Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

Oh fuck. Rest in the great post-human existence space, my favorite erudite atheist Brit.

And fuck you for waving pom-poms for invading Iraq.

@SanFranLefty: I’m sorry, but he was not much more than Andrew Sullivan with a severe drinking problem, a bigger ego and a better pen.

Also noted – Hitch died on the day the Iraq War ‘ended’.

@blogenfreude: From thetweetofgod twitter feed:

Me: “Welcome!” Hitchens: “Spare me your encomia, you illusory construct of Hobbesian terror and Pecksniffian morality.” I LOVE THIS GUY!

@blogenfreude: Oh, and also on the same day they found the God Particle.

This is more coincidence than, say, the two crosses in Timmy Tebow’s name.

@SanFranLefty: Also: Fuck cancer.

@Mistress Cynica: “Everything gives you cancer. There’s no cure, there’s no answer.”

Everybody mambo!

@Nabisco: Not my favorite either, although I fully support anyone who has the balls to appear on national TV completely wasted on single-malt scotch.

@Tommmcatt Be Fat, And That Be That: And still be way smarter and funnier than most of us.

@redmanlaw: My cousin patty is a big-time nurs-oncologist at UC Davis, and has it on good authority that we are looking at a cure for lung cancer within the decade. Something about mice, antibodies, and gene therapy.

I was half-awake when she told me about because I had been up all night with my Mother at the hospital, but that was the gist of it.

Hitch would be pissed at this “God’s Will” category business, and rightly so.

@SLF: Exactly
@MistressCyn: Exactly
@Nabeesko: Bullshit

@JNOV will finish this lovely sweater today or bust:

(a) “God’s Will”: Was Hitch that brittle? Good thing he’s not reading The Tweet of God today.

(b) Sully’s rememberance last night quotes from a Hitch email, after Hitch sponsored Sully for permanent residence: “I managed to say that your faith had allowed you to extend a warm hand to so many of your fellow men, and then remolded that bit to make it sound a touch less close to the heart’s desire.”

You don’t have to be an asshole to be an atheist.

Also, I’m with Nabisco, more or less. Specifically, I really don’t care either way.

@nojo: Brittle is the wrong word. Pissed is more like it. There are some interviews with him on BBC (also available on YouTube) where he discusses his illness and people who pray for him to get better, convert, or go to hell. His opinion of all of them was the same: Idiots.

So, yes, having his obit called “God’s Will” would piss him off bc it’s idiotic to say that an anti-theist, not simply an atheist, would consider his death to have anything to do with any deity.

As far as being with Beesko, he can use all the friends he can get. Are we talking about the same comment? Sully is an idiot. Hitch was a dick. Dawkins is my man. Harris is growing on me.

@JNOV will finish this lovely sweater today or bust: So Bloggy, who chose the post category, is arguing that Hitch’s death is literally an act of God? And somebody like Hitch, visiting a site like this, would immediately presume that all language here is literal, all categories here are assertions of truth, and all writers here spend their days Tebowing in ignorant bliss?

Mmmmkay.

@nojo: I think he would object to the term, “God’s Will” because he did take that shit literally and thought it was really fucking important. He would dissect the idea that God would will that he or anyone die, let alone die of some dread disease, and he would disparagingly fillet the concept.

You don’t have to like the guy, agree with him, or any of that shit. BUT you cannot discount the fact that the man was a balls-to-the-wall ANTI-theist, not a run-of-the-mill “meh” atheist.

He considered all religion harmful to the person, society, and the world. Sometimes I’m with him; sometimes I’m not.

@nojo: Just fucking with him. And it’s also the category we use when anyone dies. Don’t judge me.

@blogenfreude: He’s not judging you — he’s arguing with me. And I think nojo has used other categories when people die, but I could be wrong.

@blogenfreude: @JNOV has a right to be hostile (it’s a book, okay?):

Long story. When we switched from CP to Stinque, I didn’t want to use “their” intellectual material — and I didn’t know who came up with “God’s Will” — so I adopted “The Great Beyond” as my obit category.

But if we must be blunt, which I really hate doing, “God’s Will” is a manifestly ironic term for an obit category, and I have a profoundly difficult time imagining somebody like Hitch not getting it.

But if you’re right, and he would consider it an insult, then fuck him.

@nojo: Dude. You do not hate being blunt, so don’t even try to pull that crap. Your online demeanor is a matter of what suits your needs at the time.

What this really boils down to for me is how uncomfortable I feel about these damn obit posts anyway. Not your problem — totally mine.

