Christopher Hitchens was unable to speak at the American Atheist convention because of his declining health. But he sent a message. Here is the first part. It's beautiful.

>Dear fellow-unbelievers,

>Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death. Nobody ever wins this argument, though there are some solid points to be made while the discussion goes on. I have found, as the enemy becomes more familiar, that all the special pleading for salvation, redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before. I hope to help defend and pass on the lessons of this for many years to come, but for now I have found my trust better placed in two things: the skill and principle of advanced medical science, and the comradeship of innumerable friends and family, all of them immune to the false consolations of religion. It is these forces among others which will speed the day when humanity emancipates itself from the mind-forged manacles of servility and superstitition. It is our innate solidarity, and not some despotism of the sky, which is the source of our morality and our sense of decency.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/04/hitchens_address_to_american_a.php



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/23/2011 09:19AM by Stray Mutt.

Very well written and emotionally delivered. I've always enjoyed his prose as it is characteristically Hitchens.

If he has stage 4 cancer, he'd better make his peace with God.
Not that I'm advocating the Mormon version of God, mind you.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/23/2011 11:08AM by Stray Mutt.

Chloe Wrote:
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> If he has stage 4 cancer, he'd better make his
> peace with God.

yes, easier said than done

I mean, you start making peace with one imaginary deity, and you risk pissing off another imaginary deity.

what if you make peace with Quetzalcoatl, and wake up in Valhalla with Odin standing over you?

It simply can't be found outside of the self. Humans are amazing- we bravely face death every day. Many of us do it without a god.

Without the theists tossing in fear mongering?

If you, the theists, could not convince him based on the values of your ideas why resort to this sort of tactic in death? Seriously "he'd better make his peace with God." sounds to me like a threat. What sort of loving god would have to resort to fear mongering and threats?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/23/2011 10:44AM by MJ.

Is that like making peace with santa claus ?

Otherwise you won't get the bestest presents!

or the Easter bunny! He won't get any cadbury eggs! oh noes!

again VERY ADULT.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGCbDtng5MA

LMAO....That would be the best commercial EVER!

...without thinking "RELEASE THE GOO!"

That's why I prefer the caramel kind! Thanks for the laugh!

Gross.

A rousing "Amen!" from me.

Memo to Chloe:
It is highly suggested that when posting replies to threads that you 1) read the actual message, 2) understand said message, use a dictionary if needed, and 3) quickly remove your head from your rectal orifice asap to breathe in the fresh air of freedom

This man has my admiration. That article is a keeper- a eulogy and legacy.

(His statement addresses frightened superstitious fear mongers like Chloe who obviously don't understand a word he wrote in that article, IMO.)

May you die in comfort and dignity, Mr. Hitchens. Thank you for expanding my views and life experience.

Good for him! Nothing I like more than a person with the integrity to stick to their guns when the going gets tough.

And Chloe, I'm with the others. If you need to "make your peace" with your god then why the hell would you worship him? Sounds like a nasty bully too me, kicking a man while he's down.

Was it Thomas Paine who was told on his death bed he had better make peace with God and replied he was not aware that they had ever quarreled.

"When his aunt Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded: 'I did not know we had ever quarreled.'"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau#Death

I wish Christopher Hitchens a good passing.

Irvin Yalom, an existential psychotherapist, has written a book, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death, which I found helpful. Yalom is an atheist.

http://sunsetslight.blogspot.com/



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/23/2011 11:39AM by robertb.

I've had the feeling for awhile that if Hitchens had to go, as he's made it clear that we all are on the road to death--he's just accelerated a bit, that he's kind of glad (for lack of a better word) that he went with cancer, knowing his death is iminent, to make a point that there ARE Athiests in foxholes.

His point that his trust is better placed in advanced medical science than on superstition reminded me of one of my very favorite posts ever on RFM. I archived it and I'm going to repost it just because it's so good. The poster hasn't been on RFM in years so I will leave off the name, but since it was in the public domain, I hope it's ok to repost. I guess admins will pull it if it's not. Enjoy:

ATHIESTS IN FOXHOLES

"Last December, I stepped into my own emotional foxhole.

