Hitch asked us to think, to question, and to appreciate. There is surely no better embodiment of a hacker ethic than someone like Christopher Hitchens: a unique voice who challenged the world not to accept the status quo.
In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011
131–140 of 228 posts
Re: In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
No it's not. Why wouldn't an atheist want an afterlife?
Atheism is a very broad category. It just means you don't believe in any gods. The people who belong to that category, and their philosophies, are wildly different. You can't draw a lot of conclusions just from knowing someone is an atheist. I'm an atheist myself and I do find the idea of an afterlife extremely compelling. The tragedy here is that I'm also enough of a scientist to know that the odds of there being an…
"The tragedy here is that I'm also enough of a scientist to know that the odds of there being any kind of afterlife are vastly against us."
You presume, of course, that these things apply to the dead. But when dead, materially, you can reason about nothing because the bases for reason, perception and memory, no longer exist. Seeing yourself as disanimated material after you die is a trick of the mind, and not one that comes naturally, but that is learned in training as a part of survival in your time and place. But in many ways, to yourself, you are unlike anyone else, and in these ways you can conclude nothing about your dead self from your perception and memory of all others that have died.
In short, you can conclude nothing about yourself when dead. Even the laws of physics and nature are not a help to determining the nature of your dead self; these are artifacts of perception and memory.
I do not claim that we have hope for life after death, whatever that means; I only claim that for the living it is, and will likely always be, the "horror of the shade", the mystery of mysteries, and why music and poetry are as important to human beings as science and reason.
Re: In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone who knew Hitchens knows that "heaven" as depicted by cristianity is a "celestial North Korea, where the sole purpose is to praise the dear leader incessantly, compelled to love someone you fear (essence of sadomasochism). You'd think the Lord himself would get bored of this after a couple of billion years"... So, wishing him in heaven from another atheist as you say you are is really saying you don't know much…
Vonnegut on wishing a person was in heaven: "I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that functionless capacity. We Humanists try to behave well without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community. We h…
In case anyone cares... I was curious about the source of this quote and did a quick search. Although I found this exact quote many places on the web, the only source I could find in an KV book was in God Bless You, Dr Kevorkian, which (according to Amazon's "search inside", looks something like this):
I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an AHA memorial service for my predecessor I said, "Isaac is up in Heaven now." That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored.
I made that joke, of course, before my first near-death experience--the accidental one.
So when my own time comes to join the choir invisible or whatever, God forbid, I hope someone will say, "He's up in Heaven now." Who really knows? I could have dreamed all this.
My epitaph in any case? "Everything was beautiful. Nothing hurt." I will have gotten off so light, whatever the heck it is that was going on.
Re: In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Noam Chomsky quite well articulates what so greatly annoys me in the use of term "marxist". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Tq4VE8eHQ It has hardly any relation to the original context or meaning of the writings of one Karl Marx.
> Noam Chomsky quite well articulates what so greatly annoys me in the use of term "marxist". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Tq4VE8eHQ > It has hardly any relation to the original context or meaning of the writings of one Karl Marx. Truth be told, Marx himself would probably not be seen as a "marxist". And as a guy who swears by his Hayek and Lord Acton, I wonder how come when someone in the former Western block co…
"...when someone in the former Western block countries calls you a "marxist" or as a follower of Marx supposedly it is something bad, very bad?"
Our Western popular[1] perception of Marx is heavily colored by the usurpation of his name, and bastardization of his philosophy, by Lenin, Stalin, et al. These days, most people simply conflate Stalin and Marx, and they're unable to separate the two. (I bet many people probably assume Marx was Russian!). After 50-odd years of cold war with the forces of "Marxism," people in the US are still pretty wary of the name and the title. Add to that mix the fact that the uber-right-wingers have been all too eager to toss the epithets "Marxist" or "socialist" at the first sign of political opposition.
[1] I specify "popular," rather than simply catch-all "Western," because within Western academia, Marx is still studied and taken seriously.
Re: In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone who knew Hitchens knows that "heaven" as depicted by cristianity is a "celestial North Korea, where the sole purpose is to praise the dear leader incessantly, compelled to love someone you fear (essence of sadomasochism). You'd think the Lord himself would get bored of this after a couple of billion years"... So, wishing him in heaven from another atheist as you say you are is really saying you don't know much…
Hitchens never seemed to understand that "North Korea" isn't the Christian conception of heaven. To wish for him to be surrounded for all eternity by those he loves most, in the presence of the source of all love, truth and beauty... I think that's something we'd all like to experience along with him. Edit: Unclear phrasing
I believe Hitchens point on this is taken directly from the bible. There is no biblical basis for your description of heaven. If you read Revelations, though, heaven is described exactly the way Hitchens described it.
To put it another way, I think when Hitchens calls it "the christian conception" of heaven, it wasn't a description of what certain christians believe, but of the biblical description.
