REPOST: "The moral and aesthetic nightmare of Christmas," by the late, great Christopher Hitchens.

I've chosen to allow NA Confidential to run its course, and so to close out the dreadful pandemic year of 2020, I'll be making a daily post from the archives. The following appeared on December 14, 2014. 

---

How I miss Christopher Hitchens.

Introductory excerpts from Hitchens' timeless essay are reprinted below, so be sure to follow the link to read the whole, glorious piece, first noted here at NAC in 2008. I reread this every year on or before Christmas Eve. In 2013, there was added gravity, which also deserves another look.

In 2013, as Christmas approached, I'd just finished reading Ray Mouton's novel, In God's House. In 1984, Ray was the lawyer chosen by the state of Louisiana's Catholic Church hierarchy to defend the first priest ever to be charged in secular court with child molestation. Looking back on the perspective of the present day, we obviously know what became of all this, and that Ray's appointment with destiny was the first tiny peek inside a truly massive scandal. I wasn't expecting to be moved to such an extent by Ray's book, but I was -- and remain.

Carrying these thoughts into my annual date with Hitchens, I find the atheist's cynicism to be vastly enhanced.

'Tis the Season To Be Incredulous: The moral and aesthetic nightmare of Christmas, by Christopher Hitchens (Slate; Dec. 15, 2008)

… My own wish is more ambitious: to write an anti-Christmas column that becomes fiercer every year while remaining, in essence, the same. The core objection, which I restate every December at about this time, is that for almost a whole month, the United States—a country constitutionally based on a separation between church and state—turns itself into the cultural and commercial equivalent of a one-party state.

As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda is inescapable. You go to a train station or an airport, and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor's office or a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard. So, unless you are fortunate, are the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer. It becomes more than usually odious to switch on the radio and the television, because certain officially determined "themes" have been programmed into the system. Most objectionable of all, the fanatics force your children to observe the Dear Leader's birthday, and so (this being the especial hallmark of the totalitarian state) you cannot bar your own private door to the hectoring, incessant noise, but must have it literally brought home to you by your offspring. Time that is supposed to be devoted to education is devoted instead to the celebration of mythical events ...

ON THE AVENUES: Godlessness in defense of heathens, infidels, idolaters, atheists, non-theists, irreligious people, agnostics, skeptics, heretics and apostates.

Until someone proves me wrong, I’m operating under the assumption that I am New Albany’s most famous atheist.

Thank you; thank you very much. As absolutely nothing is my witness, this content will remain free and I’ll not be asking you for money.

I've never been shy about it.

I try to be who I am, all of the time, publicly and privately. In part, this is to offer explicit support and solidarity with those who feel they cannot openly embrace their absence of religious belief. In my case, this absence has been lifelong. Once I was in grade school, the concept of "god" stopped making sense to me.

However, being an atheist should not matter, and it does not matter -- except, of course, when it does, as yesterday when the forever culpable News and Buffoon emitted this tweet.

Nothing identifies this link as "opinion," which it most certainly is, as emitting from the prolific evangelical pen of Tom May, who is published so often at this propaganda portal that he surely must possess compromising photos of the publisher reading a book other than the bible.

This and other recent social media utterances serve to remind me that there are occasions during the course of my always eventful existence in Nawbany when otherwise inexplicable behavior on the part of others can be explained only by their disapproval of my atheistic proclivities.

I might go into greater detail, but it’s unnecessary. I'm fairly certain that opportunities have gone by the wayside owing to these instances of disapproval. But also know that no sleep has been lost over them; I'm a contrarian, and a combative and defiant sort. Of course, maybe atheism has nothing to do with it, and they merely dislike the way I roll.

A slim chance, although a chance nonetheless.

All I can do is shrug. Consider today's words to be philosophical musings, nothing more. It wouldn't be the first time that honesty raised hackles or inspired push-back.

---

Following is a letter I wrote to the underachieving Jeffersonville newspaper in 2017.

Subtle bigotry against atheists is still discrimination

Figures vary, but nine of ten Americans might believe in God. At least that’s what they say when asked. Many of these believers are Christian.

If another recent study is accurate, 69% of view a belief in God as necessary to be a genuine American.

This is highly disconcerting. Throughout history, atheists have been subject to criticism, persecution and at times overt eradication at the hands of believers of all faiths.

At the very least, atheists often experience a more subtle form of bigotry. For instance, a survey showed more than 30% of respondents preferring atheists be banned from the teaching profession.

Insecurity, intolerance and outright humbuggery always have been regrettable components of human society, and while majoritarian disapproval of atheism isn’t (yet) comparable to racism, sexism and other forms of institutionalized violence, it represents a form of discrimination characterized by ignorance, and one deserving of periodic counterpoint.

