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Author Topic:   Hitch is dead
Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


(1)
Message 1 of 560 (644196)
12-16-2011 3:52 AM


Damn, damn, damn.
Christopher Hitchens 1949 - 2011
---------------------------------------------
Edited by Tangle, : image added
Edited by Tangle, : Caption added
Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien. I am Mancunian. I am Brum. I am London.I am Finland. Soy Barcelona
"Life, don't talk to me about life" - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

Replies to this message:
 Message 2 by Trixie, posted 12-16-2011 5:54 AM Tangle has replied
 Message 8 by cavediver, posted 12-16-2011 8:26 AM Tangle has not replied
 Message 52 by Straggler, posted 12-17-2011 8:46 AM Tangle has not replied
 Message 71 by kbertsche, posted 12-17-2011 12:56 PM Tangle has not replied
 Message 191 by Phat, posted 04-13-2019 2:59 AM Tangle has not replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


Message 5 of 560 (644210)
12-16-2011 7:05 AM
Reply to: Message 2 by Trixie
12-16-2011 5:54 AM


Trixie writes:
Do you mean Hitchy from the forum?? Please say no.
My pleasure; no.
see: Christopher Hitchens dies at 62 after suffering cancer - BBC News

Life, don't talk to me about life.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 2 by Trixie, posted 12-16-2011 5:54 AM Trixie has not replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


(3)
Message 6 of 560 (644211)
12-16-2011 7:08 AM
Reply to: Message 3 by Portillo
12-16-2011 6:04 AM


Portillo writes:
Christopher Hitchens. What a rude awakening it is when he realises that there is an afterlife after all.
He'd be fine with it; he'd think it was a huge joke - he'd pinch Mother Teresa's arse, buy St Peter a scotch and laugh for all eternity.

Life, don't talk to me about life.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 3 by Portillo, posted 12-16-2011 6:04 AM Portillo has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 187 by Phat, posted 12-15-2017 2:22 AM Tangle has replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


(1)
Message 18 of 560 (644249)
12-16-2011 12:29 PM


Devil's Advocate, Pro Bono
My favourite quote is this one when asked to give witness against Mother Teresa at her beatification in the Vatican:
The present pope, in his feverish campaign to make as many saints as possible, has abolished the traditional office of "Devil's Advocate," so I drew the job of representing the Evil One, as it were, pro bono. Fine by meI don't believe in Satan either.
Page not found | Free Inquiry

Life, don't talk to me about life.

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


Message 49 of 560 (644309)
12-17-2011 4:11 AM
Reply to: Message 38 by Dawn Bertot
12-16-2011 11:37 PM


Re: Afterlife Surprises
Dawn Bertot writes:
He was a filthy piece of garbage and a piece of dung. Recieve that which you have reaped Mr Hitchens
Nice. How terribly Christian of you. Jesus will be impressed.

Life, don't talk to me about life.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 38 by Dawn Bertot, posted 12-16-2011 11:37 PM Dawn Bertot has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 51 by Dawn Bertot, posted 12-17-2011 8:38 AM Tangle has replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


(8)
Message 54 of 560 (644347)
12-17-2011 8:59 AM
Reply to: Message 51 by Dawn Bertot
12-17-2011 8:38 AM


You Madam, are not a Christian.
Dawn Bertot writes:
I repeat he was a piece of Garbage and a piece of dung
The problem with pig-ignorant, hate-filled and downright unpleasant 'Christians' like you is that you don't even live by the book that you say you revere so much. If you did, I'd at least respect your delusions; as it is, you're just a nasty piece of work and a disgrace to Christianity.
Ephesians 4:31-32
English Standard Version (ESV)
31 Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

Life, don't talk to me about life.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 51 by Dawn Bertot, posted 12-17-2011 8:38 AM Dawn Bertot has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 56 by Dawn Bertot, posted 12-17-2011 9:03 AM Tangle has replied
 Message 61 by Dawn Bertot, posted 12-17-2011 9:28 AM Tangle has not replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


Message 59 of 560 (644354)
12-17-2011 9:15 AM
Reply to: Message 56 by Dawn Bertot
12-17-2011 9:03 AM


Re: You Madam, are not a Christian.
Dawn Berlot writes:
Look at your own words and terminology then start throwing stones
Perhaps you could go and find something I have actually said before you accuse me of saying it?
However, whatever is said and by whoever, how does that excuse you of behaving so appallingly?
Walk the talk or stop pretending to be a Christian.

