Why Christopher Hitchens Matters

I felt a deep loss when I read Christopher Hitchens had passed away. As I never knew him personally, the sense of loss was more for never meeting him, shaking his hand, and thanking him.

I certainly did not want to believe my parents, teachers, and clergy would be so irresponsible as to lead my young mind astray with falsehoods. Would my parents be so naïve and gullible before a theocracy that boils down to mere nonsense? No child, young or old, wants to believe that about their parents. Therefore, I concluded by the age of 20, there had to be some truth at the core of the Christian revelation. And that truth I spent years trying to find, without success.

When my mind met Christopher’s voice, it was a surreal experience. Listening to him so cleanly articulate all the things that are wrong with Christianity vindicated me: my mind was indeed asking the right questions and drawing the correct conclusions. It was Christopher who shook loose the last remnants of a mental oppression that had burdened me for so long. His writings and his voice immersed me in hours of reason and coherent argument. It was as if his timbre went to the source of my struggles, and simply handed me the answer: Christianity and reason were orthogonal and could not be resolved to congruency.

Reading his books and watching any debate I could conjure up from YouTube, I saw with great objectivity how religion is disseminated through societies via the cultural influence and the misuse of authority. This subjugation of the masses is clever. By never giving the innocent mind a chance to breath the free air, the maturation of critical thinking skills is arrested. Prayer, servitude, and donations smother the requirement for evidence and corroboration of supernatural claims. Fortunately, the concept of faith became weak and silly to me. I wanted to understand before believing.

But the answers I so desperately wanted and needed never came. The great unifying theory squaring Christianity with science and reason, that I once believed had to exist, never materialized. And I never found a shred of evidence to even hint that such a theory existed. In short, Occam’s razor cut through it all; The Christian faith was simply manmade, and that explained everything. It was Hitchens that gave me validation that my conclusions were not only correct, but that my reasoning HAD to be correct.

The writings and orations of Christopher Hitchens matter in this analysis because of what can flourish in a human being after reading and hearing him. And what can flourish is reason and consciousness. If we are to evolve into a species that is anything more than ½ a chromosome away from a chimpanzee, Christopher’s fight for intellectual freedom over theocratic tradition must be sustained until we finally let go of superstition and species-centric narcissism. Some argue that the voice of Christopher Hitchens does not matter. If this is true, then we as a species don’t matter either. And sadly, we never did.

Five Arguments Why The COEXIST Movement For Religions Will Not Work.  



The focus on peaceful coexistence between faiths has sharpened over the last few years. However, we need something more than ecumenical. To be effective a true armistice between faiths must include recognizing one another as divinely valid and with the right of practice. Unfortunately this will not work as it violates the initial condition of any monotheism: my religion is the true and correct religion.

1. To claim the ‘divine stamp of authenticity’ any religious belief system is, by its own alloy, immalleable. Accepting another's religious beliefs or lifestyle gives the acceptor no choice but to compromise or doubt, at some level, the validity of that stamp. Once this occurs the inevitable deconstruction of the belief system begins for the believer. This is an unavoidable consequence that the religious, as a whole, cannot engage in while preserving the divine stamp.



2. Religious belief is for a large majority of our species, culturally born and nurtured. To ask a practicing Roman Catholic from an Irish neighborhood in Boston to not only accept another faith (and one that is disseminated from the Middle East) but also give credence to its divinity violates the theocracy to which Catholics are beholden. It is simply not part of the cultural makeup. In other words, it devalues faith when beliefs and convictions become transferable commodities rather than derivations from their holy book of alleged truth and wisdom. And if we only take the three modern monotheisms into account for this discussion, then two out of the three holy books (Koran, New Testament Bible, Torah) are disavowed in favor of the third.



3. The human is psyche is a dangerous place in which to play these sorts of games. The sense of identity and purpose that can rise in the heart and in the mind when having something to oppose is extremely addictive. It is like two magnets being pushed together against their positively charged surfaces. Without the other to oppose you cannot ‘feel’ or experience a sense power. The same is true of the human condition. Think how many feuds, disagreements, or downright hateful emotions exist between people, institutions, or cultures. This creates a heightened sense of self-importance if backed by a contrived divine charge.



4. George Orwell writes, "A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened." What Orwell is pointing out here is not only true but the most demonstrative reason why the COEXIST movement cannot succeed. The admission of fallibility convits the belief system as manmade (emphasis on man not woman). Hence, the believer is faced with admitting that not only their own faith fails this litmus test, but every other monotheism as well. In other words any theocracy is in fact a house of cards built upon a premise of infallibility that simply cannot be true.



5. The belief systems trumpeted by the three monotheisms have neural integration/infection working for them. These alleged holy books, their derived teachings, and the leaders who freight them are able to bore into the areas of the mind where reason and critical thinking should function unmolested. But even the most educated mind can succumb to such molestation and become an instrument of the draconian. At some point we may face 14th century mentalities wielding 21st century weaponry. There can be no allowance for the least bit of tolerance under such circumstances.



The underlying human condition of egocentric tendencies coupled with the narcissistic orientation of monotheism is fertile ground for at best non-tolerance, and at worst apocalyptic violence. The only hope we have is in a secular society whose political and social fabric proactively puts a stop to such destructive and medieval thinking and is itself intolerant of irrational and dangerous beliefs.