Christopher Hitchens, Dying Man
by Joel McDurmon
http://christianreader.com/2010/08/christopher-hitchens-dying-man/
Christopher Hitchens is dying of cancer. He says five years, maybe. If he is as bad as he says, I would suspect less. Christian groups are praying for him—a few misguided ones for him to suffer and burn in hell, most however for his recovery and salvation. He is most at pains on this subject of prayer to assure us he will make no death bed conversion while he remains in control of his faculties. If there is a death bed conversion, the emaciated, drugged, or demented figure that does so will long since not have been him anymore.
Someone ought to tell him, that’s what Christian conversion is all about: the death of the old man, the rebirth of a new. It is a question of one’s true identity and glory. Better to die spiritually to that old identity than foolhardily to affirm his stubborn clinging to the cancer of his sin until physical death. Let us examine a bit about that identity and its foolhardiness.
Meet the Real Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens is one of the most widely published people whom many evangelical Christians had never heard of until recently. Despite dozens of books and pamphlets, and hundreds of articles and interviews, his almost exclusive attention to global political issues and his radical leftism kept him off the evangelical radar. This is less true for Roman Catholics due to the fact that he publicly excoriated and ridiculed Mother Teresa in a crass exposé subtitled The Missionary Position. Hitchens later narrated his politically-motivated disgust for Teresa into a public television format indelicately titled Hell’s Angel. While many Catholics have been outraged, Protestants and Evangelicals had largely been spared such abuse from our subject atheist.
That was, until March of 2007. In that month the Rev. Jerry Falwell died, garnering national media attention. The atheist, with his newly released book on atheism, and coveting the attention which he normally demands, was beside himself, outraged especially at liberal media outlets. The following day, Hitchens graced CNN with his judgment on Falwell: “I think it’s a pity there isn’t a hell for him to go to.”
Why any news organization with an obligation to public decency would call up an incendiary smoke-bomb like Hitchens to comment on, of all things, the death of Jerry Falwell, escapes me, unless it were to exploit his shamelessness for ratings, or to level cheap-shots at rival conservatives. Hitchens served both purposes well. Led by newsman Anderson Cooper, Hitchens referred to Falwell as an “ugly little charlatan” who was “giggling and sniggering all the time with what he was getting away with.” Hitchens snorted at the idea that Falwell actually believed what he preached, charging that the Reverend only used religion as a means of extorting money from “gullible” and “credulous” people: “He woke up every morning pinching his chubby little flanks, thinking, ‘I’ve got away with it again.’ . . . I think he was a conscious charlatan and fraud.”
When confronted for his hatefulness on Fox News’ “Hannity and Colmes,” Hitchens refused to show the slightest pity even toward the grieving family, saying, “I don’t care whether his family’s feelings are hurt or not.”
If Hitchens, along with other atheists, makes the complaint that atheists are unduly outcast by the majority of the American populace, well, perhaps he can at least understand why they are disliked. He makes it quite easy for us to do so.
A Tale of Two Faces
What drives a man to such violent, implacable one-sidedness? Whence the immovable, unrepentant, stubborn hate?
In God Is Not Great, Hitchens tells his own story of childhood in a Christian school: taking nature walks and learning Biblical passages, until one early-adolescent day when his own skepticism arose from nowhere. You could tell this point in his story generally without needing the information, because Hitchens darkens from sweetly describing his schoolmarm as a “good, sincere, simple woman, of decent and stable faith” at the beginning of the tale, to confronting “this pious old trout.” Despite the modern atheists’ pleading—constantly—that atheism does not accommodate a jaded, cynical personality, Hitchens’ sweetness and daisy-elegance always fade to a transparent pretense.
This window into Hitchens’ soul reveals something very interesting. After studying his wider corpus of writing a bit I have come to see through the whole game. He styles himself a “contrarian,” which is to say, a professional arguer, a hired mouth, a credentialed naysayer. Most people with such talent go into law, carrying on the ancient Greek tradition of sophistry, the proponents of which studied vice bragged that adopting either side of an argument—right or wrong notwithstanding—they could win.
The importance of this fact jumps out after hearing the atheist’s absurd charge that Falwell consciously extorted the people, allegedly using what he knew to be a false message to extract money and power from the credulous. Of course, those who knew the Reverend know otherwise—he was the “real deal,” they will tell you—and it will not take any amateur researcher long to discover that Hitchens has but projected his own admitted hucksterism onto the Christian leader, likely out of envy.
