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Walter Watts
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Christopher Hitchens on the Death of Jerry Falwell
« on: 2007-05-16 17:50:14 »
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Christopher Hitchens on the Death of Jerry Falwell


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkAPaEMwyKU



Walter
« Last Edit: 2007-05-16 17:52:59 by Walter Watts » Report to moderator   Logged

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Blunderov
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Re:Christopher Hitchens on the Death of Jerry Falwell
« Reply #1 on: 2007-05-17 01:07:50 »
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Quote from: Walter Watts on 2007-05-16 17:50:14   

Christopher Hitchens on the Death of Jerry Falwell

[Blunderov] Wow. A proper lambasting. In the strict sense of proper.

Hitchens is doing some good work for secularism and atheism. I could wish he was more sound on the subject of the Iraq war though.

Best regards.
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Blunderov
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Re:Christopher Hitchens on the Death of Jerry Falwell
« Reply #2 on: 2007-05-17 01:51:01 »
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[Blunderov] A conventional precept holds that one should "speak not ill of the dead"(De mortuis nihil nisi bonum.) This is, in my observation, a common sentiment amongst those who have flaws and dubious practices similar to those of the departed.

So let us speak ill of the living too, just to be fair. Perhaps Pat Robertson might have the grace, if that is the right word, to follow his buddy into oblivion sometime soon?

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=14862
FALWELL'S LEGACY
16 May 2007, 03:39:17
FALWELL'S LEGACY

John Chuckman

That great bulk, Jerry Falwell, has eaten his last family-size bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Yes, Jerry has ordered his last tent-sized silk suit, taken his last bag of cash from lonely old ladies, and ordered his last truckload of cheap, merchandising Bibles with his picture stamped on the cover. Gone on to his reward, as they say.

He donated his organs, the only gesture of kindness recorded in his adult life, but they were all rejected, except for the spleen, reportedly large enough to serve three.

The following piece, written some years ago still aptly summarizes his legacy.

October 18, 2002

JABBA APOLOGIZES

John Chuckman

The Reverend Jerry Falwell has apologized again. It is his third-favorite occupation.

His first, as we all know, is using national television to promote the kind of intolerance and ignorance long associated with sweltery, fly-blown corners of America's South. It's a profitable business by the looks of Falwell's cascading jowls and tailored, tent-size suits. He generally doesn't apologize for these activities, whether it is his retailing of video-tapes sensationalizing the pitiful suicide of a member of President Clinton's staff, or his spending countless hours blubbering from the pulpit against the lives of people who happen to be gay.

He once alerted the nation to dangerous hidden tendencies he discovered in a British television show for children, a harmless piece of fluff called Teletubbies. Falwell gravely warned America that one of the tubbies was promoting homosexuality.

Being a hate-entrepreneur or appealing to the worst instincts of nitwits is not an unusual occupation in America. There are many people who make handsome livings much the way Falwell does, and they are not isolated in the dark corners of American society. Some of them have considerable influence. Success in accumulating money and making a name for yourself, however achieved, counts far more than decency or intelligence in America. Just ask the man who now occupies the White House.

Falwell's second-favorite occupation is making idiotic statements blaming others for disasters. In this he displays a common American trait, blaming others for what goes wrong. But Falwell takes the practice to a lunatic level, the best example being his statement, just days after 9/11, that America's liberal and gay citizens were responsible for God's allowing such destruction.

His third occupation is apologizing. Going way back to 1985, Falwell apologized to Jewish Americans for regularly using the expression "Christian America." He said he wouldn't use it in future, but nasty old habits are tough to break, and, in fact, he did use it again.

In 1999, he again apologized to Jews for what probably qualifies as his most bizarre and inexplicable utterance, "Antichrist was probably alive and that he was in the form of a male Jew." His apology expressed regret for having said these disturbing words but did not disavow belief in them.

Odd that on a recent tour in the United States, Mr. Netanyahu - Israel's answer to Richard Nixon with a generous dash of John Gotti tossed in - was photographed consulting with Mr. Falwell. There appears to be no shame to the alliances of intolerant politicos. But, as I said, money and celebrity count for immense influence in America, and it doesn't much matter what you did to get them.

About a week after 9/11, Falwell apologized for his having said, days before, that the nation's liberal and gay citizens were somehow responsible for very angry men from the other side of the planet high-jacking airliners and blowing up buildings in America. He made his original claim on the television program of another fundamentalist know-nothing, Pat Robertson, who readily responded with "I totally concur." Perhaps Robertson used "concur" rather than "agree" to emphasize the high tone of this scholarly exchange.

Now, Falwell has apologized for remarks on still another television show. Perhaps anxious to demonstrate his leadership capacity for making tasteless, ignorant statements at a time of international crisis, Falwell originally said he had read enough to believe that the prophet Muhammad was "a terrorist," "a violent man," and "a man of war."

One just has to wonder what it is that Falwell read. Perhaps it was one of the "comic strips" put out by some of his fellow American fundamentalists portraying Muslims as dark, evil characters opposing the nation's Christian values and Manifest Destiny. Precisely such material does circulate today in America. It is difficult to imagine Falwell ever having read a serious book, or at least having done so with any reasonable understanding. After all, this is a man on guard against Tinky Winky the teletubby.

