Farewell Christopher Hitchens
I didn’t agree with everything Christopher Hitchens said, but at least he had it right about religion and was always worth reading.
The world will be a worse place without him.
Probably if he hadn’t smoked he’d still be here.
In some ways smoking is the most selfish vice, as it annoys all the people around you and then when it kills you, it leaves your family in total distress.
He was eminently quotable.
The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that ‘if English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for me.
[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.
Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.
To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world?
There are lots more like these.
The Anonymous Widower 
Regarding the Texas quote, the following is an extract from Wikipedia. Miriam Ferguson [Governor of Texas in 1925], along with a few others, have been credited with the quote: “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas”. However, variations of this going back to 1881 were often used to ridicule the backwardness of various unnamed Christians, which supports the argument that the attribution to Ferguson is false. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miriam_A._Ferguson .
I admired Christopher Hitchens in many ways, but I disagree with some of his statements, such as:
“What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof” [Goldbach’s conjecture being a rather boring counter-example].
“It must be obvious to anyone who can think at all that the charges against the Hussein regime [in Iraq] are, as concerns arsenals of genocidal weaponry, true”.
Comment by SpencerH | December 18, 2011 |