The News and Tribune sees fit to publish not one, but two Christian advocacy columns on a weekly basis. When I made my dismay known in a social media comment, I was told by a reporter that this makes perfect sense because many readers are Christians.

Interestingly, research published in the archive of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science suggests that more Americans (and newspaper readers) are atheists than may seem apparent, perhaps as many as 25 – 30%.

That’s because the stigma of atheism, as perpetuated by believers, causes many atheists to pretend they’re pious.

How very sad, indeed.

Some particularly virulent true believers don’t like heretics even when they’re properly cooked – and indeed, we unbelievers have been fire-roasted oft times throughout history. It’s mighty totalitarian in nature, this stubborn unwillingness on the part of so many “godly” people to compromise on questions that have tended to result in them directing violence against others in the name of their own unknowable deity.

Then again, I’m just one of those contrarian communistic freethinking threats to human decency … and damned proud of it.

Certainly I’m not the first person to place a tattered bookmark in my cherished copy of Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, make an espresso, and proceed to the computer to search for images of Francisco Goya’s "Los Caprichos" series of 18th-century etchings.

That’s because in Chapter 14, Hitchens specifically refers to Plate 43 of Goya’s series. It is called "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters," and shows a "man in defenseless slumber … hag-ridden by bats, owls and other haunters of the darkness."

The author’s actual point in citing this effective visual aid is to take a view contrary the etching’s originally intended symbolic properties, namely, to offer that human reason always is the subject of fear and distrust when viewed through the distorted lens of man’s religious impulse, and that human reason has been derided accordingly throughout mankind’s damaging religious experience.

Damaging? Of course. Just ask the aforementioned "heretic" who was burned for believing what science in due time came to confirm.

One aspect of my upbringing for which I’m eternally grateful was the near complete absence of religious instruction. There was an old book in the house about the lives of the saints, and it included some fairly frightening scary drawings depicting the various ways that these saints were tortured and scourged, though they were not to Goya’s level of artistic proficiency.

I recall another volume of illustrated children’s Bible stories, and of course a Bible itself, presumably awarded my parents on their wedding day, and duly ignored by my parents forever after.

Beyond these three seldom consulted sources, there was nothing else on the topic of religion forced upon me, and I was permitted to grow to maturity with the luxury of making up my own mind, absent indoctrination.

Hitchens reminds us that Blaise Pascal is famous for supporting belief in god by means of a wager, or more appropriately, a conscious effort to cover the spread: If you believe in god and god exists, you win. If you believe in god and god doesn’t exist … well, what does it matter, anyway?

Bertrand Russell is equally famous for refuting this wager by positing that if, after he died, he unexpectedly met a god of one sort or another, he would chide the "supreme being" for providing insufficient evidence of her existence.

Hitchens follows suit by stating his own version of Russell’s words.

My own reply: Imponderable Sir, I presume from some if not all of your many reputations that you might prefer honest and convinced unbelief to the hypocritical and self-interested affectation of faith or the smoking tributes of bloody altars. But I would not count on it.

I wouldn’t, either. It’s interesting to me that in some measure, Goya was right, and my own personal demons spring from my reliance on reason. But that’s encouraging, because it means that reason, properly applied, can scatter and dispel them.

There is no other choice, is there? Here is an excerpt from Hitchens as he summarizes his case.

Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to be able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard – or try to turn back – the measurable advances that we have made. Sometimes, true, it will artfully concede them. But this is to offer itself the choice between irrelevance and obstruction, impotence or outright reaction, and, given this choice, it is programmed to select the worse of the two.

We're seeing this all too clearly in pandemic times, aren't we?

---

As a postscript, let's go back to the local chain newspaper's predominately older white male cast of (in some cases decades ensconced) opinion piece authors. I have no desire to be listed among them again, primarily because I suspect the pay scale is even more abysmal than it was back in 2009 - 2011.

However, strictly as a matter of principle, it's worth repeating that there really should be a weekly column counterpoint to Bill Hanson's thinly-veiled proselytizing -- and weekly, Susan, just like Tom May's evangelism is, not "you can write a letter to the editor any time you like."

Here's my stand, as published last August.

ON THE AVENUES: Welcome to "Pagan Life," a weekly column devoted to heathens, infidels, idolaters, atheists, non-theists, irreligious people, agnostics, skeptics, heretics and apostates.

In my experience, atheists generally just want to be left alone, and prefer that religious belief remain a matter of private conscience and not a public policy lever.

It's funny how so many religions make public show of private conscience. Whatever. It's a pandemic holy-holi-day, and this atheist has penitent drinking to do.

---

Recent columns:

May 14: ON THE AVENUES: Food is my friend, but please, I'm no foodie.

