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=> Re: Hitchens´s big Scare

Re: Hitchens´s big Scare
Posted by Jeffrey (Guest) - Saturday, April 23 2011, 4:12:42 (UTC)
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Christopher Hitchens was scheduled to appear at the American Atheist convention, but had to cancel because of his illness. He sent this letter instead.

Dear fellow-unbelievers,

Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death. Nobody ever wins this argument, though there are some solid points to be made while the discussion goes on. I have found, as the enemy becomes more familiar, that all the special pleading for salvation, redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before. I hope to help defend and pass on the lessons of this for many years to come, but for now I have found my trust better placed in two things: the skill and principle of advanced medical science, and the comradeship of innumerable friends and family, all of them immune to the false consolations of religion. It is these forces among others which will speed the day when humanity emancipates itself from the mind-forged manacles of servility and superstitition. It is our innate solidarity, and not some despotism of the sky, which is the source of our morality and our sense of decency.

That essential sense of decency is outraged every day. Our theocratic enemy is in plain view. Protean in form, it extends from the overt menace of nuclear-armed mullahs to the insidious campaigns to have stultifying pseudo-science taught in American schools. But in the past few years, there have been heartening signs of a genuine and spontaneous resistance to this sinister nonsense: a resistance which repudiates the right of bullies and tyrants to make the absurd claim that they have god on their side. To have had a small part in this resistance has been the greatest honor of my lifetime: the pattern and original of all dictatorship is the surrender of reason to absolutism and the abandonment of critical, objective inquiry. The cheap name for this lethal delusion is religion, and we must learn new ways of combating it in the public sphere, just as we have learned to free ourselves of it in private.

Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.

As the heirs of a secular revolution, American atheists have a special responsibility to defend and uphold the Constitution that patrols the boundary between Church and State. This, too, is an honor and a privilege. Believe me when I say that I am present with you, even if not corporeally (and only metaphorically in spirit...) Resolve to build up Mr Jefferson's wall of separation. And don't keep the faith.

Sincerely

Christopher Hitchens


......yes...he had to mention MULLAHS!

____________
pancho wrote:
>...this is favorite scare tactic..."we´ve always been afraid that a fundamentalist extremist religion might get a hold of the atom bomb, well, ladies and gentlemen, we´re about to find out"....meaning Muslims are the ones to fear because they MIGHT get the weapon...
>
>...what a croc. We have an America, fundamentalist and extreme, who has 100s of them..but that isn´t the real danger...Hitchens says that 9/11 woke him to the dangers of religion...again, meaning Muslims. I think it´s safe to say that Hitchens is afraid of MUSLIMS....but really he only started being afraid when they looked like they might FIGHT BACK.
>
>But not, I would say, for what Muslims have actually done to anyone...but because they now dare to fight BACK....fight back against the same Euro Americans who´ve been abusing them for decades...it is this that he fears...that they will FIGHT...and he blames that on Islam, of all stupid things...like they would NEVER fight had it not been for Muhammad.
>
>What the world has to fear is not Muslims and not nuclear weapons either...America with helicopter gunships is enough, because those gunships are used against Muslim children...and THAT will bring about a reaction and retaliation which MIGHT include atom bombs, or not...but in any case it isn´t Muslims STARTING this thing...it is Christians...again.
>
>Sanctions that starved to death 700,000 Iraqi children are a lot more to be fearded than atom bombs...because that was the fuse.
>
>That´s the part where Hitchens falls apart...trying to convince us that Islam was ALWAYS a threat by bringing up a Muslim PIRATE from 300 years ago!!!



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