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photography from Guatemala, Maryland, Italy and elsewhere by Doug Terry |
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VISIT DC? AN ESSAY ON WHY EVERY AMERICAN CITIZEN SHOULD VISIT |
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News, analysis, commentary, social trends, culture, politics, government, books, movies, travel, cycling and other stuff |
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T H E T E R R Y R E P O R T 2012 |
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Facts first, logic always, truth before everything |
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Unrepentant, noisy, never boring, Christopher Hitchens is dead at 62. An avowed atheist, Hitchens never stopped arguing and attacking to the very end. Here is a quote from the NY Times article about his death: |
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In 2007, when the interviewer Sean Hannity (on Fox) tried to make the case for an all-seeing God, Mr. Hitchens dismissed the idea with contempt. “It would be like living in North Korea,”he said. |
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A snappy quote, indeed, which brings up a thought. Heaven, as it is generally described, especially by most in the Christian faith, seems like a place of unending boredom. Unless one were to enter some kind of state where nothing, including time itself, really mattered and all one did was vibrate like atoms, heaven seems like the worst place to spend eternity. Who wants to see everyone you used to know? Who wants to live in perfect harmony, without any change for millions of years? You can have it. We humans are conflict, change, difficulty, struggle, love, hatred and longing. One play by Tennessee Williams will teach you that. |
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From the Washington Post on Hitchens: |
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He wrote relatively little about his atheism and disdain for religion until his 2007 international bestseller “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.”€¯ He attributed many of the world’s most serious problems to religion, from ethnic cleansing to the subjugation of women to the denial of scientific progress. He criticized religious faith as nothing more than a fatuous belief in magic, fables and nonsense, calling it “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.” |
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What is remarkable about Hitchen’s writing, whether or not one agrees with anything he said, is the sheer vehemence with which he wrote. He constructed sentences as if they matter, as if what he is saying is a spear in the side of ignorance and misdeed. Note, also, his stringing together of highly descriptive adjectives, as if what he is writing about is so bad, so evil, that nothing but a total blast of words, a torrent, can possibly work to take down the fortress. Those who are religionists, those who believe that a relationship with god, personal or otherwise, is the prime necessity of a life well lived, should consider his words and the impact religion has had on the world. There is no doubt that religion, apart from the comfort it offers individuals and communities, has had an enormously negative impact on the world as a whole in creating conflict, wars, hatred and death. This is the central contradiction of religious faith seen in the long historical context: what is intended to save man from himself has plunged all of us into seemly eternal conflict with other humans. Those conflicts, because they are rooted in the belief that one side has the complete answer to the problem of “god” and universal rules for living while others do not, can never be reconciled. For a great many people around the world confronted with this problem, particularly the young, the answer has been to walk away. Hitchens was not someone calling people to action in the name of the truths he espoused. Indeed, the polemical nature of his writing would likely turn as many people away, even those who might agree with some of his points, as it would unite them. He was an inveterate provocateur, an intellectual suicide bomber who seemed to have enjoyed every minute of it and never apologized to himself or anyone else for cutting his own life short by drinking and smoking. Doug Terry, 12.16.11 |
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