Saturday, December 24, 2011

Merry Christmas

  1. +Sid
  2. Personal Disclosure:
  3. I am not a Christian, so help me (Christian) God
  4. However, that does not stop me from making all them Christians hoodlums, singing stupid Christmas songs and adding to that noise pollution commercial hoopla, hopping mad.
  5. So sue me. Not in the court of (Right wing fundamentalist) American law. The supreme court of the most supreme, God of all puny, little lesser, backyard, kitchen garden gods.
  6. May Allah be praised, (PBUH).

Little Drummer Boy - London Symphony Orchestra


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Wish Merry Christmas From Anywere In The WORLD!! (comment your country :)!!!)
These are the Countries that had wished a Merry Christmas on the comments from this video :)
USA -. 42
Germany - 10
Canada - 8
Greece - 6
Mexico - 5
England - 4
Ireland - 3
Philippines - 3
Sweden - 3
Netherlands - 2
Estonia - 2
Egypt - 2
Holland - 2
Switzerland - 2
Peru - 2
Italy - 2
Lebanon - 2
Romania - 2
Australia - 2
India - 2
Bulgaria
Costa Rica
Maine
Austria
Chile
Venezuela
Puerto Rico
Vienna
Colombo Sri Lanka
Trinidad
Hungary
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China
France
Cyprus
Taiwan
Spain
Denmark
Brazil
New Zeland
Updated Jan 2011
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THIS piece of music was performed by a famous orchestra, so it has NO LYRICS!, please if you dont like it dont comment. :)
also no Religious fights :)
-thank you
-Little Drummer Boy-
Performed By London Symphony Orchestra, presented by Century 21st CO. on the album Christmas At Home.
DOWNLOAD THE SONG HERE
http://www.sendspace.com/file/0acpsd
Please, DONT sell this song!

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  • Merry Christmas from New Jersey, USA! Peace to everyone!
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The Sunday Review


Op-Ed Columnist

The Believer’s Atheist

By
Published: December 17, 2011
OF the many remarkable things about Christopher Hitchens, who died on Thursday after one of the most prolific and provocative careers in modern Anglo-American letters, perhaps the most remarkable was how much religious believers liked him.
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Ross Douthat

Readers’ Comments

Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
Not all believers, of course: When Hitchens’s esophageal cancer diagnosis became public last year, the famous atheist took obvious pleasure in quoting the none-too-Christian sentiments that bubbled up on various religious blogs and message boards (e.g., “Who else feels Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him?”). But in the world of journalism, among his peers and competitors and sparring partners, it was nearly impossible to find a religious person who didn’t have a soft spot for a man who famously accused faith of poisoning absolutely everything.
Intellectually minded Christians, in particular, had a habit of talking about Hitchens as though he were one of them already — a convert in the making, whose furious broadsides against God were just the prelude to an inevitable reconciliation. (Or as a fellow Catholic once murmured to me: “He just protests a bit too much, don’t you think?”) This is not a sentiment that was often expressed about Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or any other member of the New Atheist tribe. But where Hitchens was concerned, no insult he hurled or blasphemy he uttered could shake the almost-filial connection that many Christians felt for him.
Some of this reflected his immense personal charm, his willingness to debate with Baptists and drink with Catholics and be comradely to anyone who took ideas seriously. But there was something deeper at work as well. American Christian intellectual life is sustained today, to a large extent, by the work of writers very much like Hitchens — by essayists and journalists and novelists and poets, from G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis to W. H. Auden and Evelyn Waugh, who shared his English roots, his gift for argument and his abiding humanism.
Recognizing this affinity, many Christian readers felt that in Hitchens’s case there had somehow been a terrible mix-up, and that a writer who loved the King James Bible and “Brideshead Revisited” surely belonged with them, rather than with the bloodless prophets of a world lit only by Science.
In this they were mistaken, but not entirely so. At the very least, Hitchens’s antireligious writings carried a whiff of something absent in many of atheism’s less talented apostles — a hint that he was not so much a disbeliever as a rebel, and that his atheism was mostly a political romantic’s attempt to pick a fight with the biggest Tyrant he could find.
This air of rebellion did not make him a believer, but it lent his blasphemies an air of danger and intrigue, as though he were an agent of the Free French distributing literature deep in Vichy. Certainly he always seemed well aware of the extent to which his writings traded on the unusual frisson of saying “No!” to a supposedly nonexistent being.
Perhaps he was a little too aware. Like most writers of a religious persuasion I was once enlisted to publicly debate Hitchens, with predictably disastrous results for God. But my strongest memory comes from a Washington dinner party two years ago, when he cornered me in the pantry and insisted on having a long argument about the Gospel narratives. The point he was particularly eager to make was this: “Suppose Jesus of Nazareth did rise from the dead — what would that prove, anyway?”
It’s a line whose sheer cussedness cuts to the heart of Hitchens’s charm. But it also hints at the way that atheism — especially a public and famous atheism — can become as self-defended as any religious dogma, impervious to any new fact or unexpected revelation.
For Hitchens, those defenses stayed up till the end. His last word on the possibility of conversion was at once characteristically dismissive and characteristically protective of his hard-earned reputation as an Enemy of God: “Suppose I ditch the principles I have held for a lifetime, in the hope of gaining favor at the last minute? I hope and trust that no serious person would be at all impressed by such a hucksterish choice.”
In his very brave and very public dying, though, one could see again why so many religious people felt a kinship with him. When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood.”
Officially, Hitchens’s creed was one with Larkin’s. But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair.
My hope — for Hitchens, and for all of us, the living and the dead — is that now he finally knows why.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on December 18, 2011, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: The Believer’s Atheist.

400 Comments

Share your thoughts.
    • Robert Wolfson
    • Forest Hills, NY

    As a lifelong atheist (and no regrets) I have come to expect condescension from believers. Douthat hasn't disappointed.
    Two French Philosophers had very deep thoughts about religious belief.
    a. Blaise Pascal proposed a wager. It was as if he was buying an insurance
    policy, assuming a vengeful god, if there is such a god: then it would be very
    costly to mistakenly not believe; if there is no god, then what is lost if you do
    believe? So . . . believe. Well, there IS your self-respect.
    b. Pierre-Simon Laplace was asked, by Napoleon, why he did not mention god in his book on Astronomy. Laplace replied that he had no need of the hypothesis.
    'Nuf said.
    • suzanne
    • New York, NY

    what an idiotic column. Can't you let him be? EVEN NOW????????
    • la.melb
    • Australia

    His drinks line was, "“Suppose Malcolm Muggeridge DID rise from the dead — what would he say about ME, anyway?”
    Well, I think his sheer monsterdom would keep anyone from rising from the dead.
    Something like Dick Cavett will have its more amusing retrospectivity.

  4. Ross, I like your articles. Thank you for your work. However, you don't seem to be receiving much encouragement from the NY Times readers. (smile)
    Let me ask your athiestic reviewers a few questions.
    Have you ever brushed up against intellectually credible and existentially satisfying Christianity? Sure, you can get seafood from Long John Silver's in Arkansas. But, you can also get fresh lobster on the docks in Portland, ME. Both are seafood, but they are two completely different experiences. Do you know the difference in terms of Christianity?
    Why is it that some scientists and leading thinkers (oh say Francis Collins) have moved towards theism not away from it? Do you really think he could be quite as foolish as you say theists must be?
    Ross, I think you are right. There was something about Hitchens that was playful and warm. Thank you for your work.
    • Larry Platt
    • Costa Mesa, CA

    If Hitchens were grading bluebooks and read the following: "atheism . . . can become as self-defended as any religious dogma, impervious to any new fact or unexpected revelation" and "rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor," he would write in the margin, "PROVE!" Which is what "rigorous atheism" rightly demands concerning statements about the world. Hitchens, to his credit, was more demanding than most and did it with unmatched style, panache, and intelligence. I miss him already.
    • glenn
    • al

    Without Christ there is a hopeless end. With Christ there is endless hope. Merry Christmas!
    • Judy
    • Lawrence, KS

    "When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor..." Huh? One person's wasting shadow is another's liberation. Why not?
    • Louise
    • Vancouver, WA

    Christopher Hitchens life and death are proof that one can live a vibrant, fullfilling life with one's integrity intact.
    Sing, "Ho!", for the life of a man!
    • MVanniel
    • Philadelphia, PA

    I don't always agree with your politics Ross, but on this column I'm with you completely. Well done.
    • Larry Eisenberg
    • New York City

    Hitchens went a wee bit too far,
    Don't bid Olympus au revoir,
    Zeus and Hera still rule
    I revere them on Yule,
    Their Divinity words can't mar!
    • Mouse
    • NYC

    "...When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor..."
    Seriously?
    It is because I do not believe in God and an afterlife that I want to make the most of this life, not because I expect some heavenly reward for being 'good'.
    • lnufnaut
    • Rye NH

    What a fatuous and misguided little essay!
    Hitchens was not just Atheist, he was Antitheist.
    He knew god worship is not just wrong but damaging and destructive to that which he held in highest reverence, the free human spirit. Your myopic soft-pedal of his very clear and strongly held disgust with theists is unpardonable.

  13. You state that you hope "he finally knows why". He finally knows what? If you are under the impression that he was not really an athesiest to the end, you are sadly mistaken. I cannot abide all you people that keep finding excuses for why he was an athesiest and that he really wasn't, shake the cob webs out of your head.
    Your truth is only your truth, not Hitchen's truth and that is the only fact that is imperical.
    • hey-jude
    • Vancouver,BC

    Hitch reminded us to always, always question anyone who claimes to know the absolute truth
    Thank you sir..
    • Sasha
    • New York, NY

    Ross, you somehow managed to loose a debate with a dead guy.
    • crl4lunch
    • Napa Valley

    Uh...sorry Ross, did I miss your column that divulged those new facts and revelations?
    And please don't be confused...your "hope...that Hitchens...finally knows why," is simply your projection...to which you are certainly entitled.

  17. Thank you Ross, eloquent and beautiful.
    • BCY123
    • NY NY

    Mr. Douthat: It is hard to know where to begin.
    If your comments were about the beliefs of others (such as Jews or Muslims) they would be categorized as pure ignorance and would get your fired. What is that so upsets you about the stance of Atheists?? That we might be right?? That your fear of an everlasting void is too hard for you to integrate into your harden belief structure?? Frankly, you should be re-examining your faith. Is it that weak that you must attack the dead?? When apparently you were unsuccessful in debating your opponent when alive?? You comment that atheists fail to incorporate new facts or an unexpected revelation. What facts might these be?? Can you give me one example of an important revelation?? Further, I ask you - a writer who implies that he values facts so highly - are there any facts that support the existence of God?? And your swipe at science...remind all of us to check that your eschew any support from that bloodless realm when you or your family is ill...
    All-in all you have revealed a significant lack of kindness, good sense and scholarship. Shame on you.
    • A. M. Garrett
    • Lafayette, La.

    Loved Hitchens. But I agree he did protest too much about God. It was his entire reason for being.
    And truly, the proof of God was right there in his own existence. Only a just, generous and, dare I say, playful Creator could have conjured up such a mercurial, brilliant, and tortured adversary as our dear Mr. Hitchens.
    You served Him well, Hitch. Even if you didn't know it.

  20. Cheap shot and poor taste, arguing with the recently deceased. But, to Hitchens credit, he still out-argues you from beyond the grave, Douthat.
    Hitchens would say that death without the promise of an afterlife doesn't, "cast a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor" but a life without books, ideas and rigorous intellectual thought does. Thanks for proving his point with your sad shot at winning the debate using the mans death to make a weak argument. I'm all the more convinced that the goodness of faith, as a character trait, is wasted on the religious.
    • Carol
    • Santa Fe, NM

    I think Hitchens would say that it's aburd to hope for a dead man that "now he finally knows," because reason dictates that a dead man cannot think or know anything.
    • Mcarm
    • New York, NY

    I have no problem with Christopher Hitchens's atheism. He was a brilliant sad man who never got over being from the lower class in a rigid class system. This made his narcissism impossible for him to accept any one else's thoughts which countered him. In the last 10 years every time I saw him he was drunk and boorish. Too bad.
    • J. Robert Surface
    • Greenville South Carolina

    Intellectual discourse is lively and engaging because of people like Hitchens. He was amazing and persuasive.
    • justice
    • Michigan

    Ross, have no fear of being contradicted. Go ahead, it is safe to speak on behalf of god and dead people.

  25. What of the irony of Hitchen's being named after Jesus? My brother is also named Christopher, was raised by a jewish father, catholic mother in a secular house without religious instruction or even discussion. And, like Hitch, he's always had a chip on his shoulder toward the man upstairs.

  26. Hitchens was as much "an enemy of God," as I could be a hunter of unicorns.
    • m. m.
    • southern ca.

    As for Hitchens: Well educated, yes. Provocative writer, yes. A person with the core, unresolved issues of an adolescent rebel, definitely.
    • Daydreamer
    • Philly

    Ross, isn't it entirely possible that your "God" does not exist and in his stead is a force that provides much of the afterlife you envision for Hitchens, without the human made rituals and rules known as religion?
    • Bob
    • Corvallis, OR

    Ross,
    Your last sentence is the last refuge--the only refuge--of the believer
    Bob

  30. That someone shares a white, male, anglophile, testosterone-fueled one-up-manship milieu is only exciting for the other people within that circle.
    It certainly doesn't do it for me.
    • Don
    • Davis, California

    and what "new fact or unexpected revelation" do we have to ponder?
    • Mother by Choice
    • Philadelphia

    @ Mr Bruce-Thompson: Quite. The thought of 'humanism' and 'C.S. Lewis' in the same sentence is equally odd. Methinks that for Mr Douthat to produce such a sentence means either that Mr Douthat does not read or that he cannot write (neither of which could be said for Hitch).
    • Steven Critelli
    • Clinton, NY

    You really left the wrong impression of what Larkin said. The key stanza was this one:
    This is a special way of being afraid
    No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
    That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
    Created to pretend we never die,
    And specious stuff that says No rational being
    Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
    That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
    No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
    Nothing to love or link with,
    The anasthetic from which none come round.
    Larkin's point was whether you were a believer of that "vast, moth-eaten brocade/ Created to pretend we never die" or not, there was the inevitability of death ("what we know,/Have always known, know that we can't escape,/ Yet can't accept."). Millions of years of human evolution is not eviscerated by a disbelief in God. It is the belief in good men, like Hitchens, that we need to have more of.
    • Christopher
    • California

    It's remarkable how in the last few lines Mr. Douthat can so quickly reverse the respect he says he holds for Hitchens. Putting aside for a second Douthat's comment about despair - who said the freedom from delusion causes despair? - the idea that now, after Hitchens' is unable to speak for himself any longer, Douthat imagines him in some fantasy afterlife where he is miraculously proved wrong (beyond anyone's witnessing, conveniently) betrays such little regard for the man and his ideas.
    How someone who claims to understand and respect Hitchens can fail to see this is beyond my understanding as a mortal.

  35. "When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavour"
    I think one were to be honest one would have to say that most of the fairy tales are on the religious side - virgin births, resurrection, wine turning into blood, blue elephant gods, animal gods of all sorts, reincarnation, heaven, hell, - I don't think Marxism has anything to compare with this. I'm not sure what the techno-utopian happy talk is that Mr. Douthat refers to but what could be happier than the pie in the sky hope of eternal life on a puffy white cloud in heaven surrounded by angels, seraphim and cherubim - or virgins if you prefer. I'm still at a loss to understand how any moderately intelligent person can believe any of this nonsense. However, it does seem important for neo-conservatives and Straussians that the "common man" believe it - part of binding the populace in shared ignorance I suppose.
    The terrible thing about dyingis that those left behind can twist your words to their own purpose. Who was it that said a radical is someone a conservative admires 50 years after they're dead - or in this case 50 hours.

  36. Whatever else may be said (rightly or wrongly) about Hitchens, it seems that his most abiding hatred was reserved for totalitarianism. This was undoubtedly a manifestation of George Orwell’s profound impact on his worldview. And it can’t be argued that, at least when it came to that animosity, he remained steadfastly consistent. I believe that his atheism sprang as well from that very source.
    That is, nobody who is that viscerally opposed to totalitarianism can possibly endorse any of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) all of which are erected on the belief in autocratic rule by an all-knowing, all-powerful “supreme” being. The latter (of course) always a male, it being that women have always been (and largely remain) second-class citizens in any society based on any of these creeds.
    The Abrahamic religions betray their Middle Eastern origins in their belief in a sort of Saddam Maximus up in the sky. For millennia, this region has been (and continues to be) the cradle of despotism and one-man rule. It is not at all surprising that Middle Eastern rulers in time immemorial decided to cement their grip on political power by ascribing to their successive deities the absolutist powers that they sought to arrogate to themselves here on Earth.
    • sweethome
    • Alabama

    No. 1, there is no evidence that atheism leads to despair, let alone that it "casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor" (talk about gloomy). The fact is, there are many happy atheists out there. No. 2., even if it did lead to despair (a la Larkin's poem) that would not prove that Christianity -- or any other theistic belief -- is correct. Many religious believers -- like Douthat, apparently -- make a curious logical leap. They internalize the widespread prejudice that atheism is an engine of despair and then use that prejudice as a proof that religious belief is correct. But one does not lead to the other. This is merely a dodge that allows them to avoid facing the issue head-on.
    • SLD
    • San Francisco

    I think most true believers have blind faith. That's what most religions count on. People who believe in God or a higher power, don't need scientific proof that something did or did not happen. For many reasons, we humans turn to that God or higher power, when things seem beyond our control. We hope that this entity will grant an end to someone's suffering, or help our team win, or keep our kids from harm or help us find a parking space. People pray for all kinds of things and when it appears that God has answered our prayers, it reinforces our beliefs. When God doesn't answer our prayers, sometimes we think it's his will, that He had some higher reason for letting the baby die or letting wars exist. Blind faith is what works for many. Christopher Hitchens gave us the opportunity to question all that.
    • Lou
    • New Jersey

    In the end, Hitchens kept faith with his belief when others might have erred and started praying. He refused to permit Death to force him renounce his faith in an idea in exchange for the comfort religion offers.
    Yet in that singular act of courage you seem to find to use the occasion of a principled man's death to reaffirm your own beliefs and probably seek God's favor in proclaiming that "rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor".
    But what you really do is prove Hitchens' point: religion poisons everything, and can even turn the courage of a man who holds fast to his beliefs, to an idea, during a prolonged illness up to his last breath. Had he not been an atheist, you probably wouldn't have written that.
    Long ago Socrates proved it meant a lot to all those would also bear the joys and burdens of life. True, Death comes anyway, whined at or withstood, And so? It's still not the only thing that matters. What we do also matters. I didn't always agree with Hitchens, but was saddened to hear he had died and also inspired by the way he handled it. If there is a just and loving God, He will rule that that word and idea "faith" is to be interpreted broadly and He'll take him in, imperfections notwithstanding.
    • Richard Martin
    • Santa Barbara, CA

    Regarding "When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor", this one phrase captures the difference in worldview between theists and atheists. For theists life is an empty meaningless depressing ordeal if this is all there is. Whereas for atheists it is a glorious experience to be living in the worldly paradise of planet earth, to be able to understand the nature of our universe from subatomic particles to the outer limits of the universe, from it's origin to the evolution of stars producing the elements required to form planets, life, and ultimately us. To revel in all the gifts of being human.
    • Doug G
    • San Francisco

    Would atheists feel better about the religious if religious beliefs weren't generally tied to the believer getting some kind of post-departure payback because they spent a few hours a week in humble prayer? Theists like Douthat believe in the supernatural (without any evidence), and then use the unprovable existence of a god or gods to give them solace for their own deaths. Regardless of the existence of some supernatural designer, when Russ Douthat dies he will be just as dead as Mr. Hitchens. The designer of the universe would not need Douthat's "spirit" kicking around for all eternity -- to what purpose?
    • Louise
    • Vancouver, WA

    Atheists are without hope? What utter nonsense
    Too many religions use dogma causing people to abandon hope for a better world by convincing them that all atrocities are gods will The patient wait for entry into heaven robs people of the motivation and energy they need to fight for the best possible world Heaven exists on earth in places where peoples ask themselves and reflect honestly on the question, "If I am to love others as I love myself what motivates me to rationalize harming others? Perhaps I don't know how to love Perhaps what is meant by, "Know thyself" is seeing my own greed, envy, etc and working to eschew those feelings which cause harm
    Scientist explains non-dogma:
    "What do you mean dogmatic? The theory makes precise predictions which need to be confirmed experimentally How can it be dogmatic when we are constantly trying to check its predictions and find possible contradictions? It would be dogmatic if we said "well it has been personally revealed by a supernatural being to Prof Prophet that our theory is the eternal truth, it will never change and should not be challenged We dont have proofs but we have faith in it "
    There is no dogma here, if the theory works (ie agrees with data) then it is accepted, otherwise it is thrown away or corrected And whenever something shows what is not predicted then we move on, that is how science constantly makes progress because we never stop asking questions and challenging the currently accepted theory." EA on Higgs Bosun
    • LV
    • Athens, OH

    What greater source of despair can there be than to postulate a loving, interventionist deity and then soberly observe the course of history and individual lives? It is religion that should produce despair if one is not intoxicated by its fantasies.