My wife was pregnant with twins, and she went into premature labor (4 months premature) in November, 2002. She was hospitalized for a month, while the doctors medically and surgically fended off delivery. For a month, I slept on a cot in her hospital room, only a few steps away from her, in case there was an emergency. During the first week of December, that emergency came, the labor kicked back in, and within a few hours, the twins were born.

My son weighed 2 lbs., 3 oz.

And my daughter weighed 1 lb., 14 oz.

Both of them nearly died.

They were in the intensive care unit for four months. My daughter had stomach surgery, eye surgery, and brain surgery (twice). It cost over a million dollars to keep them alive. And, even now, there is still a possibility that my daughter will have learning disabilities and even cerebral palsy.

On the day they were born, I prayed to God pleading with him to protect their lives. But, since I knew that there was a good possibility that they would die, I pleaded with him even more so to protect my testimony. I knew that if the kids died, I might become bitter and resentful and fall away from the Mormon church. And I was afraid of that happening.

And I wanted to be right with God. I wanted to be in harmony with his plan. I thought "Maybe it's in God's plan for my kids to die. Maybe there's some higher purpose." And I tried to meditate and pray to determine what that purpose might be. I tried to come closer to God, to align myself with his will, so that I could be an instrument in fulfilling his purpose. And so I legitimately tried to determine why God would want my kids to be sick. Maybe I would grow spiritually from the experience. Maybe I would learn patience and trust and dependence on the Lord. Maybe I would learn about my own physical limitations, strengthening my ability to be humble.

And so I tried to learn all those things. Maybe if I was a receptive student to the lesson God was trying to teach me, I would be able to stave off any further injury to my kids. But when the news got worse for them, rather than better, when my daughter had to go in for her second brain surgery, it was obvious that God was not staying his hand.

And then something in my mind switched gears. Maybe God was not trying to teach me something. Maybe there was no grand lesson in all of this. Maybe my kids had problems because that kind of stuff just happens sometimes. Wow. What a concept for me. The pressure was off when I realized that I was not in the midst of some cosmic pop-quiz of my personal character. God was not testing me, because there is no God behind the scenes.

To me, that was a comforting thought. Suddenly, I didn't need to worry about my own culpability. I wasn't responsible, through my sins and transgressions, for the physical problems my kids were experiencing. And when I met with the neurologists and the gastroenterologists, and I listened to their explanations of the biochemistry and the anatomical mechanics of their procedures, I understood what they were trying to accomplish. After hundreds of years of medical science, these doctors have the ability to facilitate healing and development where it would otherwise be impossible. They are healers, in a way that I have never seen demonstrated by anyone who speaks in the name of Jesus. And, in the presence of these doctors and their knowledge, I HAD HOPE.

Of course, many people have told me that I was in fact being tested by God, and that I failed his test. But then why did I feel that surge of hope? Why did I feel peace relying on mortal man rather than swaddled in the comforting arms of the Lord? Why did I feel nothing but despair in my prayers and nothing but optimism when I stopped kneeling before God?

Don't tell me there are no atheists in foxholes.

I've been there.

And the doctors in the Newborn ICU were like my atheist clergy. They spread a message of hope and of peace. And they do it without pointing to some Jesus in the sky. They do it with their hands. And they do it with their minds. Theirs is a message of realism, pragmatism, self-reliance, community, and compassion. For some of us, that message is perfect, even without a God."

