Readers’ tributes to Hitchens: Part 6

December 23, 2011 • 4:11 am

There are still enough of these for a few more days, and, surprisingly, a few are still trickling in.  If you have something worth showing, do send it along.

Landon Ross sent in two pictures, and I decided to use both of them. In the first, he’s with Hitch:

One could tell he was always “on” by his eyes. The only words I can muster are “Christopher, I cared more about you than anyone I’ve never loved in person, and I’ll miss you.”

And the second from Landon:

Here’s my best (and lacking) approximation of the what-are-you-looking-at face he so often made. He’d probably have scoffed at anything more extravagant than JW Black, but, well, there you go. It’s all I had. Here’s to Hitch.

From Bertrand:

Here’s my participation. I’m calling it Inspiration.

Artwork and words from Gary K.

Hitch.  I never read anything by him until God is Not Great and I have not stopped thinking about what he had to say there, in other articles, and in debates ever since.  He was a wordsmith par excellence and more importantly, he took on religiosity, grabbing the bullshit by the horns. Reading him and others of his ilk such as Dawkins and Harris convinced me that we shall not escape our shackles until we stop playing with imaginary friends and taking instructions from them.  Hitch told us to grow up.  Thank you, Hitch, we needed that.

From David Glück, a photo perfectly expressing Hitch’s contrarianism:

Taken by my son at TAM5 with Hitchens help.

And from Carroll, lest we neglect that there was more than one restorative in Hitchens’s life:

I don’t do amber restoratives. I quit smoking. But I can follow Hitch’s advice to make sure the water is boiling before it hits the tea.

North Korea is a theocracy

December 22, 2011 • 12:51 pm

I hope that you managed to watch a few of the videos about North Korea that I recommended the other day (I highly recommend The Vice Guide to Korea, in three parts, and A Day in the Life of North Korea, in four parts).

At any rate, have a look at a short article by Tom Chivers in the December 19 Telegraph: “Kim Jong-il was a Lefty atheist in the same way that Hitler was a conservative Catholic.” This should dispel any lingering doubts that North Korea is not an example of the evils of atheism.  Here are two excerpts:

Kim Jong-il, the Shining Star of Mount Paekdu, was not, of course, born in a log cabin on the mountain at all, but in exile in Siberia. (I am also unable to confirm the reports of talking birds and celestial miracles.) But the birth of a great Son to a great Father in humble-yet-holy circumstances, accompanied by heavenly signs, is very familiar, as is death and reincarnation. Mithras, a pagan sun-god, was apparently born of a virgin to great miracles, and died and was reincarnated. That story has many obvious parallels to that of Jesus Christ. In Greek mythology, Dionysius, the son of the great god Zeus, was killed and resurrected. . .

None of this is intended to mean that religious societies are all going to be like North Korea, or that religion implies dictatorship, or that all atheists are lovely people. But to suggest that North Korea is what happens when atheism holds sway in a country is equally ridiculous. Saying Kim Jong-il was a Lefty atheist is like saying that Hitler was a conservative Catholic, and we all know that that is very silly indeed.

The funniest miracle of Kim Jong-i’s life is one recounted by UK Reuters, taken from official Korean news sources:
And legend has it that the first time Kim played golf, he shot 11 holes-in-one and carded a score about 20 strokes lower than the best round ever for a professional event over 18 holes.
The first time he played golf! The man was surely a god!

The notion that dictatorships like that of North Korea are not atheist regimes but theocracies—complete with godheads, miracles, slavish worship, and sacred books—was best expressed in a talk on the “Axis of Evil” that Christopher Hitchens gave in California.  I have never seen him give a better talk, and it appears to have been done entirely without notes.

The man was amazing, and the talk is mesmerizing. It shows that you don’t need Powerpoint slides to keep an audience entranced. When you see the passion with which he speaks, perhaps you can better understand why he persisted in his misguided position on the invasion of Iraq. It was not an idle opinion, but one based on his compassion for the oppressed and deep-seated hatred of tyranny.

If you want to see the video of Saddam Hussein’s purge of the Baath party in 1979, which Hitch describes so graphically beginning at 5:24, here it is as part of a documentary:

h/t: Dom

Readers’ wildlife photos: frogs in lust

December 22, 2011 • 11:01 am

Andrew Sinnott has contributed a pair of lovely frogs, along with the story:

I thought I’d appeal to your amphibian soft spot in submitting this photo for consideration for the website. It’s a pair of Smilisca cyanosticta (blue spotted tree frog I think is the common name) in amplexus [JAC: “amplexus” is the grasping of a female by a male amphibian just before spawning] that I shot in Belize in the summer of 2009.