  44. This piece is really a lot of condescending blather. I would say that Hitch has stood by his beliefs throughout his entire career. This is not to say that he has not changed, but he has been a clear voice of logic in an often muddled conversation. The implication that Hitchens is "almost a Christian" is ludicrous. As he himself said, read his work.
    One of the earlier comments maligns Hitch's reputation for honesty and logic, by stating that he would weasel out if proof were found that God exists. If there were such a proof of God, I think he would have been amused and perhaps a bit chagrined, but to imply that he would find some way to deny it is just wrong; again, read his work. Of course, there is no proof that God exists; so, the implication is just added blather.
    • Sara
    • Cincinnati

    Some atheists here are so devoid of imagination. I too loved Hitchens, being a contrarian at heart, and if he didn't make it to the other realm( whatever that is) than I would rather not go there either. I never did understand fully why he attacked Mother Teresa with such vehemence, though. Some of us believers have a much wider understanding of what god is. Atheists seem to confuse belief in the supernatural with organized religion and all of its negative connotations and that's about it.
    I choose to believe that there is more to life than the concrete and the here and now. It gives me hope and it gives lots of other people hope. I find it depressing to think that all there is to life is this brief moment of our existence. How does my belief in the possibility of another realm of existence hurt anyone? Atheists seem to be such a negative bunch. Lighten up and don't take yourselves so seriously. You're like the people who won't "lie" to their kids about Santa or the Easter Bunny. For god's sake, we all need a little magic and make believe, hope amd a "truckload of faith" to get by as the song goes.
    I read and admired Hitchens for his mind, but strangely enough, his anti god book, made me believe in god and in the supernatural even more! Must be the contrarian in me.
    • Leland Neraho
    • SF

    With so many logical and enlightened commentators coming forth, why then are we still having to choose between Baptists, Catholics and Mormons as our leaders while we follow and fight Muslims around the world? Hitchens work may have been grand, but it's hardly finished. Rest not in peace. No child wants to know that Santa isn't coming, fair enough, but when is the spread of ignorance and subservience going to stop? Epicurus and the atomists knew most of this well over two thousand years ago, and yet we are still living in a world of illusions spun by ponzi schemers and psychotics (and pedophiles).

  47. I'm utterly astounded by the durability of the notion that nature has some kind of immortal personality that one disses at the gravest peril of the conditions of one's post-mortem existence. There's a world of forsaken saints and blessed sinners out there.
    • Gemli
    • Boston

    Many of my classmates in Catholic school absorbed their lessons about hell and sin and punishment only too well, and maintained that childlike fear well into adulthood. The early exposure to religion imprints on the developing brain, and lodges behind emotional barricades that later logic and reason can't breach. There's a reason religion is taught to 7-year-olds, and physics isn't taught until high school. The sciences demand critical thinking, but religion only requires a defenseless mind waiting to be filled with fear and foreboding.
    Christopher Hitchens railed against the indoctrination of religion into young minds, and this column is an example of why this was so. Those who feel they must dim the brilliance of Mr. Hitchens may be doing so because they're afraid of their own shadow.
    • Larry
    • Lancaster, PA

    Douthat's central problem is that - as a believer, and therefore a denier of reality - he simply does not understand the mind of an atheist. He cannot appreciate that living a moral life of accomplishment and satisfaction is far noblre if done because of inner conviction rather than from fear of an imaginary skygod.
    Further proof of Douthat's innocence is his mistaken association of atheism with despair. The real despair should attach to the conviction that god created this world, with all its evils and suffering. Why should we revere such a god?
    Douthat acknowledges that in his debate with Hitchens god came out "disastrously." He implies that this was due to Hitchens' intellect and debating skill, but he can't accept that Hitchens had the advantage of arguing from the side of truth and reason.
    Proof of Douthat's inability to understand Hitchens was his misunderstanding of Hitchens' question in the pantry ("what if Jesus were resurrected"). This should not have been taken as Hitchens' refusal to accept evidence, but rather as an invitation to renew their debate. Hitchens was giving Douthat a headstart by setting the stage with a universally accepted mythology of Christendom, the essence of the faith, the very origin of the Jesus legend.
    Even on this tilted field, Hitchens would have held his ground.

  50. Well, it's my earnest hope that our precious and forgiving God look with kindness upon his life, during which he exhibited integrity, and gave him a great surprise when he closed his eyes, reuniting him with all those he loved and respected during his life.
    • Patrick
    • Manhattan, N.Y.

    I really admire Christopher Hitchens for being so outspoken and thoughtful about atheism... I went to Catholic schools growing up but reached the same conclusion as he did when I was 18. And I think he makes it easier for those of us who share his views but would feel uncomfortable voicing them so publicly (knowing where the majority of people are coming from). Thanks.

  52. To paraphrase Dawkins, find me a mammalian fossil in the same strata as the earliest reptiles, and you've disproved evolution. We're still waiting. The existence of a God, of course, can never be disproven by the scientific method. But the existence of the Abrahmic God, the flat earth created 6,000 years ago, the Firmament above the earth, the sun stopping for Joshua, etc as depicted in the Bible are certainly untrue, so the existence of this particular God, except in an entirely metaphorical sense, is easily accomplished. And the power of metaphor is insufficient to draw many believers, or agnostics, to attend a church, leaving the field to fanatics and those indoctrinated by fear at an early age and to the decline of the mainstream Protestant churches.
    • Redneckhippie
    • Oakland, CA

    Though Douthat is a theist, I have still been a fan of his columns. It seems a curious lapse to say that Hitchens (and other atheists) are not open to new facts, not to mention the additional lapse of neglecting the wasting shadow of religious institutions and hypocrisy on human life. The good and the bad are inseparable.
    • Ashley
    • Acton, MA

    Surely we cannot conclude that God exists because to think otherwise "casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor"? Whether or not one finds atheism depressing is irrelevant. The question of God's existence has nothing to do with whether or not humans, individually or as a group, need that existence in order to find meaning, purpose, or joy in living.
    • hammond
    • San Francisco

    Although I do not share Hitchens' passion for atheism, I do find religion to be painfully limiting, lacking in both imagination and wonder. I mean, how much creativity does it take to make up anthropocentric stories of creation and a creator? Douthat's conclusions illustrate these limits: he can't imagine a world without a God, nor imagine that anyone else can.
    By contrast, the world around around us is far more wonderful when we approach it with humility; when we don't try to impose our beliefs on how it should exist, but rather let it teach us how it does exist. The 'miracles' described in the Bible are contrived and cliched when compared to the mind-bending behavior of the quantum mechanical world; a world that no mind could have imagined until it revealed itself to a small group of scientists who possessed enough humility to let it do so.
    After spending many years studying physics--replete with more revelations and rapture than I can describe here--I guess it is my turn to have trouble understanding how anyone can live such limited and shallow lives as religious believers.
    • Josh Hill
    • Connecticut
    • Trusted

    Just curious -- what exactly are those new facts and revelations?
    Last I checked, God had been out of the burning bush business for quite some time.

  57. re: "can become as self-defended as any religious dogma, impervious to any new fact or unexpected revelation."
    You missed his most powerful lesson,"it's not what you think it's how you think."
    Once you come up with one of those new facts please enlighten us Ross.

  58. There are hundreds of millions of Buddhists in the world who hold no belief in a Creator God (or any god referenced with a capital 'g').
    Arguably, they live lives that are far happier and far more removed from "despair" than those who have put their faith/hope/wishful thinking in the unproven existence an unseen Supreme Being who, on all available evidence, has no more reality than the Tooth Fairy.
    Does the Dalai Lama cast "a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor"?
    • come plainer
    • Portland, OR

    I've always admired Hitch in much the same way, and for the same reasons, I admire the Jesus of the Gospels: truth-speaker to power, and one who, literally, pulls the image of a transcendent God down into human flesh, where it's always belonged. (If this point has been made in the 300 comments before me that I have no desire to read, forgive me.)
    I don't truck in bugaboo rubrics such as "religious," "atheist," "agnostic" and their shadow-play anti/thesis dialectics (and various doctrinal dialects). I see people I know only through literature--Parmenides and Plato, Jesus and the Pharisees, Meister Eckhart and Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Merton and the current pope, Christopher Hitchens and...Lewis? Chesterton? (I see no one around who's a worthy enough foil, like GB Shaw was to the latter).
    I see them all as making and taking points according to the contexts of their times and places; the rhetoric they cultivate tells me more about the range of human nature's character than of anything it might purport to prove as an objective truth.
    • Dave
    • seattle

    Atheism doesn't cast a wasting shadow. After all, does it really matter whether our moral sense is externally imposed or the result of our evolutionary and social history? I would posit that In either case the results would be the same. We would still struggle over what is right and wrong. Atheists just don't automatically enlist God as their ally to justify what their inner voice is telling them is right. It leads to a sense of humility, not arrogance.
    • Makeda
    • Philadelphia

    ..."When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor,..."
    Rigorous atheism cast a wasting shadow?
    It is in this life that we must struggle against ignorance, poverty, authoritarianism. It in this life that we have hope that our endeavours - like some of Christopher' Hitchens' - will better the world.
    If believers need a religion to fight the good fight, ok. But is there really a need for condescension of this kind to unbelievers?
    • Bob Foster
    • San Carlos, CA

    The latest of those who debated the living Hitchens and lost, now trying to slip in one more argument. Hitchens told him even if Jesus died and was resurrected it wouldn't be enough to convince Hitchens there was a god. Indeed, by Occam's razor, a provable resurrection does dictate an unprovable god as its mechanism. Calling Hitchens' atheism a dogma "impervious to any new fact or unexpected revelation" is simply a slur spun out of gossip. Whatever one may think of Christopher Hitchens many changes of heart over the course of his life, they bear witness he was ever open to, and willing to be changed by, new facts. Finally, the allegation that atheism inevitably leads to Larkin-like despair is refuted by Hitchens' own death, spent with loving friends, working to the end.

  63. How empty the world seems without Christopher. He often infuriated me, but what a magnificent mind and courage he possessed! I was in total awe of his knowledge and erudition, even when I thought he was wrong. The world has lost a great mind with his passing.
    • Sarah
    • Dublin, CA

    Since when is Jesus rising from the dead a fact OR a revelation? Its a myth in a story book. That's all it is.
    • rrl
    • Durant, OK

    Short story. A few years ago my wife, son and I who were visiting Washington D.C. (from the bible belt), were walking around the Dupont Circle Area. We were on a side street a few blocks away from the normal bustle and activity there. It was a weekday around 5:30. The street mostly deserted my wife and son had been briefly distracted by something and had gone to investigate. I was standing by myself on the walkway when Mr. Hitchens (we are about the same age) came strolling down the sidewalk. As he approached I said "hi! You are a, hmm, a... " and he began to walk a wide arc around me (I had been taken by surprise and had a brief lapse). As he sped up a bit (probably thinking I could be crazy) I managed to blurt out, "you wrote the book God is not Great" at which point he slowed considerably allowing me to follow up with "I haven't read it yet but I have been reading some of Bart Ehrman's stuff." At that point he stopped, turned, walked up to me and we began discussing Ehrman and other writers of the ilk. Very soon my wife and son reappeared having no clue as to this stranger's identity. With my family displaying a somewhat odd reaction to the two of us talking, they probably thinking the worst, I graciously ended the conversation to avoid him detecting their uneasiness (and perhaps feeling guilty for having invaded his privacy) and parted with my them verbally committing that his book would be moved to the top of my must read list. I will now carry through on that promise!
    • suitworld1
    • Chicago

    Douthat's understanding of Atheism is simply a mirror image of his own theistic views. Atheism is about argument and evidence, not dogma. If Douthat needs a supernatural figure to give life meaning, so much the worse for him. If evidence emerges for a supernatural deity, then atheism is done. Like evidence for Zeus, however, it is unlikely to be discovered. Hitchens understood this.
    • Mary
    • Santa Cruz
    NYT Pick

    "When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood.”
    Douthat's column’s formulation represents a theistic criticism of atheism, rather than a necessary truth. There may be “Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk” among atheists, but rigorous atheism does not necessarily lead to Larkin’s dark place. To the contrary: a rigorous atheism exalts the primacy of the individual, his independence, and free will. The lack of a deity means that what happens on our watch comes from our exercise of our own authority, and is our own responsibility.
    Although I consider myself agnostic, I find that ennobling,

  68. Thanks, Hitch, for reminding us that the best way to live is develop the intellect, reason, not wallow blindly in a pool of our own ignorance and denial. .
    There is only one factor (God?), Nature. It is the only "thing" that can destroy the world in retribution for despoiling it. If you mistreat it as we are doing now, things will end for us humans. Nature cannot be bought with contrite repentance; that is a human delusion, a fantasy.
    Hitchens understood this and bravely exited busily warning us that we are mortal and we live a delusion when we believe our own fairy tales for consolation. There is only one consolation: treat the Earth and each other kindly and we will have a heaven on Earth.

  69. There is a mildly interesting new book on the subject of god being published entitled MAN SEEKS GOD by Eric Weiner. In reading parts of it (just came in), the galloping doubts of many believers come seeping, no flowing, between the lines and are right there in some of them. The book is a the story of a search, carried out through travels around the world, for faith and understanding. In the end, the author comes back, in part, to where he started, the Jewish faith into which he was born, with a lot of insightful extras on the side.
    This book could be seen as a counterpoint to Hitchens work and, also, to the unbending, professed faith of Douthat, but it is more. It suggests that holding on to one set of beliefs, usually those in which one is raised, and proclaiming them boldly and even belligerently, is not the answer. Searching, with all of one's doubts accessible to the conscious mind, could be.
    http://terryreport.com
      • Rea Tarr
      • Malone, NY

      Your key word here is "beliefs," correct? Then you are not speaking to us, the atheists. Because we do not "believe" there is no god. We lack belief. So there's nothing to doubt, nothing to "hold" onto.
      We aren't "beligerent," we are, in the main, peacefully hoping that soon religion will quietly slip back into its churches and keep its nose out of our civil lives.
      That's not a lot to ask.

  70. Many of the same Christians who decry secularism were in the same camp with Mr. Hitchens, the ultimate secularist, when it came to the war in Iraq.
    http://lotuseditions.wordpress.com
    • mpk
    • MT

    ...Being brave
    Lets no one off the grave.
    Death is no different whined at than withstood.
    That conclusion was embraced by Hitch not as terrible but as an expression of his zen-like acceptance, even love, of paradox in life.
    • Debra
    • Fort Collins CO
    NYT Pick

    Mr. Douthat is right that Mr. Hitchens was liked by his opponents, but he's wrong about Hitchens having a secret affinity for religion or a suppressed desire to recognize God. Atheism does not equal despair. This is the main definitional fallacy in Mr. Douthat's piece; Mr. Hitchens would have it to shreds. Nice try, Mr. Douthat, but you have an unfair advantage--your opponent has left the field.
      • Dana
      • 06612

      Nicely said.

  73. There are lots of elements of Christianity, when examined with any small depth of thought, that make no sense whatsoever. I have a former friend who, at an early age, was encouraged not to return to Sunday school. His crime was to state the obvious: if Judas was betraying Jesus in one of the most hated acts known to Christians, and if he was doing so as part of prophecy, was he not, also, following god's will? If a deed must be done and someone has to do it, then was Judas little more than an automaton in carrying out a necessary task?
    Here's a big one to consider: why would god make human beings, send them to earth with all their human faults and its temptations, just so that a majority of them could be tortured for all eternity because of (drum roll here) their human failings? A brief life filled with fear and suffering, followed by hell? Considered from the perspective of a believer who hopes to avoid this fate, it makes sense. Considered by someone who is outside in the condemned masses, it could be seen as a trick, an act of pre-condemnation by an uncaring god.
    Here is why I think Hitchens was regarded favorably by many: First, his erudition and his ability to call forth, with apparent ease, every ringing quote he had ever encountered and, second, because he was willing to state, to blast around the world, the doubts that many believers hold in their hearts but dare not speak. In Hitchens, they saw themselves unbound and unafraid.
    http://ttr4.com
  74. "Evelyn Waugh" and "humanist" are two words I never expected to see in the same sentence. Waugh would have been a bit shocked too.
    • Thor
    • Ann Arbor MI

    Atheism is a religion just like any other, one that claims, of course without proof, that God does not exist.
    Atheism is not rational. AGNOSTICISM is the only rational position.
    While I am sorry for Hitchens' passing (a result of a common human fate, but accelerated by about 25-50 years by his own utterly reckless self-destruction by TObacco and Alcohol, and who knows what else)
    I am not in the least impressed by him. I listened to some debate last night at C-SPAN, He was marginally entertaining, but not a serious thinker.
      • Rea Tarr
      • Malone, NY

      Come back, Thor! Please. Explain, if you will, how one might "prove" that god does not exist. Where might we locate evidence of nothing? Why isn't it sufficient to say, "Look, here is nothing?"
      Does the agnostic say, "Well...there just might be something. So it might be god." To which I would, naturally, as a staunch but good-humored atheist, reply: "But then again it might be a fairy or a fiend or a goblin or the shade of a doodle bug."
      But, then, I always have had the courage of my convictions.
      • Eli
      • New York

      The point, Rea Tarr, is that atheism is as unscientific as faith and therefore is dogma as well. The yard of stick any true scientific theory is it can be proved wrong. Atheism cannot be proved wrong no matter the strength of its philosophical arguments. This is the one weakness of Hitchen's debate against religion. How can atheism be a bastion against faith when they both have the same foundation ?
    • FromWhereIStand
    • WA

    The problem with theism is that it boils down to a grand tradition of "because I said so." The problem with athesim (especially coming from a "scientist") is that it denies the fundamental theorems of the scientific method and should be an affront to science. It seeks to surreptitiously replace a question mark with a period. Scientific atheism is an oxymoron. "Because I said so," is the argument of autocrats, the weak minded, and those that fear discussion and debate of any human controversy. Those people and their non-arguments that are at the root of some the greatest calamities of injustice in history. Why is it so difficult to allow a question mark to be what it is?
      • Rea Tarr
      • Malone, NY

      How might we use the scientific method to prove that there is no disease that attacks the hair curling out of your ears? How could we use the scientific method to show that there are no mice in your ice cream? What method to provide falsifiability of the hypothesis that my cat cannot speak a word of Spanish? And other nonsense.
      Why does a scientist need science to say there is no such thing as god? There's no theory here. No method called for. No experiment. No analysis. No conclusion at the end of the research.
      Try it out. See what you come up with.

    2. "What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof."
      ~ CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
    • Pjoe
    • Stratford

    Do not try to portray atheists as Marxists - what is true of some is certainly not true of all. There are plenty of common sense moderate capitalist atheists out there dude. Belief in the God of Abraham is intellectual immaturity - plain and simple. So many people go 'half-way' to atheism. They say, 'oh of course, the God of the Bible is not real, but there must be SOME God..." No. There are just too many among us who ARE atheists but are afraid or unwilling to admit it. Politicians and others are cowards and would never admit to being one. Only the few have the courage to admit what we are. I hope some day you will join us.

    1. Thanks, Pjoe, spot on.
    • kwb
    • Cumming, GA

    Having apparently lived many years in an intellectual wasteland, i had never red any of Hitchens' columns until alerted to his death. I have spend the best part of the weekend reading his past contributions, and enjoying them immensely.
    I have to agree that Ross has completely misunderstood Hitchens' thoughts. Perhaps he needs an afternoon of re-reading as well.
    • shawn
    • Pennsylvania

    I suspect that the only Christians who admired Hitchens were those who were either culturally or professionally compelled to put on a facade of faith. I take it back; they didn't admire him, they envied him. He had the courage to be honest with himself as well as anyone who would care to listen.
    If you want to know Hitchens, skip the obits and read Hitchens...ideally, with a good Scotch.
    • flaco
    • Philadelphia

    It is unfathomable that anyone, especially the educated, still believes in the ancient fairy tales which constitute organized religion.
    Hitchens was just pointing out the obvious.

  81. Hitchens made many theists and non-theists alike feel comfortable with the essential irrationality of their beliefs.

  82. Mr Douthat,
    Thank you for stirring the stew.
    David Beglinger
    • Larry
    • Centerport NY

    On Thursday MSNBC showed some interviews of Mr Hichens,one from 2008 and during the campaign of John Mccain,he concentrated his target in a cruel way.
    The issue of his age and being able to survive the term if elected was in full swing.
    Mr Hichen totally denounced the Senator,using his age,seemingly lack of concentration etc etc as a mockingly targeted attack.
    Sounded clever then,now terribly ironic.

    1. Not ironic in the least-it was a perfectly reasonable question Hitch posed-not to mention McCain's chosen running mate.
      Do you recall when Cactus John proclaimed "the fundamentals of our economy are sound"? Look it up.
    • barbara
    • Jersey City, N.J.

    You seem to be saying that because, in your view, atheism leads to despair, then any atheist who truly enjoys life, even in the face of death, must of necessity be something less than a true atheist. You also suggest that Hitchens' atheism was some sort of romantic rebellion instead of a well-reasoned conviction -- and in doing so you diminish him. I'm sure you don't mean to -- you write of him with obvious affection. Yet, simultaneously you write of his beliefs with condescension.
    You write that "atheism . . . can become as self-defended as any religious dogma, impervious to any new fact or unexpected revelation." I am struck, on reading your column, by your need to defend your own beliefs in the face of Hitchens' atheism.

