Comments | all_unnecessary: Illustrious Dead Athiests

all_unnecessary

Illustrious Dead Athiests

Dec 19, 2011 18:06

Over on Crooked Timber, there's a little dust-up regarding Ross Douthat's characterization of Hitchens as the believer's atheist. Having spent so much time with Villiers and Spiritisme, the terrain of the argument is familiar, but this quote tickled me. Apparently it's from John Sladek's book The New Apocrypha (though I can find no text online to ( Read more... )

diss, animate trash

Comments 4

proximoception December 20 2011, 07:59:01 UTC

Don't mormons bless us into salvation with the rest? Or does it not take because we never wear underwear.

all_unnecessary December 20 2011, 18:40:49 UTC

Baptism for the dead, it's called, and it only takes if the dead you makes it take (so they say). Albert Goldbarth (in "After Yitzl") imagined a Singapore couple (both still-born, and married 36 years later by their parents and a spirit medium) receiving a post-coital visit from the missionaries: "...given the chance to be Mormon, to always have been Mormon, and everlastingly Mormon." Maybe it'll happen to you in your afterlife. Will you be gracious? Not sure I would be.

proximoception December 20 2011, 18:58:40 UTC

Retroactive conversion means I already am. But, wait, I'm not, so I guess that means they forgot me. This is as confusing as calvinism.

all_unnecessary December 20 2011, 19:49:49 UTC

CTR (Choose the Right), the Mormons say. It's a key doctrine: if there's no choice, then there's no free agency, and thus there's no righteousness. So you *will* be offered the choice when you're dead. It's up to you to either hang out with Hitch and the other evildoers, or climb the ladder of success and get your own planet.

Me, I'll be in hell playing scrabble with Carl Sagan and Emily Dickinson and Jean Renoir.