Farewell, great voice. Great voice of reason, of humanity, of humour. Great voice against can’t, against hypocrisy, against obscurantism and pretension, against all tyrants including God. Farewell, great warrior. You were in a foxhole, Hitch, and you did not flinch. Farewell, great example to us all.
~ Richard Dawkins
Armed with a quick wit and a keen appetite for combat, Mr. Hitchens was in constant demand as a speaker on television, radio and the debating platform, where he held forth in a sonorous, plummily accented voice that seemed at odds with his disheveled appearance. He was a master of the extended peroration, peppered with literary allusions, and of the bright, off-the-cuff remark. . .
Mr. Hitchens, a British Trotskyite who had lost faith in the Socialist movement, spent much of his life wandering the globe and reporting on the world’s trouble spots for The Nation magazine, the British newsmagazine The New Statesman and other publications. . .
Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011)
English-American, Literary Critic, Journalist, Author,
Essayist, Polemicist, and Outspoken Anti-theist
The gods we have made are exactly the gods you would expect to be made from a species about a half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.
Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011)
English-American, Literary Critic, Journalist, Author,
Essayist, Polemicist, and Outspoken Anti-theist
Religion and the churches are manufactured, and this salient fact is too obvious to ignore. Ethics and morality are quite independent of faith, and cannot be derived from it.
Hitchens himself was many things: a polemicist, reporter, author, rhetorician, militant atheist, drinker, name-dropper, and raconteur. He was also an absolutist. He liked a clear, defined target against which to take aim and fire; he knew what he wanted to write against and he did so with all the force and power of his formidable erudition and articulacy. Hitchens was an accomplished and prolific writer, but an even better speaker: his perfect sentences cascaded and tumbled, unstoppably. He was one of our greatest contemporary debaters, taking on all-comers on all subjects, except sport, in which he professed to have no interest at all. . .
An absence of doubt defines his work. His weaknesses are overstatement, especially when writing about what he despises (Islamism, God, pious moralizing of all kinds), self-righteous indignation (“shameful” and “shame”, employed accusatorily, are favoured words in his lexicon), narcissism, and failure to acknowledge or accept when he is wrong. His redeeming virtues are his sardonic wit, polymathic range, good literary style and his fearlessness. . .
The culture no longer throws up people like the Hitch. Today, he is very much a man apart. He has no equal in contemporary Anglo-American letters; there are followers and disciples but no heir apparent.
Fascism and the Catholic Church
RD The people who did Hitler’s dirty work were almost all religious.
CH I’m afraid the SS’s relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.
RD Can you talk a bit about that – the relationship of Nazism with the Catholic Church?
CH The way I put it is this: if you’re writing about the history of the 1930s and the rise of totalitarianism, you can take out the word “fascist,” if you want, for Italy, Portugal, Spain, Czechoslovakia and Austria and replace it with “extreme-right Catholic party.”
Almost all of those regimes were in place with the help of the Vatican and with understandings from the Holy See. It’s not denied. These understandings quite often persisted after the Second World War was over and extended to comparable regimes in Argentina and elsewhere.
. . . The fact that the Christian or Muslim does not obey their holy books does not change what is in the books, and when you redact the few and far-between messages about peace, love and understanding, you are left [with] books that are basically manuals on how to hate people who don’t agree with you and the various methods of punishment that should be meted out, up to and including death.
Until we can all agree that diplomacy should not even be on the table until the religious leaders of the world agree to remove the bigoted, hateful and discriminatory doctrines and beliefs from their official doctrines, even if that means redacting huge chunks of their holy books, there will be no hope of compromise or co-existence.
Christianity is marketed as a religion of love and tolerance and Islam is marketed as a religion of peace. However, on their fundamental levels, these belief systems causes division, promote willful ignorance and retard intellectual growth.
Modern society requires and deserves a truly secular state, by which I do not mean state atheism, but state neutrality in all matters pertaining to religion: the recognition that faith is personal and no business of the state.
Read more . . .
Posted by New Statesman – 12 December 2011 11:05
If ever there was a life that embodied the spirit that is driving the Occupy Wall Street movement it is that of Emma Goldman, who went to jail in 1893 for having stood on a soap box in Union Square in the midst of one of America’s worst depressions and, pointing at the mansions on Fifth Avenue, implored 3,000 unemployed men and women to ask the ruling class for work. “If they don’t give you work,” she cried, “ask them for bread. If they deny you bread, take it!” These words made those listening to Emma erupt in thunderous cheers; they also made J. Edgar Hoover describe her in 1919 (when he was urging the government to deport her) as The Most Dangerous Woman in America.
Always Question Authority 