"I've had the feeling for awhile that if Hitchens had to go, as he's made it clear that we all are on the road to death--he's just accelerated a bit, that he's kind of glad (for lack of a better word) that he went with cancer, knowing his death is iminent, to make a point that there ARE Athiests in foxholes."

beautifully put =)

"Dear baby jesus, I'm sorry you're so hopelessly incompetent that you couldn't have created a world in which you didn't have to commit suicide in order to create a loophole in a mafia protection contract which you knew ahead of time could never be honored (since you knew the future before it happened), and I'm sorry I had the audacity to not worship an evil-minded being such as yourself, who chooses to torture creatures for all time for no good reason;

and dear baby jesus, knowing that you are 'all-powerful' and that nothing you do can be difficult, I'm sorry you're such an asshole that instead of offering to give each of your creatures their own universes in which they could do anything they wanted without ever hurting anyone or *gasp* offending you, you've decided the best course of action is to deep-fry them forever;

and dear baby jesus, I forgive you for all this, because you're just doing what you were always going to do, for, if you always knew your own future, then you really didn't have a choice but to be such a dick, did you?

I forgive you, baby jesus. But you're still fake."

Is that what you had in mind, Chloe?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/23/2011 04:03PM by itzpapalotl.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/09/hitchens-201009

I like his perspective on things.

Hellfire will be his perspective soon.

"Hellfire will be his perspective soon."

Please PROVE your statement.

Truth Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hellfire will be his perspective soon.


Straight from a christian bosom.

Then Hitchens will convert them all to atheism and set them free!

You really are OK with a god who sends people to "hellfire" because they don't value belief and faith in a god?

That tells me you are a person who is full of revenge and fine with causing people to suffer.

I personally could not show any approval for a god that would do such a thing. In fact, I would tell god I think he is petty and cruel to create people he sends to hell in the first place.

The characteristics you assign to a god are really a reflection of your own values. I think hell is something YOU would invent (or wish on someone) or you would be appalled at a god who would operate that way.

If God is Love (as many theists contend), "He" could not give anything but love. To give punishment, suffering, or pain--whether post-mortem or by way of natural disasters--"He" would have to have those unloving qualities in "His" own nature (excuse the quotation marks...our pronouns are really inapplicable here and I'm just following convention).

Still you say something quite relevant (to the Truth poster): "The characteristics you assign to a god are your own values. I think hell is something YOU would invent (or wish on someone)...."

Again, complete agreement. Only not "wish on someone," but wish on OURSELVES. Our own superego/guilty conscience envisions punishment, but it's too painful for our ego to think WE deserve it, or that we're doing it to ourselves, so we project both this Stern Judge and his punishments outside us, into the sky and under the earth (whew! now we can imagine we're safe...). But where I would probably go beyond your views is in the extension of this psychological dynamic to ANY SUFFERING we feel in life itself. We don't want to think that we have it out for ourselves (though we do, via that superego), so we project the causes of suffering out into the world in the form of adverse conditions, enemies, or accidents--or onto the body in the form of shortcomings, illness, and even death.

(Yes, these phenomena are "real" in our conscious awareness, but I'm tending to suspect that our whole conscious awareness is, like a dream, concocted to make us think that we are innocent and "stuff happens" to us. Dreams are pretty convincing in that respect.)

Now, perhaps the distasteful part: Hitchens' relation to his own body. Is his condition a projection? I agree that "God" didn't do it, nor will any "God" condemn him to any suffering now or hereafter. But there is some cause...and in my inclusively psychological view, it's not because we are pinball victims in a crushing impersonal universe.

"To be tortured 24 hours a day for the rest of eternity, that's not very nice. To believe that's going to happen to people you disapprove of, I think, shows a pretty low level of mental health."

I don't think a loving God would send anyone to the traditional hell especially because they didn't believe. If there is a God, Hitchens will find out when he dies and I suspect God will care a lot more about how Hitchens or anyone else treated others than he cares about what they believed.

Why would a believer (theist) not want to read it? I might disagree with Hitchens' viewpoint but I can respect his right to believe or not as he wishes and I can certainly empathise with his condition and its seeming conclusion. I wish the man no ill will and hope that his suffering is minimal. As the poet conveyed,since we're all part of mankind the death of any one diminishes us all.

to everyone's ears.