I was there as a research assistant for the University of Manchester studying Agalychnis moreletii and Agalychnis callidryas and for all sorts of reasons it was really hit and miss if we saw more than a handful of either species, let alone any other, but this night was like a goldmine for an amateur herper! On this six foot wide, four foot high bush overhanging the pond there were maybe eighty frogs, of I think six different species. At one point a colleague held up a two foot twig that had six or seven moreletii males clambering over each other to get to the nearest female.

I snapped a ton of shots and was lucky enough to get this one with my cheap kit lens and flash gun I got for £20 on ebay. I’m particularly proud of it because it’s a shot of natural behaviour that isn’t staged in any way. I haven’t been back to Belize (or any other rainforest for that matter!) but that that trip was one of the best experiences of my life so far.

Guest post: Two HuffPo pieces claim Hitchens for religion

December 22, 2011 • 7:01 am

Reader Sigmund takes on two recent pieces that have implied that, well, maybe Hitchens had some form of faith after all.

__________________

The Huffington Post takes on the “religious” Christopher Hitchens

by Sigmund

The Huffington Post and its never-ending supply of buy-my-book religious apologists has decided that now is the perfect occasion to tackle Christopher Hitchens.

More than take him on, they attempt to trounce his most potent argument, the moral challenge, and if that were not enough, go on in a second post to declare that Hitchens was in fact religious!

Back in the real world, we can look on only with a mixture of amazement and disgust at the base antics of those who seek to further ‘moderate’ religion by demonizing and misquoting the non-religious.

In the first piece, “Christopher Hitchens is ‘not great’“, by Kabil Helminski—a Sufi ‘Shaik’—we find an attempt to answer the famous “Hitchens Challenge,” an attempt that is almost breathtaking in the level of arrogance and bigotry it reveals.

The challenge itself is spelled out by Helminski while describing a debate between Hitchens and the journalist Chris Hedges:

During the debate Christopher Hitchens kept offering a challenge to Chris Hedges and to the audience: Show me one moral act undertaken by a religious person that could not have been done by someone who doesn’t believe in God. The challenge went unanswered by Mr. Hedges and understandably by the audience of 800, since there was no microphone for any audience member to counter the interruptions and insults of Mr. Hitchens.

Well, let’s ignore the ad hominem insults and see where we get with Helminski, who says:

I would like to take up that challenge.

Hooray!  Very brave of Helminski to attempt a challenge that has been met with nothing but po-faced silence by practically every one of Hitchens debating opponents.

For starters, I recall something Rev. Charles Gibbs, Director of the United Religions Initiative, said: “Go anywhere in the world, as far down the dirt roads into those corners of the world where there is no civil administration and no government aid, go to the poorest of the poor and you will find there people of faith working to help the helpless and forgotten.” You will not find armchair intellectuals there. You will not find people inspired by Bertrand Russell, or Voltaire, or Christopher Hitchens helping out.

Pardon?  There are no atheists working to help others in the world? There are no humanitarian aid organizations or charities? Medicine Sans Frontiers, Amnesty International, Oxfam, The Red Cross?  None of these count?

Does Helminski even realize what he is suggesting, that all charity or humanitarian aid is religiously based or inspired? That no atheist will work to help the poor? If he does realize the implications, he certainly doesn’t act as if he cares.

Helmiski spends most of the rest of the article decrying secular regimes (naturally those of Hitler, Stalin and Mao are the examples chosen) and complaining that Hitchens was somehow cynically tone deaf towards the ‘spiritual’ side of life.

Perhaps Helminski should have spoken to a fellow apologist who tries an even bolder strategy to destroy Hitchens’ atheistic credentials.

If ever an occasion presented when the entire body of a post could be written with just two letters and a full stop, I doubt we’d see a better example than the next one:

Was Christopher Hitchens Religious? 

Instead we have the Huffington Post version of Lady Hope, the Reverend Marilyn Sewell, informing us of her conversations with Hitchens during an interview she conducted for a Portland media site.

According to Sewell, she encountered “a surprisingly religious Christopher Hitchens. He ended up using words like numinous and transcendent and soul.”

So, Hitchens was either secretly religious all along or had become so in his final year.

