I'm therefore dedicating my post this week on Christopher Hitchens, a short biography, videos, achievements, and quotes. He was an amazing man, I am who I am in part because of him, among others, and it's the least I could to to honor his memory. I don't usually get very sentimental about people's passing, but I feel very passionate about this.
Firstly I'm going to post a news article featuring his death earlier today, the complete article can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16212418
"British author, literary critic and journalist Christopher Hitchens has died, aged 62, according to Vanity Fair magazine.
He died from pneumonia, a complication of the oesophageal cancer he was suffering from, at a Texas hospital.
Vanity Fair said there would "never be another like Christopher".
He is survived by his wife, Carol Blue, and their daughter, Antonia, and his children from a previous marriage, Alexander and Sophia.
Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter described the writer as someone "of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar. Those who read him felt they knew him, and those who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls."
Mr Hitchens was born in Portsmouth in 1949 and graduated from Oxford in 1970. He began his career as a journalist in Britain in the 1970s and later moved to New York, becoming contributing editor to Vanity Fair in November 1992.
He was diagnosed with cancer in June 2010, and had documented his declining health in his Vanity Fair column.
In an August 2010 essay for the magazine he wrote: "I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient."
Speaking on the BBC's Newsnight programme, in November that year, he reflected on a life that he knew would be cut short: "It does concentrate the mind, of course, to realise that your life is more rationed than you thought it was."
He wrote for numerous publications including The Times Literary Supplement, the Daily Express, the London Evening Standard, Newsday and The Atlantic.
He was the author of 17 books, including The Trial of Henry Kissinger, God is not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything, and a memoir, Hitch-22. A collection of his essays, Arguably, was released this year.
Radicalised by the 1960s, Hitchens was often arrested at political rallies and was kicked out of the Labour Party over his opposition to the Vietnam War.
He became a correspondent for International Socialism magazine."Now for some quick cut and paste information on him from wikipedia, before getting on to the more relevant information, that being his lifetime work and achievements. You can find more information, and where I got the information below, by following this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens .
"Christopher Eric Hitchens (April 13, 1949 – December 15, 2011) was an Anglo-American author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career spanned more than four decades. He had been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in September 2008. He was a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits and in 2005 was voted the world's fifth top public intellectual in a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll.
Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson and for his excoriating critiques of, among others, Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Henry Kissinger. His confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure. As a political observer, polemicist and self-defined radical, he rose to prominence as a fixture of the left-wing publications in his native Britain and in the United States. His departure from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwā calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie. The 11 September 2001 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind."
Identified as a champion of the "New Atheism" movement, Hitchens described himself as an antitheist and a believer in the philosophical values of the Enlightenment. Hitchens said that a person "could be an atheist and wish that belief in god were correct," but that "an antitheist, a term I'm trying to get into circulation, is someone who is relieved that there's no evidence for such an assertion." He argued that the concept of god or a supreme being is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom, and that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilization. He wrote at length on atheism and the nature of religion in his 2007 book God Is Not Great.
Hitchens on Religion:
Hitchens often spoke out against the Abrahamic religions, or what he called "the three great monotheisms" (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). He said: "The real axis of evil is Christianity, Judaism, and Islam". In his book, God Is Not Great, Hitchens expanded his criticism to include all religions, including those rarely criticized by Western secularists such as Hinduism and neo-paganism. His book had mixed reactions, from praise in The New York Times for his "logical flourishes and conundrums"\ to accusations of "intellectual and moral shabbiness" in The Financial Times.\ God Is Not Great was nominated for a National Book Award on 10 October 2007.\
Hitchens contended that organized religion is "the main source of hatred in the world, [v]iolent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children", and that accordingly it "ought to have a great deal on its conscience". In God Is Not Great, Hitchens contends that:
above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man and woman [referencing Alexander Pope]. This Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person. The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by electronic means, will revolutionize our concepts of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first time in our history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone.His book made him one of the four major advocates of the "new atheism", and an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society. Hitchens said he would accept an invitation from any religious leader who wished to debate with him. He also served on the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America, a lobbying group for atheists and humanists in Washington, DC. In 2007, Hitchens began a series of written debates on the question "Is Christianity Good for the World?" with Christian theologian and pastor, Douglas Wilson, published in Christianity Today magazine. This exchange eventually became a book by the same title in 2008. During their book tour to promote the book, film producer Darren Doane sent a film crew to accompany them. Doane produced the film Collision: "Is Christianity GOOD for the World?" which was released on 27 October 2009.
