Michael Gerson offers a very moving article about the noble atheist. There are many nuggets, but I’ll only quote the concluding paragraph:
At the Pew Forum, Hitchens was asked a mischievous question: What positive lesson have you learned from Christianity? He replied, with great earnestness: the transience and ephemeral nature of power and all things human. But some things may last longer than he imagines, including examples of courage, loyalty and moral conviction.
Read the whole thing.
December 16th, 2011 | 12:41 pm
Can you please explain to me what was so noble about Christopher Hitchens? The attacks on Mother Teresa, whom he called a fanatic and a fraud, among other things, didn’t seem particularly noble. His atheist tracts–blustering, bludgeoning, full of historical inaccuracies, philosophically simplistic–didn’t seem too noble either; they were certainly successful rhetorically, though, and I would suspect helped destroy the faiths of many. Is that noble?
It’s true that he was a great writer and it’s true that we can all pray, like we would for any soul, that God may have mercy on him. But I don’t understand the fawning praise from religious quarters.
December 16th, 2011 | 1:33 pm
Sometimes I agreed with Hitchens (sort of on Iraq); most times I did not. His view of religion was stereotyped and shallow. I’m sure he had his good qualities like most of us do, but unless burning strawmen is a noble endeavor, “noble” isn’t really a word I would use to describe him.
December 16th, 2011 | 1:37 pm
Robert,
Thank you. Christopher was a great man as the world measures such things, but he was also the most famous and passionate blasphemer alive.
I am sorry he died, sorrier that he lived as he did, and heartbroken that what is left of Christendom should weep for a Pontius Pilate who meant it.
God forgive us all.
Richard
December 16th, 2011 | 2:24 pm
Egad, Gerson can’t even quote St. Irenaeus correctly. The so-called “Hammer of the Heretics” almost certainly didn’t mean Hitchens when he wrote, the glory of God is man fully alive; moreover man’s life is the vision of God: if God’s revelation through creation has already obtained life for all the beings that dwell on earth, how much more will the Word’s manifestation of the Father obtain life for those who see God. Sure, I added some emphasis there; on the other hand, truncating the quote as Gerson does quite changes the meaning…
December 16th, 2011 | 3:53 pm
I enjoyed his intellect, his wit, his command of language, and his pomposity. I enjoyed, even more, RJN’s ability to eviscerate his arguments and rantings with equal panache
December 17th, 2011 | 1:44 am
And, thank you, Hitch, for the courage to stand up and say things you carefully reasoned to be true, even among those you knew full well would be unhappy to hear them.
December 17th, 2011 | 5:09 pm
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled”. While most readers of this site will question the appropriateness of Hitchens’ judgements, no-one will doubt the hunger and the thirst – which put most of us to shame. This is not to approve of all he did and said, but it is churlish not to praise virtue where it flourishes.
December 18th, 2011 | 6:28 am
Apparently, he loathed Judaism most of all: “In short, Judaism is to blame for everything Hitchens hates about monotheism as a whole. ‘As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire,’ he writes of the father of Enlightenment anti-Semitism, ‘that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam.’ ”
Lots more at http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2011/12/16/main-feature/1/the-trouble-with-hitchens/e
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