Ferocious atheist Hitchens is dead

CHRISTOPHER Hitchens has lost what he described in April as his “long argument with the spectre of death”.

The BBC reports that the 62-year-old British author, literary critic and journalist – renowned for his fiery attacks on religion – died yesterday from pneumonia, a complication of the oesophageal cancer he was suffering from at a Texas hospital.

Christopher Hitchens

Unable to attend the American Atheist Convention earlier this year due to his illness, Hitchens sent a letter instead to delegates, saying of his battle against cancer:

Nobody ever wins this argument, though there are some solid points to be made while the discussion goes on. I have found, as the enemy becomes more familiar, that all the special pleading for salvation, redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before.

He said his trust was now better placed in two things:

The skill and principle of advanced medical science, and the comradeship of innumerable friends and family, all of them immune to the false consolations of religion. It is these forces among others which will speed the day when humanity emancipates itself from the mind-forged manacles of servility and superstitition. It is our innate solidarity, and not some despotism of the sky, which is the source of our morality and our sense of decency. 

He added:

The pattern and origin of all dictatorship is the surrender of reason to absolutism and the abandonment of critical, objective inquiry. The cheap name for this lethal delusion is religion, and we must learn new ways of combating it in the public sphere, just as we have learned to free ourselves of it in private. 

Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations. 

But just last week, someone called Mark Judge, writing for the Daily Caller, posed the question:

Could Christopher Hitchens become a Christian?

And Judge, subsequently described here by Ophelia Benson as “a vulture licking its filthy chops”, said:

It’s a possibility that doesn’t seem laughable anymore.

Hitchens is survived by his wife, Carol Blue, and their daughter, Antonia, and his children from a previous marriage, Alexander and Sophia.

Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter described the writer as someone:

Of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar. Those who read him felt they knew him, and those who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls.

Hitchens became contributing editor to Vanity Fair in November 1992. He was diagnosed with cancer in June 2010, and documented his declining health in his Vanity Fair column.

He wrote for numerous publications including The Times Literary Supplement, the Daily Express, the London Evening Standard, Newsday and The Atlantic.

He was the author of 17 books, including The Trial of Henry Kissinger, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and a memoir, Hitch-22.

A collection of his essays, Arguably, was released this year.

Hat tip: BarrieJohn, Adam Tjaavk, John Morris and others too numerous to mention.

A CALL to end executions in Saudi Arabia has been made by Amnesty International after a woman was beheaded for “witchcraft and sorcery”.

The country’s Interior Ministry, according to this report, confirmed that Amina bint Abdul Halim bin Salem Nasser, a Saudi Arabian national, was executed on Monday in the northern province of al-Jawf. It gave no further details of the charges against her.

Said Philip Luther Amnesty International’s interim Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme:

The charges of ‘witchcraft and sorcery’ are not defined as crimes in Saudi Arabia and to use them to subject someone to the cruel and extreme penalty of execution is truly appalling. While we don’t know the details of the acts which the authorities accused Amina of committing, the charge of sorcery has often been used in Saudi Arabia to punish people, generally after unfair trials, for exercising their right to freedom of speech or religion.

The execution is the second of its kind in recent months. In September a Sudanese national was beheaded in the Saudi Arabian city of Medina after being convicted on “sorcery” charges. He had allegedly confessed after being tortured and was tried without a lawyer.

The number of executions in Saudi Arabia has almost tripled this year. So far at least 79 people – including five women – have been executed there, compared to at least 27 in 2010.

Luther said:

The huge rise in the number of executions in Saudi Arabia is deeply disturbing. We regularly call on the Saudi Arabian authorities to impose a moratorium with a view to abolishing the death penalty. Where the death penalty is used, under international law it should only be applied to the most serious crimes.

Saudi Arabia applies the death penalty to a wide range of offences ranging from murder and rape to blasphemy, apostasy, sorcery, adultery and drugs-related offences.

In December 2010, Saudi Arabia was one of a minority of states voting against a UN General Assembly resolution calling for a worldwide moratorium on executions.

An Indonesian policewoman, with lipstick and jacket tastefully coordinated, takes scissors to the hair of a 'deviant' punk rocker. (AFP: Chaideer Mahyuddin )

I guess we should be grateful that in Indonesia they are not using Islamic law to remove heads – just hair … for the moment.

Sharia police, according to ABC News,  have “morally rehabilitated” more than 60 young punk rock fans in Aceh province on Sumatra island, saying the youths were bad for the province’s image.

After they were arrested at a punk rock concert in Banda Aceh last Saturday, 59 male and five female punk rock fans were forced to have their hair cut, bathe in a lake, change clothes … and pray.

