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"So, with all due respect, I hope he is wrong in his beliefs about the after life because if there is a heaven he's surely earned his place in it." "all due re

"So, with all due respect, I hope he is wrong in his beliefs about the after life because if there is a heaven he's surely earned his place in it." "all due respect" cannot change the fact that this is the most disrespectful thing you can write at the death of an atheist.

SamReidHughes 15y ago
No it's not. Why wouldn't an atheist want an afterlife?
- jpulgarin 15y ago
  Christopher has stated multiple times that he finds the Christian idea of heaven unappealing. Furthermore, if the Christian heaven does exist (which in turn implies that Christian doctrine is true), Christopher is most certainly in hell.
  - tspiteri 15y ago
    > Furthermore, if the Christian heaven does exist (which in turn implies that Christian doctrine is true), Christopher is most certainly in hell. If the Christian heaven does exist, it does not imply that all Christian doctrine is true, only that some is true. And there is a lot of contradictory Christian doctrine. By that, I am not saying that Christian doctrine is self-contradictory, I am only pointing out that several different Christian denominations have doctrines that contradict each other. According to some denominations, Hitchens would indeed be in hell, and according to others, he would be in heaven.
    - jpulgarin 15y ago
      Instead of "which in turn" I should have said, "and further assuming", sorry about that. I am almost certain that there are some Christian denominations under which Christopher is now believed to be in heaven, although they are in the minority, and not in the mainstream of Christianity that Hitchens usually debated against. Can you name me two Christian denominations according to whom Christopher is now in heaven?
      - tspiteri 15y ago
        I do not know much about different Christian denominations, but I do come from a Catholic background myself, and I guess Catholicism does qualify as mainstream. I think that according to current Catholic doctrine, if someone does his best to find out the truth, and lives according to what he sincerely believes, he goes to heaven, even if he's wrong in the end. And I think Hitchens qualifies for those qualities (to be clear: I am referring to his doing his best to find out the truth and living according to it, not to being wrong in the end).
        jpulgarin 15y ago
        In Catholic doctrine one who commits a mortal sin without repenting is bound to hell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_sin#Roman_Catholicism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_sin#Roman_Catholicism If you look at the three conditions that a sin must meet to be considered a mortal sin, I think there is a very high probability that writing a book titled God Is Not Great is a mortal sin. There are hundreds of things that Christopher did which very likely meet those conditions, and there is also a high probability that he has not repented about them before death. According to Catholicism people do not get into heaven by living according to what they sincerely believe, and many, many, Catholic scholars would say that Christopher is bound for hell.
        tspiteri 15y ago
        The three conditions for a mortal sin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_sin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_sin 1. Its subject must be a grave (or serious) matter. 2. It must be committed with full knowledge, both of the sin and of the gravity of the offense (no one is considered ignorant of the principles of the moral law, which are inborn as part of human knowledge, but these principles can be misunderstood in a particular context). 3. It must be committed with deliberate and complete consent, enough for it to have been a personal decision to commit the sin. The question is about point 2. While Hitchens knew that it would be morally unacceptable according to Catholic doctrine, he considered writing the book as the right thing to do according to his own moral standard, so he would not be doing something he considered as a gravely wrong thing to do. Similarly for other people who live according to what they sincerely believe: they are not committing actions with full knowledge that the actions are the wrong thing to do. It does leave room for interpretation, and can be argued both ways, but I do not wish to be drawn further into a religious discussion.
  - masklinn 15y ago
    > Furthermore, if the Christian heaven does exist (which in turn implies that Christian doctrine is true), Christopher is most certainly in hell. It's much more complex than that as there is no single "Christian doctrine" (each christian sect has its own doctrine, including concepts of hell, and these doctrines evolve over time). Some christian sects promise hell to all non-convers (and sinners), while others consider only acts and make devotion irrelevant to entry in heavens. I'm not going to make judgement calls on the hitch or these doctrines, but "Christian doctrine" being true absolutely does not translate into "Christopher is most certainly in hell". Let alone "the Christian heaven" existing (the "Christian" heaven being real) translates into this ("Christian heaven" could be true while everything else is false)
