I came across this homage to Christopher Hitchens by his wife, Carol Blue, and thought it a fascinating study in a man who despised the God who he was convinced didn’t exist, and belittled this God’s followers. He sounds like a terrific fellow, a larger than life figure who was a great husband, father and friend, not to mention dinner guest and host. It’s not nice to speak ill of the dead, but that was a courtesy Hitchens didn’t himself follow.
Men of brilliance, like Hitchens undoubtedly was, are often blind to their own, well, blind spots. He poured scorn and bile on the religious in a way that his personal charm belied. Human beings are often contradictory creatures. The Jewish and Christian religions which he so despised give plausible explanation as to why this is so: human beings are fallen, sinful creatures who are made in the image of God. As such they are capable of transcendent goodness and beauty and truth, as well as the most vile and despicable evil. How someone like Hitchens who believed that all of reality is solely material accounts for this is not plausible to very many of his fellow human beings. Yet he acted as if some transcendent reality were the most ridiculous, ludicrous and harmful of delusions.
We know, as Jesus says in Matthew 5 in his exhortation to love your enemies, that God sends his sun to rise on the evil as well as the good, and for the rain to fall on the righteous and unrighteous. Reading the tender remembrances of Mr. Hitchens’ wife I marveled yet again at how God graciously bestows inestimable blessings on his rebellious creatures, even those who mock and ridicule him and his followers.
I get Google alerts when Christopher Hitchens is discussed on the inter webs, so I got this. As a true beliver, I suppose you are meant to look generous when you write admiringly of Hitchens and his wife. But even so, you do what so many other religious folk do when they discuss Hitchens and atheists and atheism, and it’s a shame because it belittles you. To wit, you assert that Hitchens “despised” god. That’s like saying Hitchens “despised” garden fairies. Hitchens didn’t see any reason to believe there is a god, so characterizing him as despising something he didn’t believe existed is simply you supplying a colorful and provocative description of the man to please what must be the way most of your readers WANT to believe Hitchens and atheists feel about your god. In truth, we feel exactly about your god as you feel about Zeus. Do you despise Zeus? Hitchens never railed against your god, he just said he wasn’t there, and pointed out, at length, why that is a good thing, which I’m sure is offense enough to those under the magic spell of religion. So why not just leave it at that?
Did he “despise” religions, as you assert? You may be closer to the truth there, since religions do in fact exist, and are frequently the sole motivators for crimes against humanity. What’s not to despise?
Yours in a better understanding of Christopher Hitchens and his brethren,
Coach
‘To wit, you assert that Hitchens “despised” god. That’s like saying Hitchens “despised” garden fairies.’ – Jim Haggerty (above).
This so-called argument (i.e. if you believe in God, you may as well believe in fairies, Zeus, spaghetti-monsters et cetera), is really old. Not to mention fallacious, misleading, asinine and employed only by those who obviously don’t have a clue, so I will do you the favour of (trying) to enlighten you.
Why people believe in God:
There are many reasons, too many to adequately list here, but one of the major reasons has to do with the problem of infinite regress that is encountered when one tries to explain the origins of the cosmos via purely mechanistic processes. It is asked ‘How did the universe come to be?’. The atheist responds with ‘Oh, the Big Bang’. ‘What caused the Big Bang?’ Atheist: ‘A Singularity’. Theist: ‘What caused the singularity?’ Atheist: ‘Mass/Energy’. What caused… ? So on, ad infinitum.
Anyway, the point I am trying to make here is that ‘nothing contingent, composite, finite, temporal, complex, and mutable can account for its own existence, and that even an infinite series of such things can never be the source or ground of its own being, but must depend on some source of actuality beyond itself.’ – David B. Hart, from the article ‘Believe It Or Not’. The obvious, the self-evident, answer to this impasse can really only be that the universe we observe and are a part of had to have an origin that transcended it, a source that was, and is, not bound in any way, shape or form by the limitations imposed upon anything within that universe (ex. spatio-temporal, entropic etc.).
Why people do NOT believe in tooth fairies or Zeus:
They are fictional, and everyone knows this. Everyone knows this because these entities lack supporting evidence in their favour, they are not needed to actually account for anything that one can observe or detect, and they do not serve any useful function.
Peter, great response! You gotta love the atheists with absolutely no humility. I feel sorry for them, really. Man’s knowledge, as any honest atheist would agree, is infinitesimal, yet we are to believe in spite of our finiteness that a supreme being is an absolute impossibility? The reason Jim’s analogies are toothless (pardon the pun), is that the witness of the Bible corresponds to our encounter with reality, especially human reality.
The Bible talks about something we call “the fall” where man decided he wanted to be like God, and thus usurp his throne. This state we are in is called sin, which puts us in rebellion against God and his law. This alienation is described in Scripture as mankind having a “heart of stone” and as we being “at enmity with God.” We in our natural fallen hearts are literally at war with God, we hate him because we stand under judgment for our rebellion.
When “bad things happen to good people” what do most of us do, probably all of us? We shake our fists at God, we are angry at how a supposedly all powerful and good God could let something so bad happen. I came across a powerful example of this with the Band King’s X. They were known as Christians in their early years, even making an album called “Faith, Hope and Love.” But the lead singer struggled with homosexuality, and I guess never could overcome it, so he rejected his faith. I purchased a CD some time after this had happened, and the bitterness and anger toward a God they now claimed didn’t exist was palpable. I had to eventually throw it away, because it was so offensive.
I don’t say this kind of thing proves God’s existence, only that it serves as evidence that lends plausibility to that existence. Needless to say, my children never got pissed off at the tooth fairy when she(he?) didn’t show up!
Ah, I love it when theists get all butthurt :’)