Why should his suffering matter more than anyone else’s? It doesn’t. And I don’t believe I called it an insult — I said he’d probably think it’s idiotic. And I agree. So fuck us if you’re straight and into necrophilia.

@nojo, jnov etc: Irony/comedy is hard. Points to Nojo for going there.

@JNOV has a right to be hostile (it’s a book, okay?): I detest being blunt. I really do. Friends get pissed at me about it. Most of what I say or write is a cat going from Point A to Point B by wandering all over the house.

More to the point, then: I hate explaining jokes.

And what you said is that Hitch would be “pissed”. And unless you meant Brit Pissed — drunk — then “angry” or “insulted” is all that’s left. And if Hitch was so serious in his atheism that he would fail to see the ironic humor of a “God’s Will” obit category, then yes, he’s brittle and fuck him.

(Which is different than recognizing the humor and not finding it humorous. Which is entirely fair game.)

But Hitch wasn’t so serious in his atheism, not in that way. He was certainly dead set against charlatans and credulity — I just watched his comments on Falwell’s death — but he respected Sully’s faith, even though he found it groundless.

So what I really think is that you’re selling him short — that he, of all people, would see the ironic humor of a “God’s Will” obit category, especially when applied to him.

The argument really isn’t about Christianity, but social and political fundamentalism. The New Atheists wouldn’t be able to sell books if Americans were all respectful Episcopalians. Fundamentalists pervert the religious conversation — on both sides.

@nojo: Explaining a joke = stabbing it in the heart.

Breaking: FUCKING TOOL ANNOUNCES WINTER 2012 TOUR, INCLUDING ABQ!!!!!

I now have three tix for the show. *whew*

@nojo: I disagree mainly because so many said that it was God’s will that he became ill — payback for his thoughts, not his physical lifestyle. They prayed that he would suffer eternal torture, that he would not be healed but see the error of his ways and convert (I think he called this a type of emotional blackmail — that people pull this shit on others at their most vulnerable moments and have them recant everything that they stood for during the greater part of their lives). Think of Antony Flew and the bastards who claimed that he converted, but it came out that he was suffering from senility, and those fuckers took advantage of him to advance their own agenda.

Some prayed that Hitchens would recover. At times, those prayers for recovery seemed to touch him, but he’d add that they were pointless. Sometimes they annoyed him, but who wouldn’t be annoyed in his situation?

The argument isn’t about Christianity at all. It’s about the belief that to live a moral life, to love and be loved, to have compassion, to have honor and a sense of purpose, to find wonder in the world, you must have religion, be it UU, Wahhabi and everything in between.

Go ahead and piss on strong atheists all you want, but they’ve always been around. They are just more vocal now because they need to be. The conversation was perverted a long time ago, like with the pilgrims. Did Madalyn Murray O’Hair pervert the conversation?

Hitchens was not humorlous, but in light of all the shit he went through, and because he was an antitheist, I find the description cruel, not funny, not ironic. Like most people, he did not want to die — especially thinking that This. Is. It. He gave all those interviews so he would not be Flewed with reports of some deathbed conversion.

The better angels of our nature are within us, but we created them.

@redmanlaw: Points to Nojo for going there. Like skee ball tickets? My xon, you will dire.

@nojo: On being blunt:

You’ve smacked me and my kid down and blocked my fucking comments (1) when I was defending someone and (2) when I was wholeheartedly apologizing to another over a mistaken identity. You’ve taken me to the woodshed and bitched me the fuck out, so while I’m not your friend, I have been on the receiving end of your blunt ire.

I’m not as clever as you. I don’t always get the joke. And some stuff just isn’t funny.

As someone who also might have cancer, I’d say that if anyone said that my possible cancer is God’s will, they are unfunny assholes. I admit that the possible cancer thing might have fucked up my perception of this post.

I’d like to see God kick the bucket, and I’d like to write His will. It would go something like this:

To every living thing I’ve fucked over and fucked up, I apologize. It was shitty of Me. I take back all the illnesses and famines and dangers and floods and fires and violence perpetrated by Me, by others in My name, and all that crappy stuff I did just for shits and giggles.

To make it up to you, here’s that heaven you were promised. Right now. Here, have it. I’m gone, so I can’t fuck it up anymore.

@Nabisco:

We gotta Cern this mutha out.

…on the same day they found the God Particle.

@¡Andrew!: Haha! Do the same with Tevatron, Hammer.

@JNOV has a right to be hostile (it’s a book, okay?): I got the joke.

Pop quiz: What scenes in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” evoke “The Godfather II”? Also, which two sci fi classics are referenced and in which scenes?