British-born author, literary critic and journalist Christopher Hitchens has died at the age of 62.

He died from pneumonia, a complication of the oesophageal cancer he had , at a Texas hospital.

Vanity Fair magazine, which announced his death, said there would “never be another like Christopher”.

He is survived by his wife, Carol Blue, and their daughter, Antonia, and his children from a previous marriage, Alexander and Sophia.

Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter described the writer as someone “of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar”.

“Those who read him felt they knew him, and those who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls.”

Hitchens was born in Portsmouth in 1949 and graduated from Oxford in 1970.

He began his career as a journalist in Britain in the 1970s and later moved to New York, becoming contributing editor to Vanity Fair in November 1992…

[continues at BBC News]

One response to the question is commentary on monotheism’s Apocalyptic “literalists” — people who sincerely want to see the world end and are actively trying to bring about its destruction.

Atheists see it as their moral duty to attack the root of such beliefs — which just happens to be belief in God. And it’s fair to say this is all part of the Atheistic consensus.

So atheists are literally trying to save the world … delusions of grandeur, anyone?

Time and time again I can’t help but notice the parallels between atheists and religious types: the bitter hostility towards anyone who doesn’t just choke down their ideology; the inconsistent belief system and subsequent rationalizations that sidestep the issue by exploiting our human emotions.

Let’s examine the so-called ‘facts.’ The [atheist] argument totally hinges on morality, principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior, that life has intrinsic value. But considering Science, that yardstick by which atheists tell us measures truth, has not provided meaning for the universe — logically, this must also apply to our very existence. So again, if life ends when you die, and the universe itself is going to ’starve to death’ from entropy, or collapse in on itself from the big crunch, then what are you clinging on to? What does it matter if we all die in a fiery Armageddon? Why do you care that people disagree with you? Atheists have yet to answer such a question in terms of: materialism, logic and objectivity. Because when you get down to it, respect for life (the foundation of morality) has no objective basis — its all rooted in subjective emotionalism.*

* What I find fascinating is that this is such a source of contention for nearly everybody (again I’m referring to atheists and religious types). No one wants to believe morality is essentially irrational. But why should that be a problem? Why can’t we be content with morality as self-validating; its own reward? What I find ‘illogical’ is the fear of being illogical. Everyone wants to believe in the objective supremacy of their beliefs — from their taste in fashion & entertainment to their ideas about God, the universe and everything. Everyone wants to be perfect. And isn’t it so much harder to feel perfect when you know someone out there thinks you’re 100% wrong about everything. The tacit assumption is that we can only have world peace when everyone believes the same thing. However, I would argue our behavior has more empirical consequence than belief itself; actions speak louder than ideas. IF people would acknowledge their feelings of empathy and act accordingly — then all the differing opinions in the world could never kill anyone.

Theologically speaking I can relate to atheism, theism & agnosticism. I can relate to the atheistic belief that self-accountability and autonomy are our most noble goals; I can relate to theism because I believe an intelligent force surrounds us, and I can relate to agnosticism because this intelligent force must have aspects that are beyond my current comprehension … so why bother having opinions about it? I consider myself a Pantheist and it doesn’t bother me I’m a minority — it’s not my mission in life to make you believe I’m right — because I believe the distinction between truth and lies is irrelevant. However, I do believe in morality, and it doesn’t bother me my beliefs are inconsistent; I’m not concerned with being perfect.

** As far as those Apocalyptic “literalists” go — you might worry about ‘what to do with all those ‘CRAZIES,’ but I say there is no revolution; ***because you can’t change people with force, intimidation or name-calling. . . all that can ever accomplish is make them more fanatical. DALE CARNAGIE. VINDICATED! lol — what/ev,

EPILOGUE: Post Observations.

If you sincerely want to show people the error of their ways, specifically in regard to the Apocalyptic “literalist,” you’re not going to do it by calling them “EVIL” — all name-calling will ever accomplish is make them more fanatical. The best you can do is espouse an alternate interpretation of the Apocalypse and hope for the best. Like maybe start by pointing out the original Greek translation of “Apocalypse” LITERALLY means “lifting of the veil”; a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind. Far from being a horrible experience, Apocalypse represents the revealing of the true nature of things. It ushers in an era of forgotten freedoms and unprecedented clarity. This “lifting of the veil” will set us free from the misery that has been a result of our ignorance in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception.