“Admitted,” you ask? Quite. Probing just a bit into Hitchens’ loquacious career one may retrieve this gem:
If you don’t get up every day whimpering with fear, thinking this is the day they’ll find you out, and say, “Well he would say that, wouldn’t he?” you’re not doing your job. You should be in a state of permanent fear about being discovered as a blowhard, or as an irrelevance.
So what is this game we now see through? It is to be a blowhard, but never let your paying audience know. Recall, however, the proverb: “In the multitude of words there wanteth not sin” (Prov. 10:19). Garrulity has its consequences, namely, that of actually telling on yourself, if you’re not careful. Hitchens knows he is mischievous as a principle—there being a market in the media for merely rousing passions—and he must train himself like an actor not to let his true self peak through his spoken causes.
“Contrarian” is thus a fig leaf for “Empty Soul.” Since Hitchens is an epicure of great literature, I will offer him one of my favorite passages from Milton, who describes outer darkness—the abode of emptiness:
Up hither like aerial vapors flew / Of all things transitory and vain, when Sin / With vanity had filled the works of men: / Both all things vain and all who in vain things / Built their fond hopes of glory, or lasting fame, / Or happiness in this or the other life. / All who have their reward on earth, the fruits / Of painful superstition and blind zeal, / Naught seeking but the praise of men, here find / Fit retribution, empty as their deeds (Paradise Lost, 3.445–454).
The Atheist as Prophet
At the base of Islam is the well-know confession, “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.” This defines the fundamentalism of that oppressive and close-minded religion: One authority, and one voice for that authority, anything outside of which is damnable.
Atheist’s say they abhor this type of dogmatism, preferring “freethinking”—a not unwholesome thing in itself—but many unwittingly fall into a very similar type of self-imposed mental blindness in the name of free-thought. One need only recall the history of Marxist-inspired revolution, and the mass graves of “dialectical materialism” (a fancy phrase for “atheistic struggle,” or which could well be put, “atheist jihad”). This history has well been written of elsewhere.
Among the atheists who inspired those slaughters stands the figure of Leon Trotsky, whom Hitchens relates was immortalized in a definitive biography entitled The Prophet. “Prophet” now carries a pejorative to the extent that it implies a voice of authority: especially in the form of God telling us how to live. In the past, when these atheists have taken a stand against God, they have turned and formed their own dictatorship and ruled as gods themselves. The creed of atheism, were its proponents careful and honest enough to formulate it, would inevitably mimic the Islamic pillar thusly: “There is no god, and I am His prophet.”
Hitchens tells us how he once admired and followed a particular sect of Trotskyites, but later left his affections for the prophet behind, choosing rather to follow the dictates of his own mind. He implies that because he left this particular sect behind, that he therefore has proven his ability as a freethinker—ready to discard a pet theory when the evidence mounts against it. This, he thinks, qualifies him to sympathize with those whose faith he now intends to undermine. See what a great therapist we have in our atheist? He is building us an emotional bridge over which to walk into his outstretched arms.
But let’s not run too fast. Christopher informs us that Marxism itself still has his heart, referring to it as an “idea that I have not yet quite abandoned.” This is an understatement on his part. Amidst the murk of his life’s “multitude of words” surfaces this from an interview: “I don’t think I’d ever change my view that socialism is the best political moment humans have ever come up with.” It is clear to me that while Hitchens may have left one particular sect of radical leftists, he has not left radical leftism itself. His mental-shift can hardly be displayed as an example of intellectual bravery or sacrifice, and hardly compares to the moment that tries any Christian who has genuinely experienced repentance. Considering Hitchens’ still extreme faith in his political and economic system, his claim to have a “chainless mind” is laughable, and his aligning of atheism with “freethinking” another transparent front.
Vanity and Reason
Besides, “freethinking” itself is a gyroscope that spins in the hand of whomever holds it. Christopher himself leads us here in his earlier book Letters to a Young Contrarian: “The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.” I am inclined to agree with this concerning the essence of freethinking, but this leaves silent—as most atheists’ treatments of the term do—the assumption that intellectual independence must still adhere to certain basic rules of conduct in order to be taken seriously. Reason is not a moral guide; morality must guide reason in order for reason to produce good results. But this truth is too often left unaddressed by atheists because it raises the question, “If moral rules must precede reason, then where do the moral rules come from?” Since the answer obviously cannot be “reason,” then we must look outside of ourselves for the answer. This is why so few atheists continue very far down this logical path of inquiry. Instead, they stop and extol “reason” as an end in itself, the only way to enlightenment.
