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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."
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.
Even at that, Zen Buddhism has been used to justify a great deal of nastiness; off the top of my head I can tell you that, despite being nominally Shinto, the army of the Empire of Japan was heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism. The whole kamikaze thing, while nowhere near as widespread as some would have you believe, was nevertheless directly influenced by the teachings of Zen Buddhism.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Whether or not you agree with his stance on the Iraq War, it is a grotesque oversimplification to say that he was a shameless shill. His views on the war were extremely well reasoned and definitely worth listening to; differentiating him from the brainless talking heads on Fox News. While I never happened to agree with his stance on the war, I always found his thoughts on it to be extremely informative, thought-provoking, and challenging. This man was there, he saw what was really happening. He went out of his way to seek out and confront totalitarianism throughout his career. For you to sit back from the comfort of your parent's basement and say that he can rot in Hell for expressing an opinion that is different from yours is disgusting and shameful. Fuck you, and fuck the people who modded you up.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Yes but it is the wrong question. This question is asking if religious persons are morally superior to non-religious persons. I have often heard that claim but I don't believe it is true, nor it is relevant to me. The relevant question in my view is, "Name one good, moral action you took that was motivated by religious belief, that you would not otherwise have done." In other words, ask not whether religion makes "people" more ethical, ask whether religion makes me more ethical. And BTW that is very easy to answer.
And name one wicked action committed in opposition to religion. Also easy.
I hope there is more to Hitchens' book than that. Very likely. Frankly as a religious person myself I am interested in reading it. I believe it was Aristotle who said the unexamined life is not worth living. Answering questions like these is in my opinion good for anyone's moral development, whether they prefer a religious or humanist approach.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Right.... except that it isn't hard at all to find that different people have interpreted it differently. A quick google search will bring up some interesting articles on the topic. Interesting if you find biblical interpretation debate interesting. I usually attribute my interest to the sort of bemused fascination that comes from having been an atheist who went to catholic schools...
The main quote on the topic is:
Some bibles have reinterpreted this to "Homosexuality is a sin", which would include lesbian acts, etc. Clearly thats a debatable stretch, but, before even debating that part, arguments about the context of the statement lead to different conclusions:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_bibh4.htm
Under that interpretation, its kind of hard to use that as a condemnation of all gay sex.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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...