Re: In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does that even mean?
That would mean the goal is not escaping death per se. The goal could be escaping a painful death or particular kind of death. There was a hint of a false dilemma.
As I understand it, "old age" is a euphemism for "getting X after a certain age", where X is something like cancer.
Re: In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011
#137Hitchens was essentially a Marxist (by his own admission) who was also in favor of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the foreign policy it represented. So there was very little I agreed with him on. But I'm terribly upset about this and I'll tell you why. Because of his willingness to debate. I'd literally scan right wing talk radio schedules for his name because you just knew it would be a great show. In a world where s…
Noam Chomsky quite well articulates what so greatly annoys me in the use of term "marxist". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Tq4VE8eHQ It has hardly any relation to the original context or meaning of the writings of one Karl Marx.
This video is appallingly deceitful. E.g. where he argues that the USSR was not only not socialism, but in fact as far from it as possible. He deftly redefines the core idea of socialism to make it look superficially plausible.
If socialism was ever about one bug thing, it was the collective ownership of the means of production. This was the slogan of all socialist movements, particularly Marxist socialist movements.
And the USSR was exactly that kind of society: the defining feature of its economy was a total ban on private ownership of the "means of production". Meaning, you could own an apartment, a house, a car, a wrench. You could buy and sell goods privately at a market. But you could not own a factory that made toy cars, or a tool shop that sold wrenches, or a company that wrote software. That was owned by the state collectively.
Now of course one can argue that the implementation of this ideal was twisted because e.g. the actual workers at a particular factory didn't control its planning or production, which were governed by the party apparatus. But even if true, (and it's actually not true; centralized control over the means of production is perfectly compatible with Marxism), this is still infinitely closer to the actual ideal of socialism than, say, a capitalist state with an oligarchy at power, where means of production can be and are privately owned. To claim that the USSR was not socialism and in fact some kind of anti-socialism (Chomsky: "as about remote from socialism as you can imagine"), is just such so offensively misleading; such a gross lie, clearly meant to influence people who've never lived in a socialist economy or actually read Marx.
(And it's in fact not true that workers were "virtual slaves" in the Soviet Union. They had shitty lives, to be sure, just as everybody else except state bureaucracy, but they were quite free in their choices, and made more money on average than any other class in the society. It was peasants who were virtual slaves, disenfranchised by the state and in fact forbidden to move to a different village or city without the state sanction well into the 1960s).
Re: In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vonnegut on wishing a person was in heaven: "I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that functionless capacity. We Humanists try to behave well without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community. We h…
In case anyone cares... I was curious about the source of this quote and did a quick search. Although I found this exact quote many places on the web, the only source I could find in an KV book was in God Bless You, Dr Kevorkian, which (according to Amazon's "search inside", looks something like this): I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolif…
Since it is a joke, Vonnegut used it on more than one occasion.
There is a version in Timequake as well. That was where I originally read it [see: http://books.google.com/books?id=ggiR05avpw4C&pg=PT73...]
Re: In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
In case anyone cares... I was curious about the source of this quote and did a quick search. Although I found this exact quote many places on the web, the only source I could find in an KV book was in God Bless You, Dr Kevorkian, which (according to Amazon's "search inside", looks something like this): I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolif…
Since it is a joke, Vonnegut used it on more than one occasion. There is a version in Timequake as well. That was where I originally read it [see: http://books.google.com/books?id=ggiR05avpw4C&pg=PT73... ]
Wow -- I've read most of his books and never realized he "plagiarized" himself like this. Thanks!
Re: In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vonnegut on wishing a person was in heaven: "I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that functionless capacity. We Humanists try to behave well without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community. We h…
In case anyone cares... I was curious about the source of this quote and did a quick search. Although I found this exact quote many places on the web, the only source I could find in an KV book was in God Bless You, Dr Kevorkian, which (according to Amazon's "search inside", looks something like this): I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolif…
I loved that book. It feels good sometimes to know where that quote came from without Google.
My path to becoming a fan of his work started young when I was no more than 11 or 12 and sitting in a pediatrics waiting room with my dad on the East end of Long Island. The man sitting next to me cross legged with a pile of loose curly grey hair was reading a magazine and gruffing every few moments. I noticed my dad staring at him.
Anyways when we left my dad said do you know who you were sitting next to? Of course not. That man was Kurt Vonnegut, I have a book on my book shelve you should read...That night I read the entire book Slaughter House Five. Then he gave me Galapagos, and then I was reading Schopenhauer, but I digress.
I have since read every single one of his works, which is why I cloud have told you where that quote was from. Vonnegut introduced me to the American Humanist Association, of which I am a member now, which means I send them money every year, also contribute to their lobbying group in DC, and read their magazine Free Inquiry.