People So Irrationally and Determinedly Stupid, It Makes You Want to “Pray” for Them — Mary Elizabeth Williams’ Appropriately Acid Rebuke to the Know-It-All Religionists who Blazened, “I Told You So,” across the Heavens at News of Atheist Christopher Hitchens’ Death

© 2011 Peter Free

 

17 December 2011

 

 

Wise spirituality, it seems to me, should incorporate a healthy dose of humility — after all, that’s essentially what Wonder is about

 

Nevertheless, we repeatedly have to suffer the conceited and spiritually irrational certitudes vomited by brain-dead evangelical fools from all faiths.

 

Thankfully, yesterday, Christian-believer Mary Elizabeth Williams printed a scathing paragraph about her less humble Christian brethren’s, “I told you so” rants.  The occasion was atheist essayist Christopher Hitchens’ death:

 

Within hours of the news of Hitchens’s passing at the age of 62, the Internet was hotter than an inner circle of hell with the God squad thundering its own version of vindication.

 

Along with plenty of hope that he “made his peace with God,” there was blowhard-for-Jesus Rick Warren tweeting that “My friend Christopher Hitchens has died. I loved & prayed for him constantly & grieve his loss. He knows the Truth now,” while creepy creationist Ray Comfort declared that the now dead “Christopher Hitchens is no longer an atheist.”

 

LifeWay’s Ed Stetzer, meanwhile, blogged that “When Christopher Hitchens died, he entered into eternity as every man does: as a beggar at the gates of the kingdom,” and Southern Baptist Seminary president Albert Mohler tweeted that “The death tonight of Christopher Hitchens is an excruciating reminder of the consequences of unbelief. We can only pray others will believe.”

 

I’m not a brilliant debater like Hitchens, but let me field this one. Death is not a consequence of disbelief. It’s a consequence of living, you moron.

 

© 2011 Mary Elizabeth Williams, God didn’t kill Christopher Hitchens, Salon (16 December 2011)

 

 

Williams’ phrase, “you moron,” is not just an off-the-cuff insult — it’s an accurate summation of these fools’ inability to reason, even in the spiritual realm

 

Williams stated the rationally obvious:

 

We know with certainty that Christopher Hitchens’ body is today dead. Beyond that, nobody — neither believer nor atheist — can say with total certainty if there’s more to this life than this life, or what that might entail.

 

© 2011 Mary Elizabeth Williams, God didn’t kill Christopher Hitchens, Salon (16 December 2011)

 

Anyone who disagrees simply does not see the constraints that our human physicality, and the perceptually limited “Reality” that it is stuck in, has on our ability to provably know very much.

 

 

The moral? — Faith is not certainty — if it were, we would not need it

 

That should be obvious.  Whether in the physical world or the spiritual one.

 

As for Mr. Hitchens, I am sad to see him go.  His was a brilliantly wondrous mind, even when (and perhaps because) I so often thought he might be overstating, occasionally compassionless, and sometimes even mistaken.

 

If we cannot treasure each other’s gifts of being, we are in an emotionally sad predicament.  Whether in this life, or in the so often presumed next one.