Life, don't talk to me about life.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 56 by Dawn Bertot, posted 12-17-2011 9:03 AM Dawn Bertot has not replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


Message 65 of 560 (644365)
12-17-2011 9:57 AM
Reply to: Message 60 by Granny Magda
12-17-2011 9:27 AM


Re: Speaking Ill of the Dead
Granny Magda writes:
If people vilified Hitchens during his life I see no particular reason why they should cease to do so upon his death, provided that they are sincere.
If, on the other hand, they are merely trolling, well that is both pathetic and despicable. Such people reveal themselves in their own words. Best ignore them.
Agreed. i'm just occasionally taken aback by the malignancy of some who would call themselves Christians. It's good to be reminded of it from time to time.
"Ye shall know them by their fruits"

Life, don't talk to me about life.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 60 by Granny Magda, posted 12-17-2011 9:27 AM Granny Magda has seen this message but not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 66 by hooah212002, posted 12-17-2011 10:05 AM Tangle has not replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


(1)
Message 115 of 560 (644774)
12-20-2011 3:01 PM
Reply to: Message 113 by Artemis Entreri
12-20-2011 2:20 PM


Artemis writes:
I am glad he is dead, fuck him.
Another beautiful Christian, graceously bowing a respectful head. Jesus would be proud of you. You're a credit to your religion.
Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Life, don't talk to me about life.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 113 by Artemis Entreri, posted 12-20-2011 2:20 PM Artemis Entreri has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 132 by Artemis Entreri, posted 12-21-2011 10:49 AM Tangle has not replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


(2)
Message 129 of 560 (644836)
12-21-2011 4:02 AM
Reply to: Message 124 by Chuck77
12-20-2011 8:09 PM


Chuck77 writes:
A Christian gives his perspective on a person who dies and it's wrong.
Dawn Bertot writes:
He was a filthy piece of garbage and a piece of dung. Recieve that which you have reaped Mr Hitchens
speaking of puerile dickheads, did you hear that Hitch died?
Portilo writes:
So like a cockroach, rat, bacteria or pondscum, Hitch did his job.
Artemis writes:
I am glad he is dead, fuck him.
LOL the rationale of a dick sucking bitch like yourself. too funny. eat shit and die.
forever young writes
I am fucking tired of people being unwilling to discuss ideas without screaming about fucking evidence. You can all go to hell. I am done here. Fuck each and everyone of you save the creationists.
No I am not drinking. I hate each and everyone of you assholes and I am not sparing any words about it. Every fucking one of you is a worthless piece of garbage.
Faith write:
WHAT KIND OF GARBAGE IS THAT?/ OF COURSE NOT YOU IDIOT. WHO EXPECTS SOMEONE TO KNOW EVERYTHING WHO IS JUST TRYING TO ESTABLISH ONE POINT? YOU PEOPLE ARE LIARS AND CHEATS AND IIDIOTS.
Do you really think that these are Christian perspectives. I mean really?
Edited by Tangle, : added later abuse for completeness
Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.
Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.
Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.
Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android

This message is a reply to:
 Message 124 by Chuck77, posted 12-20-2011 8:09 PM Chuck77 has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 130 by Portillo, posted 12-21-2011 4:09 AM Tangle has replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


(2)
Message 131 of 560 (644842)
12-21-2011 4:46 AM
Reply to: Message 130 by Portillo
12-21-2011 4:09 AM


Portillo writes:
Whats wrong with being compared to a cockroach?
Don't worry your abusive little head about it - being wrong is obviously not something you care about.
(I did think that Christians cared a bit more about actually behaving like Christians, but the evidence is inescapable.)