Banda Aceh deputy mayor Illiza Sa’aduddin Djamal, who ordered the arrests, said:

We feared that the Islamic sharia law implemented in this province will be tainted by their activities. We hope that by sending them to rehabilitation they will eventually repent.

Hundreds of Indonesian punk fans came from around the country to attend the concert, organised to raise money for orphans.

Police claimed the raid was executed to deter the youths from “deviant” behaviour. Said Aceh police chief Iskandar Hasan:

They never showered, they lived on the street, never performed religious prayers. We need to fix them so they will behave properly and morally. They need harsh treatment to change their mental behaviour.

A local rights activist, Evi Narti Zain, said the arrests breached human rights.

What the police have done is totally bizarre. Being a punk is just a lifestyle. They exist all over the world and they don’t break any rules or harm other people.

Hasan denied the accusation, claiming the rehabilitation programme was merely:

An orientation into normal Indonesian society.

Hat tip: Remigius and M A Chohan (beheading report) and Name Withheld (Indonesian report)

TREVOR Phillips, Chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, exposed breathtaking ignorance on Sunday by alleging that the NSS was using the High Court in London to PROSECUTE a West Country council over prayers said in the council chamber.

Trevor Phillips

Under the headline Human rights should help us protect the vulnerable (behind paywall) Phillips wrote:

But there are some examples of cases in which, though the Human Rights Act might technically be applicable, I do wonder if people have just lost the plot. Last week, for example, Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society, a decent and sincere fellow, made me drop my coffee when he told early-morning radio that he wanted to use the Act to prosecute the councillors of a small town in Devon.

What was their alleged crime? Compelling unbelievers to walk over hot coals? Forcing small children to recite chunks of scripture before breakfast? No. It was for taking a democratic decision that those councillors who wished to follow the long tradition of saying prayers before meetings in the Council Chamber could do so.

The underlining is ours.

NSS Executive Director Keith Porteous Wood notified us in an email today that he had written to the paper, expressing his disappointment over “the serious inaccuracies” in Phillips’ piece.

We are not seeking to prosecute anyone, and we have we had no objection to prayers being said before Council meetings. It was clear from the Today programme interview that this was not a prosecution but a High Court hearing (a Judicial Review), and as Councillor Christie said on the clip, there had been an attempt to move the prayers to before the meeting (or have a short period of silence), but that the Christian councillors of Bideford had rejected this.

Our co-applicant Councillor, Clive Bone, led that compromise process. We specifically said in the High Court hearing later on 2 December that we had no objection to pre-meeting prayers or a period of silence during the meeting.

Wood added:

Seeking clarity in the law would seem everyone’s fundamental human right, including ours and I am saddened to be attacked for doing so.

Just for the record, the NSS is trying to avoid the creation of a hierarchy of Human Rights with religion at the top, and we see that as a very real danger. That is why we intervened in the application of Ladele Eweida Chaplin McFarlane to the ECHR. We are the only organisation to have intervened to support all four judgments, as the Government has done, although I am pleased the EHRC now supports two of the verdicts.

 I would appreciate an attempt by you to correct the record as both errors were repeated by the Sunday Times’ Marie Woolf and the Daily Mail.

NSS President Terry Sanderson points out here:

The NSS’s court challenge drew an extraordinary and almost entirely negative reaction from commentators. Most of it could have been written well in advance by the usual suspects, so predictable was it.

Ann Widdecombe in the Daily Express could hardly contain her heaving anger as she labelled Clive Bone — the councillor at the centre of this case — ‘an ass’ and added: ‘I hope the High Court throws out this nasty little action, which predictably is backed by the National Secular Society, and awards the not inconsiderable costs against that body.’

BY NOW, I guess, many readers of this blog would have viewed what is turning out to be the most hated video ever posted on YouTube – Texas Governor Rick Perry flagging his Christian credentials and slagging off gays in the military.

But Republican Perry, who has more teeth than brain cells, is – according to this report – not backing down from his determination to force gay service folk back into hiding should he ever become President of the US.

During an appearance yesterday on Fox News Sunday, the religious nutjob vowed that he would diligently work to undo the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, which would force gays and lesbians either back into the closet or out of the military entirely.

At the last count, Perry’s 30-second campaign video – Strong – had notched up 631, 328 dislikes. If nothing else, he’s learned one thing from this embarrassing debacle: don’t allow people to post comments!

A follow-up video, in which the bozo vows to ditch “Obamacare” from Day One – has had the “Like” and “Dislike” buttons disabled.

In Iowa yesterday he came face-to-face with a number of people who personally challenged his pathological hatred of gays.

At Café Diem in Ames, Perry spoke in front of an estimated 230 people before voices from the crowd began questioning him about how he was “demonizing gay people” in TV ads.

While attempting to leave the coffee shop, Mr Perry continued to be confronted by many who disagreed with his position against allowing openly gay people to serve in the United States military.

