A Christmas Message?

At the end of this post is a link to a syndicated Op Ed piece by Cal Thomas, of Fox News fame, published today in our local paper, the Palm Beach Post. It is unimaginable that any real newspaper would publish this, a supposedly feel good Christmas message with the poor taste of using Christopher Hitchens' death and his atheistic beliefs as some kind of a parable. Pity poor sanctimonious Cal Thomas. He would have been annihilated by Hitchens in any kind of debate but decided to "take him on" after his death. Obviously Thomas lives by the Christian dictum, "the one who saves a soul from hell saves this soul and his own as well,” but spare us the lecture. Save your own soul some other way, and all of those extremists in any religion, for their unmitigated gall in proselytizing, or worse, committing wholesale violence throughout history in the name of religion.

No sense getting into a point by point examination of Thomas' "evidence" as he references The Bible as his authority in almost every other paragraph. How can anyone take issue with that proof?

But I will say this. Arguing that an act of kindness by an atheist (or maybe even by a non-Christian?) is not as "good" as one performed by a religious person because "the very notion of 'good' must have a definition and a definer" (i.e. God, according to Jesus) is the height of superciliousness. One cannot perform "good" acts if one is not religious?

Cal must be such a "good" Christian as evidenced by his compassion for people such as Hitchens: "there is no joy in the death of one who had faith that God does not exist." Isn't that nice? But, then his Christmas message: "Hitchens now knows the truth and that can only be the worst possible news for him." Burning in hell, is that what you mean?

If people want to believe in an organized religion, no problem, but keep it out of my face and out of politics as well. If this kind of religious mania was not so endemic, probably Hitchens would not have felt compelled to spend part of his brilliant journalistic career on the topic. His confrontational atheism was in reaction to having to suffer proselytizers such as Thomas, who piously takes Hitchens to a religious whipping post while pretending to be a journalist....


Hitchens, death of an atheist
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