Thor's Day: People are praying for you...

But you can't satisfy them all

By Morris Dean

Christopher Hitchens, dying, did as he did in living;
gathered his wits and understanding and wrote
publishable lines he hardly ever blotted, giving
us thoughts that I for one oft find apt to quote.

Christopher Hitchens found himself in June 2010 in transit "from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady." He was diagnosed to have esophageal cancer, which had already metastatized to a lung and a lymph node. In Mortality, the book published after his death in December 2011, he describes the medical interventions undertaken, against heavy odds, to try to eradicate the cancer. It's harrowing reading, enough to convince me that the choice to undergo such treatment should not be taken lightly.
    Everyone said he was battling cancer, but he concluded that "I'm not fighting or battling cancer—it's fighting me."
    Another thing he had to contend with was people—most of them well-wishers—who insisted on praying for him. He doesn't write much more gently about them here than he did in his 2007 book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything:

Of the astonishing and flattering number of people who wrote to me when I fell so ill, very few failed to say one of two things. Either they assured me that they wouldn't offend me by offering prayers or they tenderly insisted that they would pray anyway....
    As with many of the Catholics who essentially pray for me to see the light as much as to get better, they were very honest. Salvation was the main point...Pastor [Douglas] Wilson [of the New Saint Andrews College] responded that when he heard the news he prayed for three things: that I would fight off the disease, that I would make myself right with eternity, and that the process would bring the two of us back into contact. He couldn't resist adding rather puckishly that the third prayer had already been answered....
    So there are some quite reputable Catholics, Jews, and Protestants who think that I might in some sense of the word be worth saving. The Muslim faction has been quieter. An Iranian friend has asked for a prayer to be said for me at the grave of Omar Khayyam, supreme poet of Persian freethinkers. The YouTube video announcing the day of intercession for me is accompanied by the song "I Think I See the Light," performed by the same Cat Stevens who as "Yusuf Islam" once endorsed the hysterical Iranian theocratic call to murder my friend Salman Rushdie. (The banal lyrics of his pseudo-unlifting song, by the way, appear to be addressed to a chick.) And this apparent ecumenism has other contradictions, too. If I were to announce that I had suddenly converted to Catholicism, I know that Larry Taunton [of the Fixed Point Foundation in Birmingham, Alabama] and Douglas Wilson would feel I had fallen into grievous error. On the other hand, if I were to join either of their Protestant evangelical groups, the followers of Rome would not think my soul was much safer than it is now, while a late-in-life decision to adhere to Judaism or Islam would inevitably lose me many prayers from both factions. I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire, who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.
    ...A different secular problem also occurs to me: What if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating.
    ...
    PRAYER: Interesting contradictions at the expense of those who offer it—too easy a Pascalian escape-hatch with me on the right side of the wager this time: what god could ignore such supplications? Same token—those who say I am being punished are saying that god can't think of anything more vengeful than cancer for a heavy smoker.
    ...
    If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does. [–Mortality, pp. 15-17, 18, 88, 89]

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Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean

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