Because I spent many an hour in evolution/religion debate here. Rest in nothingness maestro.



Dont know why these retarded youtube tags don't work. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx4_l_VNFWk&feature=related

Oh man, the closest being similar to FGR is gone.

RIP.

****. I watched / listened to hours upon hours of his stuff and had even purchased Letters to a Young Contrarian at one point. An exceptional person.

Whilst I'm familiar with his name I really have no idea who he was.

I'm sad to see one of my heroes die

(I fixed the youtbe tag. Hope you don't mind.)

Straight from my mother effin' Facebook status.
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He was a bigoted douche but it is sad when people die

I find it humorous that someone can be labeled a "bigot" for being outspoken against bigots (e.g., fundamentalists). He wasn't at all hostile or intolerant of the religious, merely outspoken about very specific ideas that many hold dear (e.g., belief without reason being a virtue, turning the other cheek, etc.).

Note: I can only assume that you're referring to religion as his "flavor" of bigotry because he doesn't really come close to the criteria on anything else (except for maybe his comments about women, which most people aren't even aware of).

I think Glenn Greenwald gives a decent account of Hitchens' less pleasant side (e.g. cheerleading for war alongside the neocons): http://www.salon.com/2011/12/17/christohper_hitchens_and_the_protocol_for_public_figure_deaths/singleton/

It's sad he's gone and he was always fun to watch in debates on religion. But he also wrote some clearly awful stuff and it seems that he only just came in from the cold in liberal circles after he joined the "New Atheist" movement a few years ago and made some eloquent statements about religion. And even then I think a good chunk of his supposed eloquence is born out of a cultural deference to home county English accents. He was practically an unknown in the UK.

Also don't ever bother reading anything by his brother, Peter; he's a boring reactionary columnist for the Daily Mail.

I'm sad to see him go, and I've appreciated some of his writings and a few of the things he's had to say have made me think, but in general I like to think he's done more to hurt the public's image of atheism, as well as fail to address the criticisms of non-theists. He appealed to emotion a lot of the time, and even when he had a good point he really ruined it with some pretty awful ways of putting it.

I understood and empathized with his positions, and I even identify with him in a lot of ways that I am pretty much ashamed of, so I've always found him too *****y, preachy, and long winded. I always feel like he's said something profound before, but then when I go looking for it all I find is a lot of extremely disagreeable things starting with premises that I do agree with.

The one thing I really credit him with is exposing me to my assumptions about Buddhism and Mother Theresa, and overall helping me both place myself in relation to those who are irrational, and those who are kind of mean. I do like a lot of what he's said about dying, as well.

Damn this is a good article. He was even worse than I realized D:

I think that many of his "fans" disagree with him on the Iraq War (even after reading Hitch-22). However, other than that, I can't say many negative things about the guy (he's certainly nowhere near as awful as Thrawn makes him out to be). He was certainly not a "neo-con", which is evident by reading any of his books (e.g., God Is Not Great). I don't think that he was "unknown" in the UK after God Is Not Great (it did rather well there & continues to do so).

As someone who lives in the UK, I've never heard anyone else mention Hitchens, I'm always having to explain who he was.

I have the same problem in the U.S. where he's very popular. :-/

His support of the Iraq war is pretty clearly couched in some incredibly sadistic Islamophobia, so there's that (it's been pretty sad to see how willing the "atheists movement" in Europe, particularly the UK, has been to ally itself with nationalistic anti-Muslim sentiment).

Other than that he's a pretty unrepentant misogynist, so I guess if you don't think that matters then he's a pretty cool dude?