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Christopher Hitchens: Somebody

Christopher Hitchens died, as we used to say, "without benefit of clergy".  Cancer does not care whether there be clergy.  Mr. Hitchins did care.  He preferred not.  Decidedly not.  


Like many of us, Mr. Hitchens did not find any evidence for God.  Unlike most of us, Mr. Hitchens articulated that opinion with eloquence and zeal.  


I do not know how Christopher Hitchens preferred to describe himself, but the news media are littered with terms like, "atheist", "non-believer", and "non-religious".  He is a "non".  They might just as well say that he was a non-Catholic, or a non-Buddhist, or a non-Seventh Day Adventist.  It is a way of description that assumes that to be a real something, or a real somebody, you have to be a Catholic, or a Buddhist, or a Seventh Day Adventist.  If you aren't one of those (or a Lutheran or a Baptist or a Cargo Cultist), you have no real identity:  you are "non".  


Personally, I am not an atheist:  an atheist is someone whose identity is described as an opposition to the notion that God is a person.  Similarly, if you are amoral, you are not moral, or without morals.  I am not sure that is very easily done.  I am not a religious believer, but neither is my identity to be defined as being in opposition to something.  I am for things!  For knowing as much as we can.  For being rational.  For using our brains.  For learning how things really work.  For finding a cure for the kind of cancer that killed Christopher Hitchens.  For being a good and decent and kind person.  


It is almost impossible to defend the notion that religious people have better morals than people who find the existence of gods to be leftover myths.  Some religious people are wonderful people and some are awful, in just the same way that most human beings are.  It is often asserted, without convincing contradiction, that our most horrible wars have been for the sake of religious convictions.  And some have been started by savage psychopaths.  The wars look pretty much the same, and have the same results.  


I have already lived eighteen more years than Christopher Hitchens did, and I can only envy how much he accomplished in his sixty-two years.  He was not a model human being.  "Irracible" might be too mild a description of him.  He left a very large mark.  He was not an a-anything; a non-anything.  He was really something!  Really somebody!  

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