{"id":2594,"date":"2011-12-19T17:14:42","date_gmt":"2011-12-20T01:14:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=2594"},"modified":"2011-12-19T20:51:01","modified_gmt":"2011-12-20T04:51:01","slug":"the-doomed-glorious-rearguard-battle-of-christopher-hitchens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=2594","title":{"rendered":"The Doomed, Glorious Rearguard Battle of Christopher Hitchens"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo credit: Ensceptico (grabbed from Wikipedia)<\/p><\/div>\n

I am by no means a compulsive student of Christopher Hitchens. \u00a0I\u2019ve yet to read God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything<\/em><\/a>, although I certainly agree with the sentiment.\u00a0 (I haven\u2019t read Dawkins\u2019 The God Delusion<\/em><\/a> either; not that I wouldn\u2019t get off on the inevitable preaching-to-the-choir reinforcement, but one tends to learn more by reading polemics written by the opposition<\/a>.\u00a0 Even if the main thing one learns<\/a> is that such folks turn their brains off when it comes to matters of faith.) \u00a0I wasn\u2019t even aware, until quite recently, that Hitchens was such an enthusiastic cheerleader for the US\u2019s invasion of Iraq. \u00a0I first encountered him via his brilliantly vitriolic The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice<\/em><\/a>, which presents compelling evidence that even this icon of Christianity \u2014 this saint-in-the-making acknowledged even by unbelievers to be a paragon of goodness and charity \u2014 was in fact a charlatan and a hypocrite who hung around with crooks, took dirty money, and deliberately kept those under her care in appalling conditions for no better reason than to further the image and the brand. \u00a0If you haven\u2019t read it, you should.\u00a0 Odds are, by the time you\u2019ve finished you\u2019ll want to dig up Ma Terry\u2019s desiccated carcass for no better reason than to punch it in the fucking nose.<\/p>\n

I would also point you to any of Hitchens\u2019s lectures, or (more revealingly) his debates with so-called \u201cpeople of faith\u201d on the existence of deities or the worthiness of religious institutions. They\u2019re all over Youtube; a personal favorite is the five-part \u201cIntelligence Squared debate<\/a>\u201d in which Hitchens and Stephen Fry utterly demolish an African archbishop and a Tory MP over the question of whether “the Catholic Church [is] a force of good in the world”. \u00a0These are enough to make the man a personal hero in my eyes.<\/p>\n

There was no last-second conversion (as far as we know); no deathbed repentance. \u00a0He did not hide his light under a bushel.\u00a0 It shone its acid contempt on invisible ass-hamsters, the charlatans and child-rapists who channel them, and the deluded hordes who buy into the fairy-tale, right up until carcinoma snuffed it out.\u00a0 Now he is dead \u2014 and what a curious, oxymoronic world he has left behind.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>You probably know that he left behind a world in which the atheist demographic is trusted even less than gays and Muslims<\/a>. (Yes, from an objective perspective this makes about as much sense as comparing the trustworthiness of dentists and tropical fish breeders, and I wish I could make a flip remark here about this being a purely \u2018Murrican<\/em> perspective; but anybody who thinks that North America has cornered the market on homophobia might want to take a look overseas<\/a>.) \u00a0What has come to light more recently is research out of UBC and the University of Oregon<\/a> suggesting that atheists are actually on a par with rapists<\/em> when it comes to public trust \u2014 a deliciously ironic finding, given the infamous predilection for child rape on display in so many of the institutions that would arrogate unto themselves the mantle of Moral Compass. And yet, for all the approbation heaped upon us Godless heathens \u2014 for all the pundits and evangelicals who\u2019d take as axiomatic the claim that anyone who does not believe in sky fairies must by definition be an amoral psychopath \u2014 Hitchens also left behind a world in which the evidence suggests that not only are secular folks at least as \u201cethical\u201d as those of believers<\/a>, but that secular societies “come closest to achieving practical ‘cultures of life’ that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion<\/a>“.\u00a0 Atheists also tend to be more law-abiding<\/a> than those who identify themselves as religious (or at least, as one commentator admits<\/a>, we are simply more adept at getting away with our crimes). (I exclude myself from the latter category for obvious reasons.)<\/p>\n

In other words, Hitchens left a world in which the very demographic vilified for their lack of morals by the faithful is actually, according to the available data, more moral than the faithful themselves.<\/p>\n

You could cite any number of reasons why such obviously-falsifiable prejudice remains so predominant \u2014 starting with plain old-fashioned peer pressure, ranging through cognitive glitches such as Confirmation Bias<\/a> and the Semelweiss Reflex<\/a>, right up to Xie et al<\/em>\u2019s network analysis<\/a> suggesting that a position held by as little as 10% of a population can become a societal norm just so long as the core group of believers is sufficiently closed-minded.\u00a0 Yet\u00a0 I\u2019d be hard-pressed to come up with a solution for any of them that didn\u2019t involve rewiring Human nature from the spark plugs up. \u00a0All too often, such phenomena render our beliefs immune to evidence or reasoned persuasion, no matter how articulate the argument.\u00a0 Christopher Hitchens, in other words, left behind a world chock-full of minds that no amount of impassioned eloquence would ever be able to change. \u00a0Christopher Hitchens was bound to lose.\u00a0 He probably knew it.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t stop him, though.\u00a0 For that and other things, I salute him.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am by no means a compulsive student of Christopher Hitchens. \u00a0I\u2019ve yet to read God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, although I certainly agree with the sentiment.\u00a0 (I haven\u2019t read Dawkins\u2019 The God Delusion either; not that I wouldn\u2019t get off on the inevitable preaching-to-the-choir reinforcement, but one tends to learn more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ass-hamsters","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2594"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2607,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2594\/revisions\/2607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}