  85. ,,,a hint that he was not so much a disbeliever as a rebel, and that his atheism was mostly a political romantic’s attempt to pick a fight with the biggest Tyrant he could find.
    Sweet, and perhaps partly true. He hated tyrants for acting out their pathologies on others and wept for their victims for acting like sheep.
    READING Hitchens' writings, however, reveals a clearer motivation for his loud atheism: He abhorred self-delusion. Even more than tyranny. And he loved people, even those he disagreed with, as people--complex, inadequate, and human. He felt strongly that he was trying to shake folks from their self-imposed stupor, and was willing to shout at them to try to reach through the smoke. In this, he was of-a-kind with the preachers, raising the roof to let in more light. Compare Hitch to the preacher of your choice, and ask yourself if he was really as "strident" or "full of himself" in his efforts to persuade as a Swaggart, or a Warren?
    Hitchens' atheism was hardly position-taking. He liked (not just loved, but really liked) people far too much to let them stumble blindly through their only opportunity at living, waiting for an afterlife that was not going to be. This aspect of Marxism was true when it was first observed, true when Hitch first agreed with it, and true at the moment after he drew his final breath.
    Ross, you, like me, are a soft-fleshed, hairless mammal, with a finite lifespan. Deal with the responsibility and reality of it.
    • TNC
    • SC

    “Who else feels Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him?”
    A perfect example of exactly why he was on to something. We have known for many years that heavy smoking and alcohol consumption are major risk factors for esophageal cancer (not divine justice). Not to mention that if he were indeed being punished by a supreme being as suggested, then he might have been stricken with laryngeal cancer, a/k/a "throat" cancer and robbed of his voice.
    As one of the witch-hunters steps out of another century to gloat, all at once he glorifies Hitchens and hangs himself with an enviable economy of words.
    • WmC
    • Bokeelia, FL

    What strikes me most clearly in viewing the videos of Hitchens' religious debates resurrected in tribute is how rarely his antagonists engaged his actual words, Instead, they all focused on what they thought were his motives and/or the implications of his words. Something which I believe Ross Douthat has done here as well. The simple fact of the matter: Christopher Hitchens said little that any enlightened, humane individual could or would disagree with, including, especially, the founding fathers.
    • Nancy Lindell
    • Santa Fe, NM

    Mr. Hitchin's book "God Is Not Great" shocked me down to my very atheistic roots! I probably have been an atheist since relatively early childhood - which doesn't speak well for my Episcopal minister grandfather's influence on me. However, those who are believers don't need their beliefs shredded by a too clever by far Christopher Hitchens. It is just rude. I am sorry he had to die before his time, but, while I agreed with him that there is no god, it offends me that he saw fit to shred others' beliefs.
    • Taos
    • Albuquerque, NM

    "After his death, Darwin too was posthumously insulted by fabrications from a hysterical Christian, who claimed that the great and honest and tormented investigator had been squinting at the Bible at the last. It took a little while to expose the pathetic fraud who had felt that this would be a noble thing to do." - C. Hitchens
    "As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon." C. Hitchens
    • pumpkineater
    • MA

    The lack of evidence argument for not believing in God is a weak one. The basis of mainstream scientific propagation of belief is best described as objective Bayesian probabilistic inference. This, for example, is the sort of empirical inference that formalizes the scientific method from which quantum mechanics emerged. On starts with a Prior belief ( e.g. hypothesis ) gathers evidence and then infers a Posterior belief , so on and so forth, guided by Occams razor . Now there is a particular Prior , with a unique and universal status called Jeffreys Prior --it does not stand or fall on evidence and provides the basis for he notion of probability itself. Thus , God , in so far as evidence based science is concerned , is The Prior and not subject to evidence. In other words, without God , there would be not rational basis for the notion of evidence itself.
    So if you believe in scientific evidence , then you will ultimately be hard pressed to deny God on the basis of lack of evidence. Strangely , this Prior involves a notion of scientific ignorance, in the sense that it is maximally uninformative ( information being defined in its scientific/technological way e.g. Shannon or Fisher) .
    The point is that to think that God emerges from evidence is naive with regard to evidence , logic and its probabilistic extension to belief. Sorry, if you want a sound argument for dismissing God , you will have to look to your lack of miracles rather than your lack of evidence.
      • Rea Tarr
      • Malone, NY

      The miracles that pumpkineater asks us to look for would be, if they existed, evidence for the existence of god. Lack of them is lack of evidence. Thus, one can infer that there is no god because there is a lack of evidence. N'est-ce pas?
    • George S.
    • Michigan

    Mr. Douthat, I was with you for awhile, until you started debating a dead man. I feel that what irritated Hitchens, and what annoys other atheists and agnostics, is the sheer arrogance of "religious" people of all stripes who say that the are absolutely certain that they have THE answer to metaphysical questions which are beyond human knowledge and comprehension, and then proceed to warn non-believers of the dire consequences - in this life and/or the after life - of non-belief. Portraying Hitchens as a misguided rebel with a gift for gab is no eulogy to the man, if that was your intent.
    • DP
    • New Jersey

    Religious belief, be it Christian, Hebrew, Muslim, Mormon, Hindu or any other, ultimately constitutes little more that bowing before the altar of Wishful Thinking. Since there is no real evidence, it can be nothing else. Hitchens knew this and exposed it eloquently and in terms that the religious could not contend with, since, unlike them, his arguments did not rely on 'faith.'
    They also loved him for his unabashed support of the war, which I suspect is the real reason they enjoyed him at all; it must frustrate them no end that he wouldn't get fully on board with their world view and embrace their God. And they all loved to argue with him--how they must have hoped to be the one who would change his mind.
    Since Ross and other religiously inclined debaters could not win the argument, they fall back on faith once again, imagining Hitchens standing at the Pearly Gates, no doubt, realizing the error of his atheism and convincing St Peter to let him in. That's a fairy tale more fantastic than anything Marx ever dreamed of.
    Of course, were he a liberal atheist, they'd be content to let him burn in hell.
    • Rick
    • Bryan

    Hitchens was an anti-theist. Even if God existed, he would be naturally against it due to the totalitarian principles of God's existence. One could also make a case for a revolt against God amongst the believers themselves since God up til now appears to have abandoned his creation and must find itself in a deep slumber in some black hole somewhere.
    • hunchbackedmind
    • il

    It's funny that you would even capitalize "Tyrant", Ross. What would the heavenly penalty be for its omission?
    Hitchens grace was not his eloquence nor his humanism. It was his refusal to acknowledge that anybody else had the right to think for him. He spoke freely, He embraced that right.
    When Bobby Fischer died, the joke among chessplayers was that we all "moved up one". I can't help but think that you and your fellow essayists might feel the same today.

  95. He did not go gentle into that good night. Hitchens' anti-religious rants did have a strong taste of the adolescent struggle to separate from the parent and emerge as a grown up, so I never took him seriously as an atheist. No one knows if there is a God, but many of us take comfort in worshiping as though there is one. A contradiction - perhaps, but with the fascination of mystery. I can't help but think that one who dismisses respect for mystery is poorer for it.
    • Jack
    • Pompano Beach, FL
    NYT Pick

    I am a Catholic, Christian, theologian, with many years (40 )in pastoral care. I have been since childhood a firm believer.
    I welcomed the intellectual challenge to faith and a theology which I wholeheartedly adhere to. He's made me more of a believer than ever.
    • Sandy Harcourt
    • California

    "rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor" writes Ross Douthat in the NYT Sunday Review.
    No, a thousand times no.
    'God did it' stops discussion, stops debate, kills interest.
    Not knowing how the magician did it is fun. But it does not begin to be enlightening. It does not begin to lead to further endeavor - except maybe the desire to see how many people you too can fool.
    Rigorous atheism stimulates hope, stimulates endeavor. If we know that God did not do it, we are left to work out for ourselves how it happened. And we get the glory of the theory of evolution by natural selection.
      • frugalfish
      • rio de janeiro

      actually, even if we know God did do it, we are left (by God and free will) to work out for ourselves how it happened. those of us who believe in God, know He gave us science as well as faith.
    • stevie68a
    • nyc

    Will "christians" ever realize that most of them were brainwashed as children to believe in fantasy? Religion is trickery, superstition, and shame. It's also divisive and delusional. Hitchens fought against all this, in order to yank the world from bronze age beliefs. We really are in a New Age, like it or not. Hitchens had the courage to
    speak his mind against the solemn respect so many in authority show for nonsense.
    Yes, there are some good things about religion, but that good can be had without it.
    Teach ethics instead. Grow up.
    • LOUIS ADESSA
    • NEW YORK

    Can anyone please say that Hitchens, like myself and many others, didn't believe there was anything to believe in ? Don't hedge, he wasn't just a curmudgeonly rebel, he was a non-believer. I'm a non believer. There are many of us. There are plenty of Atheists in foxholes. Even the kindest of believers can't seem to give a non believer a break.
    • George
    • NY, NY

    I must point out that in Auden's case, the big-haired ladies of the states' literary societies would make some point of his homosexuality - writers and artists being given far more leeway in their personal lives then than today.
    And as to Larkin's despair, I suggest 'The Explosion'. It is one of the more hopeful poems I've ever read, and speaks to a deep and abiding faith somehow. Those who most regale and revile The Church are often those with the greatest disappointment in it.
    But even Mr Hitchens must admit, that without The Church we would have had no framework for education, and the big community, that led industry and the very fiber of his faith indeed. I must also point out The Church's more reasoned advocacy on the matter of war.
    • Steve Govus
    • Rutherford County NC

    Methinks that Douthat is the one who doth protest too much.
    • jonathanikatz
    • St. Louis

    "now he knows why": I share, from a different perspective, Mr. Douthat's hope for the reality of God and another world. But surely "now", in the sense of this world's clocks and calendars, doesn't extend to the eternal.

  103. And I failed to say that I once told Christopher Hitchens that I had an "intellectual crush" on him at a public event, by which he was very charmed. I loved his work, tried to catch every show he was on, read as much as I could of his writing, and I was among the faithful who prayed that he could have played on the other team whether sooner or later.

  104. If Jesus Christ really did die for our sins, for the bad things we and not He have done, what can top that for love? If he really did rise from the dead on the third day, what can top that for power? If He really knew about Hell, isn't it too bad Mr Hitchens found out too late? Is God really to blame for Stalin, Mao, and North Korea? (Wouldn't separation of atheism and state be a good idea?) Shouldn't atheists who post comments about Christianity make sure they know what they're posting about?
      • Rea Tarr
      • Malone, NY

      Whoa. God's not to blame for Stalin, Mao, and North Korea? You sure? Was it us? The atheists?
      But you have one fair idea: Separation of atheism and state might work. You might have to explain what that means, first. And maybe give us a rough draft of a plan. Thanks.

  105. What a fine article. You are correct to make the connection between rebellion and disbelief. The choice to disbelieve has nothing to do with intellect.
    • Tim Allan
    • Hamburg, NY

    A Thomasian character -- doubter in the New Testament sense, intellectual and thinker in the late medieval sense. But I think Christians liked him, as I did, because in practice, he was more Christian that most of us in his civility and graciousness to others, more honest with himself, and always gentlemanly. Can you imagine Hitchens suggesting that God wanted (or needed) revenge?
    • Mark
    • Rocky River, OH

    Faith and doubt cannot exist without one another. Nor can life and death.

    1. Why do you write that? To me it looks like things have to coexist with their opposites to exist at all.
    • Ernie
    • Queens, NY

    Atheism is itself a faith because it is a belief founded on reason, not on scientific evidence. No atheist has ever been able to definitively prove that God does not exist. How can you prove that something does not exist?
    Also there is much confusion over the distinction between one who believes in God as a spritual entity, perhaps with powers of original creation, and one who follows an organized religion. The two are not the same.
    Therefore, my two points: (1) atheism is itself a belief, (2) not all believers follow organized religion.
    If people can understand just these two points, there will be less confusion all around.

    1. The burden of proof is on those who say the universe has a personality. The mere existence of a proposition does not mean that it is true.
    • Maureen
    • Cambridge MA

    "When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor . . ."
    How would you know, Mr. Douthat? You say you are a believer. How could you possibly imagine the freedom to think for oneself that atheism allows? How can you relate to the joy of doing good because it is right, because love and compassion are given freely, not because an accumulation of good works punches your ticket for entry into some paradise? I miss Hitch even more after your reading your poorly reasoned piece.
    • Don Duval
    • North Carolina

    Mr. Douthat apparently fails to recognize that Hitchen's beef with "God" was that humans use the concept to justify "organized" religions--which then become tools that "believers" then use to bludgeon the rest of us with

    1. It is a total absolution from responsibility. They say "Don't blame me, this is how God wants it to be."
    • mim
    • az

    The answer my friend is blowing in the wind. I loved his stimulating writings.
    • art vandele
    • jackson, tn

    this is great. the man clearly and unequivocally stated that even if you hear that he had a last minute conversion it was metastatic malignancy and not himself talking.
    so we, now have Mr. Douthat subliminally suggesting that this man was not really an atheist but just a rebellious child of god. the audacity of these Christians in their right to the final disposition of your soul and your belief system is truly astounding.
    A Hindu.

  113. I've enjoyed reading and pondering Christopher Hitchen's writings; they were always thought provoking. But unlike Douthat, it's obvious that any true believer or non-believer are cut from the same cloth of fanaticism. I never felt Hitchens was of that ilk, like the new atheists or the fundies, of whatever religion. Hitchens seemed to be more reasonable, much like an agnostic, even if he never embraced that label.
    He will be missed.
    • Seth
    • New York

    “[A]theism…can become as self-defended as any religious dogma, impervious to any new fact or unexpected revelation.”
    The argument that “atheism is just another dogma” is a crude analogy, and one that smugly waves away the very epistemic distinctions that makes atheism the only intellectually defensible position. The theist claims to have answers—the origin of the universe, the mind of its maker, the purpose of everything, and so on. The atheist does not claim knowledge, but rather the absence thereof. He/she calls the theist out on the presumption and absurdity of claiming certainty without a shred of evidence. The only certainty the atheist defends is that the theist is almost certainly wrong in his/her assumptions—that from a literally infinite range of possibilities, it is vanishingly unlikely that the answers to these huge, profound questions are to be found in the dusty scribblings of superstitious ancient tribesmen. The atheist, humbly accepting that certain fundamental questions remain entirely open, calls “faith” what it is, Mr. Douthat: arrogance and cosmic self-centeredness. No "new fact" or "unexpected revelation" stands to undermine what you call the "dogma" of atheism, which is merely epistemic humility. Hitchens's fury came not from any kind of metaphysical certainty, but rather at the horrible ends to which his fellow men used theirs.

  115. "Now he finally knows why" assumes that "he" or for that matter any of us survives death as this personality, surely an impossibility with the loss of the body. We are embodied beings and we know that the body affects the personality, as does our history (nature and nurture). The heaven of personality people imagine for themselves is a form of egotism. If anything is left when the body is gone, it is unlikely to be the same as the previously living being. "He" no longer knows anything, I suspect, because "he" no longer exists. The more interesting question than "does Christopher Hitchens or anything survive death with his ability to be CH intact" is: what might it be like to re-enter the cosmic scrum of atoms banging around the universe and not have to worry about the person (myself) who prevented my seeing anything clearly? By the way, I am ordained in the Episcopal Church--not an atheist, except in believing that whatever force governs the universe is definitely not the god theists believe in. Theism is the problem because it encourages the notion that I (ego) survive forever, just as god the ultimate egoist does.
  116. We know there was a historical Hitchens,he lived and he died and was loved by many including me even though I never met him,I felt I knew him.
    If there is proof of an historical Jesus ,I am prepared to believe in him too,if he lived then he died,but did he die,that is the tricky question ?,I know Hitchens would answer it if he were here.He loved tricky questions.
    • Barbyr
    • Near Chicago

    "Rigorous atheism?" Ross makes it sound like work. It's not. It's easily defined and executed, requires no leaps of faith or subversion of logic.
    The rigors are borne by those who reject science and reason, those who must invent castles in the air and maintain gods to meddle in their earthly affairs.
    • Tod ODonnell
    • Charlotte, NC

    It must be a relief to write a piece with no concern of a Hitchens rebuttal. The idea of a death bed conversion has always appeared to be a to good to be true proposition where a lifetime of hate and disservice could be saved at the end by a 'Hail Mary'. Of course, if that option is unavailable, it would be much more difficult to sell religion.
    • Bill Weinhold
    • Reston, Virginia

    Lovely summary of a life well lived by a larger than life person. Thank you.

  120. Never accept religeous precepts as final. Once you do your brain will shrivel to the size of a pea. Hitchens never did. I will miss his comments and changing precepts. He was a force in the world for the examination of one's beliefs. His ideas felt like a juggernaut, controversial and challenging, but never hortatory.

  121. Ross Douthat’s The Believer’s Atheist is mere wishful thinking self-delusion. No believer can understand, much less accept, unbelief unless he eschews all the precepts, attitudes and prejudices inherent in belief and the foggy prism of faith through which he looks; which he cannot do. To believe otherwise is the arrogance of piety, passive-aggressive, however admiring or well intentioned.
    I thank you, Mr. Douthat, for those good intentions.
    • Sheila
    • Miami

    mr.hitchens got you all venting, didn't he? Exactly what he would enjoyed.
    • Marc
    • Vermont

    Is religion then just denial of death? And you wish to deny that Mr. Hitchens refused to deny it.
    • DPR
    • California

    When I read articles like this, I become more convinced than ever that religiosity is a genetic trait. How else explain such language as "When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor?" That's ridiculous! We atheists often wonder why religious people find it necessary to rely on something outside of themselves to give them a moral compass.
    • Jon D
    • NM

    Chris Hitchens was not infallible (on Iraq, e.g., he was dead wrong).
    But when it comes to the cancer that is religion, he was spot on in almost every respect.
    Ed Abbey described Capitalism with "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell" and
    religion long ago fused and evolved into Capitalism with money its one true God.
    • Guthlac
    • NJ
    NYT Pick

    Glad somebody liked him. As an atheist (and an Englishman) I have no truck with these public atheists. I don't believe but why would I care about those that do, other than when they impact my life. But at this least this column has provided me with some new vocabulary , the collective noun for new atheists is a "tribe". Luckily, I am an old atheist and thus not included, but how many deist groups (religions) would accept such a term to describe them (is Douthat a member of the Roman Catholic tribe?). As for Hitchens today: If Douthat is correct then Hitchens now knows it, if Hitchens was (and I am) correct then Douthat will never know it. Life, or rather death, is not fair.
    • Kathleen880
    • Ohio

    I am was raised a Roman Catholic and am now an evangelical Christian. I am also, in a very modest way, an intellectual. C. S. Lewis had, and has, a profound influence on my life both temporal and eternal. All the meat of this story is too lengthy to recount here.
    I prayed for the salvation of Christopher Hitchens from the moment that I heard of his illness. I was saddened to hear of his death, and hope that I shall someday meet him in heaven.
    The thief on the cross next to Jesus was saved in the last hours of his life. I pray that it was so also with Mr. Hitchens.
    • Bill
    • Princeton nj

    Ross's last sentance has me ompletely confused. Can someone please explain. What it is he is trying to say in summation here?
    • DW
    • Philadelphia

    "A death faced with dignity (as Hitchens did) is vastly preferable to a death whined at, whether you believe in God or not"
    I don't really understand this. When my time comes, I'll whine if I want to.
    I'm an atheist. I don't understand either 1) why believers take such smug satisfaction out of pointing out that atheists, being human beings, have doubts and fears about things like, well, life and death - perhaps this is a guy thing? too many of the outspoken atheists are male - or 2) why, in turn, it upsets atheists so much that believers do this. Believers have a point here, it's just that it's a rather obvious one that has nothing really to do with whether god exists.
    It's ok to be afraid of death, or to wonder if what you've believed for a long time is really true, or to take a second or third or twentieth look at the beliefs you were raised with and evaluate whatever meaning they may have for you. Honest, it's okay and normal. That's kind of the point that people like Hitchens keep making.
    Of course believers are going to jeer at atheists, it's good sport. When believers jibe at us that maybe we're not really so sure and maybe we have doubts and anxieties etc., the real answer is "What is your point" or "Welcome to the club."
      • Jonathan Brown
      • Hannawa Falls, NY

      It's not - as you say - OK to be afraid of death, because this would entail a fear of life. They're the same, you know. Remember the words of Jorge Santayana:
      "There is no cure for life or death, save to enjoy the interim."

  130. Hitchens was one of the best writers of our time and one of the best on Christianity since C.S. Lewis. Where Lewis, a former atheist, got it right in my opinion, Hitchens got it wrong. But he was honest and knowledgeable in his dissent, as well as humorous. Its hard not to love a guy with that kind of logic and wit. May he rest in peace.

  131. The 'believers' who supported the war in Iraq will hopefully come to see that they are as secular Hitchens.
    http://lotuseditions.wordpress.com
    • CDC
    • MA

    We all owe a debt of gratitude to Christopher Hitchens for laying bare the oldest and most destructive scam on earth.

  133. it's not so complicated. when the religious can prove there's a god, then the rationalists among us will believe it. this is really getting tiring. you guys constantly use all manner of specious arguments to convince the rest of us of your "truth". just admit it, a rational mind will never go with god, it just does not add up. your best argument is that it cannot be understood rationally. so, given that, stop trying to convince us using rational arguments and just say, a la bush, you're either with us or against us. sadly, that is really how many of you treat those of us who are not with you... so much for christian charity.
    • A physician
    • New Haven

    Hitchens was quite right about relgion. It is a tribal concept that assuages the fears of some and provides political cover to others. His position on The war in Iraq was misguded, as Sadam Hussein was a secularist if there every was one. In the end, religious constructs are invariable self-defeating, since human behavior, in the end is driven by practical needs. Once you get down to the practical, you've already left the "leap of faith" behind. Philosophy 101 and Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling," in which he describes Abraham's hike up the mountain to sacrifice his son Isaac, was enough to make me understand the absurdity of religion. My revleation was that Socratic Humanism and rational decision making, was the only reference point for guiding human behavior that made any sense. There is no debate to be had. Once the "religious person" has even begun to debate the matter, he's already left his fold. Mr. Douhat shows that he is no believer in the end, because he's trying to use reason to justify his position, his belief in a totally irrational concept. Hitchens "wins" again, even in death.

