Christopher Hitchens' closing remarks from a debate on the question “Does a Good God Exist?”

[t0dd]

I’ll close on the implied question that Bill asked me earlier: Why don’t you accept this wonderful offer? Why wouldn’t you like to meet Shakespeare, for example?

I don’t know if you really think that when you die you can be corporeally reassembled, and have conversations with authors from previous epochs. It’s not necessary that you believe that in Christian theology, and I have to say that it sounds like a complete fairy tale to me. The only reason I’d want to meet Shakespeare, or might even want to, is because I can meet him, any time, because he is immortal in the works he’s left behind. If you’ve read those, meeting the author would almost certainly be a disappointment.

But when Socrates was sentenced to death for his philosophical investigations, and for blasphemy for challenging the gods of the city — and he accepted his death — he did say, well, if we are lucky, perhaps I’ll be able to hold conversation with other great thinkers and philosophers and doubters too. In other words the discussion about what is good, what is beautiful, what is noble, what is pure, and what is true could always go on.

Why is that important, why would I like to do that? Because that’s the only conversation worth having. And whether it goes on or not after I die, I don’t know. But I do know that that’s the conversation I want to have while I’m still alive. Which means that to me, the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet; that I haven’t understood enough; that I can’t know enough; that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

And I’d urge you to look at… those people who tell you, at your age, that you’re dead till you believe as they do — what a terrible thing to be telling to children! And that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority — don’t think of that as a gift. Think of it as a poisoned chalice. Push it aside however tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgIcJb8i4m8

[sasha031]

1. Chris Hitchens at his at his best

That was absolutely beautiful.
I hope he is still with us for years to come.

[dionysus]

2. he's dying of cancer. hopefully he beats it somehow. he's an asshole on many subjects

but brilliant in others.

[sasha031]

3. I did not agree with him over the Iraq War

I never really understood how he once was such a great thinker and liberal, then suddenly turned so sharply to the right.

Maybe due to his illness he is evolving, it was a great clip, hope he stays around for awhile.

[MisterP]

5. it's part and parcel of the 19th-century Liberalism he and many "New Atheists" espouse

"Liberalism" after like 1850 was capitalistic, technocratic, elitist, warmongering--even genocidal--and anticlerical: think Lord Palmerston or Guatemala's Justo Rufino Barrios
after 1990 this paleoliberalism took an Islamophobic as well as Catholophobic (is that the word?): Bernard Stasi and Ditchkins see the West (the old "Christendom") as under assault by scary Muslims (and often scary clergy, whom they conflate with mullahs)--so we have to tell schoolgirls their headscarves are anti-French and impossible to choose of one's own accord, and we have to blow up and civilize those scary people Over There
their calls for persecuting Muslim Britonsm and their hopes that the US uses high exposives so nobody can claim that a Quran saved their life are part and parcel with their notion of "secularism," just as their 1870s view of science and religion comes from their adoration of Auguste Comte

[toddaa]

4. Reminds me of a couple of UU jokes

A UUer dies and discovers that there is an afterlife. Unfortunately, the angel informs her, that because she died a skeptic she has to suffer in Hell, where she will spend eternity with people who will never disagree with her.

In the afterlife, UUers are presented with the choice of spending eternity in heaven or eternity discussing heaven. UUers always go with the latter option.