On long drives I could listen to christian radio for hours. Rhetoric and bombast. Brimstone and hellfire with commercial breaks. My kind of crazy. Grown men with deep, smooth voices with soothing music, quoting scripture.
Sunday mornings, after the Coronation Street omnibus, I'll spend some time flipping through faith-based television. Incredible production values, massive venues, slick hosts, white teeth. The snake-handlers still occupy the local stations in poorer areas (I loves me a good forehead slap to cure spinal injury), but the Joel Osteens (net worth 40 million) and the Joyce Meyers (8 million) cater to the moderate christians with no real affiliation or pointy-hatted leader. Lots of sweaters, nods, laughter, as the non-demoninational self-appointed preacher sympathizes with the plights of the everyman. Thirty-five dollars for a ticket to get you sooth-sayed.
These days dating sites like Christian Mingle tout that you can "Find God's match for you". No longer will you need to go to church to meet your mate. For about twenty dollars a month you sign up for god-sanctioned booty-calls from nice christian girls.
The BBC reported last week that the Pope condones the smacking of children by parents - if dignity is maintained. Regarding the never-ending sex abuse scandal, the robed leader of the self-eunuched brotherhood decrees in the same breath that it was "hard to believe" that men of the church would commit such atrocities to children. An old virgin draws lines on abuse? Cute. The "moderate" pontiff throwing a few hail-marys to see if they'll stick with the cool-kids.
The moderates are enjoying a break from criticism right now. Extremism, particularly of the islamic persuasion has left most of middle-earth exempt from deconstruction.
I wish I had one one-hundredth of the capacity of Christopher Hitchens. I joined the party far too late. I am still catching up, stamping my slushy boots clean of the effects of a childhood of catholic dogma.
YouTube is replete with religious debates featuring inept, ill-equipped believers pitted against Mr. Hitchens. It is usually ends in a bloodbath, with our atheist-anti-hero holding the scalpel. He was never left speechless. No um, uhs, or non-lexical filler to formulate a counter-attack. Calm, exacting precision in every point he made.
The crown king of atheism passed away in December of 2011. His epitaphal book "Mortality", maintained his every position to the very end. His accounts of dealing with esophageal cancer are harrowing. I have poured over all of his published works, sift through his many contributions to Vanity Fair, and through youtube I stream his debates in my home-office, pretending to be productive.
To this day he remains unrivalled by anyone who could challenge his logic with the same temperate manner and massive vocabulary. By the time Hitchens had finished his soliloquy of reason before a hall of christians (usually peppered with atheist sympathizers and hitch-sycophants), if not turned godless, all would be charmed. His penchant for alcohol may have aided him pre-debate, but I imagine his addiction to cigarettes may have driven him to finish an opponent all the sooner so to be out the door for another puff.
One would be hard-pressed to say he represented the left, whose atypical modus operandi is to challenge the right-winged 'nutter' of the god-fearing persuasion. Liberals on the whole would scoff at some of his ideas. It's easy to love Hitchens if you come from academia, live in a gentrified neighbourhood, drive a Prius and believe you're well-read, but you'd be hard-pressed to embrace everything he had to say.
Hitchens (net worth 2 million), could be of some use right now. He was not a part of any team. He was not a scientist, though he was often grouped together with reasonists like Dawkins and DeGrasse Tyson. Today, there are a few who are able to speak or freely without incurring a fatwa, or worse to be made a pariah on state-media for thought-crimes. Not even his rat-pack of the atheist roundtable can really make the stark unapologetic claims he could. "Religion", he believed "poisons everything". Hitchens spoke out on his own, pandering to nothing. Roguish might have been an apt description for him, if he had not already devised every escape route from every burning house he entered.
As far back as 2005, Christopher Hitchens predicted many of the headlines of the past six months. Sadly, he is not here for an i-told-you-so, nor to debate, to dissect opinions from the left and right.
The recent demise of Ottawa's Sun News Network this week has left many a western apologist/bleeder cheering. Their uber-conservative type of journalism was tiresome but entertaining. I half expected explosions, dancing girls or slide-whistle during an Ezra Levant-rant. Levant attacked the people liberal Canadians hold dear. Thanks to the SNN, I learned things about David Suzuki I didn't want to know. I discovered there are actual jihadists living in my country. The Sun had the gumption to invite talented liberal critics onto their show too, like the ever-irritating Warren Kinsella. Kinsella delivered a level-headed eulogy to the death of the right-winged charlatans today that was surprising and refreshing. Kinsella stated that when journalism disappears "democracy will diminish". Amen. He does not shit where he eats. Leftist mouthpieces need conservative media and vice-versa.
If you piss in your pants, it's only warm but for a moment.
All points of view are to be heard, debated, no matter how crazy. Above all, we're in need of someone who can debate them all. And they must enjoy cocktails.
But there hasn't been one since 2011.
If you'll excuse me, I'm in the middle of a another Hitch Youtube marathon.
I'm pretty sure I know how it ends.