  135. Surely one hopes never to miss The Sunday Times, in which a Catholic may upon a special ocassion accuse atheists of "happy talk."
    • Billy Ehrenberg
    • Madrid

    2/2
    Hitchins was no closet believer; neither was he a man with the blood of hundreds of Iraqis on his hands. He was a very rare and special thing indeed; a person who had the barefaced bravery to face each challenge and argument on his merit with scant regard for how his changes of opinion would sit with colleagues and allies.
    He didn’t swing between political allegiances; he followed where logic and his morality led him. His political stance was merely the best description of his opinions in any given moment. Facts and morals were followed wherever they may have led him. In this way he was far more a scientist than a man of religion.
    Science rejects the unsubstantiated for the truth that the evidence suggests. In the words of Thomas Huxley “Science is organised common sense, where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.” The truth holds no prejudice, it simply exists; it simply is. This can never be said of religion. Would that there were more like Hitchens, he opened minds where religion closed them.
    • Billy Ehrenberg
    • Madrid

    1/2
    The condescending tone of this article, especially its last line, should be in no way excused because it is part of the fatuous pantheon of opinion based on nothing more than fears and baseless emotions.
    Sadly intelligent people who wish to waste the powers their brains afford them by rejecting logic for fairytales, often to the detriment of others who exist in the only reality we have any evidence for, are the true lost cause. There is no way back for the man who rejects reason for fact-less fantasy.
    If it were possible to fight those who have rejected reason, evidence and logic as the base for knowledge with a strongly worded and demonstrable argument then Religion would be the sole preserve of those who need or use it to procure tangible gains of power or control in this single, unique existence we share.
    The paradoxical beauty and despair of death has a touch of the poetic about it for me, but rather than the finality that the religious so fear causing the proceeding years to fade into a colourless hopeless void, for me the few years we are given are all the more wonderful and beautiful for their transience. And the need to care for our fellow humans is all the more profound for the fact that there is afterlife to compensate those gravely afflicted here.
    • Michael S
    • Wappingers Falls, NY
    • Trusted

    As Johnathon Miller said: "In some awful, strange, paradoxical way, atheists tend to take religion more seriously than the practitioners"
    • AG
    • Wilmette
    NYT Pick

    I have unfortunately read Hitchens only on the topic of Orwell, and I have not had the pleasure of reading what he said about God. And that isn't because I am a theist, it is because what commentary I have read convinces me that the content of his writing is not radically different from what Bertrand Russel and H. L.Mencken said many decades ago, and what Dawkins and others are saying now. Life is short, there are too many other things on my to do list.
    What matters is not the form but the content of the ideas. It is the power of the idea that convinces so many of us that there is no God. You don't have to have read Waugh or Chesterton or any of the other brilliant turners of phrase in whose literary company Hitchens (and Mr. Douthat, apparently) revel to get to the crux of the idea of atheism. One of Hitchens' (and my) heroes was Orwell, who powerfully exemplifies what one can do with straight, unadorned language, free of learned allusions. Even if Hitchens had not been such a brilliant and erudite man, his ideas about God would have been just as valid.
    So read The Graveyard of Dead Gods once again, Mr. Douthat, and abanadon hope that Hitchens "finally knows why." He is dead, and that's it. And he is not the first atheist who has gone to his death without any need of finally turning to God. The great physicist Richard Feynman (who also died too young) believed in natural law to his last breath, not supernatural law. So did Russell, and so do millions of less famous people.

  140. "When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor".
    Demonstrably false. This atheist, for example, maintains hopes and meaningful connection with his various endeavors. Indeed, I must work to create that meaning - it is not spoon-fed by some bizarre ancient text. But meaningful it is.
    Once again, once again we must hear this lame argument - supposedly, without religious fantasy we are left with nothing. What do people who make such claims have against the incredibly varied fruits of reality? Why must they disparage the cornucopia of the real??
    That is one of Dawkin's most important points - but then people like Douthat may not be quite up to capturing that insight.
    • eric selby
    • miami beach, FL

    I hope I am not the only atheist who is offended by this column, by the arrogance of it as if we have no evidence to support our beliefs, or our non-beliefs.
    • sl
    • New York, NY

    An interesting take on the late CH but why would you feel that there is a connection between atheists and despair? I am a proud atheist and feel no despair at life and/or death. The end of your piece betrays a still misunderstood theory you hold.
    As for CH, he made you think and consider alternative ideas. Whether you agreed or not, all he wanted was a good argument to back up those views.
    • Randy
    • MA

    It's delicious to hear the true believer rationalize the fact that Hitchens managed to be a brilliant and decent guy without believing in gods.
    Like heaven, his conversion had to be just around the corner.
    Or, better yet, it's happening now.
    Thanks so much, Russ.
    No, really.
  144. "atheism — can become as self-defended as any religious dogma, impervious to any new fact or unexpected revelation"
    Hitchens would merely respond: "Name one single fact or revelation." And the theist would have nothing.
    • Loreen
    • New Jersey

    This article is just what is wrong with Christian "believers." You focus on whether or not he believed in God? Who cares? That belief, or non-belief, affects no one. More importantly, Hitchens advocated for a bloody, illegal war against Muslims, people he was clearly biased against. Hundreds of innocent lives have been lost because talented writers like Hitchens used their pen to call for more blood. Jesus would have been appalled and that is why no Christian should make a hero of this man. Who cares about his belief, or non-belief, in God? I am certain that, if there is a God, such belief is the last of His concerns about any human character. However, the relentless advocacy of violence certainly has to be a stain on this man's soul. Get a grip and focus on the real issues of this man's life, which were ugly, not on inconsequential nonsense about whether or not he may have been a true believer after all.
      • Nik Cecere
      • Santa Fe NM

      CH's writings on Henry Kissinger more than atones for his political take on Iraq
  146. You do find ways to slip in the most outrageous statements, such as "atheism — can become as self-defended as any religious dogma, impervious to any new fact or unexpected revelation." I truly would have appreciated a "such as" following that statement. Are there any new facts or unexpected revelations that point to the existence of a sentient supreme being? Do tell. Really. I don't believe in flying walruses, either, not because I can't imagine a walrus flying but because I never have and am willing to bet I never will. One last thing: Every time I read an intellectual defending his religion, why do I get the feeling that he's slumming--just a little bit? Hitchens was an honest skeptic. Give him some peace.

  147. I don't question your heartfelt intentions.
    However like so many Christians, et al, who "know better" to paraphrase Bierce:
    "Impiety. Your irreverence toward his deity " or lack thereof.
    Hitchens was the epitome of clarity and the refutation of hocus pocus, myths and gullibility. Perhaps "religious believers liked him" because he gave them a pass on their repressed doubts by being so very clear in his logical and erudite challenges.
    • Ardvaark
    • CT

    The shadow cast is religion's. Atheism, at least for me, has been what has helped to liberate my life from an imposed, depressing, tyranny of thought and philosophy of mindless obedience.
    • Bruce
    • Raleigh

    I liked him because he represented the other side of intelligence. Those of us who are told that the smartest people are scientist, engineers, computer guys, mathematicians etc. His was an intellect every bit as brilliant, if not more so, than any Steven Hawking, or an Einstein.
    RIP Chris, you've just left hell.
    • Carolyn Egeli
    • Valley Lee, Md.

    I wonder if Hitchens was an alcoholic. He sounds like one. I agree with his athiest sentiments, but not with his war mongering. I'm not sure he was so profound as much as he enjoyed his intellectualism and the comardery of like minded souls. He confused passion with alcoholism, is my guess. This is not too uncommon. And it may have cut his life short. For that, we can all be sad. I'm sure he would have been just as colorful, erudite and insightful without it.
    • shedhair
    • usa

    It is striking that Hitchens spent a large part of the last few years discerning and writing about his " No God".
    Like many others of the rational bent, he must have thought he was unique.
    • imcampos
    • Brazil

    A giant, inspiring intellect, a pleasure to listen in talks and debates.
    Made me appreciate life more deeply and fully, how can I ever thank him enough?
    • Rich Carrell
    • Medford, NJ

    Hitchens spoke for many of us. He is one of the few who withstood the slings of arrows from the religious crew who cannot stand that someone actually believes that religion is an unsupported hand me down that has caused almost every form of human suffering in the world. So many feel and the think the same way but do not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up for the ideas. Too many who are non believers are afraid of the masses of the narrow minded that somehow feel if you don't believe in their god you are a criminal or worse. I believe it is okay to believe but you should others alone who don't. Hitch, we will all miss you!
    • Dr. Bob Solomon
    • Edmonton, Alberta

    Heard Neo-Con Paul Wolfowitz praising Hitchens on CBC Saturday, and then religionist Chris Hedges meanly mocking him for being a rude drinker and intellectual bully. Made me miss Hitchens. He never would have felt praise for simply taking a particular political stand was worth receiving, nor that showering hateful comments on the newly dead was worthy of the God-fearing. Mailer, George Carlin, and Lenny Bruce are applauding Hitchens' most outrageous comments.
    Hitchens delighted in disorder. He loved to prick the bourgeoisie. Few could do what Ezra Pound demanded of intellectuals, to "kick back against the pricks" of their critics -- with Hitchens' formidable learning, wit, exaggeration, elan. Right about Saddam's evil ways but wrong against Wolfowitz's war, Hitchens loved kicking truisms, and, in this season of brain-insulting sound-bites from hell, he shall be sorely missed. He should be graciously celebrated as one who did "not go gently" through life or into "that dark night". He always "railed against the closing of the light". Dylan Thomas is raising a drink in Hitchens' honor tonight. And e e cummings is asking "How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mister Death...?"
    • Dianne
    • Florida

    I will miss him very much. Hitchens valued behavior and deeds over dogma and blather. Judge me by my actions please, not my words. My husband, another very bright atheist, always says "spiritual is doing what you should do and what you say you will do"...if we all honored our commitments to wives, husbands, parents, children and neighbors and communities we would be just fine...religious or non-religious.
    • Janet
    • Salt Lake City, Utah
    • Trusted

    I think Mr. Hitchen's appeal to Christians, eventhough he soundly won any debate on the validity and usefulness of Chrisitian belief, is that he knew their beliefs extremely well. It is the profound knowledge that no doubt led many Christians to believe or at least hope he was one of them. I see the same thing within Mormon culture. Any outsider who has taken the time to thoroughly and accurately understand Mormon religious beliefs and practices is usually embraced as someone who will eventually see the light and join the Church, regardless of the intensity of the outsider's denunciation of those same beliefs and practices. It is why Jon Krakauer has no respect and Jan Shipps is frequently invited to speak to Mormon groups.

  157. I agree that Douthat's column contained a fair degree of condescension - the condescension typical of "believers" who ultimately require you to believe as they do in order to psychologically support their often flimsy intellectual house of cards. But IMHO, such a charge could also be fairly leveled at Hitchens!
    Spare us the condescension typical of both evangelical Christians and evangelical Atheists. America was invented by free-thinkers - that is, Enlightenment era Christians, 18th century Deists, and 18th century Freemasons (like, for instance, George Washington and Ben Franklin). And let's never, ever minimize the influence of Freemasons on the Early Republic, even if it makes both contemporary Christians' and Atheists' skins crawl.
    When authentic free-thinkers conclude they require additional input, rest assured that they will seek it out.
    • Wm Conelly
    • Warwick, England

    Put thoughts in the dead man's head; put words in the dead man's mouth and the life praised is the life of the ventriloquist . Hitchens spoke just fine for himself; whether people will be reading and considering his words next year or next century---as they will Larkin's---THERE'S the crux of an argument.
    • Laughingdragon
    • SF Bay Area

    Hitchens doesn't "now know why". Hitchens is dead. Ain't nothing happening there folks, move along.
    • Josh
    • Oyster Bay, NY

    How is it that Hitchens was so skeptical of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and yet he completely bought-in to the Iraq War? Maybe -- like Jews, Christians, and Muslims -- he had a need to turn to the Middle East and see Hope.
    • Western hunter
    • Colorado

    Ross........ if there actually were a "somewhere" beyond this life - which there most certainly is not - Hitch would be laughing out loud at your piece.
    Nice try....... but no cigar.

  162. Ross Douthat makes a bogus assertion that "rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor." Huh? Says who? Hitchens did not despair of hope nor counsel others to, he invited them to reason.
      • jharris99
      • Healdsburg, CA

      That's because "True Believers" like Douthat continue to confuse religion and spirituality. Religion is narrow, dogmatic, exclusive, and defined. Spirituality is open, undefined, philosophical, and individual. God is a just a human invention seeking to explain the unexplainable. Sorry, Ross, but you're wrong about atheism and wrong about what made Hitchens tick.
    • Doug Dupin
    • Washington DC

    "the most remarkable was how much religious believers liked him."
    Don't think so and don't think Hitchens would have thought so.
      • Rea Tarr
      • Malone, NY

      Let's turn the tables on Douthat: Religious believers who liked Hitchens obviously were not believers. They displayed "whiffs" of atheism.
    • brian kenney
    • cold spring, ny

    I think he got these ideas from history- after all, what other reasons are almost all wars fought? It's either spiritual or philosophical habits that imitate religion- you're in the group or in your own group whether it's called Catholic, Coptic, Nazism, communist, etc. He decided not to join.
    • R Scalf
    • Berkeley, CA

    "When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk..."
    Marxist fairy tales? techno-utopian what? I have no idea what you are talking about. Yes, Marxists are generally atheists; but then Al Qaeda bombers are thought to be theists. I think you are projecting.
    • Nancy
    • New York

    Ross, Christopher Hitchens would have picked apart your specious and simplistic arguments in a red hot minute, leaving you whimpering on the floor.
    Stop trying to make "atheist conversion" happen.
    • Thomas Zaslavsky
    • Binghamton, N.Y.

    It was a nice column for the most part, but when at the end you wrote, "When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor" - such nonsense! Mr. Douthat, you have no idea what atheism is.
    • DHR
    • Ft Worth, Texas

    Ross,
    I think you admire him and he admired you because you both had "done the work." The words Christian and Atheist really have no clear meaning...pick out ten of each and grope for consensus. The best Christians and Atheists are really agnostic (to struggle).
    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world;
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    the ceremony is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    are full of passionate intensity.
    ~W.B Yeats (The Second Coming)
    Start your debate from there...you might get somewhere.
    • Graham
    • Toronto

    Look, we atheists don't believe God because there isn't enough evidence to believe in Him. So I never understand theists like yourself who make arguments like this, "rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor." What do you want me to say? "It does? It casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor? Oh, well, in that case, I DO believe in God." Please.
    • Mark Siegel
    • Atlanta

    As a Christian, I liked and admired Christopher Hitchens not only because he was a brilliant and vastly entertaining writer, which he was, but because he was in his own way a passionate true believer -- in his case, in the non-existence of God. He was as passionate in his unbelief as those of us who believe. I picture Mr. Hitchens now in heaven (where he belongs), drinking a strong Johnnie Walker Black, arguing with God. Christopher Hitchens, RIP.
    • Bob Sterry
    • Canby, Oregon

    Hitchens would have predicted that you might have said something like this. But only you remain to hear it.
  172. so you just don't get it...there is no god!
    • William Verick
    • Eureka, California

    This is precisely the kind of obit that Hitchens would hate. A much more Hitchens-esqe obit is the one Alexander Cockburn wrote for Counterpunch. Cockburn doesn't fawn over a dead man -- he gives an honest and not-very favorable review of what Hitchens was about. From his embrace of the Iraq war to Hitchens's attempt to ruin has former friend Sid Blumenthal for having the temerity to work for the Clintons.
    If Hitchens were writing your obit, do you think he would publish something fawning?
    • JK
    • Pearl River, NY

    Douthat writes "...how much religious believers liked him...almost filial connection many Christians felt for him...Intellectually minded Christians, in particular, had a habit of talking about Hitchens as though he were one of them already...many Christian readers felt that in Hitchens’s case there had somehow been a terrible mix-up...so many religious people felt a kinship with him...."
    That's a lot of generalizing about "many" without any specifics. How about naming one of the many with a specific quote from to back up the claims?

  175. Mr. Douthat's "fellow Catholic" friend has it wrong. Hitchens did not protest peoples religious views, if you asked his opinion, he would tell you. But he was also a polite gentleman in lots of ways-he was not out just to insult people. Tell him you will pray for him, he would say "I'll think for you"-it's what he did, think about stuff. Sure he had friends of all stripes, why do you suppose that is?
    He was not an enemy of god, he was an enemy of ignorance and complacency. He did not personally acknowledge a god, therefore he could not be an enemy.
      • MUMU
      • Plymouth MA

      "I'll think for you" is a pretty straight up insult, hardly a considerate reply, but a snide and snarky put down.
    • AMW
    • San Francisco, CA

    Or maybe Christians felt "connected" to his enthusiastic support for the mass murder of Muslims.
    Let's let him speak for himself:
    [On the use of cluster bombs by the US in Afghanistan] "If you’re actually certain that you’re hitting only a concentration of enemy troops…then it’s pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they’re bearing a Koran over their heart, it’ll go straight through that, too. So they won’t be able to say, “Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.” No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words."
    —As quoted in "The Left and 9/11:" by Adam Shatz, The Nation (2002-09-23) [ http://www.thenation.com/article/left-and-911?page=0,3 ]
    "I should perhaps confess that on September 11 last, once I had experienced all the usual mammalian gamut of emotions, from rage to nausea, I also discovered that another sensation was contending for mastery. On examination, and to my own surprise and pleasure, it turned out be exhilaration. Here was the most frightful enemy–theocratic barbarism–in plain view….I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost."
    —from "Images in a Rearview Mirror," by Christopher Hitchens, The Nation, Issue dated December 3, 2001 [ http://www.thenation.com/article/images-rearview-mirror ]

    1. Remember that he spoke of theocratic barbarism, that battle would or should be taken up by any thinking person.

    2. "Theocratic barbarism" may be an ugly term justifying what seems to come through in Hitchens' support for the Iraq war as a kind of barbaric bloodlust on his part. But it does indicate that it was not god Hitchens considered an enemy: it was the barbaric consequences of a mindless belief in god that bothered him. And, given his temperament, that drove Hitchens to language often shocking to anyone's sensibilities. Hitchens would think of the "end of times" American evangelicals as no less proponents of a theocratic barbarism as Islamic fundamentalists. He would see the similarity in their thought patterns and their willingness to act them out.
    • itzajob
    • New York, NY

    As a non-believer, I found that the virulent intolerance Mr. Hitchens displayed toward anyone whose religious beliefs differed from his own brand of atheism made me appreciate how law-abiding Muslims must have felt after 9/11 was committed purportedly in the name of Islam.
    • AJZ
    • New York

    "Officially, Hitchens’s creed was one with Larkin’s. But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair.
    My hope — for Hitchens, and for all of us, the living and the dead — is that now he finally knows why."
    Does this mean that you hope he is burning in hell forever (or whatever it is that damned souls experience)? Isn't this the fate that the religion you subscribe to postulates for unbelievers?
    • Rob DL
    • Connecticut
    • Trusted

    Christopher Hitchens fought against the lunacy that is organized religion for no other reason except that it needed/needs to be done.
    The author of this article tries to distort Hitchens motivation, as though he had an ulterior motive, or that he simply has an inner desire to be a contrarian simply for the purpose of fulfilling some rebel cause.
    The reality is: no rational and objective person can possibly embrace the teachings of organized religion. It served a useful purpose, perhaps, during a time when our knowledge of the world and Universe were still immersed in fantasy. But it is sheer lunacy to embrace it now given all we know about our world. But people, as Hitchens recognized, needs their "toys to play with". So it stands to reason that fantasy continues as the bedrock of people's beliefs so they can, I suppose, make sense of it all. Well, we don't need fantasy to explain the Universe, or why the oceans behave as they do. No, we have science and common sense that tells us among other things that human beings cannot part the Red Sea with their bare hands; amazing that we still need to argue this point.
    If the author chooses to disagree with Hitchens, that's fine, but please don't distort what the man stood for, and/or marginalize his work so that it fits nicely and comfortably into your version of reality.
      • Dan of The Prophecy Society
      • Atlanta

      On what basis, other than opinion, can you (or Hitchens) state that no rational person can possibly embrace the teachings of organized religion? Do you mean denominations, then I can perhaps agree. However, if you mean the teachings of the Bible itself, then I have to disagree rationally by offering evidence. A person of learning must consider all of the evidence to reach a rational conclusion. Hitchens did not do that. Assuming that he understood the Bible (which is doubtful, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt), he rejected the evidence of predictive prophecy, which has been placed in the Bible to strengthen the rational belief of those who have trouble believing.
      There are prophecies in the Bible that were made and fulfilled many generations after they were recorded, something that can only be explained by the supernatural. One example is the prophecy in the 8th chapter of the Book of Daniel, which states that the Temple Mount in Jerusalem would return to Jewish sovereignty 2300 Passovers (evening-mornings in Hebrew) after Alexander the Great defeated the Persians at the Battle of Granicus in 334 BCE. That predeiction was made 2500 years before it came true in 1967 (the Book of Daniel has been dated scientifically by carbon dating to 2100 years old in the Dead Sea Scrolls).
      I guess an "educated" person could hypothesize time travelers coming back to write the Book of Daniel, but having a God that did it is an equally good explanation for any rational person.
      • George
      • NY, NY

      I have no zealot's red face, but I must point through your so-serious atheism to any of the touchpoints that evolution and science cannot, indeed, touch:
      Matter cannot be created or destroyed. Bit of stickler for the atheists there.
      Intuition/inspiration. Idea making is beyond the math of science. There is no reason in pure inspiration.
      Deja vous, or ghosts. I've seen one, so....
      The great failure of you position to me, though, is all those centuries where a belief in God made the difference between living and dying. People needed a reason to believe, you'd say, and this is an evolutionary gambit. But the seed of your evolutionary gambit required the civility and structure of a society under God.
      Here we are, as a society, and in your self-assuredness as well as Mr Hitchens's, picking at the hem of the social fabric. Religion is where we come from, and while the majority might indulge and appreciate this brand of sophistry, should they adopt your view en masse, then the despair of it would tear our society apart.
      I will imagine that in your own civility you are outwith the common strivings, and rest assured in your education, and will not suffer and starve any time soon. When all you have is worry, God is the calming voice in the dark. You have no need for that voice, lucky you.
    • beethy
    • CA
    • Trusted

    No matter how strident, I like to hear them all (particularly when different) .
    Hitch's was strident and different.
    • Mariano Patalinjug
    • Yonkers

    Yonkers, New York
    18 December 2011
    Christopher Hitchens will surely be missed by the 40 million or so in America who like him are "disbelievers" or atheists.
    The fact that, as Ross Douthat here characterizes him, Hitchens was the "Believer's Atheist," clearly shows that he was a clear-minded, objective, rational and compassionate atheist who was not given to fanatical outbursts against "God" and believers.
    That is why, more likely than not, many believers will likewise miss Cristopher Hitchens.
    Mariano Patalinjug

  182. Douthat is an atheist too. Hitchens simply disbelieved in one more, additional "god".
    • Shelley Hinch
    • Hayward, CA

    Bet he's not an atheist anymore.

