My goodness gracious me! Hitch's fellow intellectual Sumo wrestler from the Atheist Stable on the God Wars debate-a-thingy, the bushy-bearded Daniel Dennett has finally found God in the shape of a conceptualized entity he refers to as "goodness" and to which he believes human beings are justified in acknowledging and communicating with by means of expressions of gratitude.
Dennett, a former seasonal Santa Claus impersonator who was catapulted to fame playing Charles Darwin in a cameo role in The Simpsons before going on to star as Uncle Albert in Only Fools and Horses, achieved literary success with his writing debut Darwin for Dummies, which he followed up with such airport bookstore favorites as Unconsciousness Explained and Why I am not a Father Christmas. In 2007 he reached the peak of his career when he was voted the world's third best-looking public intellectual in a poll of people who think Christopher Hitchens is cool, and he has been rolling gently downhill on the pundit circuit ever since, even sinking as low as sharing a platform with Dinesh D'Souza.
Of special interest to Hitch Watchers, Dennett's conversion came in an article appearing in the Washington Post entitled Thank goodness for Christopher Hitchens, in which he attempts to wriggle out of the implications of this declaration of faith by writing:
When I was in a similar medical crisis four years ago, I wrote a piece ["Thank Goodness!"] about my gratitude to the doctors (not to God) for saving my life, and said I was forgiving those friends of mine who had the courage to tell me that they were praying for me.
Dan, if you want to thank your doctors, the correct expression is something along the lines of "thank you, doctors!" or "thank my doctors!" Conversely, "Thank goodness!" is most definitely a way of expressing gratitude to the ultimate source of the good behind whatever these medics did. If you'll check your thesaurus you'll find that, like its equivalents from the same stable "thank Providence!", "thank Heavens!" and "thank the Lord!", "thank goodness!" it is normally used in place of "thank God!", as speaking or spelling the name of the Deity has long been considered offensive or taboo in many monotheistic traditions.
Pan be praised for Daniel Dennett's ability to recognize the existence of a morally absolute transcendental goodness that is omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient enough to have created and sustained Christopher Hitchens in the flesh and flab all these years against a constant barrage of booze, bile, fags and phlegm. Left to their own devices, Christopher's selfish genes would have given up the ghost and waved a white flag long ago, but as Dennett rightly points out, it is goodness that has kept the blighter heaving, seething and breathing all these years.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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