I don't know whether anyone else has noticed recently, but Falwell is looking more and more like Jabba the Hutt, that gross outlaw slug from the Star Wars movies, although his voice and manner remind one rather of the late, professional cowboy-hick, Pat Butrum.

The growing resemblance strikes me as somehow oddly fitting, a kind of In the Heat of the Night-version of the Picture of Dorian Gray. Only here, the nasty figure himself grows more repulsive and bloated every week. But I feel sure that when the smarmy Falwell looks in a mirror, he knows just who to blame
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Re:Christopher Hitchens on the Death of Jerry Falwell
« Reply #3 on: 2007-05-18 03:32:59 »
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[Blunderov] Then again, Hitchens is positively mild compared to Akusai at Action Skeptics. Wow again. And I thought I was hostile.


Ding Dong
17 May 2007, 10:16:31 | Akusai
You're walking through a cemetery. Why? I don't know, you're the one there. Maybe you brought your Ouija Board for a little seance, or maybe you're taking a shortcut home. I don't know. You come upon a new, large, and fairly ornate monument. It is a granite cube about three feet to a side, and on top is an ornately carved stone cross. The cube has emblazoned upon its front a highly detailed relief of Jesus ascending into heaven, arms outstretched, robes billowing in the wind. To the right of Jesus is the following:

Jerry Laymon Fallwell
August 11, 1933 - May 15, 2007
Beloved of God
Homeward Bound
You make a quick circumnavigation of the gravestone. You notice as you walk past the back that something has been scraped into the stone. It looks fairly recent. You squat down to have a closer look.

A "man of God" lies in eternal rest
With suit and pad and pillow for his head
He spent his life in ignorance and hate
Spewing empty shit without abate
Convinced, of course, that his way was the best
The world is glad he's rotting and he's dead
Leaning in close to read the scrawl, you notice that the monument smells of urine. It seems entirely appropriate.

As you've undoubtedly heard by now, the bastard has finally shuffled loose this mortal coil.

Good fucking riddance.

What else is there to say? I suppose I might make with the apparently obligatory "Oh, but I'm so sad for his family, blah, blah, blah..." At least I would if I was. His wife aided and abetted his hate from day one. One of his sons runs his shitfucking travesty of a university and the other one runs his awful megachurch. Fuck them. The only family member that seems worth a shit is his daughter, as she's broken from the herd to become a surgeon, but she once gave a talk titled "Is It Sin or Is It Disease? Are alcoholism, obesity and homosexuality diseases or are they really sin?" She backpedaled in traditional Falwellesque manner and tried to downplay the obviousness of that title, but I don't buy it for a second. Fuck her, too.

Jerry Falwell is dead and I'm happy about it, and I don't feel bad for a second about any of it. If the man had had his way while alive, he would have ruined the lives of millions of people for sins like thinking for themselves or liking dick instead of pussy, sins like pursuing the paramount biological imperative (that's "fucking," for those in the cheap seats), failing to worship a 2000-year-dead Jew, or just plain disagreeing with him. He brainwashed the weak-minded with fear, bigotry, and hatred. He made every attempt to move the world back a millenium, to opress, to divide, to spread superstition, to foster pride in intentional ignorance.

Nothing he did was good. I defy anyone to find evidence that Jerry Falwell ever did anything good or decent or human. He spent his life wallowing in his ill-gotten gains like a greasy, lying pig. People quite literally paid him to make them more stupid, and he relished it every day of his life. His pores oozed a mixture of hatred and ignorance.

The best you can say is that he could have been worse, though that's hardly a defense. No, he didn't kill six million Jews. He wasn't Hitler. He didn't even oppress millions of people like Stalin or Mao Tse-tung.

But he would have. Given the power and the influence, he would have. The only difference between Jerry Falwell and Josef Stalin is opportunity. Stalin had the opportunity to take absolute power and Falwell didn't. Don't fool yourself into thinking that a Falwell regime would have been in any way less oppressive than Stalin's USSR. Creationism would replace Lysenkoism. Your gulags would have the typical political prisoners and intellectual prisoners mixed with new breeds of theological prisoners and sexual prisoners. Gays would be deported, sterlized, or killed. Public schools would be replaced with ostensibly "private," church-run educational facilities bent on miseducating and indoctrinating the youth of the nation. This would be the world if Falwell had had his opportunity.

So am I celebrating his death? Yes. Does that make me a bad person? I don't particularly care either way. He was vile and disgusting person, and now he is gone. His life had no value. He was a blight on society, an affront to all that is good in the world, and we are better off without him. Seventy-three years was seventy-three years too long.

The catch-22 of a naturalistic cosmos is that Jerry never had the opportunity to realize and contemplate the lack of an afterlife. Perhaps, though, as his last breath left his bloated body, he instead of seeing God, saw nothing, and he was afraid, and then he was gone. I can live with that.

Alway remember, though, that there is always someone worse. Plumb the depths of insanity.






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