These same critics then love to slander Christians as the unreasonable ones. For example, Christopher quotes Martin Luther at the opening of one of his chapters: “Reason is the Devil’s harlot, who can do nought but slander and harm whatever God says and does.” This he intends to show how religious faith is incurably opposed to reason, for here Dr. Luther himself says so in the most obviously backward and ignorant terms. This mentality, Hitchens strives to assure us, “comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species.” Reason can be nothing but the avowed enemy of faith, we are told with no uncertain, but certainly unwitting, dogmatic irony.
One must, however, ask why Luther would say such a thing, after all, when the followers of the medieval Christian scholar Thomas Aquinas had been nearly worshipping reason for two and a half centuries up until his time. Hitchens—who usually appears adept with history and historical facts—does not attempt even to ask such a question, let alone find an answer. As it turns out, the answer is highly relevant to our discussion. Luther was not afraid of reason, and certainly did not advocate irrationality; rather, he simply saw that reason has limitations, usually due to the whims and dictates of the more powerful human will. This is why he wrote such a treatise as The Bondage of the Will: in order to show (against the Christian humanists of his time) that bare human reason cannot achieve the righteousness of God. This is not a disavowal of reason, but a proper understanding of it: knowing that the heart (especially that of a professional contrarian) can provide infinite reasons to defend any position it wants to try to justify. Reason is a tool, not a force or a guide. It can be moved, twisted and laid in whatever position one desires, and thus can deservedly be called, in certain circumstances, “The Devil’s Harlot.”
Hitchens could easily have learned this for himself. Even a simple Google search “luther on reason” yields at least one freely viewable academic book where anyone can read the following:
Of course when Luther described reason in matters related to faith as “blind” or as “the devil’s whore,” he was not simply scolding or asserting his own theological ideas without concern for understanding and insight. Rather, Luther at a very early point already understood that we are not able to engage in a neutral search for truth in matters related to the knowledge of God.
The point, therefore, is one about intellectual neutrality: something every self-vaunted freethinker should have a grip on but rarely does, and something which Christopher has failed to challenge himself with at all.
I am always willing to forgive an error, but these types of errors—ignoring historical context, perpetuating unnecessary pejoratives, refusing correction—when repeated, speak of a group that does not want to learn, but rather dig into their position due to some deeper, irrational cause, in every wit like the very ignorant and stubborn fundamentalists that group despises. By this intellectual laziness—another inexcusable attribute for thinkers—Hitchens joins this group, and proves that he has little interest in actual thought, free or otherwise. It begins to come clear that all of the effort today devoted to making atheists look intellectual, smart, “bright,” educated, enlightened, etc., is nothing more than a front. One wonders, or perhaps dare we wonder, what real desires modern atheism is covering for. It is Emptiness glorifying, celebrating itself; we might just call it a vanity fair.
Light Before the End
Christopher Hitchens is dying. He will, no doubt courageously endure his time. I pray that he be cured, that any suffering be short, but that whether he is cured or suffers, he first repent and be baptized. I would love to see that old man die immediately, that he may face God and death as a new one. Christopher—“Christ bearer”—has the will to endure to his death, but will he have the courage to die properly before he gets there. He needs to see the light before the end of the tunnel. Until then, the curtain is closing on his act.
Notes:
Mike Wade, “A Prisoner of His Own Conscience,” in The Scottsman (June 17, 2002). Available at http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/books/A-prisoner-of-his-own.2336027.jp ; accessed June 27, 2008.
Christopher Hitchens, Interview for the documentary “Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism,” New River Media. Available at http://www-tc.pbs.org/heavenonearth/interview_pdfs/Hitchens_Web_SW.pdf ; accessed June 26, 2008.
Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 3.
Bernard Lohse, Martin Luther: An Introduction to His Life and Work, trans. Robert C. Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 159. The interested reader will find further elucidation in the most readable, definitive and easily accessible biography of Luther: Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York: Meridian, 1995) 172–173.
Recommended further reading:
Joel McDurmon: The Return of the Village Atheist
Douglas Wilson: Letter from a Christian Citizen
K. Scott Oliphint: Reasons for Faith
http://christianreader.com/2010/08/christopher-hitchens-dying-man/
Doorzoek het forum
Zoeken met Startpagina
Startpagina Thema's
