Christopher Hitchens: a Renaissance man in an MTV world
Bookworm on Dec 16 2011 at 7:46 am | Filed under: Uncategorized
It was inevitable, but that doesn’t make Christopher Hitchens’ death less sad for those of us who valued and enjoyed his intellectual honesty, brilliant writing, and all around caustic joie de vivre.
Christopher Hitchens — Requiescat in pace.
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- Hitchens is almost right
- A follow-up to my post about meaningful lives and early deaths
- The renaissance of anti-Semitism
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13 Responses to “Christopher Hitchens: a Renaissance man in an MTV world”
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Christopher Hitchins was a man of the Left. It says so much about conservatives that they could embrace a man like this for his intellectual courage and clear thinking on so many issues, even if very often they did not agree with him.
Had it been the other way around, (i.e., a conservative thinker confronting the Left), he would have been pilloried, drawn and quartered.
Intellectual honesty? Clear thinking?? Joie de vivre??? Seriously Bookworm, have you lost your mind? Anyone with even the slightest bit of intellectual honesty will come to the conclusion that a Creator (aka God) must exist. Because the world is simply too complex to be a product of chance. You know, just like Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton and all the other great scientists in the history of mankind have concluded.
Only an intellectually dishonest, Christianity/freedom hating leftist will conclude that there is no God, and sell it as a fact.
And how can you know beyond a reasonable doubt that there must be a God? Simply THINK. With intellectual honesty.
I liked Hitchens, enjoy his clarity, appreciate his sense of fun, and will miss his contributions. Undecided about the validity of the conclusions. Though much of His book is baloney (or bologna, for the purists among us), I don’t assume that therefore God must be – and am perfectly willing to put a cap on the “h” and “g.”
And oddly enough, I don’t consider myself in the least intellectually dishonest, nor do I hate Christianity or freedom. I’m not even a leftist, either. I’m also not selling anything, and I spare a few minutes every week – Thursdays, between 5:11 and 5:18 PM – for simply thinking.
One of the things I think is that natural selection bears about as much relationship to chance as elephants do to Eskimos. If there is anything in the world that is not in the least dependent on “chance,” it’s natural selection.
Sorry – but I’m still not a leftist.
I didn’t mean that you are intellectually dishonest JJ, I meant to say that Christopher Hitchins is/was intellectually dishonest. I believe you are truly thinking for yourself, but Christopher Hitchins was not. He had a conclusion (religion is evil/stupid) and tried to sell it as a fact. To me, that’s your typical leftist intellectual dishonesty (see Bookworms slogan).
Now about your remark about natural selection and chance: what comes before natural selection? Random mutations. And the word ‘random’ has something to do with chance, wouldn’t you agree? Only after random mutations, natural selection comes to play. No random mutations, no evolution.
And about atheists hating Christianity: I believe you when you say that you don’t hate Christianity or freedom. However, the left does hate Christianity. And to ‘prove’ scientifically that God doesn’t exist is a strategic objective to the left. After all, if there is no God, man is exactly the same as any other animal. And we can kill animals, right? So if man is just any other animal, there’s no reason why it would be immoral for the left to kill, say, 120 million people. O wait, they’ve allready done that.
And I see you’re a critical thinker, so here’s a question for you. The average age of humans is about 75-80 years, right? Now, if the purpose of random mutations and natural selection is to live longer and to have more offspring, how come there’s no random mutation that makes humans live forever? (or any life form for that matter) Wouldn’t that be the ultimate natural selection? There’s no reason whatsoever why the cells in your body wouldn’t regenerate indefinitely. Even while you are reading this, your body is breaking down a bunch of cells, and creating new ones. There’s absolutely no reason why this process should end, ever. But it does. So my question is: can the evolution theory explain this? And if it can’t, shouldn’t atheists like Christopher Hitchins have a little more humility? (hehe fat chance, a leftie with humility
There is a random mutation for forever life, it’s called cancer. Cancer is basically the prevention of autonomic cell destruction due to reproduction. Normal human cells are designed to die. They have a finite reproduction cycle before the RNA/DNA gets eroded. A perfect replication cycle that does not erode itself, means that if any radiation or damage occurred to the cells, the defect would be reproduced ad infinitum, and probably erase entire genetic lines if you had something like genetic defects or cancer.
There can be no life, without death. And this is part of the reason. The weak die off, making way for the better. Whereas if your cells did not have a built in death bomb, all it takes is one mistake and all future reproduction would be flawed, forever and ever. Coincidentally, that’s what the Left seeks to create for human systems of government. They wish to introduce a specific flaw, that will reproduce itself until infinity, and they call it Utopia.
