From your reply you do not actually understand anything that I wrote.
Have another go at reading my post.
Hey mallethead, there was nothing in your post to me, to comprehend. it was simply a contradictory statement implying that you fellas might have the same respect for a dying theologian. Yesh right, that is going to happen
So what was the overwhelming message i missed? I mean come on, the guy was a journalist, he wasnt even a trained philosopher. His arguments were 101 stuff. They put me to sleep
The other half is composed of equal portions of red and blue lasers:
I don't know nothin' 'bout Hitch, the man. All I've heard of is the #GodIsNotGreat stuff and a coupla quotes here and there.
People here have said they disagree with some of what he said. What are some of the more controversial positions he's taken? I think someone mentioned politics. I don't care about the atheism stuff, what else did he do?
What are some of the more controversial positions he's taken?
For starters: his position on the Iraq war and seemingly implicit support of GWB. His paycheck came from journalism, but his rise to fame was his atheism. So, in that respect, a lot of people see him as more of a champion for the freethought/atheist movement.
I don't care about the atheism stuff
Then you don't really care about Hitch. His polemic debates with religious types, his vocal opinions against all things religious, are what made Hitch, Hitch. You will notice that he wasn't "center stage" until the release of God is not Great. It wasn't until then that any of the other main players even heard of or met him (Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Dawkins).
What I have also noticed is that the dissenting views of him never really came out until he died. It would appear that no one had the cojones to call him out on his controversial opinions. Yes, people mentioned it, but not in the magnitude that people are talking about it now.
Now, I could be wrong because I enjoyed watching/listening to Hitch debate religious figures, not for his political views because that his what I saw him as: a champion for the "New Atheists", if you will.
People here have said they disagree with some of what he said. What are some of the more controversial positions he's taken? I think someone mentioned politics. I don't care about the atheism stuff, what else did he do?
He had quite a number controversial opinions around violent solutions. He once said we were bombing Afghanistan out of the stone age. That we should hate our enemies; kill our enemies, and voiced some general support for lethal violence against Islamists as the only rational response. I remember him once saying something like 'Want to be a martyr? Allow me to help with that.'
I can't find any of the specifics now, but that kind of rhetoric is what some people feel a little uncomfortable endorsing.
quote:Hitchens condemns Teresa for having used contributions to open convents in 150 countries rather than establishing the teaching hospital toward which her donors expected her to apply their gifts. He claims that Teresa was no "friend to the poor," and that she opposed structural measures to end poverty, particularly those that would raise the status of women. He argues she was a tool by which the Catholic Church furthered its political and theological aims, and the cult of personality that she developed was used by politicians, dictators and bankers to gain credibility and assuage guilt, citing Hillary Rodham Clinton, Charles Keating and Michèle Bennett as examples.
I mean C'mon, MOTHER TERESA!?!.
the guy was a troll. I am glad he is dead, fuck him.
You should read more on Mother Theresa if you really think she is such a saint.
"wiki writes:
Chatterjee writes that while she was alive Mother Teresa and her official biographers refused to collaborate with his own investigations and that she failed to defend herself against critical coverage in the Western press. He gives as examples a report in The Guardian in Britain whose "stringent (and quite detailed) attack on conditions in her orphanages ... [include] charges of gross neglect and physical and emotional abuse",[77] and another documentary Mother Teresa: Time for Change? broadcast in several European countries.[58]
The German magazine Stern published a critical article on the first anniversary of Mother Teresa's death. This concerned allegations regarding financial matters and the spending of donations. The medical press has also published criticism of her, arising from very different outlooks and priorities on patients' needs.[68] Other critics include Tariq Ali of the New Left Review and the Irish investigative journalist Donal MacIntyre.[76]
She has also been criticized for her view on suffering. She felt that suffering would bring people closer to Jesus.[78] Sanal Edamaruku, President of Rationalist International, criticised the failure to give painkillers, writing that in her Homes for the Dying, one could "hear the screams of people having maggots tweezered from their open wounds without pain relief. On principle, strong painkillers are even in hard cases not given. According to Mother Teresa's philosophy, it is 'the most beautiful gift for a person that he can participate in the sufferings of Christ'."[79]
