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In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011

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Re: In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011

#191

Post by Tloewald »

redthrowaway wrote: post #180
Tloewald wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd go further and suggest that a lot of atheists would echo the hope that there is some kind of fabulous immortality beyond the grave, it's just that the concept is, upon examination, absurd.

Eternal life holds no interest for me. Imagine living a million years, seeing and thinking all there is to see and think, then living a billion years after that. Then you realize that you're precisely 0% of the way to the finish line. Long after the heat death of the universe, a consciousness with nothing to cogitate. No thanks.

You're making a lot of assumptions there. The idea that there are finite number of possible thoughts is highly improbable given the number of things there aren't finite numbers of.

If you argue from a base mechanics point of view (e.g. Your brain is basically a hard drive with n bits of storage an thus can only enter 2^n states) then you're assuming that in this hypothetical afterlife your physical limitations are maintained. Since your basic assumptions about the universe have been demonstrated to be wrong, assuming this particular assumption will be correct is drawing a very long bow. And the initial assumption is very much in doubt.

To my mind an atheist is someone who has yet to encounter a plausible religion, not (a) someone who defines their beliefs in opposition to one religion (e.g. I do not believ heaven is a green pasture populated by angels playing harps and dead Christians tending sheep) or (b) someone who is closed to the possibility that a plausible religion might exist.

Re: In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011

#192

Post by anamax »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #181
anamax wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A free market system with socialist overtones can work wonderfully well. Just look at Northern Europe. Anything will work with Northern Europeans (or Mormons, in reference to another thread) so that doesn't prove anything. The key test is whether {something} works with cultures where other things fail.

Or maybe it's the other way 'round. Perhaps they chose a sensible system because they are rational, compassionate and civilized people. Come to think of it, that seems more likely now.

Huh?

How they chose their system has nothing to do with whether that system would work for someone else. It also has nothing to do with how well another system would work for them.

Re: In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011

#193

Post by chalst »

emmelaich wrote: post #188
TomOfTTB wrote: post #16

Hitchens 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…

"Hitchens was essentially a Marxist .. " My understand was that he was a Trotskyist rather than a Marxist. Emphasis on 'was' for either. But if there was anyone to whom labels should not be applied surely it was Hitch. Here's the best obit I've read: http://reason.com/archives/2011/12/16/christopher-hitchens-r... edit - I should add that I am vehemently in agreement with your sentiments about why it is so much a trag…

I see "drink-soaked, former-Trotskyist popinjay" applied to Hitchens a lot.

Hitchens' 2002 review of Martin Amis Koba the Dread, "Lightness at Midnight", gives a good summary of his (i.e., Hitchens) attitude to Trotskyism and Marxism. He picks out a wonderful quote of Victor Serge:

> Have you forgotten the other bankruptcies? What was Christianity doing in the various catastrophes of society? What became of Liberalism? What has Conservatism produced, in either its enlightened or its reactionary form? ... If we are indeed honestly to weigh out the bankruptcies of ideology, we shall have a long task ahead of us.

(From http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2002/09/hitchens... )

Something to think about today, with respect to our own politics.

Re: In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011

#195

Post by ajkessler »

davesims wrote: post #67

As a person of long-held religious conviction I am deeply saddened to see this worthy adversary go. He had an uncanny ability to go straight for your mostly deeply held beliefs with the most trenchant rhetoric and yet somehow made you like him anyway. I think it's because with Hitchens, you knew he spoke from the integrity of his own convictions. He was nobody's man, on no one's bandwagon, carrying water for no polit…

I don't think a finer thing could be said about a man.

http://www.ajkesslerblog.com/a-hell-of-a-eulogy/

Re: In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011

#196

Post by redthrowaway »

Tloewald wrote: post #191
redthrowaway wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eternal life holds no interest for me. Imagine living a million years, seeing and thinking all there is to see and think, then living a billion years after that. Then you realize that you're precisely 0% of the way to the finish line. Long after the heat death of the universe, a consciousness with nothing to cogitate. No thanks.

You're making a lot of assumptions there. The idea that there are finite number of possible thoughts is highly improbable given the number of things there aren't finite numbers of. If you argue from a base mechanics point of view (e.g. Your brain is basically a hard drive with n bits of storage an thus can only enter 2^n states) then you're assuming that in this hypothetical afterlife your physical limitations are ma…

>Since your basic assumptions about the universe have been demonstrated to be wrong

That's ambitious of you.

>To my mind an atheist is someone who has yet to encounter a plausible religion

In principle, were a plausible religion to present itself, I would weigh it on the evidence. In the real world, the vast number of religions, none of which are plausible, combined with the demonstrated ability of science to explain the universe through natural causes, leaves no doubt in my mind that there is no supernatural creator.

As for an afterlife, the complete and utter lack of evidence or argument in favor of it consigns it to the realm of all other fairy tales. As such, I treat it as a thought experiment more than as a proposed state of the Universe. If there is an afterlife, either it's eternal or it isn't. If it is, it is boring beyond belief. If it isn't, then what have you "gained"? Sure, it'd be nice to have a few thousand years to think, but I'd far prefer telekinesis and control over the flow of time. Since the propositions of my having superpowers and my consciousness enduring after my neurons stop firing have equal chance of coming true, I'll stick with the fantasies that tickle my pickle.

