If you love the Hitch, you need to watch this.
“It’s only with gentle Jesus, meak and mild, that eternal torture for minor transgressions is introduced.”
— Christopher Hitchens
| Interviewer: | How're you feeling? |
| Christopher Hitchens: | Well I'm dying...but so are you. |
“Ask yourself the question: how moral is the following? I am told of a human sacrifice that took place two thousand years ago, without my wishing it and in circumstances so ghastly that, had I been present and in possession of any influence, I would have been duty-bound to try and stop it. In consequence of this murder, my own manifold sins are forgiven me, and I may hope to enjoy everlasting life. Let us just for now overlook all the contradictions between the tellers of the original story and assume that it is basically true. What are the further implications? They are not as reassuring as they look at first sight. For a start, and in order to gain the benefit of this wondrous offer, I have to accept that I am responsible for the flogging and mocking and crucifixion, in which I had no say and no part, and agree that every time I decline this responsibility, or that I sin in word or deed, I am intensifying the agony of it. Furthermore, I am required to believe that the agony was necessary in order to compensate for an earlier crime in which I had no part, the sin of Adam. It is useless to object that Adam seems to have been created with insatiable discontent and curiosity and then forbidden to slake it: all this was settled long before even Jesus himself was born. Thus my own guilt in the matter is deemed “original” and inescapable. However, I am granted free will with which to reject the offer of vicarious redemption. Should I exercise this choice, however, I face an eternity of torture much more awful than anything endured at Calvary, or anything threatened to those who first heard the Ten Commandments.”
— Christopher Hitchens on Vicarious Redemption, God Is Not Great
“Erections could be like cops: often there when you emphatically didn’t require them and sometimes absent when you did. Or so I have been told by friends who thought the could trust me.”
— Christopher Hitchens
“Trotsky was so much an intellectual that in the final analysis, Marxism was not quite enough for him.”
— Christopher Hitchens, “The Old Man,” Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2004
Hitchens Vs 4 Christians
Christopher Hitchens Vs Lee Strobel, Douglas Wilson, James Denison, and William Lane Craig
Hitch at his very best
“Death has this much to be said for it:
You don’t have to get out of bed for it.
Wherever you happen to be
They bring it to you—free.”
— Kingsley Amis, quoted by Christopher Hitchens
“There is, especially in the American media, a deep belief that insincerity is better than no sincerity at all.”
— Christopher Hitchens
“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.”
— Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian, 2001
Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis in Cape Cod with their sons Alexander and Louis, 1985.
“I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator — that’s beyond my conceit. I therefore have no choice but to find something suspect even in the humblest believer. Even the most humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicit in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke Greville’s unforgettable line, “Created sick — Commanded to be well.” And there are totalitarian insinuations to back this up if its appeal should fail. Christians, for example, declare me redeemed by a human sacrifice that occurred thousands of years before I was born. I didn’t ask for it, and would willingly have foregone it, but there it is: I’m claimed and saved whether I wish it or not. And if I refuse the unsolicited gift? Well, there are still some vague mutterings about an eternity of torment for my ingratitude. That is somewhat worse than a Big Brother state, because there could be no hope of its eventually passing away.”
— Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian, 2001
Hitchens (right) at a work camp for young revolutionaries in Cuba, 1968. Only a few months after Che Guevara died, Hitchens ventured there to work at the Campamento Cinco de Mayo, a new camp meant to spur dialogue between what the government referred to as “internationalists.”
