I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interréd with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.

– William Shakespeare (HT: Bardweb.net)

We are admonished by the wise to speak no evil of the dead. Christopher Hitchens, however, described the beatification of Mother Theresa as “a great day for parasites” and went on to say “Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed.”

In so doing, he signed a waiver disavowing any right to have his one life and passing treated with any more sanctity than he personally believed existed in the universe at large. I come to set the record straight on Christopher Hitchens. I read this man receiving posthumous praise and feel the acidic backwash of my morning coffee in the nape of my throat.

There are those on the right who will demur. They will offer fawning, Huntsman-like praise of his dedication to “science” over “religious dogma.” But to assume science is synonymous with either learning or knowledge is analogous to the logical fallacy of assuming that politics is synonymous with civic virtue or good government. Hitchens, like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, has seemingly successfully fathered and nurtured an illegitimate by-blow we’ll call “scientific dogmatism.” This consists of doing anything necessary, even resorting to fraud, to assert the primacy of science over religion as the proper vehicle for the acquisition of universal knowledge.

We see a banner-worthy example of this moral disingenuousness in his hate-screed commemorating the Beatification of St. Teresa. You see on Oct 21, 2003, Slate Magazine was forced to issue the following “correction to Mr. Hitchens polemical broadside of an article.

Correction, Oct. 21, 2003: This piece originally claimed that in her Nobel Peace Prize lecture, Mother Teresa called abortion and contraception the greatest threats to world peace. In that speech Mother Teresa did call abortion “the greatest destroyer of peace.” But she did not much discuss contraception, except to praise “natural” family planning.

Oops! He just slipped up a little. I’m sure he felt deeply apologetic after his vodka hangover wore off. /sarcasm off>. I believe Mr. Hitchens accidentally exaggerated St. Teresa’s positions on family planning about as much as the late Mr. Hitchens reportedly believed in the words of The Nicene Creed.

Some would call me a faithless skeptic for saying such uncharitable things. But if they did, while praising the life or career of the publically and unabashedly atheistic Mr. Hitchens, they are pathetically hypocritical. If having faith in an omnipotent God is delusional insanity, how can one possibly argue that I hold faith in my fallible fellow man without falling headfirst off of a sheer logical precipice?

Others will argue that Mr. Hitchens is courageous for not liking Islamic Terrorists. After arguing in his “masterpiece” God is Not Great that all Abrahamic religions are designed to make people feel like worms. This leaves him no room to take any other position. To fail in condemning Wahabbi Islam for example, would have stripped him of any remaining fig leaf of intellectual respectability.

That he was considered an intellectual instead of a dishonest leftist-hack demonstrates the desperation of the Post-Modern West to still claim a capability to produce great thinkers. That Hitchens is considered brilliant perhaps proves the gravamen of Allan Bloom’s arguments in The Closing of The American Mind. Bloom’s plaint athwart the Modernists reads as follows.

“Professors of these schools simply would not and could not talk about anything important, and they themselves do not represent a philosophic life for the students.”

The same could be said of atheism. What good is found in understanding a world that holds no mystery, no beauty, and nary the promise of a beneficent coda? To Christopher Hitchens, and the hard-core, militant atheists of his ilk, little in life is worthy of celebration. When there is no light, they cannot enlighten; but only mock instead. The political leaders who grow steeped in their nihilistic philosophies; through enstupidating maleducation, predictably spew this bile at those who cling bitterly to their Bibles and guns.

To hear Barack Obama’s poisonous contempt for simple, but honest people like Joe the Plumber, is to see whole-cloth the moral desolation wrought by men who think and believe like Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens attempted to destroy the meaning of life for billions of human beings groping as best they could through the terrors of our harsh mortal coil. He saw nothing to celebrate in life, therefore I see nothing much to celebrate in his existence. He did do us one favor at last. Merry Christmas, Mr. Hitchens!