    1. The software running on your brain, your software soul compiled from your experience, is inseparable from it and depends totally on its electrochemical functioning. Death is oblivion, and Hitchens is oblivious to it now.
      • Ed the Engineer
      • Manchester NJ

      Well, he's no more at all, isn't he?
    • Brenda
    • Reading PA

    He always seemed to me a repellent and bloodthirsty drunk who looked disheveled and acted obnoxious.
    He stridently championed a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Some would submit anything else he did was insignificant beside that.
      • Bud
      • USA

      Amen. I couldn't stand the guy and am very amused reading all the accolades he's getting from the enlightened bunch here at the NYT. I'm stunned that so many are willing to sweep his cheerleading for the Iraq war under the rug. I agree that organized religion is a bane to the world but I get the feeling he was an atheist the way a teenager declares himself an atheist - it made him look cool and intellectual.
      I dislike in-your-face atheists as much as I dislike in-your-face born again christians. They're both obnoxious, self-righteous and smug. Hitchens fit that description to a T.
    • Tomas Pedroso
    • Minneapolis, MN

    Hitchens would have been annoyed with your imposition of his real thoughts. He was clear in his disbelief in God. Period. You take the liberty of twisting the idea of his disbelief into belief. It is this type of arrogance that he greatly fought against.
    • TBS
    • New York, N.Y.

    All religions are a form of philosophy – a philosophy to live by. I agree with Douthat that Hitchens was the religious man’s atheist. He was the foil for his enemies in politics and culture too. And it was for the best reason: he cared about the world of ideas. In short, he actually listened to his opponents! He took them seriously.
    Whether in the possible next world he comes across a religion that transcends philosophy – whether he find that Judaism, Islam, or Christianity (or another) religion is actually correct – I would LOVE to read his essay on that experience!
    • Rory Evans
    • New York

    As usual, Christians find it very easy to love those whom they cannot see: god, angels, unborn humans and now apparently, Christopher Hitchens.
    • Bill
    • New York

    Not believing in a fairy tail that is often used to hurt and oppress people is in no way the equivalent of giving into despair, Ross.
    Why indirectly question people who reject your dogma? Especially after they are gone and can no longer outwit you.
    I think YOU protest too much.
    Merry Christmas!

  189. What a lot of work just to get Larkin wrong. What will survive of us is love.
      • HCM
      • New Hope, PA

      You nailed it. Ones immortality is built on what they do in life to support and nurture others and how this carries on with those who are still alive - it is not some magical existence after death.
      • George
      • NY, NY

      An Arundel Tomb - thank you. I especially like The Explosion too.
    • Angie Calligan Tucker
    • Boise, Idaho

    “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” ― Christopher Hitchens
    A simple, yet meaningful comment perfectly representative of Mr. Hitchens.
    I'll miss him.
    Signed,
    A baptized Catholic-Mormon (who is now agnostic, leaning to atheist).
      • George
      • NY, NY

      What a dangerous way of thinking! He was a child intellectual and a tyrant.
      Judge not, lest ye be Christopher Hitchens. Wow.

  191. I will miss Mr. Hitchens. He was a great writer and an interesting person.

  192. They loved him because he loved their wars.
      • Michael
      • Pasadena, CA

      This, exactly. Conservative Christianity has become the War Party / Republican Party.
    • ed connor
    • camp springs, md

    Hitchins was brilliant, charming and witty, which is not typical of the atheist I have known.
    Shortly before his death, he quoted another noted atheist, Voltaire, who had been requested to renounce the devil before sucumbing.
    "Why make new enemies now?," he replied.
    My favorite Hitchism was his comment on the Tea Party:
    "All politics is yokel."
      • PL
      • Sweden

      Voltaire was no Christian, but he was no atheist either. He was what may loosely be called a "Deist": There is a God; the human soul is immortal; God being righteous, humans can expect condign rewards or punishments in the afterlife; prayer is foolish and alleged miracles are all fables, since God does not interfere in human life; the Church is a great evil.
    • Jeofree
    • New York

    "When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor"
    In the middle of an almost reasonable essay, Ross Douthat throws in a line that makes you blink in amazement at its sheer religious extremism.
    Richard Dawkins uttered my favorite response to people like this: "We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
    Atheists and the religious can have a healthy debate, but writing a supposedly reasonable and even sympathetic column about a non-believer and calmly tossing in a statement like the above is simply amazing.
    To go back to Dawkins, imagine for a moment that a believer in the actual reality of Zeus were somehow still around, and told you that your non-belief in Zeus renders anything you hope for or strive for meaningless and doomed to fail. I bet you'd think the person saying that was a profoundly silly and/or disturbed individual. Right.

    1. Frankly there is no reasonable debate with people who see their own personalities reflected and immortalized in nature.

    2. I would add to the list of Douthat's gratuitous slanders against atheism his snide remarks about its"bloodless prophets in a world lit only by atheism" and atheists' supposed absence of "hope." I doubt very much that Douthat is totally ignorant of the long pantheon of atheists who have been among history's greatest humanitarians, including people like Clara Barton and Bill Gates, or atheists' many contributions to music, literature, etc. (Shelley, Brahms, etc.). That can only lead to the conclusion that Douthat is either projecting, deceiving himself, or being outright dishonest in order to get in a final cheap shot at one of atheism's brightest.
      But even as insulting as his supposed appreciation is, perhaps Douthat has done Hitchens a favor by once again revealing how uncharitable and unfeeling believers can be -- all the while claiming to be the sole bearers of the mantle of love and kindness toward their fellow human beings.

    3. This is exactly the thing that he fought against. Atheists and agnostics have to constantly navigate a world where you are free to practice your religion but it seems you must chose one. It's sometimes infuriating when we realise that because of your lack of "spirituality" we seem to have to mute ourselves or modify our actions, the intellectual equivalent of being banished to the back of the bus. No wonder so many of us are so defensive, we ARE constantly under pressure from the religionists.
    • J. Free
    • New York

    Anyone who was benighted enough to support the Iraq war, as did Hitchens, lost all credibility as a clearheaded thinker. Hitchens was merely a Gingrich of the left: kind of a blow hard, convinced of his own importance, but glib enough to be superficially entertaining.
    • Darsan 54
    • Grand Rapids, MI

    I find the attempt of faux Christians to recruit Mr. Hitchens beyond the grave more obnoxious than anything he wrote. I still admire his craft skill, but I hold no admiration for Mr. Hitchens. But this passive-aggressive recruitment by God's followers does Him no honor or glory. It sullies His name.

  197. Douthat misses the point with false premises like this one: "rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope." Huh? Hitchens didn't argue that nor did he counsel giving into despair. On the contrary, he despaired of a life that did not make a full use and exercise of reason. Douthat may have met the man at a dinner party but can't seem to get out of his own way. He misreads Hitchens, as well as Larkin. And he's just a trifle anthropomorphic about death.

    1. The Douthats and Scalias of America will evidently never understand the liberty that comes from dumping the need to believe anything without substantiation.
    • r
    • US

    Hitchens was as much a true believer as his nemesis Jerry Falwell, even if Hitchens professed disdain for organized religion (and open racism toward Moslems).
    Like Falwell, Hitchens showed an outright contempt for facts that flew in the face of his (often repellent) ideology. This trait reached its apogee in his many pieces defending the US-led massacre in Iraq.
    To the bitter end, Hitchens insisted the demolished country was happier and healthier now, that torture was a rare aberration by a few bad apples, that Ahmad Chalabi was a brilliant statesman rather than the shady con-artist everyone knew him to be, that Saddam had close ties with Al Qaida and was involved in 9/11, that WMD DO indeed exist and we will eventually find them and on and on.
    Perhaps Hitchens didn't believe in Noah's Ark, but he might as well have. Indeed, such belief, while childish, would at least have had less disastrous consequences for hundreds of thousands of innocent people caught in America's war without end.
      • B Mann
      • Philadelphia, PA

      Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Vastly more wars (and death and torture and rape and pederasty) in the name of God than for any other cause.
    • The Lone Ranger
    • Colorado

    The arrogance is with Ross and his "intellectually minded Christians" who would like to believe that Hitchens was really one of them.
      • Rea Tarr
      • Malone, NY

      I have degrees in language and English, and I'm still trying to grasp what "intellectually minded Christians" means. I've reached the conclusion that, somehow, it does not mean "highly intelligent." It probably does not mean "gifted," or "really smart," either. Willing to work for food?
      I need some help, here.
    • jim
    • new hampshire

    Would that Mr. Hitchens were alive to write a response to Mr. Douthat's article. Perhaps he wrote one already in anticipation. One can hope.

  201. This article reminds me of what was sometimes said about people with dark skin in Central America. "See that man? As black as he looks, he has a white heart, he is a good person". Even as your praise Mr. Hitchens, your words betray your lack of respect or understanding for anyone who does not conform to your world view. How insulting to say that his defenses were up until the end. Perhaps it is your own defenses that are being strained by his courageous example.
    • Andrew J.
    • SF, CA

    Such a nice article, until the end. I believe the word Mr. Hitchens would have used to describe your sentiments on the inherent despair of atheism would be "rubbish".
    • Rick Young
    • Richmond

    "My hope — for Hitchens, and for all of us, the living and the dead — is that now he finally knows why."
    I'm sure you didn't intend it, but the above is a rather cheap shot. It represents one of the more irksome tactics of believers. Lacking Christopher's gift for retort, I will leave it at that.
    • Michael
    • Florida

    Admit it, you liked him because, although an arch-liberal for most of his life, he vociferously opposed Bill Clinton and supported George W. Bush's costly wars of aggression. Though a traitor to liberalism, many liberals continued to hold out hope for him because of his staunch secularism and rigorous empiricism. He was tolerated, if not embraced, by both sides because he attacked each without quarter. In some way just about everyone could define him as a "friend," in being the "enemy of their enemy."

  205. "My hope — for Hitchens, and for all of us, the living and the dead — is that now he finally knows why."
    If this should be true, then I suspect that what he now knows is something that Mr. Douthat would not recognize nor ever would have imagined.

  206. Beautiful piece. And yes, he was a brilliant atheist protesting too much.

    1. You can't protest too much the multi-layer tapestry of lies giving shirk and idolatry a public imprimatur they never deserved here in a nation that refuses to emerge into adulthood in defiance of its own constitution.

  207. Humbug. He meant every word of it, and he was right. "An atheist at his funeral," I read in a provincial paper the other day," is all dressed up with no where to go." Which makes him no different from anyone else, Catholic, Buddhist, Mormon, pagan, Pope.
    • john
    • Milwaukee

    The prodigal son is on the road home with his father running out to great him and readying his embrace? I think and pray so.
    • Ed
    • Clifton Park, NY

    Rather hard to debate a dead man but it's a way to get the last word in.

  210. Perhaps I have misunderstood Hitchens, but surely not as enormously as you have, Mr. Douthat. For instance, if you can imagine your roles reversed, that you became ill and died, and Hitchens continued on in his inimitable way, consider what his thoughts would have been about you. I think it's likely that he would have hoped that for your sake, all your imaginings about religion were true, for you at least, so that you would not suffer needlessly. His own sufferings, which as you say he bore so publicly, and to which he gave words, an impossible feat for lesser writers, demonstrated again the breadth and depth of this man. And in doing so, life itself is illuminated by his fire (an analogy used by others in his name), so that we who are left behind can measure our own grasp, or lack of it, of the beauty and potential inherent in all that surrounds us. Who needs God, or an afterlife? It's all here, now.
    • Bent Schmidt-Nielsen
    • lexington, ma

    "rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor" This statement seems to be contradicted be your praise and admiration for Hitchens. Hitchens was a rigorous atheist who cast a strong and moral light on many topics.
    • Chris G
    • San Jose, CA

    Ross, you seem to find it difficult to believe that a man of Hitchens interest in religion was not at the same time a believer himself. You seem to think, underneath it all, he was a true believer just waiting to come out of his hardened shell- that he 'protest to much'. What you fail to see is that Christopher was more interested in exposing those institutions and individuals who were- for lack of better words- full of it. There is no institution more 'full of it' than religion. Ross, he didn't believe in the invisible man in the sky who can read your thoughts and watches everything you do. He didn't believe that. Many intelligent and passionate people don't believe in a god or gods. They don't believe it because it's just a ridiculous notion. Not believing in a god or gods is very liberating, and demands that you appreciate the here and now- for there is no afterwards. The reason why you misunderstand Hitchens is because he didn't seek refuge in the puerile myths and feeble assurances offered by any religion. He had a courage you can't tap into, and therefore misconstrue.
    • T.E. Duggan
    • Chappaqua, New York

    Time and again Hitchens, in God Is Not Great, specifically accused "religion" of poisoning everything, not faith. He would have certainly be displeased by your casual and careless conflation of the two as accuracy of both thought and fact was critically important to him.
    • Sam
    • Bangkok

    I remember a late show episode when Letterman, smacking Bill O'Reilly around, remarked "you are too smart to believe the things you say". Huckstering for a buck, facts and posterity be damned - this I think describes Hitchens as well.
    Though one would be loathe to place on O'Reilly and Hitchens on the same intellectual or moral plane, the fact remains they both made (and one continues to make) a profession out of forceful straight-faced mostly false provocation. In Hitchens case this strikes home very clearly as one watches or reads him twisting into a pretzel while proselytizing the neocon worldview.
    • Rob
    • New York, NY

    What utter claptrap, and what breathtaking arrogance. Hitch would have a field day with this, as well he should. For Douthat, D'Souza and so many others, a life without religion is just so lonely and confusing that they can't live a day without their myths, much as an infant needs the proverbial pacifier. For Hitch, rejecting mythology was the first step in a process of real revelation -- how things work, what they mean and don't mean, and where we must (and will) find our inspiration in lieu of the supernatural. HIs joy was people, books, ideas. If anything, Mr. Douthat, your parting "hope" for Hitch should be turned on its head; in fact, he hoped that, one day, you would cast off your fairy tales and join the world of real thinkers. Apparently that's not going to happen. Your loss, not his.
    • Jay Casey
    • Arkansas

    He was brilliant. I agreed with him on many things (except Iraq) and only wish I could set forth my ideas as well as he did. I especially admired his courage.

    1. Well said. I would have added eloquence and ease.
    • DaveW
    • Tempe, AZ

    I found Hitchens to be charismatic, but not too different from the other new atheists. Isn't Richard Dawkins and engaging, thought provoking individual?
    Yet, like Dawkins, the ad-hominem was his best form of argumentation. His atheism is a non-religious, enlightened view of the world and man's role in it, while someone else's theism is a blight on human kind to be eradicated.
    Why so much press is given to Hitchens and other atheist philosophers and so little press given to the legitimate Christian apologists, always escaped me. Most non-religious people think that TBN is the intellectual pinnacle of Christianity, but in fact, there are many Christian apologists (philosophers and scientists) that support their faith with logical arguments backed with evidence.

    1. You don't seem to understand new atheism. The issue is whether nature has a personality with empathy for the human condition or not. Atheists categorically reject the thesis that nature has any personality at all.
      The personality theists read into nature is a projection of themselves. They're narcissists.

    2. No there aren't. There is no proof, just faith or belief.
      • Rea Tarr
      • Malone, NY

      What evidence? I dont have television or a cellphone, so I must have missed it. Is it on line? What keyword?
    • Steve
    • NYC

    Curious last sentence: do you really believe that Hitchens is now enjoying the afterlife, able to reflect on the wrongness of his atheism?
    Remarkable. Or maybe I've lived in the northeast too long to get it. Do intelligent Christians still really believe that "they" will survive their deaths in an afterlife?
    Do they give equal credence to Hindu beliefs in past and future lives? Do Muslims go to a Christian afterlife, or a Muslim heaven? Or do they simply believe that, as Christians, they happily have the true way?
    I always thought intelligent Christians understood the afterlife and all those miracles as metaphor.
    • cboy
    • nyc

    Well this little piece sets new heights for being offensive and patronizing, and poor old Hitch is scarcely cold. But I am scarcely surprised.
    • Steve Ellman
    • South Florida

    On what basis does Douthat claim that Hitchens--while living--was unable to articulate reasons not to live in despair? All the evidence suggests otherwise. How presumptuous, and patronizing.

    1. Hitchens demonstrated a great joy of learning that appears to have made him happier than most people.
      • bdbd
      • Philadelphia, PA
      • Trusted

      I agree. Read Ian McEwan's account of Hitchens' final days ( http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/opinion/christopher-hitchens-consummat... ) , when he was as engaged and active as his physical condition permitted. The more I consider Douthat's smug assurances about Hitchens' true state of mind, and by implication about the states of mind of those who agree with Hitchens on matters of religion and deities, the more I want to spit.
    • jrd
    • NY

    "My hope — for Hitchens, and for all of us, the living and the dead — is that now he finally knows why. "
    Astonishing, that Mr. Douhat would wish on humanity the capricious, cruel and inexplicable god of the bible, to be revealed to Christopher Hitchens in the form of a conscious afterlife of endless torment.
    It would appear that this eulogist understands atheism far less well than he supposes.
    • PL
    • Sweden

    An impressive eulogy — especially as you'd met Hitchens in person. I was reminded of Ronald Knox's good feelings for Bertrand Russell. Other atheist intellectuals had professed to admire Jesus as a man; Russell, incapable of flattery and sentimentality, had owned that he despised him.
    • David Green
    • Brooklyn

    In the last two paragraphs you assume that the only mental state which is consistent with true atheism is existential despair .
    Actual atheists run the usual human gamut from despair to overwhelming joie
    de vivre.
    You’re confusing what you, with your upbringing, would feel if you were suddenly required to give up the idea of an all powerful divinity, with what a mind which came to atheistic conclusions through honest effort, without early indoctination would feel.
    If you want to have some examples of atheists who abhorred the idea of an after life, and who infused their own with both purpose and deep existential satisfaction
    you could think of Einstein, and for good measure Christopher Hitchens. He is worst candidate for a closet believer you could find.
    As Einstein showed, Atheism can even be consistent with a deep spirituality, and a deep belief in the worth of human life.

    1. Einstein also showed a fearlessness of death when he declined to have his aneurism operated on. It killed him.

  224. I enjoyed Mr. Douthat's commentary as Mr. Hitchens' death and life was also the subject of my rabbi's friday night sermon. What was disappointing in the the article was the lack of consideration of the other religions that were sparred with. I guess Mr. Douthat was so scarred by his debating experience that he overlooked them except the full spectrum of Christianity. For a different perspective I might add a similar Op-Ed piece here: http://www.forward.com/articles/148061/
    Maybe Mr. Douthat should read it too.
    • Mark
    • Seattle

    A thoughtful memorial, Ross. It speaks as much to your own fear of death as Hitchens' philosophy. Live each day like it's your last and discover an essential morality and beauty.

  226. Despite all of his praise (?) of Hitchens, Douththat finds it impossible to believe that anyone can basically doubt his own fundamental beliefs.
    • Max
    • Dana Point, CA

    "When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor"
    I regularly hear variations of this from believers, as no doubt did the saintly Hitch (if God really does choose his saints to sit at his right hand, then Hitch must be there now, and complaining at the unfairness of such ghastly elitism). But he knew, as I do, that a god-free life in which one savors the delight of being nothing but the chance combination of matter in a purposeless universe, is the happiest and most fear-free of all.
    If there is a heaven, and if the likes of Jerry Falwell are there, and Pat Robertson has his spot booked, send me to the other place - please! But Hitch knew, and I do too, that the monstrous cosmology of the Abrahamic faiths is a tale full of sound and fury and signifying - nothing.
    • Fred DiChavis
    • Brooklyn, NY

    Hitchens, of course, would suggest that a life well and willfully lived was itself more than enough cause to resist despair. He no doubt would suggest that those of your fearful and judgmental ilk must look to satisfaction in a Place Beyond because you fear to do so in this life.

  229. Oh, please, this is as bad as low-level psychoanalytic contortions. Atheists, like Hitchens, are defending themselves from taking a leap into belief in God?
    Also, Douthat's presumptuous hope that Hitchens has met his maker, a maker in whom he had no belief, is crass.

    1. Here here, Yvonne: "Douthat's presumptuous hope that Hitchens has met his maker, a maker in whom he had no belief, is crass."
      By implication Douthat believes God considers religious belief and participation irrelevant to the decision on Judgment Day. Otherwise, Douthat has written today's column in praise of a soul dispatched to Hell.
      Giving him benefit of the doubt let's assume it's the former, which means Ross believes the purpose of religion is not to save our souls, it is just there to take away our despair, i.e. to make us feel better. So it is not Hitchens who secretly agrees with Douthat, it is Douthat who secretly agrees with Hitchens!
    • new moniker
    • Miami

    Although I disagreed with Hitchen's philosophy, I could not help liking and respecting him.
    Ross your eulogy is very much of a piece. We will be poorer without Hitchen's piercing intelligence.

