Christopher Hitchens is dead at 62.

Christopher Hitchens died yesterday of pneumonia due to esophageal cancer. (New York Times link.)

His last published article — an extended refutation of the adage, "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger" — conveys the agony he was in at the time:

I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

Last year, he wrote:

In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? … To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

He wrote about death and the afterlife in his memoir from last year, Hitch-22 (at 337, taken from The Quotable Hitchens, at 85):

I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on — only henceforth in my absence. … Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave.

He wrote this about George Orwell (in Why Orwell Matters, at 211, taken from The Quotable Hitchens, at 210-211):

[W]hat he illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that "views" do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.

 


(Photo by meesh via Wikimedia Commons.)

Steve Jobs on life and death

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO of Apple.

An atheist finds "comfort" in thinking of death.

I largely agree with this long, thoughtful blog post about death by Greta Christina. Like her, I find the claim that religion provides "comfort" to be quite perplexing in the context of the afterlife.

Knowing that there is no afterlife would provide more comfort to me than knowing that you'll go either to heaven or to hell in the afterlife, even if I thought I'd have a much greater chance of going to heaven than to hell. As a thought-experiment, let's put aside the afterlife for a second and imagine there's a magical coin that you may choose to flip. If you flip it and it comes up heads, you'll experience a wonderfully blissful sensation beyond anything you've ever experienced for, say, one minute. If you flip it and it comes up tails, you'll experience horrible torture worse than anything you've ever experienced, also for a minute. Or, you're free not to flip the coin at all and go on with your normal life. Would you flip the coin?

Not only would I not flip the coin, but this decision seems so obvious that I find it hard to imagine anyone saying they would do it. But let's change the hypothetical so it's far more skewed in favor of flipping it. Or, rather, let's say it's not a coin but a well-shuffled deck of cards. If you draw a two of clubs, you get the torture, but if you draw any of the other 51 cards, you get the pleasure. So there's only about a 2% chance of the bad outcome. And we could skew the hypo even further by imagining that if you get the pleasure, it lasts for a whole hour; the torture is still just one minute. Even with all these stipulations, I would still readily choose not to take this gamble. That's how bad the possibility of torture is.

That's why I couldn't find comfort in any worldview in which hell — which presumably involves torture — is a possibility. The idea that hell would be eternal obviously intensifies this feeling. In fact, even if I know that the afterlife could be heaven or hell but were assured that I would get to heaven, I still couldn't feel good about this knowing that other people would go to hell. In fact, my feeling about this would be the opposite of comfort.


ADDED: After I posted this, I saw that Greta Christina has a whole other blog post on that last point, including a response from the Christian theologian William Lane Craig. Sample point from Craig:

[I]t is possible that God removes from the minds of the redeemed any knowledge of the damned. It seems to me that so doing is merciful and involves no wrong-doing on God's part.

Unsurprisingly, Greta Christina isn't convinced — she can't get past the question:

How can it be Heaven if our families aren't there?

Why do non-religious people care about their dead loved family members?

Joshua Knobe and Jesse Bering mull over our self-contradictions:



This is at least tangentially related to my post on the afterlife. I don't know if that post contains the answer. Do we really just care about the people who are still alive?

"Ask me why you deserve Hell"

An intense debate over Christian ethics on an American campus.

Reported and participated in by my girlfriend.

(Continued here.)

Who cares about blasphemy? Who'd want immortality?

I don't read novels anymore now that I'm not required to for school. So I'm grateful when people who do read them excerpt some of the good parts. Example:

She had always found a paradox in the crime of blasphemy, for it seemed to her that any God who could be discountenanced by the words of human beings was by definition not worthy of reverence.

That's from Michal Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, quoted by LemmusLemmus on his blog, The Church of Rationality. He gives the obvious solution:

[A]nti-blasphemy rules were not made by and for gods, but by and for believers.

Once you decide that it's OK to rationally scrutinize religion, the flaws become so obvious that, whether or not you're a believer, it feels a little embarrassing.

Another one:

Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

That's from Susan Ertz's Anger in the Sky, excerpted in the Yale Book of Quotations, via AskMetafilter.

Here's what I don't understand about how Heaven fits in with Christianity: I thought Christians justify the existence of evil in the world by saying you need free will to allow for goodness, and free will leads to evil human behavior. If Heaven is free of evil, doesn't that also mean people in Heaven aren't free, and doesn't that mean Heaven isn't very good?

Make yourself comfortable

If I'm completely comfortable saying, as I said the other day, that I didn't exist during the Carter administration, why shouldn't I also be comfortable saying that I also won't exist during the future _______ administration -- probably by 2080, and surely by 2100?

I don't understand the desire to have some kind of religious faith in order to comfort yourself about death, which seems to be one of the main motivations for believing in a religion. Maybe there's an afterlife -- I don't dismiss the possibility. But I don't see a very good reason for affirmatively believing in it.

Any belief of mine always has a hidden asterisk at the end, with a footnote that says: "This is what seems to be true ... but, of course, I might be wrong." You may not know anything with 100% certainty, but you can get pretty close. You just have to accept the residual uncertainty in order to get through life, so that you're not paralyzed by doubt.

Yes, there might be an afterlife, which would involve a soul that somehow survives the death of the body. But that doesn't match up very well with what we can observe in our lives. So, I'm going to go ahead and just assume it doesn't happen -- not because I'm 100% certain, but just for the sake of having some basic default beliefs about how the world works. The fact that I might be wrong about this is fine with me.

So I think the correct way to refer to dead people -- more so than how we're used to referring to them -- is that they don't exist. They haven't "passed on" to some new place, and they haven't transformed into some sort of different creature.

This is not at all to disparage the fact that we need to take various steps to remember them. But this is for our benefit, not theirs. Because we're the only ones who still exist.

If my family members or your family members were in heaven, doing whatever it is that people do there (singing? pontificating? carousing?), then there'd be little reason to be sad about their deaths. In fact, death would be something to be welcomed and sought after. (Of course, I know that religions get around this by having rules against homicide and suicide. Whether that's coherent is another question.) But in fact, there is very little chance -- I would say no more than 1% -- that these people are in heaven (or hell or purgatory). They're definitely on our family trees and in our memories; they're not very likely to be going on weird adventures in mystical alternate realities.

This is a lot more consistent with the fact that we mourn the deaths of our loved ones: (1) they are no longer in existence to enjoy life, and (2) we no longer get to be around them. Those are the basic facts, the inevitable starting point for both feeling bad about death but also getting over it. You don't need some extra layer of "facts" superimposed on what we can plainly see to be the case. I find the straightforward, reality-based, secular view to provide a lot more comfort and closure than the "Gee, I hope they went to heaven instead of hell" view.

I know this is supposed to be too upsetting; we're supposed to need to be comforted by something more dignified than the plain, observable facts. But I think this is a paradox in religion: you're told you need religion to comfort you, but before you can get to that point, you need to buy into an elaborate story about all the scary, horrible things in the world: sin, hell, etc. I prefer to skip all that drama and just approach whatever specific problem in my life happens to be facing me at the time. Life is hard enough when you're just dealing with the real problems. To those who offer a whole other set of made-up problems, I say: thanks, but I'll pass.



(Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris - photo by me. We Will Become Silhouettes - video by The Postal Service.)