And had, somehow, forgotten to mention it to anyone.

Sewell describes herself as a Unitarian Universalist minister and liberal Christian and as such takes the kind of open-minded, unbiased approach to Hitchens and his views that we have come to expect from modern moderate theists.

I didn’t want to do the interview. As I told editor Randy Gragg, “I don’t like Christopher Hitchens. He is rude. He is a bully. So why should I help get his work before more people?

Unsurprisingly, the original interview doesn’t reveal much other than Hitchens on his usual form, discounting supernatural explanations and humoring Sewell, who comes across as a happy-clappy religious type, desperate to distance her own beliefs from the bad, fundamentalist version of faith, and only too willing to co-opt any artistic metaphor used by Hitchens as proof positive that he secretly believed in a spiritual dimension.

The context in which Hitchens uses terms like “numinous” and “transcendent” defies any religious association but we should know by now that quote mining is standard practice in defense of Jeebus.

It is perhaps best to finish with Hitchens’s original words to illustrate the travesty of using them to paint him as religious:

We know we’re going to die, which gives us a lot to think about, and we have a need for, what I would call, “the transcendent” or “the numinous” or even “the ecstatic” that comes out in love and music, poetry, and landscape. I wouldn’t trust anyone who didn’t respond to things of that sort. But I think the cultural task is to separate those impulses and those needs and desires from the supernatural and, above all, from the superstitious.

Readers’ tributes to Hitchens: Part 5

December 22, 2011 • 4:09 am

We’ll have a few more days of readers’ tributes to the life of Christopher Hitchens.

This one is from Dominik Miketa:

This photo was taken in the Lindsay Bar of Balliol College, Oxford, where Hitch spent his undergraduate years reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics. People at Balliol are so proud of the great man: you can see my friend Emily kissing Hitch’s picture on the wall. We intend to toast to Christopher when we go back to Balliol after the holidays and somehow I expect the bar will run out of Johnnie Walker on that night.

Here’s a drawing and some words from Henry McQuale:

For Hitch, who didn’t make me an atheist, but who made me a non-pusillanimous one.Thanks to him I realized that disbelief is not enough and that harshness is sometimes necessary, because there are far worse things than disrespect towards cherished beliefs: just as it is immoral not to urgently warn who is about to drink poison thinking it will quench his thirst (specially when the bottle is passed promising the freshest of waters), now I know that the pusillanimity of being quiet about the evils of religion is an act of unforgivable negligence towards mankind, for as Hitch brilliantly showed, there are few poisons deadlier than religion, and religion poisons everything.

From k.m.:

Here’s my submission in honour of Hitch. I chose a few of my favourite photos of him, mounted them on cork (for obvious reasons), and hung them on my xmas tree. A cheeky nod to this great man. I’ve cried too much in the last couple of days to include myself in any photo, so I hope this will do.

And from Aja, who wanted to thank Hitch for his “mental illumination:

Hitchens always made observations that cast an issue in a new light.  I would read his books and essays and it was like a light went on.

From reader Jacobus van Beverningk:

This is a picture I took in January 2007 at James Randi’s TAM5 (The Amazing Meeting #5), in Las Vegas. It’s as if he’s in debate with his own projected image. Fond memories!

Catholics get an out: more on the Shroud of Turin

December 21, 2011 • 1:33 pm

I had forgotten that while radiocarbon dating in 1988 from three separate labs showed that the Shroud of Turin likely dated to between 1260 and 1390 A.D., the results were criticized by other workers because the bit used for dating may have been contaminated by bacteria, candle smoke, or a fire that damaged the Shroud.  It’s even been suggested that the labs fed each other secret information, so that the dates weren’t independent, or that the piece of the shroud sampled was from a later repair.

I haven’t followed the debates about whether the weave of the shroud was not characteristic of first-century cloth, and wasn’t developed till later, but it does make one skeptical.  And that’s on top of the way the image appears, which isn’t what one expects from a shroud wrapped around a body, and of the distorted proportions of the body.

But all this can be settled. Just take a piece of the cloth from an area that all experts agree is original (perhaps the Vatican won’t allow it, though), and subject it to completely independent testing in different labs, with strict quality control.  If the Shroud dates from anything after the first century, it’s a fake.