May 7: ON THE AVENUES: COVID tolls for thee -- whatever, so hurry and get your ass back into this seat.

April 30: ON THE AVENUES: A week that was wooden like Pinocchio and dry as an unused water park or an unfilled glass.

April 23: ON THE AVENUES: Hemingway in a time of mercifully silent thunder.

Amid the vapid intellectual carnage inflicted by pay-to-play Gahanism, it's worth thinking about George Orwell's fundamental truthfulness.

(adapted from a 2016 post)

The embedded video above, complete with photo of George Orwell wearing a bizarrely uncharacteristic Hitler mustache, features Christopher Hitchens and George Packer (circa 2009).

George Packer and Christopher Hitchens talked about George Orwell and his work. Mr. Packer selected the pieces that appear in two recently published volumes of George Orwell’s work: Facing Unpleasant Facts and All Art Is Propaganda. Mr. Hitchens, essayist for The Atlantic Monthly, is the author of Why Orwell Matters.

Hitchens and Packer manage to stay on task for most of the program, though things start coming off the rails near the end, when Hitchens indulges in Iraq War apologetics. Overall, it's a thought-provoking hour with two erudite men.

At YouTube, there is a five-part BBC Arena series on Orwell's life. The segments are just shy of an hour, each. It's a bit dated, but invaluable for the testimony of interviewees now long dead.

Part 1 - Such, Such Were the Joys

Part 2 - Road to Wigan Pier

Part 3 Homage to Catalonia

Part 4 The Lion and the Unicorn

Part 5 Nineteen Eighty Four

Finally, here's something I wrote back in February, 2010: New York Times: "Why Orwell Endures." 

It strikes me as the stuff of wretched cosmic injustice that Orwell and Hitchens died far too young, while Franklin Graham will remain to torment us with drivel for so many years to come.

---

A collection of George Orwell’s essays proved to be the surprise reading hit of my Christmas vacation. I picked it up at the library book sale, and tossed in the carry-on bag as an afterthought. It's a good thing I did, seeing as the remainder of my magazines and books were stowed in delayed luggage.

Essay topics in the ancient paperback, which became shredded into unbound pages soon after opening, ranged from memories of shooting a rampaging elephant while posted as a policeman in Burma to researching the origins of bawdy English postcards. Orwell wrote not only of lofty topics such as his service for the Republic during the Spanish Civil War, but also described in excruciating detail his recollections of boyhood boarding school days, experiences so quintessentially English that they might be lampooned by the likes of Monty Python without we Americans never really imagining the real-life sources.

As a piece in today’s New York Times by Geoffrey Wheatcroft makes clear, Orwell may not have been right 100% of the time, but his pursuit of truth and unwavering intellectual honesty remains noteworthy by comparison to many of his ideologically compromised peers. They are qualities worth cherishing.

As a postscript, this insightful passage from Wheatcroft's 2010 NYT article. Orwell glimpsed impossibly early that a culture of consumerism falls short of supplying certain basic human needs.

Whenever perplexed Americans fret over Osama bin Laden or suicide killings, and delude themselves that material progress will cure these ills, I think of what Orwell wrote in 1940 about another charismatic monster. “Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice. . . . However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.”

Time for an encore: "The moral and aesthetic nightmare of Christmas," by the late, great Christopher Hitchens.

I miss Hitch. Last considered here in December of 2014, Hitchens' anti-Christmas masterpiece sustains me during these weeks of ideological overkill. 

---

How I miss Christopher Hitchens.

Introductory excerpts from Hitchens' timeless essay are reprinted below, so be sure to follow the link to read the whole, glorious piece, first noted here at NAC in 2008. I reread this every year on or before Christmas Eve. In 2013, there was added gravity, which also deserves another look.

In 2013, as Christmas approached, I'd just finished reading Ray Mouton's novel, In God's House. In 1984, Ray was the lawyer chosen by the state of Louisiana's Catholic Church hierarchy to defend the first priest ever to be charged in secular court with child molestation. Looking back on the perspective of the present day, we obviously know what became of all this, and that Ray's appointment with destiny was the first tiny peek inside a truly massive scandal. I wasn't expecting to be moved to such an extent by Ray's book, but I was -- and remain.

Carrying these thoughts into my annual date with Hitchens, I find the atheist's cynicism to be vastly enhanced.

'Tis the Season To Be Incredulous: The moral and aesthetic nightmare of Christmas, by Christopher Hitchens (Slate; Dec. 15, 2008)

… My own wish is more ambitious: to write an anti-Christmas column that becomes fiercer every year while remaining, in essence, the same. The core objection, which I restate every December at about this time, is that for almost a whole month, the United States—a country constitutionally based on a separation between church and state—turns itself into the cultural and commercial equivalent of a one-party state.

