I wasn't going to blog until I heard, just now, Glenn Beck making fun of Hitchen's throat cancer by mimicing his raspy voice and chuckling. Today is Pray for Hitchen's Day. I think it's a subtle way many Christians can gloat over his throat cancer while pretending they care.

Unanswerable Prayers

What’s an atheist to think when thousands of believers
(including prominent rabbis and priests) are praying
for his survival and salvation—while others believe his
cancer was divinely inspired, and hope that he burns in
hell? Related: The first in the series, “,” by Christopher
Hitchens

HE OF LITTLE FAITH

The author at home in Washington, D.C.

When I described the tumor in my esophagus as a “blind, emotionless alien,” I suppose that
even I couldn’t help awarding it some of the qualities of a living thing. This at least I know
to be a mistake: an instance of the “pathetic fallacy” (angry cloud, proud mountain,
presumptuous little Beaujolais) by which we ascribe animate qualities to inanimate
phenomena. To exist, a cancer needs a living organism, but it cannot ever become a living
organism. Its whole malice—there I go again—lies in the fact that the “best” it can do is to
die with its host. Either that or its host will find the measures with which to extirpate and
outlive it.
But, as I knew before I became ill, there are some people for whom this explanation is
unsatisfying. To them, a rodent carcinoma really is a dedicated, conscious agent—a
slow-acting suicide-murderer—on a consecrated mission from heaven. You haven’t lived, if
I can put it like this, until you have read contributions such as this on the Web sites of the
faithful:
Who else feels Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer [sic] was God’s
revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him? Atheists like to ignore FACTS.
They like to act like everything is a “coincidence”. Really? It’s just a “coincidence”
[that] out of any part of his body, Christopher Hitchens got cancer in the one part of
his body he used for blasphemy? Yea, keep believing that Atheists. He’s going to
writhe in agony and pain and wither away to nothing and then die a horrible
agonizing death, and THEN comes the real fun, when he’s sent to HELLFIRE
forever to be tortured and set afire.