The quality of care offered to terminally ill patients in the Homes for the Dying has been criticised in the medical press. The Lancet and the British Medical Journal reported the reuse of hypodermic needles, poor living conditions, including the use of cold baths for all patients, and an approach to illness and suffering that precluded the use of many elements of modern medical care, such as systematic diagnosis.[68] Dr. Robin Fox, editor of The Lancet, described the medical care as "haphazard", as volunteers without medical knowledge had to take decisions about patient care, because of the lack of doctors. He observed that her order did not distinguish between curable and incurable patients, so that people who could otherwise survive would be at risk of dying from infections and lack of treatment. Dr. Fox makes it a point to contrast hospice, on the one hand, with what he calls "Mother Teresa's Care for the Dying" on the other hand; noting that, while hospice emphasizes minimizing suffering with professional medical care and attention to expressed needs and wishes of the patient, her approach does not.[80]
Colette Livermore, a former Missionary of Charity, describes her reasons for leaving the order in her book Hope Endures: Leaving Mother Teresa, Losing Faith, and Searching for Meaning. Livermore found what she called Mother Teresa's "theology of suffering" to be flawed, despite being a good and courageous person. Though Mother Teresa instructed her followers on the importance of spreading the Gospel through actions rather than theological lessons, Livermore could not reconcile this with some of the practices of the organization. Examples she gives include unnecessarily refusing to help the needy when they approached the nuns at the wrong time according to the prescribed schedule, discouraging nuns from seeking medical training to deal with the illnesses they encountered (with the justification that God empowers the weak and ignorant), and imposition of "unjust" punishments, such as being transferred away from friends. Livermore says that the Missionaries of Charity "infantilized" its nuns by prohibiting the reading of secular books and newspapers, and emphasizing obedience over independent thinking and problem-solving.[81]
Christopher Hitchens and the German magazine Stern have said Mother Teresa did not focus donated money on alleviating poverty or improving the conditions of her hospices, but on opening new convents and increasing missionary work.[82] Mother Teresa accepted donations from the autocratic and corrupt Duvalier family in Haiti and openly praised them. She also accepted 1.4 million dollars from Charles Keating, involved in the fraud and corruption scheme known as the Keating Five scandal and supported him before and after his arrest. The Deputy District Attorney for Los Angeles, Paul Turley, wrote to Mother Teresa asking her to return the donated money to the people Keating had stolen from, one of whom was "a poor carpenter". The donated money was not accounted for, and Turley did not receive a reply.[83]
Arent you always on about how you dont trust the media etc? Apparently you believe the lie that mother theresa was a good person. She wasent.
the guy was a troll. I am glad he is dead, fuck him.
Ezekiel 18:23 Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord GOD: and not that he should return from his ways, and live?
Most definitely Mother Theresa. I know you see her through your catholic rose colored glasses, but perhaps before launching into a tirade, you would do well to see what he actually wrote and said about her. Ah well, that would require honesty, integrity and fortitude on your behalf and I would think myself a fool to expect that from you.
the guy was a troll
Said the pot to the kettle in reference to it's color; black, as it were.
Yeah, shocking. We know, of course, that all criticisms of her are invalid 'cos she was so wonderful. And we know she was so wonderful 'cos there are no valid criticisms of her.
This piece from Gawker sums up Hitchens' political views quite well:
quote:The outpouring of grief, goodwill, and teary encomia that has attended news of Christopher Hitchens' passing would—if he was anything like the persona he presented in print—have turned his stomach. He loathed sentiment, welcomed combat, and delighted in inflicting hard truths. In that spirit, it must not be forgotten in mourning him that he got the single most consequential decision in his life horrifically, petulantly wrong.
In its obituary, the New York Times quoted Hitchens' friend Ian Buruma, who told the New Yorker in 2006 that Hitchens was "always looking for the defining moment — as it were, our Spanish Civil War, where you put yourself on the right side, and stand up to the enemy." He shared that impulse with George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz, and they found their moment in the stupid decision to invade Iraq. For Hitchens, it was the opening maneuver in a grand, imagined clash of western civilization against the Islamofascist hordes.