    - oelewapperke 15y ago
      And all of them agree on the fact that running afoul of Christian doctrine is -by itself- not a reason to go to hell. The usual point is that trying to get into heaven without the bible is like driving a car blindfolded : you may very well get there, it's just ... You might want to google "good samaritan". While you're correct that there are variations, they're not that different at all.
  - protomyth 15y ago
    Some of the Christian groups don't believe in hell either - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilationism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilationism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_conditionalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_conditionalism
- michael_dorfman 15y ago
  I can't speak for others, but this atheist doesn't want one.
  - corin_ 15y ago
    I also don't want one, but if someone said "I hope there's a heaven so that he will have gone to it" after I'm dead I wouldn't call that disrespectful in the slightest.
- borispavlovic 15y ago
  Because we don't need it. Our genes are reproduced and they are carrying the best and the worst parts of us and our experience.
  - emil0r 15y ago
    Your children carries your experiences?
    - jarin 15y ago
      If you raise them.
      - emil0r 15y ago
        1) The OP made the claim that our genes carry our experiences onto our children. I've never experienced that and AFAIK it doesn't happen. 2) Raising a child doesn't give the child your experiences either. I have no memory of what my father experienced in his life based on him raising me. AFAIK it doesn't happen to other people either.
  - abdulhaq 15y ago
    I find that a stimulating comment because for me, not one tiny iota of what is good and bad about us comes from our genes. Our genes are the cards we are dealt with when we are born. How good and bad we are is seen in how we respond to that initial start. To say it's our genes that make us good sounds close to the stream of thought that believes in certain races being 'better' than others etc.
- olavk 15y ago
  The christian concept of heaven is not very attractive if you are not a christian. While there are different interpretations, the common is that heaven is an eternal non-physical state of being together with God (the god of the Bible), perhaps even "absorbed" by this god. The god of the Bible is racist, jaloux, blood-thirsty and opposed to critical thinking, and among other things calls for human sacrifice, genocide and killing babies. (Read the Bible if you dont believe me.) Now, if you are christian you might think this is all justified and fair, but for an atheist, an eternity of being together with this being (without any possibility of rebellion or critical thinking) might seem more like a never ending nightmare. Furthermore, it is generally agreed that there is no kind of physical pleasure in the heaven - no sex, no sunshine or rain, no books, no Johnny Walker Black Label. The only pleasure is being together with and eternally worshipping the aforementioned god. Who would in good conscience wish this for Hitchens?
  - swah 15y ago
    Fuck you (you representing anti-christian trolling in general in HN).
  - euroclydon 15y ago
    Has it occurred to you that if God created everything, than the standard by which you're judging heaven might be short sighted? I like to think there might be little racism and infanticide and much discourse on creating universes.
    - redthrowaway 15y ago
      No description of the afterlife given by any of the major religions appeals to me, save perhaps Buddhism from a mystical standpoint. If we want to start conjecturing beyond what anyone says the afterlife is like, then why believe in it at all? Without evidence, the only thing any of the religions claim to have going for them is holy books and priests claiming divine knowledge. If you want to ignore those, then you're just pulling ideas out of thin air. It might be nice to imagine some utopic afterlife for each person, but it has precisely the same relationship with fact as my desire to drop into the worlds of books I read and take part in the story.
- Udo 15y ago
  Atheism is a very broad category. It just means you don't believe in any gods. The people who belong to that category, and their philosophies, are wildly different. You can't draw a lot of conclusions just from knowing someone is an atheist. I'm an atheist myself and I do find the idea of an afterlife extremely compelling. The tragedy here is that I'm also enough of a scientist to know that the odds of there being any kind of afterlife are vastly against us. So there is probably a group of atheists who, like myself, wish for an afterlife but at the same time know that wishing doesn't make it true. The universe doesn't really care whether a couple of carbon-based molecules change their state and it, sadly, doesn't care about the information stored in our brains either.