Hitchens Photo: Trockennasenaffe (CC) / Chomsky Photo: Duncan Rawlinson (CC)

Christopher Hitchens takes issue with Noam Chomsky’s recent Guernica article in Slate:

Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism.

This cognitive dissonance — to give it a polite designation — does not always take that precise form. Sometimes the same person who hails the bravery of al-Qaida’s martyrs also believes that the Jews planned the “operation.” As far as I know, only leading British “Truther” David Shayler, a former intelligence agent who also announced his own divinity, has denied that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, took place at all. (It was apparently by means of a hologram that the widespread delusion was created on television.)

In his recent article for Guernica magazine, however, professor Noam Chomsky decides to leave that central question open. We have no more reason to credit Osama Bin Laden’s claim of responsibility, he states, than we would have to believe Chomsky’s own claim to have won the Boston Marathon.

Read: Noam Chomsky’s recent Guernica article

Read: Christopher Hitchens’ recent Slate article

However meanly and grudgingly, even the new Republican speaker has now conceded that the president is Hawaiian-born and some kind of Christian. So let’s hope that’s the end of all that. A more pressing question now obtrudes itself: Is Barack Obama secretly Swiss?

Let me explain what I mean. A Middle Eastern despot now knows for sure when his time in power is well and truly up. He knows it when his bankers in Zurich or Geneva cease accepting his transfers and responding to his confidential communications and instead begin the process of “freezing” his assets and disclosing their extent and their whereabouts to investigators in his long-exploited country. And, at precisely that moment, the U.S. government also announces that it no longer recognizes the said depositor as the duly constituted head of state. Occasionally, there is a little bit of “raggedness” in the coordination. CIA Director Leon Panetta testified to Congress that Hosni Mubarak would “step down” a day before he actually did so. But the whole charm of the CIA is that its intelligence-gathering is always a few beats off when compared with widespread general knowledge. Generally, though, the White House and the State Department have their timepieces and reactions set to Swiss coordinates.

Read More on Slate

Back in college, while I was busy pretending that a blottoed discussion of Nietzsche over $1 beers made me an intellectual giant, my fiftysomething father, who’d worked so hard to send me there, was quietly being saved. Having long eschewed any ties to his Southern Baptist upbringing, he suddenly found himself born again and on a quest to know God better.

As a longtime atheist, I was a little surprised. But eventually I came to be relieved by this development. While my friends’ fathers were buying flashy sports cars and exchanging their wives for models, my own father was turning inward and asking: Is there more to life than this?

I was also proud of him for becoming a student again. As I watched him pore over C.S. Lewis, Lee Strobel and even neoatheist thinkers such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, I thought it amazing that he still wanted to learn something new.

It was a revelation I’d experience over and over again – meeting faithful believers and discovering that, no matter how long they’d been in the fold, many were still on a dogged quest for spiritual knowledge.

And it’s why I decided to go back to school as well and study religion in a more meaningful way. It wasn’t necessarily an acknowledgment of a higher power, but a realization that I knew little about the beliefs I had railed so arrogantly against.

Which brings me to the problem with modern atheism, embodied by the likes of Harris and Hitchens, authors of “The End of Faith” and “God Is Not Great,” respectively. So often it seems like a conversation ender, not a conversation starter. And the loudest voices of today’s militant atheism, for all their talk of rational thought, don’t seem to want to do too much thinking at all. As James Wood wrote in The New Yorker, “The new atheists do not speak to the millions of people whose form of religion is far from the embodied certainties of contemporary literalism. Indeed, it is a settled assumption of this kind of atheism that there are no intelligent religious believers.”

What spiritual quest are they on, except to put an abrupt end to those like my father’s? For them, the science is settled, the data are conclusive and the book (no, not the Good Book) has been written. Time for everyone else to pack up and move on to other business, like, presumably, accumulating wealth and fulminating at the sight of the nearest Christmas tree.