  231. Still smarting from that debate with Christopher?
    "the bloodless prophets of a world lit only by Science."
    I find scientists quite bloody, but not as bloody as the crusaders and jihadists and zionists.
    • Eric
    • NY

    More claptrap from Ross. Unfortunately Hitchens isn't here to respond.
    "When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor..."
    As an atheist, I'm always amazed at how defensive - and offensive - believers are.
    But there is one simple, inescapable, inarguably true fact about the existence of God: there is no proof, no evidence - none - that such a being exists. By proof, of course, I mean scientific proof - the only kind that matters. (The rest is just playing with words.)
    That most people believe in God there is no doubt. That belief is a profound part of human nature, also true. Otherwise how could such beliefs withstand the lack of evidence.
    It may be sad, or just too much for most people to take, but life has no meaning beyond the here and now. There is (likely) no afterlife. Presumably if there was a God, it would be pretty darn simple for Him (or Her) to prove his existence. As Hitchens said, God didn't make man, man made God.
    • P Cox
    • Minneapolis

    Douthat writes, "When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor..." This is delusional, grandiose nonsense. Those who chose to espouse religious dogma, whether true believers or of convenience, have some to celebrate and much to defend, but they have absolutely no right to claim a monopoly on hopefulness or any other human attribute.
    It is fine if Douthat wants to claim some affinity to Hitchens. But don't use his death to write self-justifying nonsense that he isn't around to refute. Save it for another day.
    • Robert Levine
    • Malvern, PA

    Were Hitchens alive to read this, he might well ask you what new "fact" could possibly confirm Jesus rising from the dead. It is your smugness, your absolute faith in the supernatural, that he disputed. The condescending tone of your piece could only come from a believer who, facing a skeptic, is sure that he is backed by a phalanx of angels and spirits returned to life. Your self righteous stance is really insufferable. Look over your shoulder Ross- there's no one there.
  235. NYT Pick

    I must politely disagree with the conclusion of your article because it does not seem as if you understand what Hitch's atheism really was. His "rigorous atheism" does not "cast a wasting shadow over human endeavors". It does the exact opposite. It does not lend itself to despair at our eventual end but rather a greater appreciation of life and what experiences we may gather in the fleeting time during which our consciousness exists. Hitch lived his life to the fullest not because of a secret realization that he was wrong and that there was some eternity after the end, but because of his very acceptance that the time we have is limited. I would not go as far as to say that your assumption that he would like eternal slavery is insulting because your respect for him is palpable. But I do not believe that he employed his vast eloquence and massive intellect to merely be a rebel. RIP Hitch. Your legacy and your ideas will live on even though your soul does not. "The best teachers of humanity are the lives of great men."- Charles Henry Fowler
    • Andrew
    • Flyover country

    As humble as he tries to sound, Douthat cannot hide a certain smugness that culminates in the presumably fussed-over parting line: he *hopes* that Hitchens finally knows why the "despair" that Douthat attributes to Atheism is not worthy of our surrender. In other words, Douthat and theists are the right ones, and Hitchens has been embraced at the pearly gates like a prodigal son. But if Douthat truly respects the man and his thinking, he should put his own beliefs aside and allow Hitchens his forecasted fate of nothingness, at least publicly. To do otherwise, esp. suggest that the likable "rebel" has probably come home to Jesus, is a great example of sentimentality and limited respect.
    • Clement R Knorr
    • Tucson, Arizona

    I think Ross nailed it! Hitch loved a good fight and what bigger fight to pick than one with God? Hitch could convince you that the world was flat if he was in the mood to do so. First Bill Buckley, now Hitch and old Norman waiting in the wings. These were the guys who really raised the level of public discourse, made us see things in a new way and delighted us with their wit and wisdom. Sorry to say I don't see any youngsters on the horizon able to stand in the shoes of these giants.
    By the way Ross, thanks for "cussedness". My grandfather, vintage 1881 frequently referred to my mother's spoiled Siamese cat as "that cussed cat".
    • John Conrad
    • Manhattan and London

    "[R]igorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every [every?] human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably [really?] to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood.”
    The column format can be limiting, but this is nonsense. Outside established principles in mathematics and the natural sciences, very few things enjoy the level of epistemological security that justifies claiming that they ineluctably lead to something. We have no evidence for such causal symmetry. So, note this: atheism is a mere rejection of the existence of god(s). Nothing more, nothing less. Does it, traditionally and as lived, suggest a concomitant disavowal of the metaphysical and moral and, less so, aesthetic infrastructure of theism? Yes. But ineluctably so? No.
    To you, religion, and surely Catholicism, negates the supposed bleakness that Larkin mourns in "Aubade." But you forget that Larkin ends the poem with resolute, stoic defiance, finding in that most quotidian of activities, work ("Work has to be done"), and its modern totem, the telephone, ("Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring") a grace that rivals and, indeed, for its honesty, exceeds religion's delusional and infantile soteriologies including the pseudo-sophisticated bleating of your Rahner, Dei Verbum, Lumen Gentium, e tutti quanti.
    Moreover, Larkin's "An Arundel Tomb" cripples your facile equation of him and atheism with bleakness. L

  239. Hitchens's Christian critics can take heart that, as they see it, he got the most important personal decision in any man's life wrong: the god decision.
    Hitchens's liberal and pacifist critics can take heart that, as John Cook at Gawker put it, "he got the single most consequential (political/historical) decision in his life horrifically, petulantly wrong ... toward (his life's) end, he aligned himself ... stridently with the very fools, cowards, and charlatans who most desperately invited exposure by his prodigious skills as butcher. How can someone who devoted so much of his life to as noble a cause as destroying the reputation of Henry Kissinger blithely stand shoulder to shoulder with Rumsfeld."
    Anti-war Christians have the Babe Ruth of modern letters striking out twice in the two most important at-bats in his life. Anti-war atheists have him batting .500, not a bad record for a slugger.
    • Ed Weiss
    • Charleston SC

    Ross, your conjectures about what Hitchens would have said or what is motivations were for what he did say are exactly what he objected to. Statements (explanations) based on emotional thinking. There is much in his life that sheds light on what influenced his interpersonal behavior. It would help if journalists such as you who are embarking on explanations of his behavior would talk about how his thinking impacted you and how those thoughts challanged your world view.

  241. The world is a much less interesting place without Hitchens. If you judge something at least in part by the enemies it makes, the Catholic Church should be taken (more) seriously because of Hitchens.
    • Colleen Cooper Russell
    • Indianapolis, Indiana

    Hitchens was "completely wrong to give into despair," you say? You can't be serious.
    Hitchens chose to think freely and widely, and to make up his own mind on life's biggest questions. He rejected the mind control of clergy and cast aside centuries of religious oppression. He raged against efforts to give up his thoughts or liberty in favor of religious succor. He was a thinker and a writer on a huge scale. How exactly is that despair? If it is, may we all be afflicted with it.

  243. "atheism — can become as self-defended as any religious dogma, impervious to any new fact or unexpected revelation."
    Oh really? Pray tell, what are these new facts or unexpected revelations that atheists are supposedly impervious to? You didn't bother to mention any specifics here, and I'm fairly certain I know why; because you can not.
    The closing phrase: "now he finally knows why," is exactly the kind of presumption on the part of a believer that Hitchens would have found offensive and would have scoffed at.
    I don't know why this is so hard to accept: the human brain, once the blood stops delivering oxygen, won't work any more! It's a well known fact. As sad as it is true, the man of such great knowledge and erudition knows nothing now, and for better or for worse is entirely free of the joys and burdens, and the tedium and excitement of existence.
    He can't look down upon us, and he can no longer unleash his pen to hurl insults at those who would smugly speculate about Hitchens' surprise discovery of God after his death. He was certainly able to predict the occurrence of this sort of non-sense before he died. I knew we could count on Mr. Douthat to be unable to resist that kind of churlish dig disguised as a benevolent blessing.
    • John Boylan
    • Los Angeles, CA

    As usual, Mr. Douthat gets it wrong: "When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood.” "
    Most atheists I know would reject that utterly. A death faced with dignity (as Hitchens did) is vastly preferable to a death whined at, whether you believe in God or not.
    And atheism does not cast a shadow over anything - the life well lead is worth living, whether there is an afterlife or not.
    Mr. Douthat's constant defenses of religion, usually couched in terms designed to make himself appear reasonable, are sounding more and more desperate. He seems unable to admit what every serious thinking person knows - religion is the cause of more pain, suffering, and violence than almost any other man-made cultural institution in human history. Hitchens was right.
    • Dave Harmon
    • Michigan

    "But it also hints at the way that atheism — especially a public and famous atheism — can become as self-defended as any religious dogma, impervious to any new fact or unexpected revelation."
    What "new fact" or "unexpected revelation" could overthrow the demonstrable fact that a supposed all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God -- the only kind worth worshipping or arguing about -- has been stupendously absent 100% of the time whenever atrocities have been visited on the most innocent people?
    This, I think, is what Hitchens was getting at when he "cornered you." There is a history of culpable neglect here, one that no future miracle (not that I'm expecting one) can ever erase.

  246. Oh come on.
    "But it also hints at the way that atheism — especially a public and famous atheism — can become as self-defended as any religious dogma, impervious to any new fact or unexpected revelation."
    I highly doubt that Mr. Douthat had actually offered any convincing evidence for the resurrection.There was no new fact or unexpected revelation! It sounds like Mr. Hitchens was trying to demonstrate the ridiculousness of religious logic by demonstrating that even if you were to concede the impossible premise of a central biblical narrative, it would still not serve as proof for the conclusions.
    Atheism is blessed in that it very rarely does does have to confront facts (which are indeed distinct from 'revelations'!) that cast over it any serious doubt, but when it does, it has the enormous advantage of having a method of verifying and incorporating them instead of merely declaring them false.

  247. "Like most writers of a religious persuasion I was once enlisted to publicly debate Hitchens, with predictably disastrous results for God."
    Nice tribute, Mr. Douthat.
    • Raven Brewer
    • New York, NY

    What a crash-and-burn in the last three paragraphs. Death is a fact of life. Why the author thinks that this indicates that "rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor" I do not understand at all. Isn't it enough for atheists (or anyone else) to know that while we're alive, that we're working to make the world a better place for those who will come after us?
    As far as the remainder of the quote is concerned ("and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood." ), yes, but so what? What's your point? The universe is indifferent to our desires, or how we face death. That's entirely our choice.
    • Southamptoner
    • East End

    "American Christian intellectual life is sustained today, to a large extent, by the work of writers very much like Hitchens — by essayists and journalists and novelists and poets, from G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis to W. H. Auden and Evelyn Waugh, who shared his English roots, his gift for argument and his abiding humanism."
    Well, thank you for inadvertently pointing out what a vast wasteland "American Christian intellectual life" must be today, that the lodestones are British writers born over a century ago. Early twentieth-century impressions and essays by esteemed English writers of the day were about distinctively British approaches to Christianity. That one scarcely recognizes in the writings of latter-day Christian "intellectuals" in America, the ones who use "Christian" as their first and foremost calling-card, in a way the long-dead British writers mentioned never did. They were top-flight writers first, their (indeed worthy) musings on religion did not define them.
    I realize citing these British writers seems apropos in regards to Hitchens's intellectual forebears, just wondering aloud why in this country, where certain sports stars and op-ed columnists parade their faith as superior to yours has not produced a shelf of intellectually engaging works of literature and essayism in the modern era. Why is it that the intellectual class you implicitly include yourself in is "sustained" by long-dead writers from another country and another century?
      • Dan of The Prophecy Society
      • Atlanta

      The economics of publishing in America do not make room for Christian intellectuals.
    • Russell
    • Oakland

    I can only wish that Douthat had written this while Hitchens lived and could have personally destroyed this flimsy effort to find kinship between the supernaturalists and the life of Christopher Hitchens. This is just more silliness of the kind that Hitchens deplored in life and it's a shame that we have to suffer this one-way volley now that he's gone.
    • Socrates
    • Downtown Verona NJ

    Hitchens always knew that religion was nothing more than a psychologocal disorder, a lie foisted upon the weak masses in society and perpetuated by generations of oppressors.
    Let us celebrate the great gift of Hitchens' life by rejecting religion.

  252. Perhaps he was the believer's atheist because his arguments had the ring of good sense to them, and because many believers are unwitting skeptics, as amenable to reason as to unreason.
    http://bonalibro.us

  253. "But it also hints at the way that atheism — especially a public and famous atheism — can become as self-defended as any religious dogma, impervious to any new fact or unexpected revelation."
    What new facts and unexpected revelations? That's the whole point--atheists look at the overwhelming facts and lack of "revelations" (in the biblical sense) and say religions are "fairy tales." And your slander of Marxism shows a crude understanding of it.
    Don't try to claim Hitchens as a sympathetic figure for the religious--I believe this has something to do with his outspoken support of the war in '03. He was wrong on that--but he has been nothing but right in criticizing and eviscerating all religions. Taking Christ or any other religious figure and the system of beliefs erected around those figures out of social life does not mean that there can be 1) no purpose to life and 2) no social compact between members of society to treat each other with respect and promote mutual welfare. That kind of view disrespects the individual, and assumes the worst about people. I guess this fits well with the christian tradition, but its not a viewpoint atheists subscribe to.
    • Dan
    • Flagstaff

    This oddly inspired op-ed, I think, has Chris (posthumously and metaphorically) casually rolling over and grabbing another smoke; particularly when encountering the phrase "...those defenses stayed up until the end."
    He might consider this tidbit of language similar to ordering from a Kosher menu at an anti-Semitic restaurant. But Chris would have (and has) done it in person, and not after any response to the implicit provocation became impossible. Chris did not defend his mind against anything (to say otherwise would violate reality); rather, he defended his (and our) bodies from the generously dispensed arsenal of "slings and arrows" camouflaged in the cloth of religious practice.
    If you understood anything Hitchen's said or wrote, he was unequivocal in his rationale for rejecting the existence of a North Korean type of celestial bondage, and also absolute in his identity as an "anti-theist". I find it crass, frankly, that you view his conviction as somehow an expression of defense. He had no need to defend rationality, and every reason to prevent organized delusion from influencing the future of humanity.
    Otherwise, nicely written piece in honor of a great example of humanity.
    • Tom Bleakley
    • Bradenton, Florida

    There is only one word that adequately characterizes this demeaning attempt to position Hitchen's beliefs about the non-existence of a supreme being; patronizing.
    • B.
    • Wellington

    One would think that, having - on his own account - lost in a debate to Mr Hitchens, Mr Douthat would see the slight distaste in now, in that rather better (and while flawed, at least somewhat more self-aware) man's absence, proclaiming what he "really" thought. We can only speculate whether Hitchens' response would have been to eviscerate this pompous oaf or simply to ignore him.
    Mr Douthat's problem (and recurrent error here) are the parallel assumptions that the absence of religion yields only despair or, conversely, that the ultimate rationale of religion is as an antidote to despair in the face of mortality. Hitchens, for all his flaws, could see the world as glorious in itself and mortality as a counterpoint to our enjoyment of it: for Mr Douthat, it seems, it all means nothing without belief.
    • Don
    • Maple Plain, MN

    So they just can't let go of the fact that a brilliant atheist who was of surpassing charm could die without losing his charm or his atheism. No, got to find a way to create a weakness in Hitch so as to convince themselves that he was somehow wrong in his disbelief; this done in an attempt to hide from the weaknesses Hitch showed them in their own beliefs. That embarrassment leads to scratching at his personality in any number of ways, some of which can be found in these posts and elsewhere by those who offer mingy regrets.
    • Ken Winkes
    • Conway, WA

    Mr. Douthat,
    It seems the easiest ways to deal with an atheist's thinking are to !) wholly ignore the contents of his arguments, 2) utterly dismiss the empirical approach that made possible the technology that allows us to communicate instantaneously what we would like to be the meaning his life (that same empiricism that serves so poorly in any search for God), 3) and to co-opt for our own purposes his intellectual and moral carcass after it is safely dead.
    But for me, the most interesting thing about Hitchens is not his atheism or arrogance, or for that matter, his brilliance. Rather, it is how he managed to move from his clarion call for Kissinger's trial as a war criminal following the U.S. backed overthrow of Allende to his loud support for the Iraq War. That conversion made me think of Arthur Koestler and other former Communists, who later in life felt the need to recant. Maybe God aside, Hitchens was also a True Believer whose urge to believe mattered more than his credo of the moment. To be sure, the passion of his writings communicated absolute certainty regardless of his subject. Was that simply his arrogance or something else more profound at work?
    I wish you had written about that.
    • Phillip
    • Laguna Hills, CA.

    Hitchen's atheism wasn't particularly interesting or compelling. His arguments against God's existence have been voiced better by others many times over. What was compelling about Christopher Hitchens was a force of personality always pressing ahead and taking center stage. Beyond that overwhelming and singular nature there existed a special kind of genius. Indeed, a genius for living life to its fullest and having no regrets. As Lytton Strachey said of Francis Bacon--his intellectual composition was nothing less then first rate--shot silk. The same could be said for Christopher Hitchens, but unlike Bacon, Hitchens had a heart.
    E
    • Howard
    • Los Angeles

    "Believer" is not the same as "Christian." As a person of faith who is not a Christian, I find your treating them as equivalent an intellectual error that undermines the point you are making.
    God, in my view, can survive honest atheism and agnosticism just fine. Religious intolerance that tries to capture a transcendent Being within the metaphors of one particular denomination is what precipitates the most hostile attacks on religion.
    • Patricia
    • Pasadena, CA

    Sam Harris is scary. He's like science's answer to the Taliban. He thinks we can derive moral certainty from science.
    From which scientists? From the scientists who work on nuclear bombs, or the scientists who work on weaponized anthrax?
    Or the scientists who help military drones recognize their human targets from the sky?
    Oh yeah, science is going to lead us all out of the moral darkness any day now. Right. Uh huh!
    It's no better than religion, because science is done by humans, and it's humans who give their institutions the capacity to do evil, not the other way around.

  262. Hitchens was unafraid to speak up against tyrants and brutality, he was all for fairplay, he was frriendly and convivial, and scrupulously honest, caring not a whit for making money.
    For these qualities, sometimes misidentified as exclusively Christian, he should have been liked. By Christians and non-Christian, that is, anyone with a unskewed moral framework. We can be absolutely certain, from even a casual reading of the Gospels, Jesus Christ would have fully approved of such qualities in any person.
    But he was no Christian rebel or English schoolboy avoiding chapel-he was a rational, Trotskyite atheist.

  263. In all the coverage on Mr. Hitchens, a very interesting aspect is a conflation of God and Christianity and a complete absence of remebering that there are other ideas on this subject. Afterall there are a billion Hindus out there who have a "different" conception of God and a billion Chinese with assorted religious beliefs with a large number beleiving in Buddhism.
    • Ken Double
    • Wellington, New Zealand

    Come now Ross, are you trying to sneakily claim Hitch for the other side, post-mortem? Why do so many people of faith struggle with the idea that it's entirely possible to live happily in a charitable, reasonable way without the intervention or involvement of God?
    I have no reason to credit the existence of a Magic Sky Friend - yours or anyone else's - and fretting over His/Her/Their existence never has and never will keep me awake at night.
    I think we atheists are better off not arguing belief with believers; we need to save our energies for proscriptive zealots. While I enjoyed Hitch's tilts at religion (more so than Dawkins' anyway) there was so much more to him than that. For the most part I think the believer's cage is best left unrattled.
    • steve
    • el cerrito, california

    Larkin didn't "give in to despair." He wrote poems. To do so was an affirmation. Anyone who truly despairs, can not create.
    Hitchens' life was full of affirmation.
    People who require "belief" may succumb to despair without it; but those who affirm life by engaging with it to the full, do not get hung up on hope or become despondent in hope's absence.
    • vicar
    • Amherst

    I wonder if too much is made of Hitchins's death because he became a right-wing darling by championing the Bush-Cheney-Blair lies about the reasons for killing tens of thousands of Iraquis. If any intellectual on the right wishes to 'admire' an atheist, they could bemuse themselves by the legend of Voltaire. It is said that he was asked at his deathbed by a priest if he would renounce Satan. And Voltaire replied, "Now is no time to be making new enemies".
      • frugalfish
      • rio de janeiro

      Voltaire's bon mot is the obverse side of Pascal's coin: "Le Pari"
    • Jay
    • Middletown MD

    Hitchens was not in denial of that observation that faith is by definition poison to logic and thus the mind. It is an insult to Hitchens to suggest his thinking was motivated by a need to rebel against a god that did not even exist in his mind.
    • T. George
    • Atlanta

    In the first part of his adult life, he moved markedly from Left to Right, so why would it be so inconceivable for him to move toward Theism if he'd had the benefit of 20 more years? After all, his own mantra was that "nothing is certain".
    • schbrg
    • dallas, texas

    The man is not yet buried, and already the posthumous effort at religious conversion begin, regardless how respectfully and subtly phrased.
    • db
    • Indianapolis, IN

    I think this piece highlights exactly what differs between Hitchens' (and most atheists) beliefs and religious followers' beliefs. To Hitchens there wasn't a deeper meaning to be achieved through revelation, so there is some irony that Douthat is using his death as a way to expose some deeper or hidden element to his existence. Believers want that pursuit of "something else", some are compelled by it, and atheists really don't care. It isn't that they don't care about others, or things, or whatever, just that they don't care about trying tofind answers to questions that may never be answered.
    • metanosis
    • detroit

    Am as well a christian with a hearty appreciation for Hitch. Now, of his many talents, argumentation was not one. Great rhetoric, beautifully arranged sentences which held us in thrall, yes indeed and more. Yet, have seen many of his debates, and his main technique was to mischaracterize his target, and then knock down the straw man he created. Also, agree with the writer of the column, he was more of a rebel. Saw a clip of him with the other atheists, and he couldn't resist praising one of the Christian apologists Dinesh D'Souza, and then giving credence to the passage in Genesis which posits the creation narrative as a prophetic and correct pronouncement of the big bang...to which Dawkins almost fell out of his chair. To me, that was Hitch, he seemingly simply had to burst any pompous bubbles or bags of hot air he came across, whatever the ideology or worldview. Couldn't disagree with him more re his atheism, and, yes, he could be quite cruel as well, remember his uncouth mean account on the death of Jerry Falwell, but am very sad to see his voice gone. RIP.

