This week, we discuss the recent loss of Christopher Hitchens and Susan Jacoby’s recent article about the challenges facing atheists. I also share some exciting news about the future.
Theramin Trees produced this thoughtful and beautiful tribute to everyone’s favorite polemicist. It’s worth a look. Be sure to check it out!
Oh Twitter, sometimes you sap away the only remaining hope I have for humanity. The unfiltered garbage that’s excreted out of the mouths of cretins is enough to drive you mad. Eventually, you reach a threshold of tolerance where it all sounds eerily similar to bees buzzing around. Once in a while, you find a few hot topics that really make our species truly shine, in both verbosity and compassion that one is forced to dig deeper inside of this noise to find out what the fuss is all about. Today’s inanity comes as a reaction to hot hashtag #GodIsNotGreat trending, and some ignorant Christians losing their shit over it. The following is a sample of some of my favorites, with grammar left intact:
Whoever started dis #GodIsNotGreat I will personally beat yu da fuck asswhole…I jus prayed for yu thp
What a nice fellow. I wonder if he’ll also pray to his imaginary friend when he sends some poor kid to the hospital for having a different belief than him.
Whoever made this TT #GodIsNotGreat should burn in hell and yo whole family
So even if this person’s family is religious, this guy still wants them to burn in hell forever because someone dared to talk smack his to sky daddy. Totally reasonable.
#GodIsNotGreat who ever created that trending topic MUST die today!!wt sort of human beings r in here?geeeez
Geeeez, I was thinking the very same thing.
#GodIsNotGreat<——anybody this hateful got to have aids
Anybody that profoundly ignorant has to be a bigot
WHO EVA MADE THIS A TRENIN TOPIC…ILL PERSONALLY KILL EM MYSELF…GOD IS THE BEST THANG EVA MANE…AMEN
God is the best thing ever, therefore I’m going to kill someone in cold blood in his name. Amen!
I seriously wanna kill whoever started the #GodIsNotGreat”
I seriously want to call the fucking police right now
why the fuk is #GodIsNotGreat teending?! GOD IS EVERYTHING YOU SATANIC BITCHES, HE’S THE REASON YOUR BREATHING #ilovegod
If God is everything, does that mean he’s also this extremely hateful tweet? What are the rules in this strange cult of yours?
We all knew it was coming, but somehow we had managed to ignore the cruelty of reality for a little while. For a moment there, it almost seemed as though Hitch had managed to defeat his cancer. Unfortunately, life is a cruel bitch that kills your heroes prematurely (it’s true that Jack Daniels and Phillip Morris had done most of the damage, but still). Now, the world is a little duller, a little dumber, and a lot less interesting as a result.
Truthfully, I would be more upset if I hadn’t read his last article. In it, he mentioned that had he known of the pain he would have had to endure to survive the cancer, he would have opted against it. It may sound trite, but there is some evidence to suggest that a person having a REASON to live is often a significant indicator of health. I think it wasn’t the cancer but the pain of the treatment that ended him. That’s the sad truth about cancer; the cure is sometimes worse than the disease.
Don’t plan on being sad for very long though. Your grief will soon turn into anger once you read the inane tweets of men like Rick Warren:
My friend Christopher Hitchens has died. I loved & prayed for him constantly & grieve his loss. He knows the Truth now.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg, folks. That tweets comes from an actual friend (despite their obvious differences, they seemed to have gotten along well). How many times are you going to overhear some religious jackass gloating that Hitch is burning in Hell for not believing in their specific nonsense?
Even more frustrating is the fact that there is no simple way to demonstrate the obvious stupidity of their assertion. The specter of death haunts us all equally, but our mortality is the only solid proof Christians need of their sadistic fantasies. It’s like arguing with children.
On a selfish note, I never got to cross “having a conversation with Christopher Hitchens” off my bucket list. I hoped perhaps that some of his brilliance might rub off on me. Now the unique arrangement of neurons that comprised his mind have ceased to function, and this pattern is lost forever. Damn you entropy. Why must you rob us of everything we love?
Here’s a nice video for you late risers that is part of a complete breakfast: Hitchens being asked if the prospect of death has caused him to “rethink” his position on the “afterlife”. His response is both eloquent, and satisfyingly vulgar. Enjoy!
This week, Carisa joins me as we talk about Christopher Hitchen’s autobiography, what freedom of speech entails, and 4 hilarious ‘proofs’ of God’s existence.
It’s good to watch some prime Hitchens where he isn’t gasping for air or looking half dead.
This is both fascinating and terribly sad to see. Enjoy this man while you still can!
Yes, I am a Hitchens fanboy and will post just about anything the man says, but in my defense, you can’t help but acknowledge the man is brilliant. Here’s an old video of him talking about freedom of speech. My favorite part is when he argues it’s the right of people not only to speak their minds, but also for others to hear the opinions of others. Simply awesome.
In case you don’t know who the hell David Berlinski is (and trust me, you aren’t missing much), he’s a mathematician and a critic of evolution. He likes to use transparently obvious slight-of-hand math to try to disprove one of the most solid theories in all of science. He describes himself as a “maverick intellectual” (what the fuck does that mean?), which gives you an idea of his qualifications. If you’re a fellow of the Discovery Institute, you’ve got zero respectability in my book. The rest of the video after the jump.
This may surprise you, but it turns out Christopher Hitchens’ little brother is religious. So religious in fact he wrote a book called The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith. It’s basically a repudiation (heh) of his big bro’s book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and it argues religion keeps shaky civilizations from collapsing (maybe on Opposite Day) and prevents the horrors of utopianism as seen through communist regimes such as Russia and China.
The first half of the video is spent showing his accomplishment dick is just as big as his brother Christopher’s, and then around the 4 minute mark he starts talking about his conversion (“I realized one day I might be judged”), his relationship with his brother (not good, considering their father’s deathbed attempt to reconcile them), and his thoughts on atheism’s shortcomings.
It’s an interesting glance into the Hitchens family and the cool things they have all accomplished. You can read a pretty thorough breakdown of his book and the claims he makes on its wiki page. It’s a pretty good way to dust up on the newest style of attacks from religious people, aka the myth that ‘Atheism would do it worse.’
This week, Ryan and I talk about the Hitchens vs Blair debate that happened this weekend in Toronto.
This week, Ryan and I talk about how God keeps getting thanked for saving the Chilean miners, the lack of media coverage of an atheist teen being shot dead after a religious dispute. We also talk about the Blair / Hitchens debate being sold out, and poke fun at the Insane Clown Posse.
In case you haven’t seen this video floating around the webs, check out this highlight of Christopher Hitchen’s best verbal bitch-slaps. It fills me with sadness we may soon lose this intellectual giant.
Fans of the site will know that I absolutely abhor the pathetic and anemic argument that is “Pascal’s Wager”. Here Hitchens compares it to a pathetic used car salesman trying to get you to buy his junker. Who wants a God who can so easily be fooled by the gambler?
