Christopher Hitchens and the Christian conversion that wasn’t

[mr blur]

‘To claim Christopher Hitchens posthumously for evangelical Christianity is to defame a man who was a champion of the Enlightenment.’

In 2016, the ultimate celebrity endorsement is posthumous. The remain and the leave campaigns have both claimed that Margaret Thatcher would have supported their respective arguments in the EU referendum. The same treatment has been meted out to Churchill, and even Shakespeare.

In this respect the trail was blazed by the world’s great religions, which routinely claim recruits among the dying. Indeed, the faithful have form when it comes to falsifying deathbed conversions – notoriously so in the case of Darwin. In 1915 the evangelist Elizabeth Cotton, better known as Lady Hope of Carriden, declared that the great scientist, readying himself for the end in April 1882, had repudiated his life’s work (“How I wish I had not expressed my theory of evolution as I have done”) and asked her to gather an audience so he could “speak to them of Christ Jesus and His salvation”.
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This was preposterous, and quickly dismissed as such. Darwin’s daughter, Henrietta Litchfield, was with her father at his deathbed and insisted that Lady Hope had not even visited him during his last illness. None of his family believed a word of her testimony.

Almost as flimsy is the Catholic church’s claim that Antonio Gramsci returned to the faith and died taking the sacraments. Though a former Vatican official maintained that the Marxist philosopher embraced Catholicism afresh shortly before his death in Rome in 1937, none of the official or personal documents relating to his last days support this extraordinary account.

It is in this context that one should consider the meretricious new book by Larry Alex Taunton, The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist.

- snip-

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/29/christopher-hitchens-christian-conversion-book

[JNelson6563]

1. A groupthink based on fiction tells lies to gain followers? Shocking!

[DetlefK]

2. Maybe it's a reflexive appropriation, to convince themselves of their own importance.

The Evangelicals in the US did try just that with Donald Trump:
He's no Christian in any way and the Evangelicals were kicked out of the republican power-play after decades of being catered to. They didn't want to believe that the candidate they support is not one of them and doesn't need them. So they tried to convince themselves that Trump were actualy a pious Christian.



Maybe it's similar with Hitchens here. Christinaity is receding in western societies, but not out of hostility. Christians don't turn into atheists. If they did, they would engage Christians in arguments, they would keep caring about religious questions.

But they don't turn into atheists. They become non-religious. They simply stop caring. And you know you have hit rock-bottom when even your worst nemesis, the non-believer, doesn't bother fighting you anymore.

[nil desperandum]

4. Indeed

you are correct, the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference and apathy.

That is what many christians don't understand about non-believers, they just don't care as you point out they become indifferent to their previous faith which means their previous faith is no longer of any consequence.

Liberating for the non-believers and unsettling for the faithful.

[trotsky]

3. Believers have been lying about "deathbed conversions" for centuries.

It's what they do.

[onager]

5. Look what happened to J.T. Eberhard...

Christian tells me of my grandfather’s deathbed conversion:

Eberhard handled this awful person...appropriately:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wwjtd/2014/01/christian-tells-me-of-my-grandfathers-deathbed-conversion/#sthash.2fDg2nil.dpuf

[Freelancer]

6. Breaking news: After 1631 days, Christopher Hitchens is STILL DEAD!!!

I sent an email to Christopher Hitchens, along with many other well-wishers, when he was near the end. I threatened to start a religion with him as a centerpiece, if he failed to recover... and if he DID recover. That's the way religion works, right?

It was intended as a joke -- one that I'm sure many others thought of and echoed in their emails. After his passing, it did give me an idea, though. I started a count of still-dead days of "his Deadness," Christopher Hitchens.

The count now is 1631 days.