Life, don't talk to me about life.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 130 by Portillo, posted 12-21-2011 4:09 AM Portillo has not replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


(2)
Message 154 of 560 (645461)
12-27-2011 4:10 AM
Reply to: Message 149 by Dawn Bertot
12-27-2011 1:07 AM


Re: Afterlife Surprises
Dawn Bertot writes:
Since the unbeliever has no absolute standard of what moral is or is not and involves himself in a logical contradiction by claiming anything as immoral, as he follows a survival of the fittest standard, the believer can perform not only one thing the unbeliver cannot, but the only thing that matters, objectivity in a moral standard without fear of blatant contradiction
This is an incomprehensible mess, but I think you're trying to make two common errors.
1. That believers (in Christianity) have knowledge of something that they call an absolute morality.
2. That atheists don't have this 'standard' because they only follow the rules of personal survival.
Is this what you're trying to say?
Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Life, don't talk to me about life.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 149 by Dawn Bertot, posted 12-27-2011 1:07 AM Dawn Bertot has not replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


Message 185 of 560 (647191)
01-08-2012 12:00 PM


Does science make belief in god obsolete?
From eSkeptics
Does science make belief in god obsolete?
That was the Templeton Foundation's Big Question in the third of a series of questions posed to leading scientist and scholars, among them: Steven Pinker, Victor Stenger, Mary Midgley, William D. Phillips, Christoph Cardinal Schnborn and Michael Shermer. In this week's eSkeptic, we present Christopher Hitchens' answer (edited by Michael Shermer). Christopher Hitchens is the author of God Is Not Great.
No, But it Should
by Christopher Hitchens
Until about 1832, when it first seems to have become established as a noun and a concept, the term “scientist” had no really independent meaning. “Science” meant “knowledge” in much the same way as “physic” meant medicine, and those who conducted experiments or organized field expeditions or managed laboratories were known as “natural philosophers.” To these gentlemen (for they were mainly gentlemen) the belief in a divine presence or inspiration was often merely assumed to be a part of the natural order, in rather the same way as it was assumed”or actually insisted upon”that a teacher at Cambridge University swear an oath to be an ordained Christian minister. For Sir Isaac Newton”an enthusiastic alchemist, a despiser of the doctrine of the Trinity, and a fanatical anti-Papist”the main clues to the cosmos were to be found in Scripture. Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen, was a devout Unitarian as well as a believer in the phlogiston theory. Alfred Russel Wallace, to whom we owe much of what we know about evolution and natural selection, delighted in nothing more than a session of ectoplasmic or spiritual communion with the departed.
And thus it could be argued”though if I were a believer in god I would not myself attempt to argue it”that a commitment to science by no means contradicts a belief in the supernatural. The best known statement of this opinion in our own time comes from the late Stephen Jay Gould, who tactfully proposed that the worlds of science and religion commanded “non-overlapping magisteria.” How true is this on a second look, or even on a first glance? Would we have adopted monotheism in the first place if we had known:
1) That our species is at most 200,000 years old, and very nearly joined the 98.9 percent of all other species on our planet by becoming extinct, in Africa, 60,000 years ago, when our numbers seemingly fell below 2,000 before we embarked on our true “exodus” from the savannah?
2) That the universe, originally discovered by Edwin Hubble to be expanding away from itself in a flash of red light, is now known to be expanding away from itself even more rapidly, so that soon even the evidence of the original “big bang” will be unobservable?
3) That the Andromeda galaxy is on a direct collision course with our own, the ominous but beautiful premonition of which can already be seen with a naked eye in the night sky?
These are very recent examples, post-Darwinian and post-Einsteinian, and they make pathetic nonsense of any idea that our presence on this planet, let alone in this of so many billion galaxies, is part of a plan. Which design, or designer, made so sure that absolutely nothing (see above) will come out of our fragile current “something”? What plan, or planner, determined that millions of humans would die without even a grave marker, for our first 200,000 years of struggling and desperate existence, and that there would only then at last be a “revelation” to save us, about 3,000 years ago, but disclosed only to gaping peasants in remote and violent and illiterate areas of the Middle East?
To say that there is little “scientific” evidence for the last proposition is to invite a laugh. There is no evidence for it, period. And if by some strenuous and improbable revelation there was to be any evidence, it would only argue that the creator or designer of all things was either (a) very laborious, roundabout, tinkering, and incompetent and/or (b) extremely capricious and callous, and even cruel. It will not do to say, in reply to this, that the lord moves in mysterious ways. Those who dare to claim to be his understudies and votaries and interpreters must either accept the cruelty and the chaos or disown it: they cannot pick and choose between the warmly benign and the frigidly indifferent. Nor can the religious claim to be in possession of secret sources of information that are denied to the rest of us. That claim was, once, the prerogative of the Pope and the witch doctor, but now it’s gone. This is as much as to say that reason and logic reject god, which (without being conclusive) would be a fairly close approach to a scientific rebuttal. It would also be quite near to saying something that lies just outside the scope of this essay, which is that morality shudders at the idea of god, as well.
Religion, remember, is theism not deism. Faith cannot rest itself on the argument that there might or might not be a prime mover. Faith must believe in answered prayers, divinely ordained morality, heavenly warrant for circumcision, the occurrence of miracles or what you will. Physics and chemistry and biology and paleontology and archeology have, at a minimum, given us explanations for what used to be mysterious, and furnished us with hypotheses that are at least as good as, or very much better than, the ones offered by any believers in other and inexplicable dimensions.
Does this mean that the inexplicable or superstitious has become “obsolete”? I myself would wish to say no, if only because I believe that the human capacity for wonder neither will nor should be destroyed or superseded. But the original problem with religion is that it is our first, and our worst, attempt at explanation. It is how we came up with answers before we had any evidence. It belongs to the terrified childhood of our species, before we knew about germs or could account for earthquakes. It belongs to our childhood, too, in the less charming sense of demanding a tyrannical authority: a protective parent who demands compulsory love even as he exacts a tithe of fear. This unalterable and eternal despot is the origin of totalitarianism, and represents the first cringing human attempt to refer all difficult questions to the smoking and forbidding altar of a Big Brother. This of course is why one desires that science and humanism would make faith obsolete, even as one sadly realizes that as long as we remain insecure primates we shall remain very fearful of breaking the chain.
Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.
Edited by Admin, : Fix special character issue, add italics on certain words.