As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda is inescapable. You go to a train station or an airport, and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor's office or a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard. So, unless you are fortunate, are the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer. It becomes more than usually odious to switch on the radio and the television, because certain officially determined "themes" have been programmed into the system. Most objectionable of all, the fanatics force your children to observe the Dear Leader's birthday, and so (this being the especial hallmark of the totalitarian state) you cannot bar your own private door to the hectoring, incessant noise, but must have it literally brought home to you by your offspring. Time that is supposed to be devoted to education is devoted instead to the celebration of mythical events ...

"I miss Hitch."

He was the Mencken of my time, and the hero of polemicists everywhere ... except the church, and that's as it should be.

Christopher Hitchens, a Writer's Writer, by Tony Rogers (About/Journalism)

Hitchens was never one for style over substance. His prose flowed from his immense knowledge of history, politics, literature and his bete noire, religion. Indeed, when Hitchens debated clerics as he toured the country for his anti-religous polemic "God is not Great," he often evinced a greater knowledge of Christianity than the Christians themselves. Hitchens did for journalism what Czech author Milan Kundera did for fiction: He poured everything he knew into everything he wrote, and, as is the case with Kundera, I always felt I learned something when I read his work.

It's been five years ...

An Atheist and More: A Tribute to Christopher Hitchens on the 5th Anniversary of His Death, by Race Hochdorf (The Humanist)

Christopher Hitchens, atheist, died at sixty-two. But on the fifth anniversary of his death this eccentric, marvelous, courageous, kick-ass contrarian still lives on, and will continue to live on, in the hearts and minds of present and future writers and travelers all over the world. The burden falls on us to fill, as best we can, the void his passing has wrought.

 ... and with the advent of Trump, I'll be missing him even more.

Missing Hitch, by Sam Harris

It has been five years, my friend.

Five short years since you taught us how to die with wisdom and wit. And five long ones, wherein the world taught us how deeply we would miss you.

Syria. Safe spaces. President Trump.

What would you have made of these horrors?

More times than I can count, strangers have come forward to say, “I miss Hitch.” Their words are always uttered in protest over some new crime against reason or good taste. They are spoken after a bully passes by, smirking and unchallenged, whether on the Left or the Right. They have become a mantra of sorts, intoned without any hope of effect, in the face of dangerous banalities or lies. Often, I hear in them a note of personal reproach. Sometimes it’s intended.

You are not doing your part.

You don’t speak or write clearly enough.

You are wrong and do not know it—and it matters.

There has been so much to say, and no one to say it in your place.

I, too, miss Hitch.

"The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud."

It isn't exactly a new story, is it?

Mommie Dearest, by Christopher Hitchens (Slate)

The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.

I think it was Macaulay who said that the Roman Catholic Church deserved great credit for, and owed its longevity to, its ability to handle and contain fanaticism. This rather oblique compliment belongs to a more serious age. What is so striking about the "beatification" of the woman who styled herself "Mother" Teresa is the abject surrender, on the part of the church, to the forces of showbiz, superstition, and populism.

At times, especially in instances of superstition, piling on is fully justified. A handful of voices, calling out a monumental religious edifice? I like (and try to live) those odds.

A Critic’s Lonely Quest: Revealing the Whole Truth About Mother Teresa, by Kai Schultz (New York Times)

Taking on a global icon of peace, faith and charity is not a task for everyone, or, really, hardly anyone at all. But that is what Dr. Aroup Chatterjee has spent a good part of his life doing as one of the most vocal critics of Mother Teresa.

Dr. Chatterjee, a 58-year-old physician, acknowledged that it was a mostly solitary pursuit. “I’m the lone Indian,” he said in an interview recently. “I had to devote so much time to her. I would have paid to do that. Well, I did pay to do that.”

His task is about to become that much tougher, of course, when Mother Teresa is declared a saint next month.

Debunking Pascal's Wager, which Christopher Hitchens aptly described as "hucksterism."

A variant of Pascal's Wager has been circulating (again) on social media.

You don't believe in God? Fine. Why is it so important for many of you to mock those of us that do? If we're wrong, what have we lost when we die? Nothing! How does our believing in Jesus bring you any harm? You think it makes me stupid? Gullible? Fine. How does that affect you? If you're wrong your consequence is far worse. I would rather live my life believing in God and serving Him, and find out I was right, than not believe in Him and not serve Him, and find out I was wrong. Then it's to late.

It's a bit more complicated that than, but not much. Pascal's Wager holds that one might as well believe in God, just in case God exists, rather than risk eternal damnation if She doesn't.

