, remain true to me, think of nothing but me, serve me, or I will make you miserable (of course, when she does love him, be true to him, serve him and think only of him, he still makes her life miserable). The Christian idea of gods’ love is the love of abuse, not the shared love of equals, not the love of a couple, not the love of a family, not the love of nature, or numbers, or reality. It is the love of pain, servitude, abuse and cruelty.
And we all know how this will end. When Christopher Hitchens dies, there will, within one or two weeks, be numerous web postings and, possibly, articles in questionable magazines, claiming that, on his deathbed, Hitchens accepted the ‘love’ of the one true gods. Just as was done to Carl Sagan, Isaac Assimov, and Charles Darwin. Even if a video is made of the last days of Hitchens’ life, non-stop, no breaks, the claim of conversion will still be made with claims that either it happened before the filming started or the film was edited. And the word of those who are there when he dies will also be rejected — those atheists are just lying to hold up the house of cards of evolution and atheism (besides, atheists lie, which true believers never do (unless there is a greater good to come from the lie))).
A bit off topic, but I’m wondering why I haven’t seen any real discussion of how Steve Jobs’ last hours were reframed by his sister as some kind of woo “tunnel of light” event.
Yes and No.
Nietzsche in my opinion gets a little more attention than is required while Camus gets not enough public attention.
If only because Camus can be more entertaining to read
Sure. The three sacraments of fundie xianity are hate, lies, and hypocrisy.
The explanatory and predictive value of this summary is very high. You can count on them lying about anything and everything.
Their whole perversion of xianity is a lie, so it isn’t surprising.
What the hell?
There are two weird assertions here. The first is the assertion of the platonic ideal of love, as if there were some dualistic archetype that must exist to explain the biochemical cocktail that produces our subjective experience of love. I’ve never understood that argument, yet it’s a common one among Christians — “God is Love,” and nonsense like that. Uhm, no. That’d be neutrophins.
The second assertion, related to the first, is that “love for your fellow mammals doesn’t require religion” doesn’t cut it. Doesn’t cut what? The feeling of attachment we have to certain others? Why doesn’t it cut it?
So, he smuggles in platonic idealism in his assumptions, then attempts to assassinate the real explanation. Does he expect this little rhetorical circle-jerk to sway someone as intellectually formidable as Hitchens?
Personally I see it happening more like this:
http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a0293.pdf
To be 100% fair, Judge doesn’t claim to have diagnosed Hitchens. He claims that Hitchens didn’t look well when they met (and, indeed, Hitchens wasn’t well). His thought that “oh shit, that’s exactly how I looked when I had cancer” – that could well have been in retrospect.
And if Mark Judge (a religionist but not an oncologist) walked up to you at a party and said “you look like you have cancer”, would you take him seriously?
@40/C. Razor:
I think I worded that wrong. The point I was trying to make is that no matter how ghoulish Christians are and behave, that doesn’t mean what they believe is wrong. The way to prove that it’s wrong is to falsify it, which the subjects I mentioned have been doing for some 150 years :)
Nietzsche pretty much laid out and as something of a pioneer fully articulated the reasons, at length and with insight, for rejecting Christianity within Modern era Western culture and society. Nietzsche is to theist apologists what Darwin is to Creationists: the major first articulator of the Weltanschauung antagonistic to theirs. Who unforgivably rams theirs hard and puts an irreparable hole into it.
Btw, for all the kerfuffle about Hitchens let’s not forget that Andy Rooney died an unregenerate :-) atheist a few weeks ago.
Bummer…
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/12/In-Memoriam-Christopher-Hitchens-19492011
Fuck. Hitch is dead.
So sorry about Hitchens, even though we were all ‘prepared’ for the news.
No more waiting for new articles, just (superb) archive material now. A loss for all of us.
‘Scenderemo nel gorgo muti’
And the ghouls are there in the BBC news article. So sad.