Why am I the last to hear about everything?
If the phrase "you either love him or hate him" was written for anyone, it would be Christoper Hitchens, author, pundit, and world renowned (if not infamous) atheist.
The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long. And the other wager is, the part of the wager, it's a certainty you'll have a terrible time and you may wish you were dying because it's an awful process.
I've gotten used to seeing Hitchens appear as the voice of lefty reason on MSNBC frequently, and it hadn't occurred to me why I haven't seen him in a while. Come to think of it, he was looking particularly ragged when I saw him last, scowling and frowning over the foolish christianism in the Teabagger movement. But I just thought of him as being his usual disappointed, and disaffected self.
I don't view myself as being a part of this religion or lacking that religion. If I had my way we would end the entire discussion and spend our energies repairing things. But when Hitchens speaks about what is or isn't, it rings true for me. You will never, ever be loved all over the world for being one of the most famous heathens on the planet. Just ask Madalyn Murray O'Hair. She ended up being murdered by one of her own inner circle people! Atheists usually gain only so much fame for stating what they believe and then they die. They can't fleece whole churches full of sheep for their riches and live off of their ignorance. So they're basically stuck either selling a halfway decent book, as Hitchens has done on a few occasions, or they starve to death.
You either love him or hate him. For his honesty, and his refusal to change a hair about himself just because someone tells him to ... I love him dearly. I am shocked that I didn't hear about this before now. I gasped when I saw this photo of him just now. And I will miss seeing him on the telly when he's gone.
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