I did not know Christopher Hitchens personally, much
to my eternal disappointment, but he shall always remain a personal hero. He
was one of our species' greatest friends. Inspiring millions, he was one of the
big guns in the fight for rationality and intellectual honesty. By now there
will be hundreds of websites online telling you all about the specific great
work he did, so I won't drift too far down that road; just do a Google search.
What I will say is how important his place in the world was and what we should
do next.
Hitchens, along with people like Richard Dawkins,
Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and James Randi (there are of course others – I personally
like Tim Minchin!) represent the line in the sand in the battle for reason. For
the majority of human history, we have been slaves to the superstitions of
others (even of our own) and this has caused suffering on an unbelievable
scale. Not only has it led to countless wars and persecutions, the slaughter of
innocents, the murder and abuse of women and children, and the theft of
property, it has dramatically held back the advancement of knowledge and
learning. You don’t even have to look to history for the evidence; the modern
day Middle East will serve just as well. Whilst we in the UK have come a long
way in comparison to the intellectual, cultural, and technological stagnation of
faith based societies, they are not alone in their ambition to drag the rest of
the world back to their level. The
United States of America, the most powerful nation in the world, is dominated
by superstition and its politicians (like Rick Perry) compete to out-God each other, in an attempt to win over the dangerously irrational majority of voters.
Given half a chance, these increasingly fundamentalist characters would waste
no time in embarking on an agenda of intellectual regression, much like that of
the Middle East. Americans are lucky though, because they have been given
protection from their beliefs, by the foresight of the secularist Founding
Fathers. The United States, whilst dangerously faith dominated in many ways, is
actually not faith based, but derives from the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment was one of humanity’s finer
moments in history. It marks the fight back of reason over superstition. This
was when the species finally began to wake up. Hard fought intellectual battles
took place against religion, but it is still ongoing even today. The simple
fact of the matter is that it has taken a high degree of effort on the part of
individuals to stand up for the truth and rationality, and every time there is
a relaxing of that effort, the enemies of reason take ground (Hitchens was one
of these people, and I aspire to eventually be one too). There are more people than ever
before, now willing to stand up and admit they do not believe in God and/or do
not follow any religion, but far too many of them also say that it is not for
us to tell other people what they should or should not think. This is a view
that is fundamentally flawed, because by not doing so, they contribute to the
potential loss of the freedom to hold and express that view. It is those who do
fight faith that have won the degree of freedom we currently have. Those who
claim to be an atheist because they have arrived at that conclusion through
reason, but who then say those like Hitchens or Dawkins are wrong to push it so
forcefully, are like the conscientious objectors to a war who are more than
happy to languish in the freedoms and protections that others have worked for,
fought for and died for. But make no mistake, without that effort, we would
face persecution for free thought, science would halt, women would be enslaved,
and children would be abused physically and mentally on a far larger scale.