The militant atheist wants nothing more than to spoil the believer’s spiritual journey. That’s both meanspirited and radically unenlightened…

[continues in the Daily News]

Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9.

Mitt Romney. Photo: Jessica Rinaldi (CC)

The inimitable Christopher Hitchens says the taming and domestication of religious faith is one of the unceasing chores of civilization, at Slate:

A recent blizzard of liberal columns has framed the debate over American Islam as if it were no more than the most recent stage in the glorious history of our religious tolerance. This phrasing of the question has the (presumably intentional) effect of marginalizing doubts and of lumping any doubters with the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings, the anti-Semites, and other bigots and shellbacks. So I pause to take part in a thought experiment, and to ask myself: Am I in favor of the untrammeled “free exercise of religion”?

No, I am not. Take an example close at hand, the absurdly named Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. More usually known as the Mormon church, it can boast Glenn Beck as one of its recruits. He has recently won much cheap publicity for scheduling a rally on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington. But on the day on which the original rally occurred in 1963, the Mormon church had not yet gotten around to recognizing black people as fully human or as eligible for full membership. (Its leadership subsequently underwent a “revelation” allowing a change on this point, but not until after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.) This opportunism closely shadowed an earlier adjustment of Mormon dogma, abandoning its historic and violent attachment to polygamy. Without that doctrinal change, the state of Utah was firmly told that it could not be part of the Union. More recently, Gov. Mitt Romney had to assure voters that he did not regard the prophet, or head of the Mormon church, as having ultimate moral and spiritual authority on all matters. Nothing, he swore, could override the U.S. Constitution. Thus, to the extent that we view latter-day saints as acceptable, and agree to overlook their other quaint and weird beliefs, it is to the extent that we have decidedly limited them in the free exercise of their religion.

One could cite some other examples, such as those Christian sects that disapprove of the practice of medicine. Their adult members are generally allowed to die while uttering religious incantations and waving away the physician, but, in many states, if they apply this faith to their children—a crucial element in the “free exercise” of religion—they can be taken straight to court. Not only that, they can find themselves subject to general disapproval and condemnation.

It was probably the latter consideration that helped impel the majority of American Orthodox Jews to give up the practice of metzitzah b’peh, a radical form of male circumcision that is topped off, if you will forgive the expression, by the sucking of the infant’s penis by the rabbi or mohel so as to remove any remaining blood or debris…

[continues at Slate]

I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement. I could faintly hear myself breathe but could not manage to inflate my lungs. My heart was beating either much too much or much too little. Any movement, however slight, required forethought and planning. It took strenuous effort for me to cross the room of my New York hotel and summon the emergency services. They arrived with great dispatch and behaved with immense courtesy and professionalism. I had the time to wonder why they needed so many boots and helmets and so much heavy backup equipment, but now that I view the scene in retrospect I see it as a very gentle and firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady. Within a few hours, having had to do quite a lot of emergency work on my heart and my lungs, the physicians at this sad border post had shown me a few other postcards from the interior and told me that my immediate next stop would have to be with an oncologist. Some kind of shadow was throwing itself across the negatives.

The previous evening, I had been launching my latest book at a successful event in New Haven. The night of the terrible morning, I was supposed to go on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and then appear at a sold-out event at the 92nd Street Y, on the Upper East Side, in conversation with Salman Rushdie. My very short-lived campaign of denial took this form: I would not cancel these appearances or let down my friends or miss the chance of selling a stack of books. I managed to pull off both gigs without anyone noticing anything amiss, though I did vomit two times, with an extraordinary combination of accuracy, neatness, violence, and profusion, just before each show. This is what citizens of the sick country do while they are still hopelessly clinging to their old domicile…

[continues in Vanity Fair]

Solomon: What did you mean to suggest by including the detail about your long-ago flings with two men who became part of Margaret Thatcher’s administration?

Hitchens: There are still people who want to criminalize homosexuality one way or another, and I thought it might be useful if more heterosexual men admitted that they are a little bit gay, as is everyone, and that homosexuality is a form of love and not just sex.

