After being sober a number of years, abusing prescription drugs, true, but not drinking, I got drunk. A 6 day binge. At the end of the sixth day I was sitting on the edge of the bed. I’d always had an internal hassle, and the older I got the worse I got. Feeling quite sorry for myself, life was crappy. It was especially bad drunk.

I had the gun at my temple and did not even have the guts to pull the trigger. Whatever was left of my self-respect left at that moment.

So I went to a treatment facility. Actually, I called the psychiatrist I’d been seeing and he referred me to a psych unit at a local hospital. They were full. So I went to a alcohol treatment center, thinking I was crazy but knowing I was alcoholic too.

And a fellow told me that I wasn’t one of the lucky ones, I was going to live, and I may as well learn how.

I know there is something back there that physics will never describe, and it’s available to everyone, and it’s not God in any sense of the word.

I hope when my time comes I’m able to still recognize that all pagan chants are to God, and a pagan chant in English is still a pagan chant. If I have a soul in that sense I do not want those folks to have it.

But what I really want to know is, if I ever have to use that gun, how will I find the courage to do so?

No, don’t bother answering. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, that’s one question we can only ask, or answer, for ourselves.

Much more here.

I remember an old story (probably apocryphal) I once heard about one of the founding fathers (Tom Payne? Paul Revere? I don’t remember which) who was determined to die without religion.

Like many, if not most, of his fellow revolutionaries, he did not particularly deny the existence of God, he just felt that existence was irrelevant. God may have created the Universe, but there wasn’t the slightest evidence he cared for any of the people in it, or was even aware of their existence.

The story goes that his friends kept bringing religious functionaries to his deathbed, ministers of many Protestant denominations, a priest, eventually in desperation, a rabbi, in the hope he would go with a prayer on his lips. He didn’t.

We all will eventually go like Hitchens, many of us, thanks to modern medicine, in dreadful pain and perfectly aware of what is happening to us. It is one of
God’s cruelest jokes, that whether he exists or not, and whether we believe in him or not, neither will make even the slightest difference.

It’s one of the reasons I bought a gun. What you can’t buy is the courage to use it.

Good bye, Hitchens. You will be missed.