  272. An absurd and fanciful analysis, not so subtly trying to chip away at the powerful message left by Hitchens. Ross suggests that Hitchens did not really know what he believed and why he believed it. He knew quite well! Basically, this was a commentary using the unearned advantage of a later death date to attempt to diminish of the legacy of a truly fine mind. More than a little hypocritical, and very much unworthy of anyone with aspirations of being an intellectual!

  273. As a good Catholic Duthat focuses on Hitchen's (anti)religion and he may have a point. As an agnostic I have always suspected atheists of being basically religious. It takes a faith NOT to believe in god. We agnostics, as the term suggests, just do not know. God may or may not exists but this issue is completely irrelevant to us, one way or another.
    So, as an agnostic I cannot really argue with Duthat whether Hitchens just missed by his too early death a salvation. He may have or he may have not.
    I may actually return to my Catholic past when I am about to drop dead, just to be sure (purely subjective feeling, of course).
    RIP, Hitchens. Many will miss you.
      • frugalfish
      • rio de janeiro

      Pascal had a rational underpinning for your "purely subjective" feeling---read "Le Pari"
    • anonymous
    • Colorado

    "When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that 'death is no different whined at than withstood.'"
    This is the biggest misconception about atheism. Over some 30 years I went from Christian to esoteric Christian (Bible as symbolism but belief in higher being), Zen Buddhism and, finally, atheism. From 1994 till 2002, I wrote for national magazines on the subject. From 2005 till end of 2010, I wrote as a religion reporter for newspapers.
    These days, no intellectually honest person can believe in a Supreme Being. There is no evidence. The final thing I gave up is belief that God created evolution.
    Which brings me to Hitchens. Of the the New Atheists, Hitchens was the worst. He didn't have a firm handle on evolutionary biology and how morals were created through evolution.
    It makes some sense that this columnist likes Hitchens, because Hitchens was the weakest of the NAs in debates. Railing against Mother Teresa, using shocking analogies...nothing but a show. Hitchens was also a drunk and a smoker (which killed him), a kind of fool.
    I speak from experience when I say life is beautiful as an atheist. Happiness in the moment and humble accomplishments. No fear of death. Free from superstitions. Understanding why religious people often lead messed up lives. That's what it is to be an atheist.
    • flmbear
    • Marblehead, MA-Roberts Creek, BC

    Hitchens brought much to a debate which is not more than that. An exercise. It's attraction is undeniable, as demonstrated by Mr. Rothstein in the preceding comment. The debate is ultimately meaningless and unnecessary. If atheism casts a wasting shadow, belief and faith provide no light.

  276. "My hope — for Hitchens, and for all of us, the living and the dead — is that now he finally knows why."
    Really? From what I took away from my insufferable parochial school, those who do not "know God," and especially those who go out of their way to reject him, aren't candidates for Heaven. The best they can hope for is purgatory. And frankly, I don't think Hitchens would be very happy in that version -- or any version -- of Heaven. There's more than a sliver of truth to the idea that all the interesting people go to Hell.

  277. Hitchens never really rebelled against "believers." If you read between the lines, his greatest objection was that religion had become noisy, intrusive and so devoid of spirituality. He helped launch a whole new generation of people who now proclaim deep spirituality while rolling their eyes at dogmatic and divisive traditional religions. Perhaps he has done more for the renaissance of spirituality than all the televangelists and snake oil salesmen put together. In that sense, he was never an opponent to "true believers of doing good" whatever their stripe, and they knew it.
    • Manuel Labor
    • El Paso, Texas
    NYT Pick

    For once I agree with Mr. Douthat. I do believe though what Christopher Hitchens accomplished most was an ability to smartly convey to many wary believers that it was OK to question religion and the existence or not of god, without fear of reprisal from the wrath of the "Dictator in the Sky." Fear is the mechanism that chains all god-fearing pilgrims of every faith. Christopher helped many escape that burdensome yoke tethered at childhood to explore the alternatives - freeing one's soul if you will and I thank him for that. He will be missed here on this planet and who knows, maybe he's giving St. Peter an earful as we speak.

  279. Mr. Douthat, in the spirit of the true believer, will never be able to even conceive that a person could actually be an unbeliever. Scrape off the veneer of disbelief, he thinks, and behold, there's always a christian hidden there somewhere. Belief in God is like a weld in the brain. It can't be broken no matter how intelligent, experienced, educated, sophisticated or in possession of any other liberating faculty a believer might be. In other words, true-belief is permanently hardwired and utterly inexorable.Sad.
    • Ralph
    • NY

    In what possible sense does atheism breed, depend upon, or equal despair? It doesn't. Some religious types, I suppose, might like to believe it does because they may need external reasons - threats and fears - to maintain their faith. I've never yet met an atheist who despaired, and it is certainly the norm for them to be liberated by escape from superstition and dogma. I think Hitch was very clear in this regard.

  281. Does atheism need agitation, propaganda, or organized resistance? Not nowadays, that is the case. Objective reality of the world has it by itself prevailed with everyday experience of living struggle against the cruel reign of capitalism. Why does not a god, if there is one, help the wretched 6.9 billion humanity on earth to find jobs, end the destitute lives and the ever-increasing natural and manufactured calamities? “Suppose Jesus of Nazareth did rise from the dead — what would that prove, anyway?”
    Were Christopher Hitchens a thorough atheist and “not so much a disbeliever as a rebel” he would not have to argue so hard against religions of all kinds as to have “religious believers liked him.” “There had somehow been a terrible mix-up and that a writer who loved the King James Bible …” By the way King James Bible presents a prose masterpiece to those who care about English.
    “Death is no different whined at than withstood?” Death comes to a living being of full sensibility causing painful dying, while birth goes to a nonbeing or a being of relatively less sensibility causing “happy” crying. As survival is an instinct of all animals and death is a challenge to their instinct, it constitutes the last also vain of all struggles by the person and there can be no despair or remorse or any other withstanding feeling but an instinctive natural dialectic process.
    • TlalocBrooklyn
    • Brooklyn, NY

    Mr Hitchens believed that when he died he would go to sleep and never wake up. To suggest that he was secretly a theist but was so bashful, too much a shrinking violet to confess publicly what he really thought? It infantilizes the man. No doubt there are several Buddhists thinking, "a man such as Douthat asks such insightful questions about Buddhism. But is he really in doubt? Or is he struggling against what he knows in his heart is the truth? Everything about his life suggests that when he passes on to his next reincarnation along the wheel of Samsara, he will one day reach enlightenment." But that's what all great-hearted believers feel: "Let him find his way. Even if it takes death, one day he will see that the one true god is Enlil."

  283. AS a fervent, Dawkins-following atheist who became (thank God) a Christian, I have a certain fondness for Atheists who feel a strange compulsion, not just to believe in a better world, but to work passionately for a better world their whole lives. Why do they do it? How do they explain it? For what purpose? When pushed, they themselves cannot explain why they choose compassion over nihilism. Often they end up sounding as circuitous as a cornered Christian explaining faith in God.
    If the the world were truly meaningless, then its meaninglessness would not be of such concern to us.
    Thankfully, it is not. In times, love will prevail on Earth. And compassionate Atheists will have helped bring 'his Kingdom come, on Earth...'
    • David
    • Austin

    The oddity, to me, is that those who espouse atheism are so regularly pilloried by theists who find them exhibiting one bad trait or another. Its a little like killing the messenger, it seems to me. And about as pointless. Anyone (Kevin Rothstein, for example) who simplifies (and belittles) someone like Hitchins as "nothing more than an intellectual bully only wishes it were so, for whatever psychological comfort that might seem to give themselves.
    • RWR
    • Birmingham

    The fascination with Hitchens is a bit hard to fathom, given that he was more dogmatic in defense of his own faith--the firm and unshakeable and unprovable belief that there is no God--than those of us for whom God is a personal reality. He had become the mirror image of those he loved to hate. His self-awareness was so lacking that he could not see himself as a man of faith--faith in the absence of God. He now is experiencing in death what wished for in life--the complete absence of God.
    • BB
    • Boston

    It reads like as if Hitchens's conversion to right-wing politics was never quite complete in Douthat's eyes, unless he can prove that Hitchens was also a believer. This attempt to co-opt Hitchens in the folds of religious believers smacks of desperation and insecurity on Douthat's part. Hitchens was way too brilliant for the debilitating dullness that pervades conservatism, and would have been offended by this piece by Douthat and its implication.
    • Allen
    • Brooklyn

    Would Mr. Douthat level the same slur -- for ultimately he is accusing Mr. Hitchens of intellectual dishonesty -- at, say, Voltaire? Hitchens always gave the pithy riposte that if he could accomplish only one thing with his life's work, it would be "to dissociate faith from virtue." For this reason, for the smugness with which Douthat's conceit is conveyed, and for the opportunism with which it reeks, I find this column utterly offensive. If Hitchens were alive, he might have found it deeply boring and poorly argued, but since the man dead it is clear it redounds with insult and wish-thinking: two elements found in all proselytizing. Christopher Hitchens was a brave man whose life's work was done (if it was done in any name at all) in the name of secular humanism.
    -Allen Wilcox, Brooklyn
    http://allenguywilcox.wordpress.com/
    • Mark Morss
    • Columbus, Ohio

    It really is beyond obnoxious that Douthat says here that atheism "casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor." I understand that Douthat is a religious believer, but he owes a minimal respect to alternative belief systems, including that of us atheists. I wonder what Douthat's attitude would be if I had an NY Times opinion column and used it to promote my anti-religious viewpoints.
    Out of a desire for national comity and mutual respect, we do not say these things to fellow-citizens who do not share our beliefs. But Douthat apparently considers that we atheists are unworthy of any such courtesy. For these grossly intolerant remarks, he really does deserve censure.
    As to the merits, whether anything divine exists or not can hardly depend on whether its non-existence would cast a wasting shadow upon Douthat's conception of human hope. Truth is truth in spite of hope; and whatever is left of hope must persevere after looking truth in the eye.
    • John Van Nuys
    • Crawfordsville, IN

    As a Presbyterian minister, I enjoyed Hitchens' sharp wit and wonderful prose. While not agreeing with him about everything obviously, I found Hitchens to be a secular, kindred spirit to the Hebrew prophets. Like Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and others, Hitchens scorned pretense masking immorality.
    I think what was most compelling about his voice was that it sought truth. Whether you agreed with him or not, it was easy to recognize in Hitchens the virtue of incorruptibility, an increasingly rare quality these days.
    One of Hitchens' most courageous acts was agreeing to be water boarded so he could back up his denunciation of torture with insight from actual experience. Who cannot admire such integrity?
    I will pray for Hitchens' family as they grieve.

  290. Christians are called to love all - even the unloveable. Atheists are among the most deserving of the unloveable title. Hitchens was different. In his denials of faith he showed both humility and humor. For my money he was a most enjoyable character running around in our popular culture. I wish him eternal rest if not salvation.
    • Bill Lipe
    • Cortez, Colorado

    Douthat talks about "the way that atheism — especially a public and famous atheism — can become as self-defended as any religious dogma, impervious to any new fact or unexpected revelation." What new facts might those be? Atheism is not based on faith or revelation, but on a common-sense recognition that there just isn't any empirical evidence for the existence of supernatural beings, or of miracles that violate the laws of physics. Furthermore, the ancient sacred texts that purport to be a history of the earth and of humanity have for the most part not stood up to empirical analysis by historians and scientists. If Ross Douthat wants to see if atheists would in fact change their minds about religious beliefs when presented with "new facts", then let him offer up some of those new--or old--facts that provide empirical evidence for supernatural beings or forces, or for supernaturally caused events.
    • Jason
    • Brooklyn

    Christopher Hitchens' condemnation of religion was principled, intellectually rigorous, and utterly scathing. And all Mr. Douthat can suggest -- without offering any convincing evidence -- is that Hitchens didn't really mean it? That when he said "no" he really meant "yes"? This is a contemptible argument indeed. By that reasoning, Thomas Jefferson was really in favor of the British monarchy, and Martin Luther King would eventually have admitted the superiority of white society if it weren't for his untimely death. Hitchens' style of exposition may have been different from that of his fellow New Atheists and may have romantically appealed to believers and nonbelievers alike, but nothing he said or did suggests that we are to do other than to take him at his word. Hitchens believed in no supernatural god, despised religion, and argued eloquently and compellingly for his position. Opponents who insinuate that he didn't believe what he was saying prove only that they are unworthy of his arguments.
    I would also suggest that Hitchens' life and brave death don't reveal an underlying kinship with believers, or undermine the appeal of "rigorous atheism," but instead beautifully demonstrate how a principled, rigorous atheist lives life and faces death: with joy, intensity, irony, and courage. Such qualities don't make him less of an atheist; they show us what an atheist CAN BE. This is atheism, folks: not nihilism, not a negation of the joy and wonder of the cosmos. Get used to it.
    • Jane Smiley
    • California

    Ross, you will never know what anyone finds after death. To imply that Hitchens found something that he did not expect is to take an insufferably superior and patronizing tone. Everyone dies. There is no way of knowing what comes after. We can only look around us and judge religion and what it promises by those who profess to believe or not believe. Hitchens recognized, as many do, that in a world of Catholic sex scandals, Shiite fatwas, suicide bombers, assassinations of doctors performing abortions, howling intolerance, books about beating children in order to teach them obedience, and scads of other cruelties, religion makes no sense and faith is a subjective experience that cannot be communicated. You know no more than Hitchens did when he was alive, so speculating about what he "finally" knows is just self-important blather.
    • Miskatonic
    • Minneapolis

    What a condescending and awful piece! To Ross, Hitchens was just some sort of lovable rebel who would eventually grow up and accept the reality of God. Nonsense! Douhat conveniently ignores Hitchen's biggest problem with religion--that it obscures abuses of power, protects the corruption of the status quo and lets dangerous idiots use fairytale logic to excuse their violence. The biggest problem with Douhat is that his career now consists of making similar excuses for power--covering for the big guy (and his GOP hirelings) at the expense of the little guy. The biggest problem with Hitchens (who I otherwise respect), is that his love of a good argument and a good party seduced him into keeping company with repugnant people.
    • David
    • San Francisco

    I enjoyed reading this. It expresses much of what, generally, is absent: real enthusiasm for someone on the other side.
    Let's make it a rule, shall we(?), that anyone who takes up public "space" arguing one way or another, concerning the God question, that he or she must demonstrate a damn thorough comprehension of the opposing view.
    • JMK
    • New York, NY

    Hitchens was a great logician and religion simply did not stand up to the rational logical argment no matter who debated with Hitchens. Hitchens did not debate from text but from logic, he really didn't know or maybe the word is employ critical scholarship that clearly show that the holy texts are complete fiction, he didn't have to because religion lives in a self enclosed fantasy world that logic easily shatters. When the New Testament bases itself and Jesus' life entirely on the the Septuagint and Homeric narrative and the ideas the other religions and philosophies of late antquity which are all fictional, logical rational thought would say that the New Testament and the life of Jesus are also fictional, derivatvie, incestuous and fabricated.
    • Robert
    • Bay Area

    A warm remembrance reflecting personal admiration. Yet the penultimate paragraph conflates atheism with a despairing outlook on life, a matter Mr. Hitchens no doubt would have loved to debate.
    May he be at whatever peace he envisioned most fitting and condolences to his loved ones.
    From a reader that did not always agree with his ideas, but admired his incandescent language.
    • KT
    • NYC

    Ross waits until Hitchens is beyond the point of rejoinder to assert that, after all, Hitchens did believe in god, but didn't know that he did. One can imagine what Hitchens would have to say to that maneuver.
    What Ross has correct is that Christopher Hitchens was, deep down, a passionate, ferocious, uncompromising humanist. He liked human beings and relished in being human. Not for him a sanitized, saintly, detoxed human nature: Hitchens celebrated sex, joy, compassion, friendship, loyalty, humor, the arts and intelligence. Intelligence; that's what Christopher displayed in abundance, all the time, to the detriment of those who would arrive at conclusions illogically and without evidence. Woe betide the hypocrite, liar or phony saint, when Hitchens was around.
    What Hitchens leaves us with is not a man whose secret was a longing for Christ, but a man whose gods were knowledge and moral integrity. And fun -- let's not forget fun.
    Rest in peace, Christopher. You didn't need god to celebrate goodness, and decry
    evil, in human beings.
    • James Currin
    • Stamford, Ct.

    There is a point at which the fawning over the late Christopher Hitchens becomes unbearable. For me that point has been reached with Mr. Douthat's eulogy. As a religious skeptic and an unchurched believer, I have never found Mr. Hitchens exposition of the hermeneutics of Atheism, to rise very far above the desire to give offense to to those of religious faith. Even his polemics about other subjects seem to be largely motivated by a wish to make enemies. A wish often granted. I fancy that there is a seminar room in the great hereafter wherein Hitch can spend eternity engaged in dialog with his co-religionists—Marx, Nietsche, Lenin, Freud, and the like. The problem with this idyll is that he will sooner or later fall out with them.

  300. I wish Hitch was still around to eloquently excoriate those whom he would and did find vacuous who now claim that Hitchens was their intellectual peer and would be their ideological peer if only he weren't mistaken regarding religion. Your argument seems to be that because Hitchens did not give in to dispair, he is therefore not an atheist. Fine. But Hitch would vehemently disagree with it.
    Religion does not have a monopoly on hope in general, but only on the hope of posthumous divine salvation. To infer that Hitchens is in heaven and thus "hopefully" now converted to your religion is to insult a dead man.
    How about this? Everyone will spend their lives as atheists, and in return, everyone will spend their afterlives as faithful. Sound good? Hitchens would readily take that deal, and I see no reason why you shouldn't too.
  301. NYT Pick

    Christopher Hitchens was erudite, stimulating and outspoken—no matter how powerful his target. Hitchens’ words and actions on behalf of Salman Rushdie earned him a place of honor among the champions of individual freedom. The threat to Rushdie placed every person who spoke out on his behalf in danger. Hitchens opposition to a religion determined to silence anyone who does not follow its dictates stands as an example to all who value freedom of religion and speech.

  302. This nicey nicey bit would have made the deceased cringe. The persistant claim made by "believerrs" that those who are in uncompromising pursuit of truth are somehow acting out some character defect or political tactic is demeaning. He was ferocious in life, as few people can sustain, and no doubt would be heavy going for those having made a leap of faith when confronted by simple fact, but to pretentiously claim one of the "atheist tribe" as one of your own, after his death, is both pretnetious and fundementally unfair. But then again fundementalists are unfair by definition.

  303. The biggest tyrant to Hitchens was not "God" but the dogma perpetuated by ill and well meaning people in "God"s name. Atheism needs defending because it is a discriminated against minorities. The people I know who are Atheists tend to hide it because of the negative reactions they get. Discrimination is not comfortable and creates defensiveness. Hitchens mostly fought delusional thinking, specifically the type of delusional thinking which results in harm to oneself or others. He was quite benevolent toward delusional thinkers who did no harm and were humane (i.e. religious folks like Mr. Douthat.
    • Kanty Prep
    • Vancouver, WA

    I detect no contradiction in atheists, or avowed atheists anyway, appreciating, citing, and arguing to the works of Waugh, Auden, the Gospel writers, and even theologians who engage in rational parsing of theological doctrines. Those people actually pursue a Socratic debate with the biggest bullies out there--religious institutions.
    What I do find confusing, though, are religious institutions which violate their own Christian ideals to proclaim that refugees from storms, hunger, and pestilence are receving God's justice or which admit with fanfare people like Newt Gingrich and his wife who violate every principle of fairness and social justice that the founder lived his life for. That kind of hypocrisy is the craftsman's built pulpit for a polemicist that Hitchens was.
    • Pauline
    • NYC

    No, Hitchens did not rail and rebel at "God" the ultimate Tyrant (he compare life with an all-seeing, judging, ever-present deity to living in North Korea). He very articulately dismantled the myths and tyrannies of those who present their conceptual gods as faith-based reality for the rest of us to believe in.
    Like all religious believers, you are unable to conceive of a life without god as optimistic, positive, and free of despair. Hitchens understood that when we face down the "void" and confront our despair, we find a life fully created and lived passionately. We find an integrity and intrinsic morality that those who answer to a "higher power" are denied -- a firm and unshakeable knowledge that one is at the end of the day answerable to oneself.
    At that point, we don't need Jesus Christ's miracles, life itself is plenty miraculous enough.
    • Christopher
    • Los Angeles, CA

    We're certainly encouraged when a writer of Douthat's ilk pens phrases such as "one of the most prolific and provocative careers in modern Anglo-American letters" when discussing the great Hitchens. This much is true. The op-ed fails during the few paragraphs Douthat cannot resist his desire to re-state Hitchens in a way that Hitchens would detest. Trying to distance his atheism from perspective of Dawkins is silly. Both men are/were their own distinctive selves but the intellectual arguments remain intertwined. We could go on, but I'll choose to appreciate the fact that Douthat appreciates Hitchens and recounts actual meetings with the great man. The religious hem-haw is disingenuous, since Hitch was no doubt an absolute atheist, a deep thinker and "preacher" on the subject.

