Merry Christmas, Christopher Hitchens!

Hitchens, the earnest atheist, hates Christmas. Why I am not surprised? “It may have struck you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's a big relationship between this marvelous time of year and living in a one-party state," Hitchens told the overflow crowd of 250. He continued:

You can't go anywhere without listening to the same music. You can't go anywhere without hearing the name of the Great Leader, and his son, the Dear Leader. . . . All broadcasts, all songs, all jokes, all references are, just for that magic few weeks, just exactly like living in . . . North Korea.

The first comment to the video of Hitchens’ attempt to out-Grinch and out-Scrooge the competition is telling:

As an atheist, I intend to consume, drink, buy things, stuff myself, enjoy carols, and listen to The Messiah all I want.

Hitchens can enjoy his gruel.

Merry Christmas, Christopher Hitchens!  Life's a bitch.

Comments

[Justin (koavf)]

More Christmas cheer

It's unfortunate, because I want to like Hitchens' - he's a great journalist, he's really sharp, and he's helped secure Orwell's place in literary journalism. On the other hand, he's an ass. I suppose everything is a trade-off...

-JAK

[Iyov]

I agree. And what better way to learn the Good News than to celebrate Chri$tma$ in America:

* where the churches close (if the holiday falls on a Sunday),

* where children are taught to beg for gifts by targeted advertising,

* where Santa Claus is a more recognizable symbol than the infant Jesus,

* where putting up a more elaborate Saturnalia display is an act of piety, and

* where we can follow the model of the Messiah by performing the acts committing sexual harassment under the mistletoe, getting drunk on eggnog, and producing copious amounts of waste in the form of wrapping paper and unnecessarily felled trees.

Absolutely, Hitchens is completely out of line in criticizing such a deeply spiritual holiday and, in the spirit of "Goodwill to Men", should be taunted.

[JohnFH]

I agree with many of your points, Iyov. I detest the elimination of the reason for the season from the public square as much as anyone.

Keep in mind that Hitchens explicitly takes issue with the reason for the season. It's the religious foundation he denigrates. Fittingly, he delivers his anti-Christian tirade with a Santa cap on his head. He falls precisely under your criticism.

Some positive counter-trends are visible. In the public schools, Christmas is making a comeback. In other words, it's okay again for the choirs and orchestras to do traditional Christmas music in which the reason for the season is praised. Alongside of that, you will hear a Hanukkah piece or two, a Kwanzaa something, and Santa Claus stuff. For a while there, it was all Santa, all the time.

[Suzanne]

Iyov,

Christmas trees come from Christmas tree farms. The land is put to better use than say growing pumpkins or even hemp, since trees are harvested every ten years. This means that 90% of the land is still covered in the crop. Tree farming is the most environmentally friendly kind of farming around, fixing more carbon than any other kind of farm.

May I suggest that you place yourself under the mistletoe in the vicinity of a suitably gendered person and let yourself be harrassed a little.

[Sue]

I deeply regret if my last comment has caused any awkwardness and has the appearance of harrassment. I have nothing but the sincerest respect for the opinins of other commenters and will blame this on too much eggnog. I am an example myself of indulging in too much Christmas cheer, along with Hitchens. However, I do not wear a Santa hat.

[JohnFH]

The funny thing is, as my family knows, I'm inclined to think dark thoughts during the holidays. A little bit of nonsense, along with the solemnity, seems to do me good.

Without asking you, Suzanne, I named you as such in one of your comments and provided a link to your blog, because I think it makes a great read.

[J. K. Gayle]

Here are two long paragraphs (his were never short!), on Christmas, from that other Brit journalist with acerbic wit.

First note that Christopher Hitchens has no belief or faith vacuum, as Stanley Fish has done a fine job of showing. Indeed; but it's the counterpart (counterfeit?) faith of one supporter of Mother Theresa, one believer in Jesus, namely Malcolm Muggeridge, who has written:

"Are we, then, to suppose that our forebears who believed implicitly in the Virgin Birth were gullible fools, whereas we, who would no more believe in such notions than we would that the world is flat, have put aside childish things and become mature? Is our skepticism one more manifestation of our having—in Bonhoeffer’s unhappy phrase—come of age? It would be difficult to support such a proposition in the light of the almost inconceivable credulity of today’s brain-washed public, who so readily believe in absurdities in advertisements and in statistical and sociological prognostications before which an African witch-doctor would recoil in derision. With Pascal it was the other way round; while accepting, with the same certainty as he did the coming of the seasons, the New Testament account of Jesus’s birth, he had already seen through and scornfully rejected the pretensions of science. Now, three centuries later, his intuition has been amply fulfilled. The dogmatism of science has become a new orthodoxy, disseminated by the Media and a State educational system with a thoroughness and subtlety far exceeding anything of the kind achieve by the Inquisition; to the point that to believe today in a miraculous happening like the Virgin Birth is to appear a kind of imbecile, whereas to disbelieve in an unproven and unprovable scientific proposition like the Theory of Evolution, and still more to question some quasi-scientific shibboleth like the Population Explosion, is to stand condemned as an obscurantist, an enemy of progress and enlightenment.

. . . It was precisely to revivify and replenish the world’s stock of faith that the Bethlehem birth took place. . . Seen with the eye of faith, everything falls perfectly into place, faith being the key which enables us to decipher God’s otherwise inscrutable communications. The centrepiece is, of course, Mary, a Virgin Mother, with God sucking voraciously at her breast; bearing in her arms the new light that has come into the world to lighten, not just the Jews, but the Gentiles, all mankind, as well. So it has been celebrated year by year through the centuries of Christendom, in carols, in crèches, in plays and processions, in a combination of public worship and private acts of giving, until now, when faith seems to be expiring, and the light has grown correspondingly dim, it has become a mighty exercise in salesmanship, a gala occasion in the great contemporary cult of consumption, an act of worship directed towards our latest deity—the Gross National Product."
(Seeing Through the Eye: Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith, pages 8-9).

[Peter Kirk]

Interesting that Hitchens has such a different attitude from his fellow atheist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins said that he liked "singing Carols along with everybody else". Well, I don't like singing carols along with people like Dawkins, whose attitude makes a mockery of Christmas. At least Hitchens is being consistent with his beliefs.

[Iyov]

In America, many people cut their Saturnalia trees directly from National and State Forests (see, for example, this page.

And mistletoe (which Christians adopted into their ritual sexual practices from its role as a pagan fertility symbol) is, of course, poisonous to both people and trees.

But I do enjoy listening to Christmas songs because it is a chance to really enjoy music by some great Jewish composers and lyricists, such as Irving Berlin ("White Christmas"), Johnny Marks ("Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer"), Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne ("Let it Snow, Let it Snow"), Mel Torme ("Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire"), and Jay Livingston and Ray Evans ("Silver Bells").

[JohnFH]

Labelling a smooch under a mistletoe a ritual sexual practice with a whiff of paganism in the background just made it more exciting somehow.

[Suzanne]

In America, many people cut their Saturnalia trees directly from National and State Forests (see, for example, this page.

Which is an entirely appropriate thinning practice.

And mistletoe (which Christians adopted into their ritual sexual practices from its role as a pagan fertility symbol) is, of course, poisonous to both people and trees.

You aren't supposed to eat it, silly!