On 26 November 2010 Hitchens appeared in Toronto, Canada at the Munk Debates, where he debated religion with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a Roman Catholic convert. Blair argued religion is a force for good, while Hitchens was against it. Preliminary results on the Munk website said 56 per cent of the votes backed the proposition (Hitchens' position) before hearing the debate, with 22 per cent against (Blair's position), and 21 per cent undecided, with the undecided voters leaning toward Hitchens, giving him a 68 per cent to 32 per cent victory over Blair, after the debate.
In February 2006, Hitchens helped organize a pro-Denmark rally outside the Danish Embassy in Washington, DC in response to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy.
Hitchens was accused by William A. Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Liberties of being particularly anti-Catholic. Hitchens responded, "when religion is attacked in this country [...] the Catholic Church comes in for a little more than its fair share". Hitchens has also been accused of anti-Catholic bigotry by others, including Brent Bozell, Tom Piatak in The American Conservative, and UCLA Law Professor Stephen Bainbridge. In an interview with Radar in 2007, Hitchens said that if the Christian right's agenda were implemented in the United States "It wouldn't last very long and would, I hope, lead to civil war, which they will lose, but for which it would be a great pleasure to take part." When Joe Scarborough on 12 March 2004 asked Hitchens whether he was "consumed with hatred for conservative Catholics", Hitchens responded that he was not and that he just thinks that "all religious belief is sinister and infantile". Piatak claimed that "A straightforward description of all Hitchens’s anti-Catholic outbursts would fill every page in this magazine", noting particularly Hitchens' assertion that U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts should not be confirmed because of his faith.
Hitchens was raised nominally Christian, and went to Christian boarding schools but from an early age declined to participate in communal prayers. Later in life, Hitchens discovered that he was of partially Jewish ancestry. According to Hitchens, when his brother Peter took his fiancée to meet their maternal grandmother, Dodo, who was then in her 90s, Dodo said, "She's Jewish, isn't she?" and then announced: "Well, I've got something to tell you. So are you." She said that her real surname was Levin, not Lynn, and that some of her ancestors had the family name Blumenthal, and were from Poland.His great-great-grandfather was Nathan Blumenthal of Kempen, Prussia, who emigrated to Leicester. In Hitch-22, Hitchens detailed his Jewish ancestry: his matrilineal great-great-grandmother had converted to Judaism before marrying Nathan Blumenthal. According to Hitchens, in 1893, his maternal grandmother's parents were married in England "according to the rites of the German and Polish Jews. My mother’s mother, whose birth name was Dorothy Levin, was born three years later, in 1896." Hitchens' maternal grandfather converted to Judaism before marrying Dorothy Levin.
In an article in the The Guardian on 14 April 2002, Hitchens stated that he could be considered Jewish because Jewish descent is matrilineal.
In February 2010 he was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers."
He appeared in many television shows since 1984, speaking on his views and opinions about politics, religion, domestic policy, wars, and his work as a journalist. Some TV appearances include (but are not limited to): Frontiers, Everything You Need To Know, Tracking Down Maggie: The Unofficial Biography of Margaret Thatcher, Princess Diana: The Mourning After, Dennis Miller Live (4 episodes), The Trials of Henry Kissinger, Real Time with Bill Maher (6 episodes), Mel Gibson: God's Lethal Weapon, Newsnight (3 episodes), The Daily Show (4 episodes), Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, The Al Franken Show, Confronting Iraq: Conflict and Hope, Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, Hardball with Chris Matthews (3 episodes), American Zeitgeist, Blog Wars, Manufacturing Dissent, Question Time, Discussions with Richard Dawkins: Episode 1: "The Four Horsemen", Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Collision: "Is Christianity GOOD for the World?", and Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune.