Pascal's Wager is an argument in apologetic philosophy devised by the seventeenth-century French philosopher, mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal (1623–62). It posits that humans all bet with their lives either that God exists or that he does not. Pascal argues that a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas they stand to receive infinite gains (as represented by eternity in Heaven) and avoid infinite losses (eternity in Hell).

A few days after I saw the Fb passage, I took my mother to her dentist in Georgetown, where I grew up. The Southern Baptist church in the middle of town has an electronic message board, and it was transmitting a two-part admonition, paraphrased: Those who deny Jesus Christ are rebelling against God.

Why must I mock those of you who believe? I typically don't, although I also don't take kindly to being threatened, because as a rebel against God, am I not marked for some variety of physical punishment, perhaps by an angry mob of believers?

I might turn this notion of presumed mockery on its ear, and say "Why is it so important for so many believers to impose their belief system on me," as when Governor Pence describes himself as a Christian first, conservative second and Republican third?

I can't recall any point in my life where theism made sense, but I've no interest in mocking the devout so long as they stay off my porch, metaphorically.

In an interview roughly a year before his death, Christopher Hitchens briefly dispenses with Pascal's Wager. It's at the 22.13 mark. The entire interview is worth watching.

However, this blogger does an even more thorough job of it.

The Fatal Flaws of Pascal’s Wager, by Diplodocus G (Average Atheist)

... The point, and I think Christopher Hitchens was on to something when he called it hucksterism, is that Pascal’s Wager isn’t an honest question. It’s a trick. It’s trying to goad the non-believer into staying quiet about religion and just go along with the Christian majority. It’s saying, “Hey, you don’t believe, but wouldn’t you rather get along with all of us who do? Yes? So why not just make the professions, perform the sacraments, and come join us in church? It’s easy; just tell yourself you believe every night before you go to bed. Who knows, maybe one day you’ll wake up and it’ll be true! I mean, think about it: What if you’re wrong about Jesus?” Well, what if you’re wrong about Muhammad? Or Mahavira? Or Sheva? Or Ganesh? Or Zeus? Or Odin? Think about it.

"When they recite falsehoods over the corpses of Paine, Darwin and now Hitchens they move from the extremely seedy to the outright creepy: from vultures to vampires."

I've never been one to refrain from piling on when it's for a noble cause.

"To claim (Christopher) Hitchens posthumously for evangelical Christianity is to defame a man who was a champion of the Enlightenment."

Or, better stated, a morale boost for my Sunday morning.

Deathbed conversion? Never. Christopher Hitchens was defiant to the last, by Nick Cohen (The Guardian)

 ... One of the charges against Christopher Hitchens that has stuck is that he was a member a new breed of “militant” atheists that besmirched the genteel world of modern western culture. Hardly anyone who threw around the term worried about the moral equivalence they were drawing between men and women, who used only the power of language, and a wave of genuinely militant religion that crushed lives, sexually enslaved women and made medieval prejudices modern. Nor did they reflect that “faith-based” political action, from the Rushdie affair via 9/11 to Islamic State, placed a moral duty on atheists to adopt a more robust mode of argument.

I am delighted to say that Taunton’s sole achievement is to show us that, in death, Hitchens provided a further reason for militant rejection of religion: its creepiness.

"To claim (Christopher) Hitchens posthumously for evangelical Christianity is to defame a man who was a champion of the Enlightenment."

One is tempted to read no further than "Alabamian evangelist."

Christopher Hitchens and the Christian conversion that wasn’t, by Matthew d'Ancona (The Guardian)

 ... The religious knew that it was worth claiming the spiritual scalps of the founding father of evolution theory and of Italy’s pre-eminent Marxist. In our own era, a resourceful Alabamian evangelist is exploiting his friendship with Hitchens, who died in 2011, to allege that the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything was, in fact, on a secret spiritual journey and halfway to embracing Jesus ...

 ... There is so much wrong with this book that one hardly knows where to start. But its fundamental error concerns the nature of intellectual inquiry itself. For Taunton, there is only one such pursuit, and it is unidirectional: if you are interested in morality, you are, axiomatically, interested in religion – which, for a southern evangelical, means the gospels. When Hitchens observes that a child and a piglet are morally different, Taunton says that “this was unambiguous theism, as he well knew”.

Of course, Hitchens knew no such thing. For him, as for any atheist, morality did not need the framework of religion. Philosophy did not depend upon the supernatural, and ethics did not require a godhead to be worth discussing – a discussion that can be traced back at least as far as Socrates in Plato’s Euthyphro.

Amid the local intellectual carnage, it's worth thinking about George Orwell's fundamental truthfulness.

The embedded video, complete with photo of George Orwell wearing a bizarre Hitler mustache, features Christopher Hitchens and George Packer, circa 2009.