  - numeromancer 15y ago
    "The tragedy here is that I'm also enough of a scientist to know that the odds of there being any kind of afterlife are vastly against us." You presume, of course, that these things apply to the dead. But when dead, materially, you can reason about nothing because the bases for reason, perception and memory, no longer exist. Seeing yourself as disanimated material after you die is a trick of the mind, and not one that comes naturally, but that is learned in training as a part of survival in your time and place. But in many ways, to yourself, you are unlike anyone else, and in these ways you can conclude nothing about your dead self from your perception and memory of all others that have died. In short, you can conclude nothing about yourself when dead. Even the laws of physics and nature are not a help to determining the nature of your dead self; these are artifacts of perception and memory. I do not claim that we have hope for life after death, whatever that means; I only claim that for the living it is, and will likely always be, the "horror of the shade", the mystery of mysteries, and why music and poetry are as important to human beings as science and reason.
- rimantas 15y ago
  Because he sees it as celestial North Korea: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nIRJVmZ4K8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nIRJVmZ4K8
vacri 15y ago
"I think that guy has a place in heaven" is much less disrespectful to an atheist than "fuck that guy, he's a bastard". It's an acknowledgement of a noble opponent.
- ugh 15y ago
  No, it's peddling your beliefs disguised as a noble statement. I cannot and do not want to speak for Hitchens so I will only speak for myself. My view is that believing in an afterlife is crazy and absurd. (Don't get me wrong: I would love there to be some sort of way for my existence to continue after death. I'm terrified of death. Just wishing for there to be an afterlife doesn't make it happen, though.) I think it is very much distepectful to say things you know the person would have thought of as crazy and absurd when commenting their death.
  - StavrosK 15y ago
    Wait, you just said you hope there's an afterlife, and so did the GP. Where's the objection?
    - ugh 15y ago
      I do not hope for an afterlife. To hope for an afterlife is akin to (and just as stupid as) hoping to win the lottery, only a lot less likely.
JeremyBanks 15y ago
That's absurd. I'm an Atheist but I'd readily echo that statement. It's an expression of appreciation. If you find it insulting that's only your own eagerness to find insult, nothing legitimate.
- Tloewald 15y ago
  I'd go further and suggest that a lot of atheists would echo the hope that there is some kind of fabulous immortality beyond the grave, it's just that the concept is, upon examination, absurd.
  - joske2 15y ago
    Honestly, I hope there isn't immortality in heaven beyond the grave. Forever is a really long time. The first 1000 years in heaven might be interesting. The billion years after that? meh
    - JeremyBanks 15y ago
      Heaven does seems rather boring. However if we allow ourselves more creativity than scripture, we don't need to assume that eternal life must be dull. http://lesswrong.com/lw/xy/the_fun_theory_sequence/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/xy/the_fun_theory_sequence/
  - redthrowaway 15y ago
    Eternal life holds no interest for me. Imagine living a million years, seeing and thinking all there is to see and think, then living a billion years after that. Then you realize that you're precisely 0% of the way to the finish line. Long after the heat death of the universe, a consciousness with nothing to cogitate. No thanks.
    - Tloewald 15y ago
      You're making a lot of assumptions there. The idea that there are finite number of possible thoughts is highly improbable given the number of things there aren't finite numbers of. If you argue from a base mechanics point of view (e.g. Your brain is basically a hard drive with n bits of storage an thus can only enter 2^n states) then you're assuming that in this hypothetical afterlife your physical limitations are maintained. Since your basic assumptions about the universe have been demonstrated to be wrong, assuming this particular assumption will be correct is drawing a very long bow. And the initial assumption is very much in doubt. To my mind an atheist is someone who has yet to encounter a plausible religion, not (a) someone who defines their beliefs in opposition to one religion (e.g. I do not believ heaven is a green pasture populated by angels playing harps and dead Christians tending sheep) or (b) someone who is closed to the possibility that a plausible religion might exist.
khafra 15y ago
Isaac is up in heaven now.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