It was something else for 113,000 civilians who died in the chaos unleashed. The great tragedy of Hitchens' life was that, toward its end, he aligned himself so stridently with the very fools, cowards, and charlatans who most desperately invited exposure by his prodigious skills as butcher. How can someone who devoted so much of his life to as noble a cause as destroying the reputation of Henry Kissinger blithely stand shoulder to shoulder with Rumsfeld?
People make mistakes. What's horrible about Hitchens' ardor for the invasion of Iraq is that he clung to it long after it became clear that a grotesque error had been made. In September 2005, he defended the debacle in Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard in terms that are simply breathtaking in their lack of concern for the victims of his Mesopotamian adventure. It was headlined "A War to Be Proud Of."
Torture and murder by feckless American troops at Abu Ghraib? "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad," he wrote. How clever! Anyone objecting to the occupation of Iraq on the grounds that torturing and murdering people is wrong and illegal is now obligated to defend the "abattoir" that existed prior to our arrival.
Anyone complaining that the chief rationale for the invasion—the indisputable presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—turned out to have been a fantasy is being "childish," he wrote. "'You said there were WMDs in Iraq and that Saddam had friends in al Qaeda. . . . Blah, blah, pants on fire.' I have had many opportunities to tire of this mantra." How tiresome you are with your boring insistence that wars be justified! Hitchens' answer to that whine is a trivial list of ominous fragments, conspiratorially arrayed: "Abdul Rahman Yasin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center attack in 1993, subsequently sought and found refuge in Baghdad." If you don't recognize the immediate global danger that the presence in Iraq of a man who built a bomb that killed six people ten years ago presents, you are a child.
If you dispute the Bush Administration line that "terror" must be fought in Iraq lest it be fought on our soil, Hitchens alleged, you are guilty of dispensing "sob-sister tripe pumped out by the Cindy Sheehan circus and its surrogates." Sheehan's son had been dead scarcely a year at the time Hitchens wrote this.
But surely Christopher, you recognize that the war has been badly bungled even if all your hearts were in the right place, right? "We need not argue about the failures and the mistakes and even the crimes, because these in some ways argue themselves." For Christopher Hitchens to identify a subject about which no argument is required is a rare thing indeed. Abu Ghraib—why argue? The $9 billion in cash that simply disappeared—what's to argue? Two months after the Hitchens wrote those words, U.S. Marines massacred 24 men, women, and children in Haditha. No need to argue.
"If the great effort to remake Iraq as a demilitarized federal and secular democracy should fail or be defeated," he closed, "I shall lose sleep for the rest of my life in reproaching myself for doing too little. But at least I shall have the comfort of not having offered, so far as I can recall, any word or deed that contributed to a defeat." The rest of Hitchens' life turned out to be unjustly circumscribed. But his demilitarized federal and secular democracy is a mirage. More likely a future Iranian client state and Shi'ite stronghold awaits. Those words would not wear well on his headstone.
Hitchens' style—ironically, given his hatred for tyranny and love of free expression—brooked no dissent. There was little room for good-faith disagreement or loyal opposition. His enemies were not just wrong, they were stupid or mean or small-minded or liars or cheats or children or cowards. It was thrilling and gratifying to see that articulate viciousness deployed against the Clinton cartel, or Mother Teresa, or Henry Kissinger—against power and pretense. To see it deployed in favor of war, on behalf of a dullard and scion, against the hysterical mother of a dead son was nauseating.
In the months and years since Hitchens publicly proclaimed his pride in the invasion of Iraq for Murdoch's ideological crib-sheet, 78,708 Iraqi civilians and 2,548 U.S. troops have been killed. He did immense good in his life, and unforgivable harm.
In his earlier years he apparently spoke out against Vietnam. On Iraq, I disagreed with him, vehemently.
I respected the man for having the courage to actually undergo waterboarding and being willing to change his mind in the face of evidence. I applaud his harsh criticism of religion and Mother Theresa. I enjoyed "God is Not Great."
I prefer to remember him for those things, because if his legacy was his tireless support for the Iraqi debacle and his zealous fervor in opposing "Islamofascism" (an idiotic term that makes no sense, Al Qaeda et al are not in any way fascist), then he was an idiot and a monster who approved of the murder of over 70,000 Iraqi civilians and the deaths of over 2,000 American troops for, essentially, no reason at all.
“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.” - Francis Bacon
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
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