An Open Letter To The Coward Who Has Slandered Christopher Hitchens’ Reputation (VIDEO)

Dear Mr. Taunton,

It is with great indignation that I compose this letter, for your new book, The Faith of Christopher Hitchens, is more worthy of a bonfire than a bestsellers list. Your book is an exercise in fantasy at the expense of a brilliant man’s reputation. Further, your book is a 200-page exercise in condemnation and slander, for it uses this brilliant man as a fulcrum for painting atheists as a hard-headed, arrogant group of people who are all talk until they are within the icy grasp of death.

For a man who has called Hitch his friend, your portrayal of him as scared and searching for supernatural solace when death became imminent is sickening and a testament to the fact you really knew nothing of the man. Even as a polarizing figure, Hitch was brutally honest and direct about his views on the God of Abraham and in your book you cast him as an ideological hypocrite and put your boot on the throat of his reputation. You hammer nails into Hitch’s well-known and obvious disdain for the God of Abraham like other Christian zealots have done to atheists before. You have chosen to do this at a moment when Hitch’s body has rotted away in the dominion of worms, at a time when he can no longer defend himself or his reputation and in doing so, you have insinuated that when death is near, even the most convicted of atheists and anti-theists will lose their convictions and get down on their knees for Jesus.

Of course, it’s pertinent to point out that this insinuation is exactly same thing Christians do when faced with death. I dare you to explain to me how Christians do not abandon their faith when death lingers. After all, when death calls, even the most godly among us are reduced to leaking vessels of emotional upheaval, mourning the loss of the deceased for months, years, and even lifetimes, despite their firm belief that death has sent the soul of their loved one to a better place. With that conviction, dying should be a celebrated affair, a time of unrivaled happiness. Is the deceased not on a plane better than this one? Is the deceased not enjoying the spoils of eternal reward? Is Heaven not the realm of supreme happiness in the loving, tender embrace of God?

But I digress, Mr. Taunton. You have brought to life the very thing Christopher Hitchens warned everyone of, that after his death there would be those who come forward with tall tales designed to discredit him and tarnish his reputation. This is the same degree of “dramatic revelation” that has befallen the corpses of other influential intellectuals who have fiercely and successfully challenged Christian notions. You have done to Hitchens what has been done to Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Émile Littré, and many others.

christopher hitchens reputation larry taunton book faith
Christopher Hitchens. Photo by Ensceptico, available under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

In an interview with Anderson Cooper shortly before his death, Hitch was asked if there was ever a moment when he would “hedge his bets,” as it were, as death approached.

“In a moment of doubt, isn’t there, I don’t know, I just find it fascinating that even when you’re alone and, you know, no one else is watching, there might be a moment where you, you know, want to hedge your bets.”

Hitch responded as eloquently as ever:

“If that comes, it will be when I am very ill; when I am half-demented, either by drugs or by pain. I won’t have control over what I say. I mention this in case you ever hear a rumor later on, because these things happen and the faithful love to spread these rumors… I can’t say that the entity, that by then wouldn’t be me, wouldn’t do such a pathetic thing. But I can tell you that… not when I’m lucid, no. I can be quite sure of that.”

He then explicitly told Cooper not to believe any story about deathbed conversion that may follow his death.

You have stabbed your “friend” in the back with this book. You have mutilated him and raped him ideologically. You have taken his reputation and immolated it for the purpose of promoting your faith and providing false confirmation of the “power” of God to the hordes of people who sacrifice their individuality to an arrogant, jealous, homicidal fictional figure and bend their knees in the hopes of eternal love and a chance at salvation.

Christopher Hitchen loathed the very core of Judeo-Christianity. To him, it was a social virus, a plague that turns otherwise rational people into blubbering shells devoid of free thought, a xenophobic murderer of millions, the womb in which bigotry is gestated, and the needle weaving a tapestry designed to halt intellectual advancement in modern societies. Christopher Hitchens detested the God of Abraham so much that in his final years, his disdain for faith went from discussing the falsehood that is the God to Abraham to discussing how an existence governed by that exploitative, murderous god would be the absolute worst possible existence people could hope for.

To quote Brian Dalton, you, Mr. Larry Alex Taunton, are a “necrophiliac” in that you “have truly fucked the dead.”

Featured image, “The Baptism of Constantine,” was painted by students of classical artist Raphael, and is in the public domain.

h/t The Atlantic

Robert could go on about how he was raised by honey badgers in the Texas Hill Country, or how he was elected to the Texas state legislature as a 19-year-old wunderkind, or how he won 219 consecutive games of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots against Hugh Grant, but those would be lies. However, Robert does hail from Lewisville, Texas, having been transplanted from Fort Worth at a young age. Robert is a college student and focuses his studies on philosophical dilemmas involving morality, which he feels makes him very qualified to write about politicians. Reading the Bible turned Robert into an atheist, a combative disposition toward greed turned him into a humanist, and the fact he has not lost a game of Madden football in over a decade means you can call him "Zeus." If you would like to be his friend, you can send him a Facebook request or follow his ramblings on Twitter. For additional content that may not make it to Liberal America, Robert's internet tavern, The Zephyr Lounge, is always open