  307. Christopher Hitchens did not impress me in the beginning. I disagreed with him on many points. I'm not sure he would have agreed that the existence of god is explained in so many other ways in different cultures. However, what was strikingly remarkable about him was his boldness, his refusal to fear the powerful people in the adopted land. He epitomized prominently what is distinct about the West: the Freedom of expression.

  308. Hitchens traced his realization that there was no God back to his early youth, much like Dawkins. Two English schoolboys who saw through the whole sham of religion in their early teens and never looked back. The later Hitchens took a position that essentially denied the validity of anyone's religious experience, thereby, in my view, throwing the Holy baby out with the bathwater. I do wish a reincarnated William James could have discussed the varieties and value of religious experience with Hitchens. Not that it would have changed Hitchens' mind; but it would have been a wonderful exchange.
    • Philbee
    • Antiguo Cuscatlan, El Salvador

    I am delighted with the celebration of Hitchens life and death. I enjoyed his marvelous sense of the obvious, that religious beliefs are largely revealed by and supported by hypocrisy.
    What keeps visiting me, however, at a time like this when believers and non-believers meet to toast a valuable life is that there seems no point in flogging the issue of belief in the supernatural either by Hitchens or Douthet or the armies of fundamentalist Christian and Muslim warriors. The secret is out: the gods are gone replaced by a sense of spirituality that does not need the defeat of the other guy's epistemology to have meaning and value.
    Hitchens entertained me for decades. Thank you. However, for me his issues as well as those of his opponents were hypothetical, not important really. Of the seminal moments in my life was one I remember clearly in the second grade with Sister Lawrence drumming on the Baltimore Catechism. I said to myself "I don't believe any of this crap" and never looked back.
    • Joaquin
    • Toronto

    If personal faith finds its ballast in being personally right and in self-justification, that is, not pausing at the possibility of having made a mistake in choosing one's value culture and metaphysics, then arrogant defence of faith is humanly necessary, and best not tampered with. But if the measure of a person is goodness, that is, deeds of charity and justice and benevolence, then what does it matter what such a good person believes? Judge my acts, not my words, especially when the words are defensive. Our acts declare who we are, not our words. Faith words are too liable to be clouded in sanctimoniousness and self-serving. Actions speak louder and more clearly.
    • B Scharf
    • Delray beach, Fl

    I always appreciate Ross' columns though I am almost always at odds with his opinions. This piece is no exception. I would not expect Ross a Catholic to understand much less have empathy for Hitchens an avowed & intellectual atheist.He will never have to 'humbly' apologize because there will never be "definite proof in the existence of God". The God concept was a figment of and contrivance of early man. Anyone who wishes can have faith in the existence of God but no one nor anything will ever prove it. That's not arrogance, it is my faith. It's not easy to prove a mirage and it's certainly not provable.

  312. I"m curious to know what' Douthat's response is to Hitchen's question: "What if Jesus did rise from the dead?" I had a similar discussion recently with a friend of mine who is a believer.
    What matters is that the world seems to have a natural moral order--an order that was probably shaped by evolution in a variety of ways. Weather Jesus rose from the dead is irrelevant to the existence of this moral order. God has less to do with moral order and more to do with explaining non-moral phenomena in nature. In an age in which we have much more credible explanations than God for why the world exists and is the way it is, God is anachronistic.
    Maybe Jesus did rise from the dead. Maybe God is real. But what real difference would it make if it were so? It wouldn't change anything. The world is still the world.
    • Ed Burke
    • Long Island, NY

    Hitchens should have been given a good scientific look at the shroud of Turin, the actual shroud of Christ to almost a certainty at this point. The modern forensics have established the evidence so conclusively that this most scientifically studied object ever (over 600.000 hours) has turned the mostly agnostic and atheist scientists who accounted for most of the work into a 95 percent Christian work force at this point. Blood residue, 3D imaging, and even skeletal evidence has been conclusive at this point. The only thing no one can explain, (unless you accept the supernatural) is how the actual image was created. Even 2011, we still can't make anything like it. God exists, even if the scientists can't point to him, the residual evidence is pretty convincing.

    1. Your "almost" equals faith. Your "pretty convincing" equals uncertainty. All fairy tales. No god.
    • Glen Ford
    • Austin, TX

    The last sentence puts a sickening twist on an impressively underhanded example of sophistry, since a vast number of Christians believe that Hitchens, having never repented the sin of disbelief, is now on week one of an eternity of the pain of literal hellfire.
    Worse than that is the winking, too-clever attempt to undermine the truth of what Hitchens actually believed. Comparing his atheism with the unthinking adherence to mythology practiced by most religious people is an insult in sheep's clothing, and is patently fallacious too. The insistence that 2 2 actually equals 4, in the face of a culture that insists it does not (or that the sum is unknowable), is not tantamount to dogma. The notion that there is some "new fact" to be found in the Bible is laughable. New facts are provided by science, not religion, and holding fast to the truth of the scientific method as one confronts one's own death requires more courage than I suspect Douthat (or I) can even understand.
    • William Fairman
    • Columbia, MO

    Religion is based on faith, not proof. Science is based on proof (testable hypotheses), not faith. But to the extent that each tries to explain our world, there has always been tension between them. But as science describes more and more of our world, religion is left with less territory. And ironically, just at this time, religion is more and more in the unfortunate hands of the fundamentalists, and the politicians that wear religion on their sleeves, and dogmatic hierarchies that have lost touch with both their congregants and the underlying principles of their brand of religion.
    We must take Hitchen's at his word. Douthat has it wrong about him. He was not just winking at us.

  316. An excellent piece, eloquent and well written. I must take issue with the idea that rigorous atheism "casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor" though. If we strip human existence of the myths and tyrannies of religious dogma, we are faced not with emptiness but with all the marvels of nature reflected in the astonishing complexity of the human brain and mind. The religious seem to think that we atheists abandon the mystery of existence for a cold and cynical apathy, an indifferent shrug, or a pointless hedonism. This is rubbish. We face reality squarely and examine it closely with the tools of science and reason to find it much more astonishing, marvelous, and mysterious than any fantasy in revealed scripture. Atheism opens the door to a compassionate humanism by exposing mankind's common predicament, our common origin, and our common aspirations. And because atheism dismisses the idea of an afterlife, it also makes this life precious and rich, every moment a jewel to be treasured and employed to the fullest.
    Although I disagreed with Christopher Hitchens on his hawkishness, I admired his courage in employing his formidable talents to stridently oppose injustice and tyranny when he saw it. He lambasted religion because of its totalitarian claims to an unquestionable absolute truth and its history of atrocity and oppression. I, for one, am sorry that he is gone.
    • George L.
    • New York

    Douthat writes: " ...The bloodless prophets of a world lit only be Science". Where has he been over the last 2000 years?
    The people who wrote the Bible, knew absolutely nothing about the world. In their grandiose vision of themselves, they were convinced that the Earth was the center of the world and the "Universe" was rotating around it. In 1630 this was still the party line, at least as far as the Catholic Church was concerned, regardless of Galileo's startling observations. Around 1900, people still thought that the Sun and its planets were part of a Galaxy that constituted the "Universe". Then we learned that our Galaxy is just one of an incredible number of galaxies. And now we are beginning to absorb that perhaps millions of other Suns also have planets revolving around them, and some may even have conditions hospitable for life as we know it.
    I think there is much more life and excitement in those discoveries than in the stale, "bloodless" dogmas Douthat is trying to defend.
    • tony
    • wv

    Blasphemies? Man, this is the 21st Century, not the 12th. And what Hitchens knows now is nothing, because he's dead. What he knew while he was alive was that a better world exists for future generations. This world will have fought free of the rip-tide grasp of ancient mythologies--insofar as the myths continue to be interpreted literally; insofar as the interpreters continue to inject themselves into the realms of political process and civil liberty.
    The "bloodless prophets of a world lit only by science" become just another fiction to be de-mythologized. I think of Hitchens speaking with Richard Dawkins and see the bloodless, brainless prophets elsewhere. They are making money as televangelists, trying to run for president of the good old U.S. of A., or wearing their cheap shoes and suits out ringing doorbells all over the world.
    • petevanpelt
    • Leesburg, Florida

    Once again supposed intellectuals make references to atheists. For once and for all there are no atheists or agnostics for that matter. No sane person believes that man made the universe. The universe exists. Some thing, creator, prime mover or whatever is responsible for what is, this is undeniable.
    So, those of you who have a link to the masses through the media, please refrain from using the terms atheist or agnostic. Something, whatever it is created us and the universe we inhabit. This is basic, fundamental, can’t be argued successfully, so quit trying.
      • M. Jamison
      • Webster, NC

      No, claiming something is undeniably true without supporting evidence is merely the other side of the coin, i.e. claiming something is undeniably false without supporting evidence.
      The universe exists. You might have simply stopped there for everything that followed is undeniably without evidence.
      Science tells us how, or at least is beginning to but why remains unknown and perhaps is either unknowable, unanswerable, or not even a pertinent question. It is the insistent search for a why that leads to the futility of creating a creator.

    2. Ha! That's a hoot! Hitch would say: "You pray for me; I'll think for you.
    • Paul
    • Boston, MA

    Christopher Hitchens forced me, due to his incredible depth and breadth of knowlege and unflinching courage in his writings, into periods of self-reflection and study that I don't think I would have otherwise visited. I felt I had to examine some of my most strongly held beliefs and ask myself if I really had adequate justification for them.
    Whether I found myself at last in complete agreement with him, (atheism), or totally at odds, (Iraq), the habits of rigorous investigation and resistance to the pitfalls of confirmation bias and blind acceptance of 'expert' opinion that I developed have made me a better thinker and a better human being.
    No, Ross, Christopher dosen't know anything more now than he knew when he exhaled his last breath. He's simply gone, and the world has lost an important voice.

  321. I'm an atheist. I don't think it's something that needs to be defended; I just don't believe. Sometimes I wish I could, like my Catholic grandmother and my Quaker mother, but I was born with this non-belief, which I shared with my father, a German Jew who escaped very late from Berlin. I love religious symbolism and will light candles for my Catholic relatives, but I'm doing it to honor their beliefs, not mine. I know the world would seem a safer place with a god or gods in it, but I just can't get there. I have no expectations for an afterlife. It would be fun to be surprised, but I think the experience of life after death is exactly like life before life--nothing at all. None of this makes me unhappy. I value and respect those who disagree with me, but I doubt there will be a deathbed conversion when it's my time. I don't see why Hitchens' non-belief is considered arrogant (although I think he had a tendency toward arrogance.) My guess is that he also respected the beliefs of his friends, even when he disagreed with them.
    • Danny P.
    • Warrensburg, MO

    I never really took much interest in the religious writings of Hitchens, I really only ever heard about him in the political context where he was equally rebellious (Hitchens prosecution of Henry Kissinger for example). However, the outpouring of thought in the wake of his death has been greatly enlightening in the religious community. Now it seems if nothing else Hitchens forced all of his intellectual opponents to sharpen their wits and reaffirm their beliefs to themselves by virtue of confronting his sheer force of conviction. I'm not sure what greater legacy someone can leave, even if its obscured by the by-lines of all those influenced by him.
    • Richard Melmon
    • Menlo Park, CA

    Science is a product of a man's soul no less than the Nessun dorma. It is no less of an attempt to orient ourselves to a frightening world than is the New Testament. Both work pretty well, albeit differently and imperfectly. I sense he objected not to God, but a too child-like belief in him. He never devolved to the 'it's nothing but electrons' of the scientific atheists. In fact, he would have made a much better scientist than any of them. What a mind.

  324. Indeed, Christopher Hitchens's atheism was positively religious in its intensity. For those of us relaxed agnostics not so sure of absolutely every aspect of Life, the Universe and Everything, this could be disconcerting in a man whose intellect and essential fairness in argument was so pronounced; and whom, indeed, we liked and respected so much.
    Don't know, however, that I agree with your statement that "... his atheism was mostly a political romantic’s attempt to pick a fight with the biggest Tyrant he could find". I think he simply looked at the cataclysmic misery that organized religion, of most stripes, had caused in the world; and the barbarities throughout history that it had either sanctioned or actively performed; associated the message with the premise and honestly rejected both. However, religions are artifacts of imperfect men (admitted by most such men); and they don't necessarily speak to the truth or lie of deity.
    I'm happy in my relaxed agnosticism; and had I the honor of knowing Christopher Hitchens in person rather than through his writing, I would have advised him to be happier.
    My hope for him, I think, is truer to him: I hope that he lives for a very long time in the memories of those whose lives he enriched, and those whose lives will be enriched in future by reading him.

    1. He will and he does.
    • Gemli
    • Boston

    I imagine that the devoutly religious can never fully understand why religion is so offensive and provocative to non-believers. Many of us keep relatively quiet about it, but if we had Hitchens's command of language and gift of argument we'd probably be a bit more vocal.
    Religious believers are certainly not shy about expressing their beliefs. Our culture is festooned with religious symbols and saturated with religious discussion. Religious belief is a litmus test for those running for office and is a potent political force, despite the constitution's efforts to keep government and religion from mixing too freely. It generates a river of money from the contributions of the faithful, but in this case the separation of church and state is honored to the letter, and the money is not taxed.
    The pall of religion is so pervasive that the few who openly make their objections known have a distinctive notoriety, and draw a disproportionate amount of fire. That they are attacked for insisting that rational thought is to be preferred over superstition and magic says something sad about our culture.
    To paint Hitchens as a closet believer is tantamount to speaking ill of the dead. Then again, maybe the pope is a closet atheist. He protests a bit too much, don't you think?
    1. If they can speak for a deity, the least I can do is speak for Hitch: Well said.
    • Salmagundi
    • Upstate, NY
    NYT Pick

    Over the years I came to understand that Hitch was ‘spot-on.’ He was a man who saw religion and its multiple manifestations of different gods as the apotheosis of The Tyrant. At it’s root the various religions create a hierarchy that seduces people by promising to ease the fear of death, debases and degrades women for the benefit of the male priest class, all the while built upon hypocrisy, arrogance, and the accretion of wealth and power. Its male dominated rulers claim to have a direct line to god, and make rules, change rules, interpret their own rules, at their whim. A failure to obey holds out the promise of eternal damnation. Of course the greatest source of murder, endless senseless wars, cruelty, the desire for control on a massive scale and the creation of a multiplicity of fantasies in the service of political ideologies has been religions most powerful masquerade. Religions and their creations of gods are the antithesis of the Golden Rule and the best aspects of mankind.
    The great enemy of religion and its gods is freedom.
    Hitchens was a man to be admired: he loved freedom and put its enemies, left and right, on notice.
    • trk
    • plano,tx
    • Trusted

    It is a somewhat strange quirk of religion that a believer needs to grasp at 'hidden' meanings apparently as self-justification for their belief. Historically it seems that things that could not be explained were somehow the work of gods, or more recently god.
    I find it not very surprising that those apparent believers, including Douthat, need to find apparently 'hidden' meaning or motives in the clearly expressed words of an avowed atheist. Perhaps their own faith is far too frail to not accept the statements of a man who is now dead at face value.
      • AAC
      • Austin

      It is a somewhat strange quirk of anti-religious bigotry to personify religion--the diverse spiritual habits of probably over 90% of the species--as the uniform behavior and process of one chimerical, all-purpose "believer." With what other group would you feel comfortable talking about what "they" are all like? How would you recognize the overlap of faith and scientific pursuits among some of histories greatest scientists/believers? Furthermore, what you call 'hidden' meanings other people might term interpretation, speculation, construction--things fundamental to the pursuit of knowledge. Interpretation, you see, is this thing that humans do when processing basically any information that enters their environment, whether scientific, literary, religious, romantic or whatever. Douthat did not, in what I read, imply that Hitch was a Christian, but rather seemed to elucidate how he was not so different. And it would take a quirk of belief not to see that Hitchens pursued religion and belief with an absolutist frenzy rarely found save for among the most fervent of believers. May Athe bless and keep him.
      • Dan of The Prophecy Society
      • Atlanta

      "Dead at face value" fully explains the belief system of Christopher Hitchens when all is said and done.
    • beethy
    • CA
    • Trusted

    I didn't worry about his views on God and religion. There are people who don't believe in god or the same God as your own, and surprise, there are also non-Christians in the world (Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and others).
    He was a voice, contrarian, passionate and challenging that's gone -- a Believer or not, doesn't much matter to me. I didn't agree with him much, but he has point of view and I wanted to see him air it. I'll miss him.
      • beethy
      • CA
      • Trusted

      He had his opinions, expressed more abrasively than I would have, even though I may have disagreed with the subject, more than he may have.
      I am forever for freedom of expression, particularly when it is in the minority, and different and passionately challenges the norm. These views, no matter however expressed, will have to be intellectually persuasive and convincing before I'd go along with them. I'm not interested in religion, and his views weren't much different from what I have heard. That's why his atheist views didn't surprise me or interest me.
    • Tim Kane
    • Mesa, Arizona
    • Trusted

    Mr. Hitchens died undoubtedly an atheist. But here Mr. Douthat is raising him from the dead as virtual Christian. It's a nice job of attempting to sell Hitchens post posthumously to certain hard boiled Christians, but it would seem to be a disservice, perhaps even dishonoring the memory of Christians, who never sought such cover.
    Mature, established and more liberal minded Christains have no problem with atheists, like Hitchens, who are making a good faith (no pun intended) attempt at seeking the truth. In this vein of Christianity, it is understood that each person follows a unique path to finding God. Here they need to merely point to C.S. Lewis.
    The intolerant Christians (an oxymoron if there ever was one), Christians that rely more on the old testament than the new to manifest hate and intolerance, these are the ones that normally would attack Hitchens, but in the last quarter of Hitchens life, while he never came to religion, he did come to this brand of Christianities politics - most decidedly after 9/11 Hitchens found himself a conservative.
    I'm incline to believe that this was a strategic move by Hitchens. Vehemently anti-religion, I'm incline to believe that though Hitchens thought all religion to be dangerous to enlightenment, he saw Islam as the religious movement that was the greatest threat to the enlightenment, and thus decided to form a political alliance with the right, including Christians on the right, in opposing fundamentalist-militant Islam.
      • Tim Kane
      • Mesa, Arizona
      • Trusted

      Please note mistake: the end of the 1st paragraph, which reads
      " perhaps even dishonoring the memory of Christians", the word "Christians" should be replace with: "Hitchens"
      "Thus it should read: perhaps even dishonoring the memory of Hitchens.
    • Sarah D.
    • Montague, MA
    • Trusted

    Very nice piece, Ross. Hitchens would have of course disagreed with your point of view, but would have expected it and taken it in stride and for the spirit in which it is intended.
    I'm an agnostic, so see something of the appeal of theism and atheism but am convinced by neither. Iris Dement has a wonderful song about this: "Let the Mystery Be."
    • bdbd
    • Philadelphia, PA
    • Trusted

    "carried a whiff of" blah blah blah.... I think Hitchens would have gotten a guffaw out of that one. For a while at least, do the man the courtesy of taking him at his word. You'll have time for "what Hitchens really meant" or "what Hitchens really thought" in due course.
    And Hitchens was no bully. He would fight one and all, fair and square, but opponents would be advised to come prepared.
    • tom
    • pittsburgh
    • Trusted

    An excellent epitaph! I seldom agree with you but this is an exception, and is an exceptional piece. The only thing I would add, is that people, such as he, do us a great favor in protecting freedom of speech.
    • Mary Leggett Browning
    • Miami Beach, Florida
    • Trusted

    To me, Hitichens would have been annoyed with Ross' implication that his rejection of religious dogma was merely a reflection of rebellion and that undeneath Hitchens sensed that a Great Father presides over all of our worldly and spiritual lives.
    No, Christopher Hitchens made himself very clear that such a view was at the root of many cruel and dangerous movements in human society. Human kindness and rational thought are the Savior of mankind.
      • Sara
      • New York

      Then the overwhelming verdict both of history and of present experience is that humanity is irremediably lost.
      • r
      • US

      In one of Hitchens's many diatribes gleefully supporting the war on Afghanistan, he joked about America's use of cluster bombs.
      Such was his devotion to "human kindness and rational thought."
      • THOP
      • SA

      Agreed.
      Rather arrogant of Mr. D to write about what Hitch "really" thought. Too bad Hitch cannot respond.
    • Kevin Rothstein
    • New York
    • Trusted

    I think Ross found the perfect quote to describe the arrogant personality of Mr. Hitchens. If there was definite proof in the existence of God, Hitchens would find some way of denying its truth instead of humbly apologizing. He was, therefore, very much like those who cannot conceive that there is no God, in spite of all the evidence that the belief in a supreme being is nothing more than, as Mr. Douthat considers the writings of Karl Marx, a fairy tale. Hitchens was, therefore, not a contrarian at all but rather, in spite of his brilliant mind and writing skills, nothing more than an intellectual bully who, just like some of his neo-con friends later in life, easily made the transition from being a Trotskyite to a far right war mongering hypocrite.
      • Raven Brewer
      • New York, NY

      As Hitchens is dead, and there is nothing remotely approaching "definite proof in the existence of God", your point would appear to be moot. Please feel free to provide such proof when you have it, and present it to atheists for evaluation.
      • Darsan 54
      • Grand Rapids, MI

      Wow. No courtesy or consideration for the family and loved ones here.
      • Nick
      • D.C.

      Not even close. You either have not read/heard Hitch and his colleagues, or don't take them at their word. If there was "definite proof in the existence of God," each and every one of them -- Hitch, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, et al. -- would be glad to retract their opinions on the subject. They are scientifically-minded men, ready, willing and eager to defer to new evidence.... of which, in this case, there is not the slightest shred. Sorry, Kevin.
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