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien. I am Mancunian. I am Brum. I am London.I am Finland. Soy Barcelona
"Life, don't talk to me about life" - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


(1)
Message 188 of 560 (825458)
12-15-2017 3:15 AM
Reply to: Message 187 by Phat
12-15-2017 2:22 AM


Re: Peter Hitchens
I watched this video many years ago and accidentally came across it this week.
I thought it may be helpful to you Phat as it shows what atheists think - albeit at a level almost none of us can match. I suspect that you spend an awful lot of time listening to religious people talk and reading what they write but maybe not much on the other side of the divide.
It's Hitch, Dawkins, Dennet and Harris.
Beware - it's 2 hours long.
Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien. I am Mancunian. I am Brum. I am London.I am Finland. Soy Barcelona
"Life, don't talk to me about life" - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 187 by Phat, posted 12-15-2017 2:22 AM Phat has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 189 by Phat, posted 12-15-2017 5:50 AM Tangle has not replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


Message 231 of 560 (875128)
04-15-2020 2:30 AM
Reply to: Message 230 by GDR
04-14-2020 8:25 PM


GDR writes:
I listened to a number of debates involving Hitchens and in some cases I thought he sounded more Christ like than the Christians he was debating.
That's because being Christlike is about being a decent human being - which is a very good thing that we all recognise. - do as you would be done by and all that.
While being a Christian is often the opposite and is at best is a waste of people's lives and resources.
btw, as usual it was impossible to avoid all the religious humbug over the Easter break but one interesting comment by an economist made my day; the global wealth invested by religions is $17 trillion - about 20% of all invested wealth. So much for the widow's mite and giving up all to follow Christ.

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien. I am Mancunian. I am Brum. I am London.I am Finland. Soy Barcelona
"Life, don't talk to me about life" - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 230 by GDR, posted 04-14-2020 8:25 PM GDR has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 232 by GDR, posted 04-15-2020 10:19 AM Tangle has replied

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