Remembering Hitchens

Religious people are always the first to take offense, and everyone else has bought into it. "You can't talk about my faith." Says who? It's only taboo to criticize religion and faith because the rest of us have allowed faith-based religions to achieve this charmed status. Criticizing bad ideas is how we make progress. All organized religion is ridiculous if you actually read the books and think about it for a minute; and they are deserving of ridicule. We can shame people into correcting their way of thinking about a host of other issues but religion is off-limits? In the same way that we can use evidence to silence the conspiracy theorists, so must we use evidence to enlighten the indoctrinated and brainwashed masses. I know it's possible because I have done it. 

Even after Hitch, and Dawkins, and Harris, and all their books - you are still afraid to speak up when 'people of faith' try to bully others or feign offense at a non-existent slight against their religion or their faith. The irony is that the non-religious are worried about being rude to another human, while the religious have no problem offending the sensibilities of the rest of us, and they have the gall to claim humility. Humility! Of all things. And this from people of breathtaking arrogance; who claim to know the mind of god, that the universe was created with them in mind, that they know what happens when we die, and that the Celestial Dictatorship (Hitch) is ever-watchful.

It was Hitchens who inspired me to become an outspoken critic of organized religion and delusion gussied up as 'faith', particularly when the practice of those ideas becomes harmful to the rest of us, which they often do. His memory lives on in all of us whose lives he has touched.