Hitchen's Golgotha

Christopher Hitchen, the atheist extraordinarie and a world class journalist, passed away late last year (2011). But his legacy will live on in the hearts of many.  Even in death, he was defiant to the end. His stand on religion is unswervingly unequivocal, that is, religion poisons everything.

"If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does," that was a quote of his. Knowing Hitchen, the insinuation is clear. I think he's trying to highlight the cowardice of those who hide behind a deluded belief when facing death.

It can't be wrong to say that Hitchen finds religion the big brainwash where even intelligent people are being conned into believing in that eternal estate flushed with rolls of big lush mansions and never-ending karaoke sessions of praise and worship.

"Death is the end of it; deal with it" - that's Hitchen's dying refrain. And if there's anything worth our secret admiration, it would be that at least he's consistent to the end. He started very much the same way he ended, that is, as an atheist who fearlessly stared into the jaws of death and saw a big black hole of nothingness.

Let's revisit his gungho quote: "If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does." Correct me if I'm wrong, but his condescending undertones are unmistakenly clear. What he is standing firm on at his deathbed can be unravelled with these rhetorical questions: What's wrong with an atheist's death? Why should Christians or religionists have the final say on the dying's last lap of life? Can't an atheist die an atheist in the same way a theist dies a theist since it is, to him, more likely that an atheist would be less surprised than a theist when both "cross over"?

Hitchens rather choose an atheist's death that courageously embraces the truth as he sees it than to die a coward's death still hanging on to one's wet security blanket of faith. No doubt Hitchens was troubled by blind idealism in this world, but he was obviously much more incensed by misplaced idealism than the idealism of atheism.

More importantly, Hitchen's salvation rest on his disbelief and that was his chosen destiny to a death of peaceful nothingness. And to say that such disbelief is a form of "religion" akin to faith is as ludicrous to him as saying that baldness is a new hair-do. Indeed, in life and in death, Hitchens lived on his own terms.

Honestly, I would miss his brilliant prose and incredibly sharp wit. Here's a taste of it (just a tribute to the creativity of the man) in his much-acclaimed book, God is Not Great (although I strongly disagree with it):

"The abolition of religion as illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions.

The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from chain, not so that man will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation but so that he will shake off the chain and cull the living flower."

How's that for brilliance? It's ironic that his name actually means "Christ-bearer". It seems that in his death, the only thing he bore was a Christ-less belief.

Well, brilliance or not, all this reminds me of what CS Lewis once wrote that a man chooses his own ultimate fate. As such, a man in hell is not likely to trade places with another in heaven because he ended in exactly the place that his life's choices have brought him there.

Here's how eloquently CSL puts it, "There are only two kinds of people - those who say, "God's will be done" or those to whom God in the end says to them, "Your own will be done." All that are in Hell choose it. Without that self-choice, it wouldn't be Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it."

And mind you, both roads to heaven and hell exact a high price for it's patronage. Both residents of heaven and hell therefore have duly earned their places there.

Soren Kierkegaard once wrote, "It costs a man just as much or even more to go to hell than to come to heaven. Narrow, exceedingly narrow is the way to perdition." Dallas Willard calls it the costs of non-discipleship.

Indeed, nothing's for free, even for one's place in heaven or hell. And in a twisted logic, those who are bound for the "paradise" of hell should be "congratulated" or garlanded when they finally get there!

So, while you hope that an atheist would eternally regret his choices in death; on the contrary, and quite uncannily, he should be "rejoicing" now as we speak. Cheers out.