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I'll close on the implied question
that Bill asked me earlier:
Why don't you accept this wonderful offer?
Why wouldn't you like to meet Shakespeare?
for example. I mean
I don't know if you really think that
when you die you can be corporally reassembled and have conversations
with authors from previous epochs, it's not necessary that
you believe that in Christian theology and I have to say
that it sounds like a complete fairytale to me.The only reason I want to meet Shakespeare,
or might even want to, is because I can meet him anytime
because he is immortal in the works he's left behind.
If you've read those, meeting
the author would almost certainly be a disappointment. But when Socrates
was sentenced to death for his philosophical
investigations and for blasphemy,
for challenging the gods of the city, and he accepted his death,
he did say: "Well, if we are lucky perhaps
I'll be able to hold conversation with other
great thinkers and philosophers and doubters too."
In other words that the discussion about what is good,
what is beautiful, what is noble,
what is pure and what is true could always go on.
Why is that important, why would I like to do that?
Cause that's the only conversation worth having
and whether it goes on or not after I die,
I don't know.
But I do know that it's the conversation
I want to have while I'm still alive, which means that to me
the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security,
the offer of an impermeable faith
that can't give way,
is an offer of something not worth having.
I want to live my life taking the risk all the time
that I don't know anything like enough yet,
that I haven't understood enough, that I can't know enough,
that I'm always hungrily operating
on the margins of a potentially great harvest
of future knowledge and wisdom.
I wouldn't have it any other way.
And I'd urge you to look at those of you who tell you,
those people who tell you, at your age,
that you're dead till you believe as they do.
What a terrible thing to be telling to children.
And that you can only live (applause)
And that you can only live
by accepting an absolute authority.
Don't think of that as a gift,
think of it as a, think of it as a poison chalice,
push it aside however tempting it is, take the risk of
thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty and
wisdom will come to you that way. Thank you.
Christopher Hitchens
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Christopher Hitchens 13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011
Christopher Hitchens 13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011
Christopher Hitchens 13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011
Christopher Hitchens 13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011