Also, if cells could not die and do not a self destruct timer, then basically it’s the same as cancer. You never stop growing, and your cells never die off. This does not actually create any kind of “natural selection” unless, there’s like a neutron star orbiting your planet.
Life is about structured order and balance between growth and destruction, creation and death. It’s not about ad infinity or perfection, like the Left envisions.
Atheists are like everybody else, some are haters I suppose, most are probably not. Hate on a full-time basis takes a lot of time and energy. And the left is like everything else: prone to individual interpretation. To say that “the left hates Christianity” is a touch broad, for my personal taste. The Archbishop of Canterbury is a total lefty; to the point where he’s a loon in many ways. But I imagine he doesn’t see himself as hating Christianity. Would he have risen to be A of C if he did? I don’t know – Rowan’s a weirdo, but probably pretty much a Christian.
Mutations happen all the time, good, bad, indifferent. Random? Some yes, some less so. That’s because we’re not stamped out on an assembly line. It’s part of the process. When experience proves one utile, it may be kept, assimilated, and over time passed on as an inheritable trait. There is nothing the least bit random about that, that’s nature at its quite deliberate best: seizing on an opportunity and recognizing that something positive has appeared. It’s original appearance may be said to be random, but then, random mutations often happen where they’ll be useful. People who were destroyed by sleeping sickness developed sickle cells, those in northern climes didn’t. A mutation with the precision of a heat-seeking missile? In my own case, my wife thinks my toes are hilarious. Hers are textbook, from large to small in nicely graduated lengths. I am pure northern islander: my heritage is Irish, English, Scottish, and Welsh. I share a mutation common to many from that part of the world: my second toe is a fair amount longer than the big one. My ancestors spent a lot of time climbing wet cliffs by the shore, or granite outcrops in the moors. The long second toe is good, they say, for gripping. (I so rarely climb wet cliffs in bare feet I can’t really say from personal experience, but could be. I’ll buy it.) There’s a mutation that spontaneously appeared in my ancestor’s corner of the world – but not in my wife’s ancestor’s corner. or down south where they have sickle cells. “Random,” if you like. Maybe “random with a purpose” would be better – such a mutation would have been of no use to her flat-land dwelling forbears, so it didn’t appear there. Is that really “random?” Can’t say – wasn’t there. Don’t know. But the people who would have found such a mutation useful got it; the ones for whom it was of no use didn’t. You could wonder about the “random” element.
The question about life-span is more interesting if you turn it on its head. The human life-span remained about the same for the first couple of million years – not very long. It finally got reliably above about 45 years – as an average – only by the 1930s, more or less, and got to the exalted stage of about 60 by the 1950s. This owed nothing to nature, but a great deal to medical science. So the question ought to be: why do cells reproduce at decreasing rates as we age? Why, as time passes, do more begin to die than are replaced? Why, in short, does the body get old? Where did it learn to do that? The race never lived long enough to experience age – for the first millions of years hardly anybody made it past the mid-twenties – there was no such thing as gray or white hair. So how, on a cellular level, did the body learn to get old? From whence came the experience? We didn’t live long enough to know how to be old, so how did the body get to know? Indeed, why don’t we just go on forever replacing cells and renewing as we do in our twenties? You’re absolutely correct and it doesn’t require a further mutation: there is already no reason why our bodies shouldn’t regenerate forever. Where – and how, and when – did they learn not to? Where – and how, and when – did they experience aging? Finding out about the mutation that turned endless regeneration off is far more interesting than wondering why one to make it go on forever hasn’t – if it hasn’t – appeared.
The simple answer to why the endless life mutation hasn’t appeared – if it hasn’t – is that we’re an experiment – and a quite young experiment at that. Sorry for the cliche (they only become cliches because they’re true) but dinosaurs were tromping around for hundreds of millions of years. We’ve been on the scene for a comparative five minutes. Natural selection takes time, and there hasn’t been much with humans. It’s observable in the animal kingdom, but even a short 25 year life-span is a lot longer than most of the animals get, eons longer than cells and bacteria do, so the entire process is much slower in us. Keep your eyes open, that eternal life mutation may be along any day.