SamReidHughes 15y ago

No it's not. Why wouldn't an atheist want an afterlife?

jpulgarin 15y ago
Christopher has stated multiple times that he finds the Christian idea of heaven unappealing. Furthermore, if the Christian heaven does exist (which in turn implies that Christian doctrine is true), Christopher is most certainly in hell.
- tspiteri 15y ago
  > Furthermore, if the Christian heaven does exist (which in turn implies that Christian doctrine is true), Christopher is most certainly in hell. If the Christian heaven does exist, it does not imply that all Christian doctrine is true, only that some is true. And there is a lot of contradictory Christian doctrine. By that, I am not saying that Christian doctrine is self-contradictory, I am only pointing out that several different Christian denominations have doctrines that contradict each other. According to some denominations, Hitchens would indeed be in hell, and according to others, he would be in heaven.
  - jpulgarin 15y ago
    Instead of "which in turn" I should have said, "and further assuming", sorry about that. I am almost certain that there are some Christian denominations under which Christopher is now believed to be in heaven, although they are in the minority, and not in the mainstream of Christianity that Hitchens usually debated against. Can you name me two Christian denominations according to whom Christopher is now in heaven?
    - tspiteri 15y ago
      I do not know much about different Christian denominations, but I do come from a Catholic background myself, and I guess Catholicism does qualify as mainstream. I think that according to current Catholic doctrine, if someone does his best to find out the truth, and lives according to what he sincerely believes, he goes to heaven, even if he's wrong in the end. And I think Hitchens qualifies for those qualities (to be clear: I am referring to his doing his best to find out the truth and living according to it, not to being wrong in the end).
      - jpulgarin 15y ago
        In Catholic doctrine one who commits a mortal sin without repenting is bound to hell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_sin#Roman_Catholicism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_sin#Roman_Catholicism If you look at the three conditions that a sin must meet to be considered a mortal sin, I think there is a very high probability that writing a book titled God Is Not Great is a mortal sin. There are hundreds of things that Christopher did which very likely meet those conditions, and there is also a high probability that he has not repented about them before death. According to Catholicism people do not get into heaven by living according to what they sincerely believe, and many, many, Catholic scholars would say that Christopher is bound for hell.
        tspiteri 15y ago
        The three conditions for a mortal sin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_sin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_sin 1. Its subject must be a grave (or serious) matter. 2. It must be committed with full knowledge, both of the sin and of the gravity of the offense (no one is considered ignorant of the principles of the moral law, which are inborn as part of human knowledge, but these principles can be misunderstood in a particular context). 3. It must be committed with deliberate and complete consent, enough for it to have been a personal decision to commit the sin. The question is about point 2. While Hitchens knew that it would be morally unacceptable according to Catholic doctrine, he considered writing the book as the right thing to do according to his own moral standard, so he would not be doing something he considered as a gravely wrong thing to do. Similarly for other people who live according to what they sincerely believe: they are not committing actions with full knowledge that the actions are the wrong thing to do. It does leave room for interpretation, and can be argued both ways, but I do not wish to be drawn further into a religious discussion.
- masklinn 15y ago
  > Furthermore, if the Christian heaven does exist (which in turn implies that Christian doctrine is true), Christopher is most certainly in hell. It's much more complex than that as there is no single "Christian doctrine" (each christian sect has its own doctrine, including concepts of hell, and these doctrines evolve over time). Some christian sects promise hell to all non-convers (and sinners), while others consider only acts and make devotion irrelevant to entry in heavens. I'm not going to make judgement calls on the hitch or these doctrines, but "Christian doctrine" being true absolutely does not translate into "Christopher is most certainly in hell". Let alone "the Christian heaven" existing (the "Christian" heaven being real) translates into this ("Christian heaven" could be true while everything else is false)
  - oelewapperke 15y ago
    And all of them agree on the fact that running afoul of Christian doctrine is -by itself- not a reason to go to hell. The usual point is that trying to get into heaven without the bible is like driving a car blindfolded : you may very well get there, it's just ... You might want to google "good samaritan". While you're correct that there are variations, they're not that different at all.
- protomyth 15y ago
  Some of the Christian groups don't believe in hell either - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilationism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilationism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_conditionalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_conditionalism