Your a) scenario is easily dismissed: I think all religions are equally silly; some have just been around long enough and are familiar enough for their silliness to become engrained. As for b) I am not closed to the possibility in principle. As I said, I simply view it as vanishingly unlikely. I have a better chance of winning the lottery three times in a row than of any religion predicated upon the supernatural being "true".

You say "an atheist is someone who has yet to encounter a plausible religion". That implies that we're waiting for the right one, like a home buyer who's only been shown hovels. That's simply not the case. I am not, in practice, open to the possibility of a god; I think the whole notion is absurd. In the same vein, I am not open to the possibility of homeopathy being effective treatment for anything other than thirst. Certainly, were science to show that it was, in fact, effective, I would change my mind. That does not imply that I'm waiting to find the right kind of water to cure fibromyalgia.

PS: To quickly address your point:

>The idea that there are finite number of possible thoughts is highly improbable given the number of things there aren't finite numbers of.

I never meant to imply there were a finite number of things. Hell, you could count for all eternity and never run out of numbers. That does not imply there are an infinite number of things worth thinking about.

Re: In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011

#197

Post by redthrowaway »

euroclydon wrote: post #142
olavk wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The christian concept of heaven is not very attractive if you are not a christian. While there are different interpretations, the common is that heaven is an eternal non-physical state of being together with God (the god of the Bible), perhaps even "absorbed" by this god. The god of the Bible is racist, jaloux, blood-thirsty and opposed to critical thinking, and among other things calls for human sacrifice, genocide…

Has it occurred to you that if God created everything, than the standard by which you're judging heaven might be short sighted? I like to think there might be little racism and infanticide and much discourse on creating universes.

No description of the afterlife given by any of the major religions appeals to me, save perhaps Buddhism from a mystical standpoint. If we want to start conjecturing beyond what anyone says the afterlife is like, then why believe in it at all? Without evidence, the only thing any of the religions claim to have going for them is holy books and priests claiming divine knowledge. If you want to ignore those, then you're just pulling ideas out of thin air. It might be nice to imagine some utopic afterlife for each person, but it has precisely the same relationship with fact as my desire to drop into the worlds of books I read and take part in the story.

Re: In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011

#198

Post by slurgfest »

TomOfTTB wrote: post #16

Hitchens 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…

Let's not use the word "essentially" as a weasel word. If you mean to say that Hitchens was a Marxist, that should be based on documented membership in some Marxist organization or some concrete quote avowing allegiance to Marxism. Otherwise we are just casually red-baiting here.

I deplore the way our political culture has taken to shorthanding disagreements by labeling people as Socialists, Marxists and Communists when those movements are politically dead and the concerned individuals are not involved in the pathetic remaining organizations and, come to mention it, don't match to the textbook descriptions of the ideologies.

Re: In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011

#199

Post by slurgfest »

anatoly wrote: post #137
127 wrote: post #48

Earlier 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.

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…

No, I think it's valid to say that the USSR was not socialism. That doesn't mean that the USSR was good, or that socialism is good, it just means that they have never been the same thing. (Unlike Chomsky, I am not concerned to save or favorably present either one, they simply have never been the same)

To be more specific, it wasn't even a simple readout of Marxism - hence the creation of separate terms like Leninism and Stalinism and Trotskyism and Maoism. I am not defending Marx, but one's disagreement with an entire class of people does not remove their significant internal disputes.

But the USSR used the ideas and words of socialism as justification quite a bit. That is very significant. It certainly justifies skepticism about anyone selling socialism, and about the robustness of socialism in the face of conditions like the establishment of simple old-school dictatorships by ruthless butchers.

Re: In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011

#200

Post by jtheory »

msg wrote: post #164
olavk wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Hitchens is arguing against what people actually believe. Christians believe in heaven based (among other things) on Revelation.

But obviously Christians don't believe that heaven is like North Korea or the Movementarians. They see it quite differently from the inside. I take Hitchens as trying to find a common ground for argument by appealing directly to the text. So it is on point if his interpretation of the text does not do it justice, especially if the Christians interpret it differently in a way that is more internally consistent.

That's not obvious at all.

The problem is that no one seems to have an idea of heaven that -- if it were actually REALIZED (vs staying as an abstract idea) -- would be tolerable for any length of time by human beings. We have to assume that people are transformed into something that deals well with eternity, for example... but we never even talked about it at that depth.

I was raised Catholic by two still-seriously-believing parents, I should mention, so I have some idea of what some Christians think heaven is like. It's a vague mush of conflicting ideas.

And that's just fine, because no one wants to think about it deeply; that's not the point. It's just for saying "well, your Nana is in Heaven now, and she's very, very happy there". It's whatever it needs to be for Nana to be very, very happy.

If she's reunited with both husbands and her lover from the late 1950s as well, presumably none of them will have drinking problems or anger-management issues anymore, and they'll all get along, and be very, very happy, and also the baby that died will be there. Also very, very happy.

But again, this is already miles further than anyone delves into it. It was just "well, God will be there, and it's just amazing to be in His presence; end of story."

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