Saturday, December 24, 2011
Wrong as usual
British satirical paper The Daily Mash thinks it's making a good point:
Yeah okay, I get the joke. In this particular case it doesn't even begin to work.
Some cancer is truly random and stupid and tragic, but not Hitchens's cancer. He intentionally disobeyed all the available Users Manuals for living things.
All documentation, from Babylon to Moses to Jesus to Mohammed to Joseph Smith, has agreed firmly and loudly on this one point. Drink as much as Hitchens drank, use every available intoxicant and poison in huge quantities, and you've voided the warranty.
Life has limits. Human culture, the most miraculous product of life, has given us huge stacks of stored wisdom about those limits. When we follow that wisdom, we're applying an extra level of survival-enhancing feedback that isn't available to other animals.
In dying Hitchens has neatly proved that all those books he wanted to burn .... were right. ¶ 5:26 PM
Hitchens cancer not intelligently designed
Hitchens passed away yesterday, prompting those he slapped up and down the street for the past 30 years to ponder whether or not he finally understood why God had invented malignant cells.
But experts said that after looking at cancer through a microscope for most of their lives they would have reassured the celebrated polemicist that it was almost certainly a result of random genetic mutations, but that if it was designed it was done so by a grade-A cretin.
Oncologist Dr Helen Archer said: "It's not very intelligent to design something and then give it cancer. It's like putting petrol in a diesel car. It is dimwitted.
Yeah okay, I get the joke. In this particular case it doesn't even begin to work.
Some cancer is truly random and stupid and tragic, but not Hitchens's cancer. He intentionally disobeyed all the available Users Manuals for living things.
All documentation, from Babylon to Moses to Jesus to Mohammed to Joseph Smith, has agreed firmly and loudly on this one point. Drink as much as Hitchens drank, use every available intoxicant and poison in huge quantities, and you've voided the warranty.
Life has limits. Human culture, the most miraculous product of life, has given us huge stacks of stored wisdom about those limits. When we follow that wisdom, we're applying an extra level of survival-enhancing feedback that isn't available to other animals.
In dying Hitchens has neatly proved that all those books he wanted to burn .... were right. ¶ 5:26 PM