Solomon: Not everyone is “a little bit gay,” as you say. Do you think your basic sexual confusion underlies your political confusions?

Hitchens: No, I wouldn’t call it confusion. I’d call it a punctuated consistency. I argue in the book that my principles were the same throughout…

[continues in the New York Times Magazine]

A longtime critic of how the Catholic Church has handled abuse allegations, Hitchens believes the current Pope was actually involved in the cover-up before he took the top job.

Hitchens also contends that the Pope is subject to criminal prosecution due to his involvement in the latest sex scandal.

On Nov. 1, 1755 — the feast of All Saint’s Day — a terrifying combination of earthquake and tsunami shattered the Portuguese capital city of Lisbon. Numerous major churches were destroyed and many devout worshippers along with them. This cataclysmic event was a spur to two great enterprises: the European Enlightenment and the development of seismology. Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were only some of those who reasoned that no thinkable deity could have desired or ordained the obliteration of Catholic Lisbon, while other thinkers — Immanuel Kant among them — began to inquire into the possible natural causes of such events.

Today, we can clearly identify the “fault” that runs under the Atlantic Ocean and still puts Portugal and other countries at risk, and it took only a few more generations before there was a workable theory of continental drift. We live on a cooling planet with a volcanic interior that is insecurely coated with a thin crust of grinding tectonic plates. Earthquakes and tsunamis are to be expected and can even to some degree be anticipated. It’s idiotic to ask whose fault it is. The Earth’s thin shell was quaking and cracking millions of years before human sinners evolved, and it will still be wrenched and convulsed long after we are gone. These geological dislocations have no human-behavioral cause. The believers should relax; no educated person is going to ask their numerous gods “why” such disasters occur. A fault is not the same as a sin.

However, the believers can resist anything except temptation. Where would they be if such important and frightening things had natural and rational explanations? They want the gods to be blamed. After the titanic eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, the Muslims of Indonesia launched a hugely successful campaign to recruit terrified local people to Islamic repentance. Following the more recent Asian tsunami of 2004, religious figures jostled to provide every possible “explanation” of tectonic events in terms of mere human conduct. (It was widely asserted in earlier times that earthquakes were caused by sodomy, yet San Francisco still stands, and when it was last hit in 1906, it was rather more heterosexual than it is now. Hurricane Katrina inundated much of New Orleans but saw fit to spare the immoral French Quarter.)

Read More of Christopher Hitchens’ article on Slate

The media-labeled “New Atheists” such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have put forward what they regard as the answer to religion: grow up, human race, and abandon your myths!

Most Americans, and maybe even most people around the world, have another answer to the extremes of religion that infect people like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who (allegedly) tried to blow up an airplane over Detroit: hunt down and kill the extremists.

I think just about everyone has missed the real point: religion won’t go away because — like it or not — people are spiritual beings.

Telling religious people to be moderate is not going to solve anything once they are convinced everyone not like them is the enemy of “truth.” Killing more people just makes martyrs. That being the case, the way to confront religious poison is to change religion, not try to win by eliminating it. And that change means we have to try and get to the next generation before the fundamentalists do.

The only real solution to religious extremism is to change the conversation about religion altogether.

We urgently need to make that conversation center on embracing paradox rather than seeking — then trying to impose by force and or “reason” — our pet certainties on others.

How do we change the conversation about religion, roll back the violence done in the name of God (be that by gay-hating American “Christian” fundamentalists or world-fearing “Islamic” radicals — and while we’re at it end the culture war here at home that divides us on everything from the existence of God to abortion and gay rights?

How do we live together in a world where some people fervently believe that the earth is 6000 years old, that gay men and women choose to be gay and can “change” if they want to, that Jesus will soon return (and thus that war in the Middle East is a good thing because it is a “sign” of the much-hoped-for “End Times”) while other people just as fervently believe that people who hold such views are dumb, evil and dangerous?

Do the New Atheists really believe that “Reason” (whatever that is) will win the day after people are indoctrinated? Good luck with that! …

[continues in the Huffington Post]