Religion
Related: About this forum“The Faith of Christopher Hitchens”
Posted 04-21-2016
by Andrew Yeager.
Christopher Hitchens and Larry Taunton seem unlikely candidates for friendship. Hitchens was a writer and avowed atheist. Taunton is the founder of the Birmingham-based Fixed Point Foundation, an evangelical Christian organization that has sponsored debates with prominent atheists. It’s through this work the two met and became friends. Hitchens died of esophageal cancer in 2011.
Larry Taunton recently wrote a book called “The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist” He spoke to WBHM’s Andrew Yeager.
Larry Taunton is founder and executive director of the Fixed Point Foundation in Birmingham.
Larry Taunton is founder and executive director of the Fixed Point Foundation in Birmingham.
Interview highlights
On meeting Christopher Hitchens for the first time at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2007:
“I just know he’s going to hate me and I’m pretty sure I’m not going to like him either. [Then] comes the knock at the door. I open it. And he spills forth into my room as though we’re continuing a conversation we’d had earlier and he said, this was the news of the day at the moment, ‘The British Army has effectively capitulated at Basra and the Archbishop of Canterbury is calling for the adoption of Sharia law. Whatever happened to a Church of England that actually believed in something?’
https://news.wbhm.org/feature/2016/the-faith-of-christopher-hitchens/
7:00 audio at link.
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jonno99
(2,620 posts)On the two road trips Taunton took with Hitchens:
“…And I was somewhat anxious because…state troopers were everywhere and I thought, you talk about open container! We have mixed drinks and so forth in here and enough Johnnie Walker in the back for a battalion. I don’t know how many Bible studies you’ve attended where scotch was served, but this was my first, and it was highly entertaining.”
Excellent story. Again, thanks.
rug
(82,333 posts)Much more so than their tedious, indecisive debates.
MisterP
(23,730 posts)"the Archbishop of Canterbury is calling for the adoption of Sharia law"!!!!
what's at stake isn't secular Western civ but some strange Britishness, appendant to a Europeanness/Westernness, that's mostly about a few fetishized culture markers, a theme-park version of national heritage composed of Sunday roasts and Eton vs. Harrow and Aspidistria and summer afternoon teas; Orwell recognized he was caught in this Englishness that didn't need to examine England, but was well able to parody it
it's the old notion of Christendom, but stripped of any content, just a label: it needs the Turk (or the Papist) as its Opposite--any sexually-repressed garlic-smelling Mediterraneans taking over can do: we can see this in Kingsley Amis, whose main fear was that Britain would fall to the Reds and who saw pizza restaurants as signs that the Catholics were about to sink the Sceptered Isle; the letter against Ratzinger's state visit was basically on the grounds that it was the Armada landing at long last and that was it for freedom, Protestantism, and Whiggery
Silent3
(15,213 posts)With Hitchens dead and not here to defend himself, suggesting with any seriousness that Hitchens might have been on the verge of conversion to Protestant or evangelical Christianity, held back only by ego, is purely insulting.
Brettongarcia
(2,262 posts)As soon as someone is dead, they take advantage of it. By making up words and thoughts for him, and attributing them to him
cleanhippie
(19,705 posts)Nothing more than flinging shit to see what will stick.
rug
(82,333 posts)
Rob H.
(5,351 posts)Doesn't sound to me like someone contemplating conversion.
rug
(82,333 posts)
Jim__
(14,076 posts)Based on what it says here, I think that's his entire review.
Sounds interesting.
rug
(82,333 posts)
Major Nikon
(36,827 posts)Just doesn't sound that much different from anyone else who makes their living repeating other Christian myths.
Hitchens said it best...
"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/danthropology/2016/04/new-book-claims-christopher-hitchens-considered-christianity-near-death-no-its-not-true/
Gandhi and Einstein were both going to convert to Christianity before they died.
I also heard John Paul II became agnostic before he died.
Major Nikon
(36,827 posts)Reliable sources have also reported that Ted Nugent was the abandoned love child of Phyllis Schlafly and Little Richard.
