Christopher Hitchens - Please Explain This

By Alicia Colon

The much ballyhooed debate on religion in Toronto last month between the Roman Catholic convert and former Prime Minister Tony Blair and the recalcitrant anti-theist Christopher Hitchens resulted in a nearly two-to-one win for the latter.

That was no surprise because sympathy for Mr. Hitchens - suffering from esophageal cancer and whose appearance bore the results of chemotherapy - came from an audience composed mostly of his secular supporters.

Mr. Hitchens has been praised by the anti-religion elite who agree with him that, as his book title asserts, "God Is Not Great." In fact, he blames most of the troubles in the world on organized religion because as he said in the debate, "Religion, it might be said, it must be said, would have to admit makes extraordinary claims but though I would maintain that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, rather daringly provides not even ordinary evidence for its extraordinary supernatural claims."

He continued to applause from the audience, "Is it good for the world to appeal to our credulity and not to our skepticism? Is it good for the world to worship a deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs? To appeal to our fear and to our guilt, is it good for the world? To our terror, our terror of death, is it good to appeal?"

Like comedian - I use that word loosely - Bill Maher, Mr. Hitchens has a beef with religion because to him there's no proof of any supernatural deity and we're fools to believe in a "fairy tale" that promises us rewards in heaven if we behave as this deity demands. Mr. Hitchens prefers to label himself an anti-theist rather than just an atheist although he's widely identified as a champion of the "new atheism" movement.

I can understand someone being an agnostic but I find it difficult to comprehend anyone with a modicum of intelligence denying that there's order in the universe and if so where does it come from? Mr. Hitchens's argument for his anti-religiosity is that no one can prove that there's life after death; that religion offers a false hope, and that it hinders our individuality, our free spirit. He obviously hasn't accepted the Christian ethos of free will determining our fate.

Did the anti-religion faction develop its philosophy as a natural progression of intellectual cogitations or did it evolve from personal experience? All the atheists I've personally met have come to their God-loathing because of a sense of betrayal with their religious upbringing and Mr. Hitchens is no exception. His mother, Yvonne, ran off with a former clergyman, Timothy Ryan, and committed suicide in a pact with him in 1973. Has every victim of molesting priests had the same conversion to this nihilistic "ism"?

What Mr. Hitchens espouses as his core philosophy is really the typical arrogance of man, which Bob Dylan described in his song, "License to Kill":

Man thinks 'cause he rules the earth he can do with it as he please

And if things don't change soon, he will...

Now he worships at an altar of a stagnant pool

And when he sees his reflection, he's fulfilled.

If Mr. Hitchens were a true intellectual and an astute student of history, he'd understand that it's religion that has halted man from self-destruction due to this arrogance. For as much as Mr. Hitchens would like to believe that religion brings death and destruction, he ignores the genocidal toll exacted by modern secular governments. But why quibble about that 95 billion when one is blind to the beneficence of the opposition?

While Mr. Hitchens may not be cognizant of the supernatural, there's still much evidence that it exists. I'd like him to debunk what happened in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917. According to the Catholic Church, the Blessed Mother Mary appeared to three young peasants on numerous occasions. Since they were the only ones who could see or hear her, the children asked her to show others a sign that she was really there. She agreed and on the appointed day she promised, a crowd of over 70,000 witnessed a phenomenon in the heavens when the sun danced around the sky and appeared to hurl itself toward the earth.

Skeptics decried the miracle as mass hysteria and hallucinations, although witnesses to the event could see the spectacle miles away and even the New York Times reported details of the incident. Cynical journalists at the Cova da Iria where it took place were ready to report a hoax but admitted that it did, indeed, occur. I've read several articles in which the authors attempted to discredit what was finally regarded by the Church in 1930 as a miracle. The scribes go into great detail explaining what could have been just a strange but natural astronomical occurrence, but none can answer the question that I'd like Mr. Hitchens to explain.

Before the alleged miracle took place, there had been a steady downpour of rain that soaked the ground thoroughly, leaving puddles in the field. It also rained that day and the crowd was drenched but after the sun supposedly left the sky and plunged toward the crowd then returned to the sky, the ground and the spectators were totally dry. How was this possible? Engineers that have studied the case calculated that an incredible amount of energy would have been necessary to dry up those pools of water in a few minutes as witnesses testified.

Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was probably the first researcher to explore in depth the possibility of life after death with her groundbreaking 1969 book, "On Death and Dying," which described the similar near-death experiences of a multitude of patients. I'm sure that Mr. Hitchens thinks this is all such rot but many people have anecdotal data that confirms her research.

The night before my sister passed away from leukemia, she awoke from her coma and spoke to someone whom she saw standing behind my other sister. Comedian Sam Kinison was heard asking, "But why?" as he lay dying after an accident, then listened - to whom? - and said, "O.K, O.K, O.K," softly before drifting peacefully to oblivion.

My stepfather lay dying in a California hospital and was unaware that my mother had recently died. He kept asking why she wouldn't enter his hospital room and insisted he saw her standing in the hallway. I was 12 when I heard my mother jump up in a fright after hearing my father say to her, "Teresa, me voy," (I'm going). We lived in Manhattan and he was in a cancer hospital in the Bronx. A few minutes later, we received the call that he had just passed.

None of my anecdotes or any of the others will change anybody's belief in whether God exists. Faith is a gift that sustains and fortifies our lives.

Ironically, when the communist revolutionary Karl Marx said that "religion is the opiate of the masses," he came from the same camp as Mr. Hitchens. He also believed that religion must be abolished so that man would face the reality of his existence rather than a fantasy. We all know how well his philosophy turned out for mankind.

I, however, will blissfully remain in this foxhole of life and will pray for the good health of Christopher Hitchens.

Alicia Colon resides in New York City and can be reached at aliciav.colon@gmail.com and at www.aliciacolon.com