michael_dorfman 15y ago
I can't speak for others, but this atheist doesn't want one.
- corin_ 15y ago
  I also don't want one, but if someone said "I hope there's a heaven so that he will have gone to it" after I'm dead I wouldn't call that disrespectful in the slightest.
borispavlovic 15y ago
Because we don't need it. Our genes are reproduced and they are carrying the best and the worst parts of us and our experience.
- emil0r 15y ago
  Your children carries your experiences?
  - jarin 15y ago
    If you raise them.
    - emil0r 15y ago
      1) The OP made the claim that our genes carry our experiences onto our children. I've never experienced that and AFAIK it doesn't happen. 2) Raising a child doesn't give the child your experiences either. I have no memory of what my father experienced in his life based on him raising me. AFAIK it doesn't happen to other people either.
- abdulhaq 15y ago
  I find that a stimulating comment because for me, not one tiny iota of what is good and bad about us comes from our genes. Our genes are the cards we are dealt with when we are born. How good and bad we are is seen in how we respond to that initial start. To say it's our genes that make us good sounds close to the stream of thought that believes in certain races being 'better' than others etc.
olavk 15y ago
The christian concept of heaven is not very attractive if you are not a christian. While there are different interpretations, the common is that heaven is an eternal non-physical state of being together with God (the god of the Bible), perhaps even "absorbed" by this god. The god of the Bible is racist, jaloux, blood-thirsty and opposed to critical thinking, and among other things calls for human sacrifice, genocide and killing babies. (Read the Bible if you dont believe me.) Now, if you are christian you might think this is all justified and fair, but for an atheist, an eternity of being together with this being (without any possibility of rebellion or critical thinking) might seem more like a never ending nightmare. Furthermore, it is generally agreed that there is no kind of physical pleasure in the heaven - no sex, no sunshine or rain, no books, no Johnny Walker Black Label. The only pleasure is being together with and eternally worshipping the aforementioned god. Who would in good conscience wish this for Hitchens?
- swah 15y ago
  Fuck you (you representing anti-christian trolling in general in HN).
- euroclydon 15y ago
  Has it occurred to you that if God created everything, than the standard by which you're judging heaven might be short sighted? I like to think there might be little racism and infanticide and much discourse on creating universes.
  - redthrowaway 15y ago
    No description of the afterlife given by any of the major religions appeals to me, save perhaps Buddhism from a mystical standpoint. If we want to start conjecturing beyond what anyone says the afterlife is like, then why believe in it at all? Without evidence, the only thing any of the religions claim to have going for them is holy books and priests claiming divine knowledge. If you want to ignore those, then you're just pulling ideas out of thin air. It might be nice to imagine some utopic afterlife for each person, but it has precisely the same relationship with fact as my desire to drop into the worlds of books I read and take part in the story.
Udo 15y ago
Atheism is a very broad category. It just means you don't believe in any gods. The people who belong to that category, and their philosophies, are wildly different. You can't draw a lot of conclusions just from knowing someone is an atheist. I'm an atheist myself and I do find the idea of an afterlife extremely compelling. The tragedy here is that I'm also enough of a scientist to know that the odds of there being any kind of afterlife are vastly against us. So there is probably a group of atheists who, like myself, wish for an afterlife but at the same time know that wishing doesn't make it true. The universe doesn't really care whether a couple of carbon-based molecules change their state and it, sadly, doesn't care about the information stored in our brains either.
- numeromancer 15y ago
  "The tragedy here is that I'm also enough of a scientist to know that the odds of there being any kind of afterlife are vastly against us." You presume, of course, that these things apply to the dead. But when dead, materially, you can reason about nothing because the bases for reason, perception and memory, no longer exist. Seeing yourself as disanimated material after you die is a trick of the mind, and not one that comes naturally, but that is learned in training as a part of survival in your time and place. But in many ways, to yourself, you are unlike anyone else, and in these ways you can conclude nothing about your dead self from your perception and memory of all others that have died. In short, you can conclude nothing about yourself when dead. Even the laws of physics and nature are not a help to determining the nature of your dead self; these are artifacts of perception and memory. I do not claim that we have hope for life after death, whatever that means; I only claim that for the living it is, and will likely always be, the "horror of the shade", the mystery of mysteries, and why music and poetry are as important to human beings as science and reason.
rimantas 15y ago
Because he sees it as celestial North Korea: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nIRJVmZ4K8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nIRJVmZ4K8