George Packer and Christopher Hitchens talked about George Orwell and his work. Mr. Packer selected the pieces that appear in two recently published volumes of George Orwell’s work: Facing Unpleasant Facts and All Art Is Propaganda. Mr. Hitchens, essayist for The Atlantic Monthly, is the author of Why Orwell Matters.

Hitchens and Packer manage to stay on task for most of the program, though things start coming off the rails near the end, when Hitchens indulges in Iraq War apologetics. Overall, it's a thought-provoking hour with two erudite men.

At YouTube, there is a five-part BBC Arena series on Orwell's life. The segments are just shy of an hour, each. It's a bit dated, but invaluable for the testimony of interviewees now long dead.

Part 1 - Such, Such Were the Joys

Part 2 - Road to Wigan Pier

Part 3 Homage to Catalonia

Part 4 The Lion and the Unicorn

Part 5 Nineteen Eighty Four

Finally, here's something I wrote back in February, 2010: New York Times: "Why Orwell Endures." 

It strikes me as the stuff of wretched cosmic injustice that while Orwell and Hitchens died far too young, Sarah Palin remains a recurring part of our lives.

Thanks, Donald.

---

A collection of George Orwell’s essays proved to be the surprise reading hit of my Christmas vacation. I picked it up at the library book sale, and tossed in the carry-on bag as an afterthought. It's a good thing I did, seeing as the remainder of my magazines and books were stowed in delayed luggage.

Essay topics in the ancient paperback, which became shredded into unbound pages soon after opening, ranged from memories of shooting a rampaging elephant while posted as a policeman in Burma to researching the origins of bawdy English postcards. Orwell wrote not only of lofty topics such as his service for the Republic during the Spanish Civil War, but also described in excruciating detail his recollections of boyhood boarding school days, experiences so quintessentially English that they might be lampooned by the likes of Monty Python without we Americans never really imagining the real-life sources.

As a piece in today’s New York Times makes clear, Orwell may not have been right 100% of the time, but his pursuit of truth and unwavering intellectual honesty remains noteworthy by comparison to many of his ideologically compromised peers. As fairy tale life in Sarah Palin’s Amerika reminds us, they are qualities worth cherishing.

"The moral and aesthetic nightmare of Christmas," by the late, great Christopher Hitchens.

How I miss Christopher Hitchens.

Introductory excerpts from Hitchens' timeless essay are reprinted below, so be sure to follow the link to read the whole, glorious piece, first noted here at NAC in 2008. I reread this every year on or before Christmas Eve. In 2013, there was added gravity, which also deserves another look.

In 2013, as Christmas approached, I'd just finished reading Ray Mouton's novel, In God's House. In 1984, Ray was the lawyer chosen by the state of Louisiana's Catholic Church hierarchy to defend the first priest ever to be charged in secular court with child molestation. Looking back on the perspective of the present day, we obviously know what became of all this, and that Ray's appointment with destiny was the first tiny peek inside a truly massive scandal. I wasn't expecting to be moved to such an extent by Ray's book, but I was -- and remain.

Carrying these thoughts into my annual date with Hitchens, I find the atheist's cynicism to be vastly enhanced.

'Tis the Season To Be Incredulous: The moral and aesthetic nightmare of Christmas, by Christopher Hitchens (Slate; Dec. 15, 2008)

… My own wish is more ambitious: to write an anti-Christmas column that becomes fiercer every year while remaining, in essence, the same. The core objection, which I restate every December at about this time, is that for almost a whole month, the United States—a country constitutionally based on a separation between church and state—turns itself into the cultural and commercial equivalent of a one-party state.

As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda is inescapable. You go to a train station or an airport, and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor's office or a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard. So, unless you are fortunate, are the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer. It becomes more than usually odious to switch on the radio and the television, because certain officially determined "themes" have been programmed into the system. Most objectionable of all, the fanatics force your children to observe the Dear Leader's birthday, and so (this being the especial hallmark of the totalitarian state) you cannot bar your own private door to the hectoring, incessant noise, but must have it literally brought home to you by your offspring. Time that is supposed to be devoted to education is devoted instead to the celebration of mythical events ...

“What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.”

Amid a predictably futile (but entertaining) Facebook discussion about religion last week with a casual acquaintance, who seems to have undergone somewhat of a strident conversion since abandoning the life of a single man, the word "revelation" came up.

I addressed it.

It's a "revelation" you choose to believe for reasons that lie outside the customary realm of human experience. I choose to dismiss it for the same reason. So it goes. I've no need to convert you. Unfortunately, Christians appear on my porch every weekend seeking to convert me, and to be honest, I resent it.

I surprised even myself by referencing resentment in this context, but it is accurate. 53 years spent ordering zealots off one's porch can do that to a fellow.

