In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011

[Dementia_Madness]

I am sad today for this loss.

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/12/In-Memoriam-Christopher-Hitchens-19492011

“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue. He died in their presence, too, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly.

http://michellemalkin.com/2011/12/16/christopher-hitchens-r-i-p-and-an-atheist-christmas-remembrance/

Agree or disagree with him (and we certainly did, jovially so, on some of his extreme atheist stunts), Hitchens was a trenchant analyst and a naturalized American original. His writings on Muslim jihadists, Islamic rage boy syndrome, and sharia law were especially compelling — and his fearless work on those topics was cited here numerous times over the years.

 

May he rest in peace.....

*sad*

http://www.slate.com/authors.christopher_hitchens.html

http://bigjournalism.com/dloesch/2011/12/15/rip-christopher-hitchens/

Ironically, Chris Hitchens was a formidable force in my conversion from liberalism. I discovered his book No One Left To Lie To about the time that I left the Democrat party, when I was 20 years-old.
It confirmed my worst suspicions about the people I had once so believed in and forever made me a faithful follower of cynicism. Ever the atheist even in the foxhole, he cautioned his friends and fans to not “trouble deaf Heaven with prayers for me,” but most did, anyway.

[Dementia_Madness]

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/

How odd it is to hear of your own brother’s death on an early morning radio bulletin. How odd it is for a private loss to be a public event. I wouldn’t normally dream of writing about such a thing here, and I doubt if many people would expect me to. It is made even odder by the fact that I am a minor celebrity myself. And that the , ah, complex relationship between me and my brother has been public property.  I have this morning turned down three invitations to talk on the radio about my brother. I had a powerful feeling that it would be wrong to do so, not immediately explicable but strong enough to persuade me to say a polite ‘no thank you’.  And I have spent most of the day so far responding, with regrettable brevity, to the many kind and thoughtful expressions of sympathy that I have received, some from complete strangers.  Many more such messages are arriving as comments here. My thanks for all of them. They are much appreciated not only by me but by my brother’s family. Much of civilisation rests on the proper response to death, simple unalloyed kindness, the desire to show sympathy for irrecoverable less, the understanding that a unique and irreplaceable something has been lost to us. If we ceased to care, we wouldn’t be properly human.

 

So, odd as it would be if this were a wholly private matter, I think it would be strange if I did not post something here, partly to thank the many who have sent their kind wishes and expressed their sympathy, and partly to provide my first raw attempt at a eulogy for my closest living relative, someone who in many ways I have known better – and certainly longer - than anyone else alive.

Two pieces of verse come to mind, one from Hilaire Belloc’s ’Dedicatory Ode’

 

‘From quiet homes and first beginnings, out to the undiscovered ends, there’s nothing worth the wear of winning but laughter and the love of friends’

 

I have always found this passage unexpectedly moving because of something that lies beneath the words, good and largely true though they are.  When I hear it, I see in my mind’s eye a narrow, half-lit entrance hall with a slowly-ticking clock in it, and a half-open door beyond which somebody is waiting for news of a child who long ago left home.

 

And T.S.Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ (one of the Four Quartets)

 

‘We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time’

 

These words I love because I have found them to be increasingly and powerfully true. In my beginning, as Eliot wrote elsewhere in the Quartets, is my end. Alpha et Omega.

Read more at http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/

[Flummoxed Lummox]

Hitchens discusses the Ten Commandments and gives his own for the 21st century. Excellent observations. Hitchens' Ten Commandments are, by far, more ethical, practical, thoughtful, and realistic for the 21st century than what was written for a Bronze Age agrarian based society who sacrificed animals as a sign of religious devotion.

כ

[Dementia_Madness]

Based on what? Your opinion. The hypocrisy and arrogance of people today is astounding, and the ignorance of so many as to what the "10 commandments" are for and what they represent is so amazing. Hitchens was intelligent and witty, but in the end he was as misguided, self righteous, and human as all of us. He could, in his mind, conquer the "ideas" he so despised, but now he KNOWS the truth that you and I can only have our faith in. To "make up" our own "commandments" is no different than "IF" those ancient peoples did so themselves, in truth we are not so far removed from them, aside from a broader collection of knowledge, we still suffer from the same limits, and shortcomings as they did...and our fate is ultimately the same, no matter if we choose to think of ourselves as gods and "better".

More foolishness....They did not "sacrifice animals as as sign of religious devotion." Too funy and it shows the ignorance in your oversimplifictaions of those people and what they did and why, They sacrificed them as a sign of FAITH, in giving part of what they NEEDED to live they were showing that they believed that God was more important than their NEEDS or desires, they sacrifices as a means of atonement, BY taking something that was NEEDED for their survival, and offering it up to GOD they showed that they recognized their failures, shortcomings and transgressions..and the need to atone for them, They sacrificed as a means of obedience, in taking something they NEEDED, the best of what they had, and offering it up to GOD they showed obedience to God's will, yes some of them probably had doubts, and questioned, and I am sure that the poor people looked at those perfect offerings and thought, that would provide us with so much, but still they gave, because God told them to...and because they had faith. Finally the sacrifices were a foreshadowing of Christ, and many aspects of his atonement and the price he paid for us, for those "bronze age" sinners, and sinners today like you and I and Christopher Hitchens.

We have two threads where the high and mighty raises himself up to tell us what he considers, in his self serving self righteous opinion, MORE moral and Ethical than Christ.... I can point to a couple of BIG differences....Christ was God incarnate...and he died for you and me, Hitchens was only a man and he died only for himself....take your pick, I choose Christ.