Some of the shouted statements included:

Why do you hate gays so much? 

And:

You’re dividing this country … You don’t deserve to be President … Obama for President!

For the most part the names of the hecklers have not been disclosed but one man, Jason Arment, 24 of Grimes Iowa made it important to identify himself. Arment, a Marine who served in Iraq in 2007 and 2008 told The Los Angeles Times that he found Perry’s ads to be “extremely offensive” and “insulting” to service members.

Warren Blumenfeld, an Iowa State University Professor shouted out to Perry:

Why are you marginalizing people in this country? Why are you demonizing gay and lesbian people?

Blumenfeld and the rest of the protesters were largely ignored by Perry, as the Governor signed autographs and worked his way towards the exit of the coffee shop.

A DOCUMENTARY scheduled to be screened on RTE One tonight features Irish Catholic priests complaining they have the hump with Catholics of Convenience using the Church simply for hatches, matches and despatches.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin

In the Would You Believe? documentary, the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, urges the rising numbers of “a la carte” Catholics to “have the maturity” to get out of the Church. In the documentary, which focuses on the Church’s future, priests reveal they will expect a firmer commitment from their flock in the future.

It shows how church pews swell to almost full capacity for celebratory sacraments, while Sunday service attendances are plummeting.

Archbishop Martin said:

It requires maturity on those people who want their children to become members of the Church community and maturity on those people who say ‘I don’t believe in God and I really shouldn’t be hanging on to the vestiges of faith when I don’t really believe in it’.

Fr Michael Drumm, from the Catholic Schools Partnership, said the church would be getting firmer with parents looking to have their children baptised as a Catholic.

Commenting on this development, the Protect the Pope blog said:

The majority of baptisms, marriages and confirmations are bestowed on nominal Catholics, who do not believe, who do not participate in the Mass and who are not members of our parishes. This not only cheapens our sacraments but also makes a mockery of our beliefs. The Archbishop of Dublin has rightly urged them to have the maturity to admit to themselves and other Catholics that they don’t believe in God, and don’t have a relationship with Christ.

The only caveat Protect the Pope would add is: Have these non-believing Catholics heard the true and full Faith of the Church, or have they only heard the travesty of the Faith invented by liberal bishops, priests and catechists over the past forty years?

It could be that these non-believing Catholics have not rejected the Catholic Faith but only the modernist heresy masquerading as the Catholic faith.

If this is the truth of the matter, then instead of asking them to have the maturity to leave the Church, its (sic) necessary to truly evangelize them.

Meanwhile, we learn that the crazy Catholic League in the US has launched an “Adopt an Atheist” Campaign. CL’s comical President, Bill Donohue explains:

Approximately 80 percent of Americans are Christian, and 96 percent celebrate Christmas. Of the 20 percent who are not Christian, non-believers make up the largest segment, though the number of self-identified atheists is tiny.

David Silverman, president of American Atheists, knows this to be true, which is why he is frantically trying to inflate his base. ‘We want people to realize that there may be atheists in their family’, he told the New York Times, ‘even if those atheists don’t even know they are atheists’.

We think there is some merit in David’s idea, even if he has things backwards, as usual. Today we are launching our ‘Adopt An Atheist’ campaign, the predicate of which is, ‘We want atheists to realize that there may be Christians in their community, even if those Christians don’t even know they are Christian’.

He burbles on:

Here’s what our campaign entails. We are asking everyone to contact the American Atheist affiliate in his area … letting them know of your interest in ‘adopting’ one of them. All it takes is an e-mail. Let them know of your sincere interest in working with them to uncover their inner self. They may be resistant at first, but eventually they may come to understand that they were Christian all along.

If we hurry, these closeted Christians can celebrate Christmas like the rest of us.

As an added bonus, they will no longer be looked upon as people who ‘believe in nothing, stand for nothing and are good for nothing’.

A nice comment here from Pharyngula:

The Catholic church’s problem is NOT that people are unaware of them; as the largest single Christian denomination, Catholicism has name brand recognition. Their problem is that people know all about the Catholic Church, and they RUN AWAY SCREAMING from it.

Hat tip: Marcus (“Adopt an Atheist” report)

THINGS like bananas and cucumbers may “arouse” Muslim women, and “make them think of sex”.

That’s the view of an unnamed Muslim cleric, based in Europe, who is reported here as saying that women should not even get close to foodstuffs such as these.

If women wish to eat these food items, a third party, preferably a male related to them such as their a father or husband, should cut the items into small pieces and serve.

The crazy cleric also added carrots and zucchini to the list of forbidden foods for women.

However, he appears to have left peppers off his list. These can sometimes have a tendency to appear phallic, as the picture below shows.

Hat Tip: Remigius