I have decided to coin a new word, "atheisticist," for use to describe atheists who are offensive, in the same way that sullyblog uses the term Christianist (apparently he coined it) to describe Christians who are annoying because of their shallow hypocrisies, militancy and/or dogmatic ideological rigidities and intolerant attitudes. The term Christianist is meant to parallel Islamist. Similarly, I would conceive Atheisticist as the same sort of parallel.
Having thus coined a new word, I shall apply it posthaste to the recently deceased philosopher/gadfly/atheisticist, Christopher Hitchens. There's some irony (or poetic justice?) in my imitating the sullyblog in this, since apparently sullyblog and the hitch were pals.
As is often the case in his bloggings on various current events, the blogger IOZ provides the sort of biting, dark and yet shiny, brilliant prose that best captures my own sentiments (almost exactly) RE the recently deceased man. He writes about his own perspective vis-a-vis Hitchens, "As an atheist, I found him as embarrassing as my loudest aunt's impenetrable Pittsburghese, mortifying in polite company. If the universe were just, he would wake from his passage on Kolob, basking in the angelic light of billions of perfect, white, immortal Mormon smiles."
This connects back to something I observed about a concept from Bertolt Brecht [broken link! FIXME] in this blog a few weeks ago – one man's heaven can be another's hell. And nothing would be more hellish for an atheisticist of Hitchens' ilk than a Mormon Kolob.
Perhaps releated, perhaps not (you decide): what I'm listening to right now.
보천보전자악단 "우리의 《김정일》동지" [Bocheonbo Electronic Ensemble, "Our Comrade 《Kim Jeong-il》"], from the DPRK. Don't suffer under the illusion that only North Korea produces music like this. You can find very similar things on South Korean television, with merely different themes – it's thought of as old-people's music, rather like Sinatra, maybe, in the U.S.