It would be enormously complicated, though. You have to keep in mind, other things have been evolving right along with us – and mutating and changing a lot faster than we have. Your body comprises approximately 100 trillion cells – one hundred million million separate units of living matter. The fascinating thing about this is that of those 100 trillion cells, only 10 trillion of them are human. The other 90 trillion are bacteria – with a few other parasites, fungi, and miscellaneous riff-raff thrown in for the hell of it. You are outnumbered – in your own body – 9 to 1 by other species. (It’s a good thing your body is not a democracy, so even though all this stuff may influence your workings in many ways, they don’t have a vote.) But you’re a community – not an individual. And the fact that 90% of you is not you – or any of us – makes the appearance of a single cellular modification – or mutation - that grants eternal life pretty tricky. It would have a lot of other stuff – that itself changes all the time - to fight, so it would need to be a whole string of modifications – or mutations – appearing simultaneously to accomplish the purpose. Not outside the realm of possibility, given the time – but the three or so million years we’ve been around is the blink of an eye. As I said: we’re a young experiment. God, or evolution, or Christopher Hitchens, or whoever – has loaded us up with a lot of passengers to overcome before the bus can be fundamentally changed, which makes it exponentially harder. Probability says, it’ll take longer. Probability also says, could happen this afternoon. Or last Wednesday at 2:17 AM in a hospital in Sheboygan someone who will not die of natural causes was born.
That’s its nature.
I don’t think it’s broad at all. The Left hates Christianity the same way Hitler and Stalin and Mao hated Christianity or any other cultural trend that challenged their power. SO long as the Left exists, they will hate those that can destroy them. Simple human self survival dynamics.
We have evidence – not conclusive, but compelling – that most mutations are deadly, not beneficial, to the organism that carries them. Out of, say, 1000 mutations, how many would be beneficial, resulting in propagation to successor generations, and therefore carrying out the effect of natural selection?
There is an argument bubbling out there that, given the EXPECTED rate of mutations in a species, and the EXPECTED ratio of beneficial mutations compared to unhelpful or deadly mutations, that for natural selection to alone account for evolutionary change, would requre a hundred or a thousand times more time than the fossil record would indicate.
Of course, we’re talking about a model here. Which is why I capitalized the word “EXPECTED”. If a model is garbage – such as the climate science/global warming models are – it’s just garbage in, garbage out. Pure crap.
That argument is not necessarily an argument that evolution is wrong, and that there must be a Creator. Even if it is true, all it means is that our current understanding of how evolution would work is seriously flawed. But scientists, with their usual deep arrogance, insist that this “science” is “settled”. Hello, Al Gore!?! In science, nothing is ever settled…
Don’t know about that, Mike. As far as I can tell the scientists in the field are still referring to it as the “Theory” of Evolution – not the fact thereof. Darwin himself certainly recognized some missing pieces, incomplete thoughts, and dangling participles; and so does pretty much everyone else. Most of the intolerance, I’m afraid, comes from the other direction, which does seem to regard the matter as settled. Question it, and you get to be guilty of intellectual dishonesty, unclear thinking, and are perhaps even some species of Christian hater, or something.
@ JJ
A lot of people think that mutations occur because they are useful. So for example they think a giraffe developed a long neck, because it was useful to eat the leaves of the trees. Sorry, but…WRONG. That is not the theory of evolution. Look it up if you don’t believe me. The theory of evolution is: random mutation -> natural selection -> mutation is passed to the entire species. And if you think about that with intellectual honesty (to return on topic), it’s a total bunch of crap. There are no other words to describe it.
@ Mike
I agree, the conclusion is that there’s a lot that we don’t know about evolution. And because the evolution theory is flawed, that doesn’t prove that a Creator must exist. However then I fall back on the watchmaker argument: when you see something complex like a watch, you autmatically assume that there must be a watchmaker. So if you see something complex like life, it is logical to assume that there must be a lifemaker (aka Creator)
@ JJ
I’m the one who used the words “intellectual dishonesty etc”, and a logical thinker like you wouldn’t make the mistake to declare the remarks of one person (me) to be representative of an entire ‘direction’ now would you 
Are you talking about me?
Mark – I don’t care what a lot of people think – mutations occur because they occur, and they’re neutral, in the sense that as many useless as useful ones happen. If useful, they’re kept. Experiments with fruit flies and moths have demonstrated this. Complexity is the test? Parthenocarpy is complex. Snowflakes are complex. Passementerie is complex. Photo-genesis is complex. Spiderwebs are complex. If it were logical to assume that everything in nature that sports complexity drives the assumption that there must be a creator, then everybody would assume it.
”Representative?” Sure. The only one? Nope. The most well known one? Nope. The one who carries the most weight? Nope. But representative, nonetheless. Surely you don’t think you originated those remarks.
@ JJ
:):)
Hehe everybody in the history of mankind HAS assumed it… only since the dawn of the Christianity hating, science worshipping, and science perverting Left, the crusade to destroy God has started. But if you look at the entire history of mankind, these atheists are only a small fringe of all humans that have ever lived. And this small fringe is only getting smaller, since they don’t create enough offspring to keep the population constant. Give it a few hundred years or so, and the fringe atheists will be completely gone! Simple a matter of natural selection
Did I originate those remarks? Yep. Unlike others, I’m a person of intellectual honesty