** I feel so sad for this man, he is suffering, I still feel compelled to pray for him, cancer is so hard, difficult, a horrible trial for him to go thru.... any opinions? If you're an atheist would you want prayers.... "just in case it could help" This story is by Alison Flood in the Guardian (UK)
Christopher Hitchens asks fans not to pray for him.
The author and well-known advocate of atheism, who is suffering from cancer, has asked that people refrain from 'troubling deaf heaven' over his plight
Author and vociferous atheist Christopher Hitchens, who was diagnosed with cancer this summer, has appealed to his religious fans and friends not to "trouble deaf heaven" with their "bootless cries" for his recovery.
Writing in October's issue of Vanity Fair, Hitchens revealed that, since he announced in June that he was undergoing chemotherapy on his oeso****us, he has been inundated with thousands of offers of prayers for his health and salvation, from all kinds of religious persuasions. "Devotional websites consecrated special space to the question," said Hitchens. September 20 has been designated "Everybody Pray for Hitchens Day", and he has even found a website inviting people to put money on whether he will renounce his atheism and embrace religion by a certain date, "or continue to affirm unbelief and take the hellish consequences".
"What if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating," he wrote. "I don't mean to be churlish about any kind intentions, but when September 20 comes, please do not trouble deaf heaven with your bootless cries. Unless, of course, it makes you feel better."
After advocating atheism in his 2007 book God is not Great: The Case Against Religion, Hitchens also pointed out that if he abandoned the principles he has held throughout his life "in the hope of gaining favour at the last minute", it would be something of a "hucksterish choice". "The god who would reward cowardice and dishonesty and punish irreconcilable doubt is among the many gods in which (whom?) I do not believe," he wrote.
Hitchens has also been the recipient of less generous responses from the religious, he said, highlighting one website contribution which asked readers: "Who else feels Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer [sic] was God's revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him? ... He's going to writhe in agony and pain and wither away to nothing and then die a horrible agonising death, and THEN comes the real fun, when he's sent to HELLFIRE forever to be tortured and set afire."
But, asked Hitchens, "why not a thunderbolt for yours truly, or something similarly awe-inspiring? The vengeful deity has a sadly depleted arsenal if all he can think of is exactly the cancer that my age and former 'lifestyle' would suggest that I got," he wrote, also musing on the question of why, if "god awards the appropriate cancers", infants contract leukemia and devout people die young and in pain, while "Bertrand Russell and Voltaire, by contrast, remained spry until the end, as many psychopathic criminals and tyrants have also done".
He assured his "Christian correspondent" that his "so far uncancerous throat" is not "at all the only organ with which I have blasphemed ... And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it's hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be 'me'. (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumours or fabrications.)"
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