To me, what happened in Rome, Mecca, (fill in blank with name of specific church building address) or Las Vegas can stay right there without ever brushing against my lint-free vest. And, it would make little sense for an atheist like me to upsell the absence of supernatural belief; after all, how does one sell nothing?

Still, it surely speaks to my occasional inner need to rebut religion that I enjoy links like this one -- and tend to publish them on Sunday. I'll close with an unoriginal observation: The target of the last bastion of socially acceptable discrimination in America is the atheist, and knowing this, perhaps it is why I tend to side with the underdog.

The 20 Best Christopher Hitchens Quotes, by Daniel Florien (Patheos)

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion.

―God Is Not Great

"The moral and aesthetic nightmare of Christmas," by the late, great Christopher Hitchens.

How I miss him. Introductory excerpts only are reprinted below, so be sure to follow the link to read the whole, glorious piece, first noted at NAC in 2008. I reread it every year on Christmas Eve, although this time there is added gravity.

I've finished reading Ray Mouton's novel, In God's House. In 1984, he was the lawyer chosen by the state of Louisiana's Catholic Church hierarchy to defend the first priest ever to be charged in a secular court with child molestation. Looking back on the perspective of the present day, we obviously know what became of all this, and that Ray's appointment with destiny was the first tiny peek inside a truly massive scandal. I wasn't expecting to be moved, but I have been. Carrying these thoughts into my annual date with Hitchens, the atheist's cynicism is vastly enhanced.

'Tis the Season To Be Incredulous: The moral and aesthetic nightmare of Christmas, by Christopher Hitchens (Slate; Dec. 15, 2008)

… My own wish is more ambitious: to write an anti-Christmas column that becomes fiercer every year while remaining, in essence, the same. The core objection, which I restate every December at about this time, is that for almost a whole month, the United States—a country constitutionally based on a separation between church and state—turns itself into the cultural and commercial equivalent of a one-party state.

As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda is inescapable. You go to a train station or an airport, and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor's office or a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard. So, unless you are fortunate, are the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer. It becomes more than usually odious to switch on the radio and the television, because certain officially determined "themes" have been programmed into the system. Most objectionable of all, the fanatics force your children to observe the Dear Leader's birthday, and so (this being the especial hallmark of the totalitarian state) you cannot bar your own private door to the hectoring, incessant noise, but must have it literally brought home to you by your offspring. Time that is supposed to be devoted to education is devoted instead to the celebration of mythical events ...

Goliath's curative for Chick-fil-A is Christopher Hitchens.

"What's it like to lie to children for a living?"

Have a coffee, set aside fifteen minutes, and daydream that when those church people invade your porch, they'd agree to watch Hitchens, too.

For my chic fil a friends

From the late, great Hitchens: "The moral and aesthetic nightmare of Christmas."

Introductory excerpts only are reprinted below, so be sure to follow the link to read the whole, glorious piece (first noted at NAC in 2008).

'Tis the Season To Be Incredulous: The moral and aesthetic nightmare of Christmas, by Christopher Hitchens (Slate; Dec. 15, 2008)

… My own wish is more ambitious: to write an anti-Christmas column that becomes fiercer every year while remaining, in essence, the same. The core objection, which I restate every December at about this time, is that for almost a whole month, the United States—a country constitutionally based on a separation between church and state—turns itself into the cultural and commercial equivalent of a one-party state.

As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda isinescapable. You go to a train station or an airport, and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor's office or a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard. So, unless you are fortunate, are the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer. It becomes more than usually odious to switch on the radio and the television, because certain officially determined "themes" have been programmed into the system. Most objectionable of all, the fanatics force your children to observe the Dear Leader's birthday, and so (this being the especial hallmark of the totalitarian state) you cannot bar your own private door to the hectoring, incessant noise, but must have it literally brought home to you by your offspring. Time that is supposed to be devoted to education is devoted instead to the celebration of mythical events ...

"Jerry Falwell lived on hatred, superstition and bigotry."

R.I.P. Christopher Hitchens.

He was the Mencken of my time, and the hero of polemicists everywhere ... except the church, perhaps.

Required watching: Q TV / 'Christopher Hitchens' on Q TV (2009; thanks BH)

The Guardian: Christopher Hitchens dies aged 62

The Guardian: Peter Wilby obituary of Hitchens

The Guardian: Tributes, memories and paeans of praise for the late Christopher Hitchens poured in this morning, bringing home with force the sheer reach and power of the great polemicist – the "finest orator of our time" and a "valiant fighter against all tyrants including God."

Hitchens on the Pope.

Hitchens is a great favorite of mine.

