Panel Discussion: Christopher Hitchens and Mortality

Posted on September 2nd, 2010 | Filed under Faith and Politics, InterViews, Science and Religion, Video

This week's Panel Discussion centers on author and "new atheist" Christopher Hitchens and his recent diagnosis with cancer. We invite you to join in the discussion with our panelists.

Response by Liane Carlson

From his prison cell, Oscar Wilde wrote his former lover a long, recriminatory letter, accusing him, among other things, of sentimentality. “The fact is that you were and are still, I suppose, a typical sentimentalist.  For a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.  You think one can have one’s emotions for nothing.  One cannot...  You should pass out of that conception of life.  As soon as you have to pay for an emotion you will know its quality and be better for that knowledge.” READ MORE HERE.

Response by Michael VanZandt Collins

For me, it is very difficult to compartmentalize the concept of mortality as an “end of life” issue. Furthermore, to isolate such a subject leads one to overlook not just the inevitability but also the fruits of death. There is the commonplace religious view of death that is endorsed through the ages even by the likes of Jack Kerouac. As his alter ego Ray Smith, Kerouac tells his Buddhist compatriot, “death is the reward.”  In his explicitly Catholic view, after our earthly suffering we arrive at a place of fulfillment. He says that any preconceptions of eternal damnation are the product of “some hysterical monks who didn’t understand Buddha’s peace under the Bo Tree or for that matter Christ’s peace looking down on the heads of his tormentors and forgiving them.” Death ushers in a reign and ethos of love. READ MORE HERE.

Response by Anna DeWeese

Death – possibly the one aspect of humanity that people have been trying to fight, avoid, halt and otherwise disrupt longer than any other aspect of the human condition. The very idea of dying is scary for many, as it seems for all of our efforts there is nothing we can do to stop it. Religions have certainly dealt with the death question at great length and breadth; and some see the very existence of religions as a mass coping mechanism for realizing our existence as finite, limited, mortal beings. Throughout periods of Christian history deathbed confessions of faith were quite common – one could live without fear of eternal repercussions of one’s actions, so long as your final act was one of repentance in order to save your immortal soul. READ MORE HERE.