He's published 17 separate books, however he's also co-written, co-edited, and assisted in prefaces, introductions, and forwards for dozens of other books. The list is as follows, and you can find more information on them by following this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliography_of_Christopher_Hitchens
Sole author
1984 Cyprus. Quartet. Revised editions as Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger, 1989 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and 1997 (Verso).
1987 Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles. Chatto and Windus (UK)/Hill and Wang (US, 1988) / 1997 UK Verso edition as The Elgin Marbles: Should They Be Returned to Greece? (with essays by Robert Browning and Graham Binns). Reissued and updated 2008 as The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification, Verso.
1988 Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports. Hill and Wang (US)/Chatto and Windus (UK).
1990 The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favorite Fetish. Chatto & Windus, 1990.
1990 Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Reissued 2004, with a new introduction, as Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship, Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-592-7)
1993 For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports. Verso, ISBN 0-86-091435-6
1995 The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Verso.
1999 No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton. Verso. Reissued as No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family in 2000.
2000 Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere. Verso
2001 The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Verso.
2001 Letters to a Young Contrarian. Basic Books.
2002 Why Orwell Matters, Basic Books (US)/UK edition as Orwell's Victory, Allen Lane/The Penguin Press.
2003 A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq. Plume Books. Originally released as Regime Change (Penguin).
2004 Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays. Thunder's Mouth, Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-580-3
2005 Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. Eminent Lives/Atlas Books/HarperCollins Publishers, ISBN 0-06-059896-4
2006 Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography. Books That Shook the World/Atlantic Books, ISBN 1-84354-513-6
2007 God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA/Warner Books, ISBN 0446579807 / Published in the UK as God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion. Atlantic Books, ISBN 978-1-84354-586-6
2010 Hitch-22 Some Confessions and Contradictions: A Memoir . Hachette Book Group. ISBN 9780446540339 (published by Allen and Unwin in Australia in May 2010 with the shorter title: Hitch-22. A Memoir.) ISBN 978-1-74175-962-4
2011 Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens. Twelve. UK edition as Arguably: Selected Prose. Atlantic.
Sole editor
2007 The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer. Perseus Publishing. ISBN 9780306816086
Co-author or co-editor
1976 Callaghan, The Road to Number Ten (with Peter Kellner). Cassell, ISBN 0-304-29768-2
1988 Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (contributor; co-editor with Edward Said). Verso, ISBN 0-86091-887-4. Reissued, 2001.
1994 When Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds (with Ed Kashi). Pantheon Books.
1994 International Territory: The United Nations, 1945-1995 (with Adam Bartos). Verso.
2002 Left Hooks, Right Crosses: A Decade of Political Writing (co-editor, with Christopher Caldwell).
2008 Is Christianity Good for the World? – A Debate (co-author, with Douglas Wilson). Canon Press, ISBN 1-59128-053-2.
2008 Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq and the Left (co-author, with other contributions edited by Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman). New York University Press.
2010 The Best American Essays 2010 (co-editor with Robert Atwan). Mariner Books.
2011 Hitchens vs. Blair: Be it Resolved, Religion is a Force of Good in the World (co-author with Tony Blair). House of Anansi Press.
Contributor
2000 Vanity Fair's Hollywood, Graydon Carter and David Friend (editors). Viking Studio.
2005 A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, Thomas Cushman (editor). University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-24555-5
2008. Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq and the Left (co-edited by Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman). New York University Press.
2011 The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism, Windsor Mann (editor). Da Capo Press.
Book introductions, forewords and prefacesHitchens became famous for his scathing critiques of public figures. Three figures — Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and Mother Teresa — were the targets of three separate full length texts, No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, and The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Hitchens also wrote book-length biographical essays about Thomas Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson: Author of America), George Orwell (Why Orwell Matters), and Thomas Paine (Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography).
