Dear Christopher,
I've never met you, but you bear an amazing resemblance to my older brother. You both wear your hair the same way, you both have a great appreciation for ideas, and you both are welcoming of the criticism of your good ideas. It's how you know that people are paying attention, and that you're having an impact.
I'm not into heroes. I don't know that I've ever actually had someone who I would consider a hero. There are certainly people in this world whom I admire for certain reasons.
I think the main reason I admire you so much is that you are willing to take the unpopular position because it is the correct position. This requires a great deal of strength. One must have the intellectual chops to be able to pull off the argument, but one must also have the creative ability to turn a phrase.
I have taken inspiration from you and many of your friends.
My job is to share ideas. I spend my days at work talking with the public about the ideas of science and the material world. I'm also a fan of language. During my interactions with the public, I usually get lots of questions (or confused looks) about the same couple of topics. So it is good for me when I have a set of "back pocket" explanations for complex ideas. What I mean by that is I need to be able to simply explain a difficult concept, or I need to be able to use an apt analogy to represent a complex concept.
You are a wordsmith of the highest order. Your ideas and the way you phrase them are unique in their ability to be of the most beautiful poetic variety. A pretty phrase without any sort of lasting impact is useless. So while your words are beautiful on their own, the true value of those words is in the punishment they deliver to your opponent in spirited debate. When I watch a debate between you and some theist, it's like going to see my favorite band in concert. I know all the songs. I know that the improvised riffs in those songs are not really improvised, because I've heard all of them before in other live performances.
I simply can't wait to hear some of the greatest hits when I watch. These aren't trite pop songs that are full of jangly guitar, and catchy riffs. These are beautifully phrased, poetically inspired, intentionally structured, and punishingly accurate stanzas of intellectual treasure.
I thank you for bringing me these gifts of honesty.
You once told Hannity this:
"You give me the awful impression, I hate to say it, of someone who hasn't read any of the arguments against your position, ever."
In that same interview, Hannity says to you, "That is just intellectual snobbishness." Your response was right there with my feelings. You said, "That could be right." Thanks for that.
I have recently read your letter to the American Atheist Convention. I sincerely appreciate the words.
Dear fellow-unbelievers,
Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death. 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. I hope to help defend and pass on the lessons of this for many years to come, but for now I have found my trust 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 superstition. It is our innate solidarity, and not some despotism of the sky, which is the source of our morality and our sense of decency.
That essential sense of decency is outraged every day. Our theocratic enemy is in plain view. Protean in form, it extends from the overt menace of nuclear-armed mullahs to the insidious campaigns to have stultifying pseudo-science taught in American schools. But in the past few years, there have been heartening signs of a genuine and spontaneous resistance to this sinister nonsense: a resistance which repudiates the right of bullies and tyrants to make the absurd claim that they have god on their side. To have had a small part in this resistance has been the greatest honor of my lifetime: the pattern and original 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.
As the heirs of a secular revolution, American atheists have a special responsibility to defend and uphold the Constitution that patrols the boundary between Church and State. This, too, is an honor and a privilege. Believe me when I say that I am present with you, even if not corporeally (and only metaphorically in spirit...) Resolve to build up Mr Jefferson's wall of separation. And don't keep the faith.
Sincerely,
Christopher Hitchens
When I debated this issue for the first time with my Father, he asked me what would cause me to do good if there is no God. Strangely enough, my Father was not offering any sort of personal or moral God. He was offering a "cosmic unconsciousness" sort of God. So I turned the question back to him and asked him what this cosmic unconsciousness says about morality and about doing good deeds.
Eventually, it boiled down to this- I value humanity. It's clear from your letter that you value humanity as well.
Your frequent criticisms of the prescriptive morality of religious dogma inspires me to recognize the necessary morals in our world.
Until I met you and some of your friends, I considered myself an atheist or an agnostic. Yet, I hadn't been forced to fully flesh out the moral contingent of my poorly constructed thinking on the issue. During the last year, you and I have spent hours together. I have spent hours reading your words. I have spent more hours being invigorated by your debates with various theists. You were not aware of that.
One of the great challenges relates to raising children as atheists. As you well know, the vast majority of the US are believers.
How does a parent teach morals to children when they aren't written down in an authoritative text? Without the passing on of the morals of the parents, then the children are put in a very difficult position when it comes time for them to develop their own personal moral structures. They may choose to look elsewhere for a prescribed plan, rather than relying on their own understandings the moral connectedness of the world.
The words of you and your friends were instructive to me. They helped me learn to develop my understanding of morality, so that I could better explain my moral position to my own children.
The prescriptive morals of the bible, even when the awful things like slavery, infanticide, and incest (to name just a few) are removed, could charitably be considered careless. At worst, they could be considered to be intentionally inhumane and destructive. Without your words, I may not have been able to develop the ability to explain this, and our whole family would be worse off for it. I can tell my kids that I see humans as having an unwritten contract with one another, and when we break that contract, we are committing an immoral act. Your words and ideas have also helped me develop my thinking about what it means when someone close to you dies. I have used the words of you and your friends to help me explain to my children what it means to remember the dead.
It means, to quote an authoritative source, "I celebrate his whole catalog." Does that mean I agree with the entirety of your library of ideas? Of course not. While I may disagree with you on many issues, I will still not shy away from discussing those ideas. They are part of who you are, and they are part of what you will leave behind for us to remember.
One thing I have always appreciated is that you seem to value the truth over any sort of outside judgement of what is moral or immoral. Thanks to your insights, the strength of your arguments, and the tenacity of your human spirit, I have been able to define how it is that my long held morals comport with my own personal thinking about the existence of the supernatural.
Outside of depriving another of his or her right to live, a lie is the worst thing that one can do to another human being. For me to claim a belief in a supernatural deity would be a lie. It's one of the ten commandments, but it is one that is not showing a god that is petty, selfish, and jealous.
The idea of not bearing false witness is an idea that itself has value. One thing that I learn and will continue to learn from you is that ideas are to be judged on their own merits, regardless of their tone or where they originate.
The only argument I can make for a soul is one that exists as metaphor. The entirety of your words, ideas, and actions are left behind as a record of your existence here, and that is, in some secular sense, a soul. In that way, you will be remembered. That "soul" will most definitely live on as long as we are able to nourish it in your physical absence.
I think I was probably influenced by your unapologetic brashness when I told some crazy Larouchies that, "Yes, you're right. I am being an asshole. But being an asshole is not illegal, nor does it make me wrong."
Just as when a religion justifies violence, I will also be forever critical of your support of the Iraq war. I realize that you didn't change anything about the outcome or the decision, but I will still accuse you of transgressing the moral boundaries that are required by the human contract we have not signed.
I will always appreciate your words and ideas. Not only will I remember you words and ideas, but I will remember that you are full of life, and that you appear to want to confront life head on. I have no fear of the mystery of life, and I think I owe part of that fearlessness to you.
Jeremy