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Christopher Hitchens Dies At 62
An anonymous reader sends this quote from the NY Times:
"Christopher Hitchens, a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell who trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking religious belief, and dismayed his former comrades on the left by enthusiastically supporting the American-led war in Iraq, died Thursday at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He was 62. He took pains to emphasize that he had not revised his position on atheism, articulated in his best-selling 2007 book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, although he did express amused appreciation at the hope, among some concerned Christians, that he might undergo a late-life conversion. Mr. Hitchens's latest collection of writings, Arguably: Essays, published this year, has been a best-seller and ranked among the top 10 books of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review."
It's just that western religions tend to be. Christianity especially have been used for lots of bad, and has always been used to control other people and is manipulative and evil by design. It also tries to hinder people's thinking, and tries to tell people how everything is without anyone needing to think.
In comparison, Theravada Buddhism is almost completely different. It promotes the idea of people thinking themselves and not just accepting what someone else tells them to. It doesn't believe in some imaginary persons or miracles - Buddha has actually lived, and isn't viewed as some kind of more than a human. It also teaches you to respect other people and in karmas law. The whole religion isn't so much an religion but good guidelines for life.
There's lots of bad with religions, but most of it comes from Christianity and western world.
I remember a reviewer observing that Christopher Hitchens writes books faster than most people read. I suspect that was true.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
people mention bombing abortion clinics, beating up gays, sorry how many times does that happen out of 2 billion Christians, maybe it more of a problem with American's then Christian's, as that type of behaviour does tend to be US centric.
The majority of Christian's i have met are actually nice people, they help the homeless, they do a lot of chariabtle work, of course there are a lot of people who proclaimed to be religious and aren't nice, but that's like saying you met an arsehole who work for starbucks, so by definition all Starbucks employees are arsehole's.
On slashdot you expect a higher level of discussion, but it's quiet funny how when you mention religion it descends into bigotry and prejudice. Again im not religious but i have no major problem with Christianity, it basic doctrines are right, i.e be nice to people, dont murder people.
People seem to forget the abolition of slavery, the fall of Communism, many of the social right's w have today where from Christian organization's in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
If you even bothered to read the summary, the answer was "no." And your hope isn't for his sake: it's really for yours -- the fact that somebody else believes in your fantasy serves only to bolster your belief.
Additionally, have a look at this.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Invariable, as religions grow and spread they are twisted and used for evil and force people to abandon reason.
What causes the religion to start in the first place? What causes them to grow and spread? What causes them to be twisted and used for evil?
Buddhism, for example, did not start out as a religion. Siddartha Gautama figured out how to get enlightened (to end suffering completely in this lifetime) and started telling other people about it. He said you shouldn't kill people because it would hinder one's progress to enlightenment (not cause of any 'divine justice' or whatever, but simply cause the mental qualities that arise as a result of planning to and executing a murder are antithetical to the ones required to calm the mind and lead to the end of suffering). How did it get from that to people using Zen to justify slaughtering their enemies?
The issue is not with any particular religion. The issue is not with any particular person, either. The issue is the human mind's capacity to react blindly to what is happening. Not seeing what is happening with discernment, you make mistakes. You believe in things that have no proof. You cause yourself and other people to suffer. The issue is with this human capacity to believe. It's a process, not a thing.
Criticizing religions won't make a dent in it. Trying to convince particular people to not believe in their religion won't make a dent in it, because it won't solve the fundamental issue - that capacity to react blindly, aka to believe in things, aka to suffer and cause suffering.
What would make a dent in it is teaching people how to no longer react blindly to things. This is far more than just an intellectual pursuit. This capacity to react blindly and grasp at what is pleasant, reject what is unpleasant, and ignore everything in-between is quite deeply rooted... only made worse by social conditioning such as religion. Teach people a practice that, when undertaken diligently, allows for clearer and clearer seeing, which leads to less and less suffering, and less and less desire to cause suffering in others.
This is not easy. That's just what the Buddha was doing 2500 years ago. And he seemed pretty good at it - there are references to thousands of Arahats (fully enlightened people) in the Pali canon. Yet now you will be hard pressed to find one person claiming they are an Arahat. What happened? I don't know. Buddhism started out as an oral tradition for its first few hundred years... I suspect much was lost.
To summarize: going after the religion is going after something far, far further along than the root cause. If you shoot down one 'bad' religion, another will spring up, and so on ad infinitem. If you eliminate the root cause, though...