1997 In Our Time: The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion, Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel (Authors). Foreword to Paperback Edition. Monthly Review Press.
1999 A Handbook on Hanging, Charles Duff (Author). Introduction. New York Review of Books.
2000 Scoop, Evelyn Waugh (Author). Introduction. Penguin Classics Edition.
2000 Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995, Joe Sacco (Author). Foreword. Fantagraphics Books.
2000 1968: War & Democracy, Eugene J. McCarthy (Author). Foreword. Lone Oak Press.
2000 Vanity Fair's Hollywood, Graydon Carter and David Friend (Editors). Introduction. Viking Studio.
2001 Kosovo: Background to a War, Stephen Schwartz (Author). Foreword. Anthem Press.
2001 The Mating Season, P. G. Wodehouse (Author). Introduction. Penguin Classics Edition.
2001 Orwell in Spain, George Orwell (Author), Peter Davison (Editor). Introduction. Penguin Classics Edition
2002 Machinery of Death: The Reality of America's Death Penalty Regime, David R. Dow and Mark Dow (Editors). Foreword. Routledge.
2002 From Russia, With Love, Dr. No, and Goldfinger, Ian Fleming (Author). Introduction. Penguin Classics Edition.
2003 Animal Farm and 1984, George Orwell (Author). Introduction. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
2003 The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow (Author). Introduction. Penguin Group.
2004 Orient Express, Graham Greene (Author). Introduction. Penguin Classics Edition.
2004 Hons and Rebels, Jessica Mitford (Author). Introduction. New York Review of Books.
2004 Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (Author). Foreword. HarperCollins.
2005 House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende (Author). Introduction. Everyman's Library.
2007 Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene (Author). Introduction. Penguin Classics Edition.
2007 Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia, Rebecca West (Author). Introduction. Penguin Classics Edition.
2008 Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, Kingsley Amis (Author). Introduction. Bloomsbury USA.
2008 God: The Failed Hypothesis- How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist, Victor J. Stenger (Author). Foreword to Paperback Edition. New York: Prometheus Books.
2008 Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Author). Introduction to Paperback Edition. Simon and Schuster.
2009 First in Peace: How George Washington Set the Course for America, Conor Cruise O'Brien (Author). Introduction. Da Capo Press.
2009 Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews with Hunter S. Thompson, Anita Thompson (Editor). Introduction to Paperback Edition. Da Capo Press.
2009 Certitude: A Profusely Illustrated Guide to Blockheads and Bullheads, Past and Present, Adam Begley (Author), Edward Sorel (Illustrator). Introduction. Crown Archetype.
2010 Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft, H.P. Lovecraft (Author), S. T. Joshi (Editor). Foreword. Sporting Gentlemen.
2010 Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud (Author). Introduction. Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
2012 Diaries, George Orwell (Author). Introduction. Liverlight.
However, the majority of Hitchens's critiques took the form of short opinion pieces, some of the more notable being his critiques of: Jerry Falwell, George Galloway, Mel Gibson, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, Michael Moore, Daniel Pipes, Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms, and Cindy Sheehan.
Some people, most notably Religionists, speculated that Hitchens may have ended up having a sort of "Death Bed Conversion" like Charles Darwin was (falsely) claimed to have had. In order to fight off the rumors that this may occur, Hitchens made a very clear statement during one interview shortly before his death. You can watch it here:
Some of his best works can be found in his book God Is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything, which can be found in my own personal library collection. He has, however, produced many other solitary quotes, more specifically on religion and (a)theism, such as:
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
"A true believer... must also claim to have at least an inkling of what that Supreme Being desires. I have been called arrogant in my time... but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator — that’s beyond my conceit."
"Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated."
"Why, if God was the creator of all things, were we supposed to "praise" him for what came naturally?"
"If Jesus could heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blindness?"
"Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did."
"The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be protracted."
"Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it."
"Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins and astrology ends, and astronomy begins."
"Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer."
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