The Great Catholic Cover-Up: The pope's entire career has the stench of evil about it, by Christopher Hitchens

... Concerning the most recent revelations about the steady complicity of the Vatican in the ongoing—indeed endless—scandal of child rape, a few days later a spokesman for the Holy See made a concession in the guise of a denial. It was clear, said the Rev. Federico Lombardi, that an attempt was being made "to find elements to involve the Holy Father personally in issues of abuse." He stupidly went on to say that "those efforts have failed."

He was wrong twice ...

Hitchens on the "moral and aesthetic nightmare of Christmas."

Excerpts only; follow the link to read the whole, glorious piece.

'Tis the Season To Be Incredulous: The moral and aesthetic nightmare of Christmas, by Christopher Hitchens (Slate).

... My own wish is more ambitious: to write an anti-Christmas column that becomes fiercer every year while remaining, in essence, the same. The core objection, which I restate every December at about this time, is that for almost a whole month, the United States—a country constitutionally based on a separation between church and state—turns itself into the cultural and commercial equivalent of a one-party state ...

... It takes a totalitarian mind-set to claim that only one Bronze Age Palestinian revelation or prophecy or text can be our guide through this labyrinth. If the totalitarians cannot bear to abandon their adoration of their various Dear Leaders, can they not at least arrange to hold their ceremonies in private? Either that or give up the tax-exempt status that must remind them so painfully of the things of this material world.

Do true believers like heretics? Only if they're properly cooked.

I personally am tired of being constantly told to compromise my Christian values to accommodate others. These beliefs I will never compromise and you should not either.
-- Posted at the We the People (a.k.a. I Am Curious Theocrat) blog

A stubborn unwillingness to compromise on questions that have tended to result historically in people cutting each other’s throats (or worse) in the name of their own unknowable “god” strikes me as mightily totalitarian in nature.

Then again, I’m just one of those contrarian communistic freethinking threats to human decency … and damned proud of it.

Certainly I’m not the first person to place a tattered bookmark in my cherished copy of Christopher Hitchens’ "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," make an espresso, and proceed to the computer to search for images of Francisco Goya’s "Los Caprichos" series of 18th-century etchings.

That’s because in chapter 14, Hitchens specifically refers to Plate 43 of Goya’s series. It is called The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, and shows a "man in defenseless slumber … hag-ridden by bats, owls and other haunters of the darkness."

The author’s actual point in citing this effective visual aid is to take a view contrary to that of the etching’s originally intended symbolic properties, namely, to offer that human reason always is the subject of fear and distrust when viewed through the distorted lens of man’s religious impulse, and that human reason is derided accordingly throughout mankind’s damaging religious experience.

Damaging? Of course. Just ask the “heretic” who was burned for believing what science in time confirmed.

One aspect of my upbringing for which I’m eternally grateful was the near complete absence of religious instruction. There was an old book in the house about the lives of the saints, and it included some fairly frightening scary drawings depicting the various ways that these saints were tortured and scourged, though they were not to Goya’s level of artistic proficiency. I recall another volume of illustrated children’s Bible stories, and of course a Bible itself, presumably awarded my parents on their wedding day, and duly ignored by my father forever after.

Beyond these three seldom consulted sources, there was nothing else on the topic of religion, and I was permitted to grow to maturity with the luxury of making up my own mind absent indoctrination. When I became immersed in philosophy as my degree choice in college, it merely confirmed what I already suspected all along.

Hitchens reminds us that Blaise Pascal is famous for supporting belief in god by means of a wager, or more appropriately, a conscious effort to cover the spread: If you believe in god and god exists, you win. If you believe in god and god doesn’t exist … well, what does it matter, anyway?

Bertrand Russell is equally famous for refuting this wager by positing that if, after he died, he unexpectedly met a god of one sort or another, he would chide the "supreme being" for providing insufficient evidence. Hitchens follows suit by stating his own version of Russell’s words.

My own reply: Imponderable Sir, I presume from some if not all of your many reputations that you might prefer honest and convinced unbelief to the hypocritical and self-interested affectation of faith or the smoking tributes of bloody altars. But I would not count on it.

I wouldn’t, either. It’s interesting to me that in some measure, Goya was right, and my own personal demons spring from my reliance on reason. But that’s encouraging, because it means that reason, properly applied, can scatter and dispel them.

There is no other choice, is there? Here is an excerpt from Hitchens as he summarizes his case.

Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to be able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard – or try to turn back – the measurable advances that we have made. Sometimes, true, it will artfully concede them. But this is to offer itself the choice between irrelevance and obstruction, impotence or outright reaction, and, given this choice, it is programmed to select the worse of the two.

Enjoy a beautiful Sunday, and I promise that the next installment of the Yugoslav travelogue is coming very soon.