Christopher Hitchens RIP

It is a mystery to me how anyone can consider Hitchens a worthy advocate for atheism. It seems to me that, where Professor Dawkins is concise, sparing with his words and usually crystal clear in his meaning, Hitchens is the exact opposite. Hitchens gives me the impression that his main concern in addressing any issue or question is to reveal how clever and knowledgeable he is. He almost always starts his sentences from the end and works his way towards the beginning. This is the same in regard to answering questions; he is forever answering them with long, windy, wordy and, usually unnecessary, verbose rambles about subjects that the audience has to fit in to the point of the question or subject themselves. It seems to me that Hitchens contributions are invariably almost in the form of riddles.

On another point, I think the disingenuous fraud Hitchens should stop quoting Marx on religion. Just as Hitchens normally mangles Steve Wienberg's quote about "good people doing good things" etc., Hitchens does the same with quotes from Marx. Having spent a great deal of his life passing off the state-capitalist, anti-democratic dictates of Leon Trotsky as the authentic voice of Karl Marx, it is laughable that Hitchens is now trying to present Marx here (as he did in his book) as simply an abstract critic of religion. Marx was nothing of the sort. The passages Hitchens quotes from Marx are, indeed, from his "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" (strictly speaking, from the Introduction), but the most interesting aspect of Hitchen's quotations from Marx is not what he says, but what he leaves out.

And, predictably, given the views of Marx in general, the very text Hitchens leaves out is the essential point that Marx was making. Yes, Marx did write that religion is "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the soul of soulless conditions." He did famously declare that "religion is the opium of the people". Marx did write, as Hitchens relates, that the point of criticising religion was not simply to pluck the flower from the chain so that human beings could wear the chain unadorned, but so that we could cull the living flower. But the connecting passage that Hitchens leaves out is the very point at the very heart of Marx's views about religion:

"The criticism of religion as the illusionary happiness of man is, at the same time, a criticism of the conditions that need illusions."

Little wonder he leaves it out, for Hitchens, of course, is now one of the most vociferous defenders of that society that "requires illusions."

Nigel McCullough
2008