. . .or so I thought. It turns out that there’s a loophole.  As The Vatican Insider states (their emphasis):

This seems to be the core of the so-called “mystery of the Shroud”:  regardless of the age the Shroud, whether it is medieval (1260 – 1390) as shown by the controversial dating by radiocarbon, or older as indicated by other investigations, and regardless of the actual importance of controversial historical documents on the existence of the Shroud in the years preceding 1260, the most important question, the “question of questions” remains the same: how did that body image appear on the Shroud?”.

In other words, even if the date of the cloth is wildly off, it still shows the genuine, miraculously imprinted image of Jesus, which appeared on the shroud as it regularly does on toast, pancakes, and tortillas.

Hitch dissing: the worst of the worst, and two rebuttals

December 21, 2011 • 11:09 am

Several readers sent me Ross Douthat’s self-satisfied “eulogy” of Hitchens in Sunday’s New York Times, “The believer’s atheist.”  It contained ridiculous statements like these:

At the very least, Hitchens’s antireligious writings carried a whiff of something absent in many of atheism’s less talented apostles — a hint that he was not so much a disbeliever as a rebel, and that his atheism was mostly a political romantic’s attempt to pick a fight with the biggest Tyrant he could find. . .

. . . But my strongest memory comes from a Washington dinner party two years ago, when he cornered me in the pantry and insisted on having a long argument about the Gospel narratives. The point he was particularly eager to make was this: “Suppose Jesus of Nazareth did rise from the dead — what would that prove, anyway?”

It’s a line whose sheer cussedness cuts to the heart of Hitchens’s charm. But it also hints at the way that atheism — especially a public and famous atheism — can become as self-defended as any religious dogma, impervious to any new fact or unexpected revelation.

. . . In his very brave and very public dying, though, one could see again why so many religious people felt a kinship with him. When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood.”

It’s smug, dismissive of Hitchens’s absolutely serious attacks on religion, and gets in a few licks at atheism as well.  What on earth are the “new facts or unexpected revelations” that have made us waver?  And really—are we atheists bereft of hope and endeavor?  If that were true, there would be a lot less science!

But enough, for author Charles Pierce absolutely demolishes Douthat’s “eulogy” in a new piece at Esquire, “Ross Douthat, gravedigger” (thanks to EvolutionBlog for calling this to my attention).

In response to the Jesus reference, Pierce says this:

(No, actually, Ross, it hints at the fact that you were asked a question you couldn’t answer. And, forgive me as a struggling Papist, but is there a “new fact or unexpected revelation” concerning Jesus Of Nazareth that I’ve missed? Other than Tim Tebow, I’m not aware of one. Did you get knocked out of a cab on the way to Damascus? Was there a new scroll dug up at Qum’ran? Did I miss an encyclical? And “sheer cussedness” Really? I’ve heard Hitchens described in a hundred ways since he died, but this is the first time he has been implicitly compared to Granny Clampett. Whooo, doggies!)

There’s a lot more as Pierce takes Douthat apart line by line.  Goodtimez.

But for sheer bile and stupidity, as well as incoherence, nothing beats Maniza Naqvi‘s piece in 3 Quarks Daily, “Hitched in history to crimes against humanity.” Not only is it loaded with superfluous invective, making one wonder why Ms. Naqvi is so angry, but, more important, the piece is virtually without content.  Even at his most strident, at least Hitch had something to say.  Here’s a sample of Naqvi’s prose:

That toad’s [Hitchens’s] words hitch him to being part of the language, literature and actions that define the racist, supremacist and fascist ethos of mass murderers who are obsessed with God all the while denying their real obsession as if to say: I don’t deny —my orientation—because I have a greater obsession than that which I need to hide: I actually do believe in a God—in a God for the right people–a white God.

The toad, an inebriated toxic decay wrapped inside the blubber of mid life crisis, appeared to himself, a legend, from a bar stool smoky view of the mirror. So he hitched his sense of self to some confusion with Dorian Gray . .

. . . He must have honed his craft in the shower room of his public school—offering himself up—whilst escaping by being entertaining and witty from those bullies whom he must’ve perceived, in his classist mind, to be his superiors—so that he, would himself survive and gang up with them on inflicting maximum harm on those whom he considered unworthy of kindness—guileless victims, those who were not able to fight back.

Before this essay I had a modicum of respect for 3 Quarks Daily—and, to be fair—they’ve since published a critique of this piece by Tauriq Moosa, “How not to write: Maniza Naqvi’s piece on Hichens“—but one wonders what the webmasters were thinking when they put up such a juvenile and empty rant.