vacri 15y ago

"I think that guy has a place in heaven" is much less disrespectful to an atheist than "fuck that guy, he's a bastard". It's an acknowledgement of a noble opponent.

ugh 15y ago
No, it's peddling your beliefs disguised as a noble statement. I cannot and do not want to speak for Hitchens so I will only speak for myself. My view is that believing in an afterlife is crazy and absurd. (Don't get me wrong: I would love there to be some sort of way for my existence to continue after death. I'm terrified of death. Just wishing for there to be an afterlife doesn't make it happen, though.) I think it is very much distepectful to say things you know the person would have thought of as crazy and absurd when commenting their death.
- StavrosK 15y ago
  Wait, you just said you hope there's an afterlife, and so did the GP. Where's the objection?
  - ugh 15y ago
    I do not hope for an afterlife. To hope for an afterlife is akin to (and just as stupid as) hoping to win the lottery, only a lot less likely.

JeremyBanks 15y ago

That's absurd. I'm an Atheist but I'd readily echo that statement. It's an expression of appreciation. If you find it insulting that's only your own eagerness to find insult, nothing legitimate.

Tloewald 15y ago
I'd go further and suggest that a lot of atheists would echo the hope that there is some kind of fabulous immortality beyond the grave, it's just that the concept is, upon examination, absurd.
- joske2 15y ago
  Honestly, I hope there isn't immortality in heaven beyond the grave. Forever is a really long time. The first 1000 years in heaven might be interesting. The billion years after that? meh
  - JeremyBanks 15y ago
    Heaven does seems rather boring. However if we allow ourselves more creativity than scripture, we don't need to assume that eternal life must be dull. http://lesswrong.com/lw/xy/the_fun_theory_sequence/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/xy/the_fun_theory_sequence/
- redthrowaway 15y ago
  Eternal life holds no interest for me. Imagine living a million years, seeing and thinking all there is to see and think, then living a billion years after that. Then you realize that you're precisely 0% of the way to the finish line. Long after the heat death of the universe, a consciousness with nothing to cogitate. No thanks.
  - Tloewald 15y ago
    You're making a lot of assumptions there. The idea that there are finite number of possible thoughts is highly improbable given the number of things there aren't finite numbers of. If you argue from a base mechanics point of view (e.g. Your brain is basically a hard drive with n bits of storage an thus can only enter 2^n states) then you're assuming that in this hypothetical afterlife your physical limitations are maintained. Since your basic assumptions about the universe have been demonstrated to be wrong, assuming this particular assumption will be correct is drawing a very long bow. And the initial assumption is very much in doubt. To my mind an atheist is someone who has yet to encounter a plausible religion, not (a) someone who defines their beliefs in opposition to one religion (e.g. I do not believ heaven is a green pasture populated by angels playing harps and dead Christians tending sheep) or (b) someone who is closed to the possibility that a plausible religion might exist.

khafra 15y ago

Isaac is up in heaven now.

deleted 15y ago

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