When
a bishop threatened a sitting President of excommunication, that can really
piss people off. It didn’t take long for me to express my anger, as shown here
in my Facebook post last September 30, 2010. The original Inquirer news has
long been deleted
for reasons I do not know. So incensed I was at the news that I was ready to
exit the Catholic Church as well. What I
didn’t realized back then that this was the beginning of my journey toward
nonbelief. This moment that set off my curiosity towards freethinking and
atheism and eventually my awakening towards a life of humanism and secularism.
And
my constant companion was Christopher Hitchens. His numerous Youtube videos of
him debating theists on why religions like Islam, Christianity and Judaism are
contributing to the persecution of women and stifling of free speech; the many
CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and CSPAN interviews of him enlightening us to the evils
of fundamentalism and the need to oppose absolutism; his BBC documentary
explaining why Mother Teresa is a complete fanatic, fundamentalist and a fraud;
his best-selling books including god is not Great explaining why religion
poisons everything in our lives.
His
arguments convinced me right away. Unlike dogma, his ideas let you think for
yourself. For a 38 year old Filipino Catholic and former seminarian of eight
years, that was a breath of fresh air, especially if I was told and taught for
many years that God can be known through reason, faith seeking understading, which
is a false premise since faith is a process of non-thinking, accepting
something by abandoning reason. So there I was, soaking my mind in atheistic
literature that was completely new to me. And I loved it!
The
Hitch stood for free
speech, empowerment
of women, against
dictatorship celestial or otherwise, defended homosexuality, and
pleaded for us to use criticial thinking and not surrender our minds against the
onslaught of mind-numbing conformity and impositions of religions.
“Faith is the surrender of
the mind, it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing
that makes us different from other animals. It's our need to believe and to
surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put
all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to
me. ... Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the
most overrated” – Christopher Hitchens
So I learned to be brave, to question everything, and to
stand for the same virtues that Hitchens stood for. Hitchens of course hated
the idea of emulating him and putting him in the pedestal; but I owe him, his
contribution to humanity for unshackling my mind from the prison of religion
and faith. Christopher Hitchens ideas are universal and accepted by
fair minded individuals around the world. When Hitchens wrote why Orwell matters, he got his analysis right. In many ways, he educated us to always pay attention to society's leanings towards absolute rule and constant surveillance. With Hitchens, a torch has been passed, now we need to be aware, not just of fascist and totalitarian tendencies, but of the uncritical surrender of the mind, against the evils of religion. That is why Christopher Hitchens matters to me.
