So, wishing him in heaven from another atheist as you say you are is really saying you don't know much of his work and life.
"I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that functionless capacity. We Humanists try to behave well without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.
We had a memorial services for Isaac a few years back, and at one point I said, ''Isaac is up in Heaven now.'' It was the funniest thing I could have said to a group of Humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, ''Kurt is up in Heaven now.'' That’s my favorite joke."
I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an AHA memorial service for my predecessor I said, "Isaac is up in Heaven now." That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored.
I made that joke, of course, before my first near-death experience--the accidental one.
So when my own time comes to join the choir invisible or whatever, God forbid, I hope someone will say, "He's up in Heaven now." Who really knows? I could have dreamed all this.
My epitaph in any case? "Everything was beautiful. Nothing hurt." I will have gotten off so light, whatever the heck it is that was going on.
There is a version in Timequake as well. That was where I originally read it [see: http://books.google.com/books?id=ggiR05avpw4C&pg=PT73...]
My path to becoming a fan of his work started young when I was no more than 11 or 12 and sitting in a pediatrics waiting room with my dad on the East end of Long Island. The man sitting next to me cross legged with a pile of loose curly grey hair was reading a magazine and gruffing every few moments. I noticed my dad staring at him.
Anyways when we left my dad said do you know who you were sitting next to? Of course not. That man was Kurt Vonnegut, I have a book on my book shelve you should read...That night I read the entire book Slaughter House Five. Then he gave me Galapagos, and then I was reading Schopenhauer, but I digress.
I have since read every single one of his works, which is why I cloud have told you where that quote was from. Vonnegut introduced me to the American Humanist Association, of which I am a member now, which means I send them money every year, also contribute to their lobbying group in DC, and read their magazine Free Inquiry.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2010/...
Jeremy Paxman: "Do you fear death?"
Christopher Hitchens: "No. I'm not afraid of being dead, that's to say there's nothing to be afraid of. I won't know I'm dead, would be my strong conviction. And if I find that I'm alive in any way at all, well that'll be a pleasant surprise. I quite like surprises. But I strongly take leave to doubt it.
To wish for him to be surrounded for all eternity by those he loves most, in the presence of the source of all love, truth and beauty... I think that's something we'd all like to experience along with him.
Edit: Unclear phrasing
----
She gave us a good tour and we saw this tabernacle here and this here and so on and then at one point she said, "I just want to tell you a little about the church of the Latter Day Saints." And we all politely stood and then she said how in the afterlife all families will be reunited. "You’ll be with your families forever!"
So I put my hand up and said, "What happens if you’ve been good?"
Yeah, pretty much.
Edit: OK, that was unnecessarily flippant. I personally never heard that statement as an honest question, only as a ha-ha-only-serious comeback. It turns out that all the people I met who didn't like their families felt bad about it, and realized it wasn't the way things should be.
To put it another way, I think when Hitchens calls it "the christian conception" of heaven, it wasn't a description of what certain christians believe, but of the biblical description.
I find myself writing the ridiculous sentence that Hitchens perhaps took a religious prose poem/vision/prophecy/allegory/history too literally.
I understand that he had an axe to grind. But he hasn't done justice to the thing he argued against.
I take Hitchens as trying to find a common ground for argument by appealing directly to the text. So it is on point if his interpretation of the text does not do it justice, especially if the Christians interpret it differently in a way that is more internally consistent.
The problem is that no one seems to have an idea of heaven that -- if it were actually REALIZED (vs staying as an abstract idea) -- would be tolerable for any length of time by human beings. We have to assume that people are transformed into something that deals well with eternity, for example... but we never even talked about it at that depth.
I was raised Catholic by two still-seriously-believing parents, I should mention, so I have some idea of what some Christians think heaven is like. It's a vague mush of conflicting ideas.
And that's just fine, because no one wants to think about it deeply; that's not the point. It's just for saying "well, your Nana is in Heaven now, and she's very, very happy there". It's whatever it needs to be for Nana to be very, very happy.
If she's reunited with both husbands and her lover from the late 1950s as well, presumably none of them will have drinking problems or anger-management issues anymore, and they'll all get along, and be very, very happy, and also the baby that died will be there. Also very, very happy.
But again, this is already miles further than anyone delves into it. It was just "well, God will be there, and it's just amazing to be in His presence; end of story."
Even in the Catholic mass, there is a point at which priest announces: "And so, with all the choirs of angels in heaven we proclaim your glory and join in their unending hymn of praise" at which "Holy" is sung.
This is in direct reference to the book of revelation where it is depicted exactly as such, unending praise to god.
And by the way, any meaning you take from revelation is really up to you. The book is a rambling by a deluded madman.
But if you don't unquestioningly share the christian or biblical values, and dont find til biblical god's special kind of love particularly appealing, then an eternity trapped in this might not seem so blissful.
I agree that love, truth and beauty are not simply reducible to matter alone. But that does not mean they have a mystical or otherworldly basis either: invoking supernatural explanations to explain software is obviously foolish, but trying to explain software in terms of atoms gets you nowhere.
This is why I reject both supernatural/mystical/religious and materialist positions. The earlier is conceptually flawed because it rejects or denigrates the physical world (at least in part), and the latter is just as flawed because it rejects the conceptual framework necessary to fully understand phenomena outside of the special sciences. Both camps claim that love, morality, etc. do not have much (if anything) to do with reason and reality.