Christopher Hitchens Dies, Age 62

Discussion in 'Art & Culture' started by GeoffP, Dec 16, 2011.

  1. Stoniphi obscurely fossiliferous Valued Senior Member

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    Denial is both the most common coping strategy employed by us humans and the least effective.

    "The island is not sinking."
     
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  3. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Hitchens and Kim Jong
    Dead in one week.
    The Babble Bashers will think their prayers are being answered.
     
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  5. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    Yes seemingly, and that's strange, isn't it? Is it part of some more elemental process? If so, why? Surely it can't be an effective response to adversity. Does a chimp live in denial? Does a crocodile live in denial?
     
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  7. Bells Staff Member

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  8. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    Finally someone spotted it. That's worth one point. The rest of you should hang your heads in shame.
     
  9. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    It just exposes a weakness in their own faith that they would even care what Hitchens might have thought on his deathbed. An argument should be judged based on the merits of its substance, not the fact that Abe Lincoln or Christopher Hitchens or Kim Kardashian said so.
     
  10. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    Humh. I wonder what Christopher Hitchens might have said about that.
     
  11. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    kim Jong was one the world's most worshipped religious leaders. Hitchens would be happy about his death too.
     
  12. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Your reasoning is typically liberal wishful thinking. You don't wish to think there is anything basically wrong with religion because it contradicts your ideology that all the world's religions are just different ways of practicing the same kind of thing and that they can all get along in a perfect multicultural world. So in this context, Hitchens must be acting out a personal vendetta against religion due to his mother's death, not that religion is a major source of world conflict. You further make the fallacy that because human reasons can be found for some aspects of religious persecution, that religion has nothing to do with ALL cases of religious persecution and violence. If anything this has to do with the falsity of religion, since it's a human creation and can serve human ends. But it also makes good people do bad things, like hate their own children because they violate some religious rule. And faith makes political and religious leaders above criticism. You may say that priests wanted to molest children anyway, but faith gave them the infrastructure of authority to get away with it. You aren't going to trust your children with just some dude, but if he pretends to be holy and above earthly desires, you don't question it.

    We don't worship Hitchens, we admire him for his eloquence and clarity. We don't hate people, we hate that religion robs people of something that makes us human, our ability to use reason to distinguish truth from fiction.

    By the way, Hitchens did write extensively on capitalism and Marxism.
     
    Last edited: Dec 19, 2011
  13. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    If you watched his recent interview with Anderson Cooper, he said that religious fundamentalists would probably start throwing around wild claims about him accepting "God" on his deathbed. He said that if such stories are passed around, they're either lies or else the byproduct of something he might say while tripping out hard on painkillers. I'm sure at the end of the day he'd readily laugh at the fact so many people care about what he says just because of who he is and not because of any specific arguments for or against an issue; doubly so for those who've convinced themselves beyond any doubt that they speak for some abstract divinity and want to co-opt his words and views to their cause.
     
  14. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    I resent your implication that I would used his words to the advantage of the great Myuu. Such things are beneath him, and beneath me, his godhead on earth.

    As for caring about him strictly because of who he is: to whom are you referring? I admire his writings because I find them eloquent, poignant, thought-provoking, frank, logical, and because they piss off Sam and Tiassa.

    I'm not sad he's dead because I'll miss his label; I'm sad because a great polemicist with a solid moral grounding is gone. He shocked even me at times with his comments, but his support of same forced me to re-evaluate my positions on issues. He changed my mind. That's a good thing.
     
  15. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    I +1 to that one. I wonder if there's a gloating petition going around.
     
  16. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    We may not have Hitch to kick around any more, but at least we still have the bemusing spectacle of his inferiors tying themselves into rhetorical knots in search of some way to dismiss - rather than address - his output. And always in visible ignorance of major facets of the guy and his work, to boot.

    All of which I've long found to be the case study par excellence on the ineffectual left.
     
  17. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Thank you for that, Geoff

    Well, at least the hypothesis is reaffirmed. That is, I'm sort of chuckling at that complaint from you. After all, you're pretty fluent with the approach.

    However, in the larger picture, the fact that you offer no real answer to the issue is apparent.

    Like Dawkins, Hitchens' criticisms of religion are valid in a pissing contest. But the reality is that even if we purged humanity of theistic religion, the same human influences of greed that pervert the great holy texts will still exist. As such, it does not seem that Hitchens' criticism is really intended to accomplish anything but denigrate various groups of people. That is, he does not demonstrate a similar antipathy toward the neurosis that arises when the primal human animal attempts to participate in that quixotic venture known as "civilization".

    Such narrow approaches only lead to the familiar adage, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
     
  18. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    That criticism is so generic as to make me wonder whether you've actually read much of any of Hitchens' output.

    That should make a handy template for dismissing anything critical that anyone has to say about anything, as misguided and tangential.

    And since the "groups of people" getting denigrated appear to be, well, damned near every major human population on Earth, I'm wondering what the implication about his motives or outlook or whatever was supposed to be. Is this an oblique charge of anti-Islamic bigotry? Because this is a guy famous for going after Mother Teresa and Gandhi as well, not to mention Thatcher and Stalin. So, exactly which "group" is he supposed to be an overwrought shill for?
     
  19. chimpkin C'mon, get happy! Registered Senior Member

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    Reminds me of my mom...

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    Not the leathery skin but the river in question...
     
  20. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    You're welcome; regroup and attack again

    God, not this crap again. You throw up a couple of long-versed complaints, neither of which panned out in the most basic element: being familiar with the body of work you're dismissing. I think I know the name of this tune of yours: ad hominem and dive for the deck. Is there a reason I should take your request for a solution seriously, knowing that it will just come back in another disjoint and implausible form?

    He's addressed both bosses. Your almost-adage above is so broad as to be completely useless: it amounts to the assertion that diff'rence is bad cos it makes for unequal power balances. Well, no shit. Unfortunately, it's also possible to have such differentiation without the bias of this new synthesis of human greed. Enjoy the Kool-aid while you sort out your overwhelming personality issues in this new pissing contest of your creation.
     
  21. chimpkin C'mon, get happy! Registered Senior Member

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    Hitchens. Even dead he starts arguments.
     
  22. Bells Staff Member

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    He never claimed differently though. His anger was that religion fed on that greed, made it worse. It was not the people who believed that angered him as much as it was the leadership of religious and non-religious organisations, those who preyed on the insecurities of mankind to further their own means.

    And I think that is what many people missed about Hitchens.
     
  23. Bells Staff Member

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    You know, it was actually my very Catholic parents who pointed me in Hitchen's direction and they too agreed with some of what he had to say, especially about the Catholic leadership. My own mother, who admired Mother Theresa for example, will be the first to state that she was manipulative and had a very public persona that she wanted to portray, but that in private, she was driven to succeed, not for the public as she tried to portray herself, but for her own means. My mother read Hitchen's articles at Slate, one could almost say religiously. While she did not agree with all that he said and like me, found some of it quite repulsive, she could not deny that some of his observations were correct.

    Like his accusation against Pope Benedict, how he was not interested in defrocking and reporting a priest that used the confessional to rape hundreds of children, but was more interested in lowering the age of confession for children, which put more children in the path of priests who used that to commit further abuse. And how Pope Benedict was more interested in preserving the Church and blatantly ignored and protected paedophiles. That is where Hitchens excelled and for that, he should be praised.
     

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