Quote Of Note About The Pope - Christopher Hitchens

"My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven't elected a new one. There's no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don't miss it." - Christopher Hitchens

Quote Of Note - Christopher Hitchens

“How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.” -  Christopher Hitchens

Does God Care If An Apologist Clashes With An Atheist?

From Atheist & apologist debate God’s existence by Michael Farr:

A prominent atheist and a Christian apologist clashed April 4 in a debate titled “Does God Exist?” at Biola University, an evangelical school in La Mirada, Calif., near Los Angeles.

Christopher Hitchens, regarded as a leader of the new atheism movement, went head-to-head with William Lane Craig, a Biola professor regarded as one of the world’s leading religious philosophers. About 4,000 people watched the debate in the university’s gym while an estimated 6,000 others watched it online or from satellite locations around Southern California.

While Craig had the home court advantage, Hitchens didn’t hold back, exhorting, “Emancipate yourself from the idea of a celestial dictatorship and you’ve taken the first step to becoming free.”

But Craig had his rejoinders.

“The fruit of the naturalistic worldview is that mankind is reduced to meaninglessness, valuelessness and purposelessness,” Craig said.

And the fruit of the religious worldview is that it is better to pretend and/or lie that God gives us meaning, value, and purpose. Believe in God, you’ll feel better. How is this different from numbing yourself with drugs or alcohol, or some other fantasy that hides or masks reality?

“We’ve heard attacks upon religion, Christianity impugned, God impugned, Mother Teresa impugned, but we haven’t heard any arguments that God does not exist,” Craig said. “Mr. Hitchens seems to fail to recognize that atheism is itself a worldview, and that it claims alone to be true and all the other religions of the world false. It is not more tolerant than Christianity in respect to these other views.”

Someone should inform Mr. Craig that atheism is not an organized religion. Unlike the religious, atheists make no claim to the truth. Unlike the religious, atheists make no claim to tolerance. We simply believe that there is no deity. An atheist does not need to prove the non-existence of God in order to be an atheist. Or to win any debate concerning atheism. Atheism is not about proving that God does not exist, it is about the absence of proof that God does exist.

I want the next debate to be about my imaginary friend Harvey. Title it: “Does Harvey Exist?”

Let the clashing begin. Harvey won't mind.

Christmas Is Inescapable And Totalitarian

Christopher Hitchens makes Christmas sound an awful lot like communism. If Bill O’Reilly knew the truth about Christmas, would he switch sides in the war on Christmas?

Christopher Hitchens explains it, so that I don’t have to.

From 'Tis the Season To Be Incredulous by Christopher Hitchens:

The core objection, which I restate every December at about this time, is that for almost a whole month, the United States—a country constitutionally based on a separation between church and state—turns itself into the cultural and commercial equivalent of a one-party state.

As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda is inescapable. You go to a train station or an airport, and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor's office or a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard. So, unless you are fortunate, are the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer. It becomes more than usually odious to switch on the radio and the television, because certain officially determined "themes" have been programmed into the system. Most objectionable of all, the fanatics force your children to observe the Dear Leader's birthday, and so (this being the especial hallmark of the totalitarian state) you cannot bar your own private door to the hectoring, incessant noise, but must have it literally brought home to you by your offspring. Time that is supposed to be devoted to education is devoted instead to the celebration of mythical events.

It takes a totalitarian mind-set to claim that only one Bronze Age Palestinian revelation or prophecy or text can be our guide through this labyrinth. If the totalitarians cannot bear to abandon their adoration of their various Dear Leaders, can they not at least arrange to hold their ceremonies in private? Either that or give up the tax-exempt status that must remind them so painfully of the things of this material world.

It disturbs me that the worst aspects of Christmas are spreading. Witness what has happened to Halloween. Lights and decorations, and much consumer spending on worthless junk. And much of it is plastic. Talk about wasting a precious commodity such as energy. Talk about filling our landfills with more discarded huge blowup plastic pumpkins and snowmen. How much lead gets added to landfills because of Christmas? Is this why Jesus was born?

The Best They've Got

Once upon a time some atheists wrote some books. Some religious people don’t like these books. So some of them wrote some books too. They also wrote articles, columns, and blog posts, too.

All the responses to the books that the hallowed atheists have written that I have read have one thing in common. Lies. They are full of lies and misrepresentations.

Norris Burkes has written something called Turn a deaf ear to whispers of hatred. Even the title is despicable. I’ll come back to why this is so a little later.

Norris Burkes is a civilian hospital chaplain and an Air Force Guard chaplain. He of all people should not be lying to other people. But he does.

Here is lie number one:

But more often than not, people ignore the whisper of hate, which is where we get our word “ignore-ance.”

I have googled the etymology of the word ignorance. Nothing I found says what Burkes claims. If someone finds something which proves what he has written is true, please let me know, and I will correct this.

Burkes then goes on and claims that the big three of book-writing atheists are “infectious carriers” of hatred.

In the world of religion, I’ve yet to see more infectious carriers than I’ve seen in the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. These evangelical atheists would have you believe that all our problems stem from all forms of religious faith.

In his Dec. 3, 2006, New York Times op-ed piece, columnist Nicholas Kristof pleads for a “Truce on Religion.”

Criticizing what he calls “an increasingly assertive, often obnoxious atheist offensive,” Kristof identifies Dawkins, author of “The God Delusion,” as leading the “Charge of the Atheist Brigade.”

“It’s a militant, in-your-face brand of atheism,” Kristof writes. “Such discrimination on the basis of (non) belief is insidious and intolerant, and undermines our ability to have far-reaching discussions about faith and politics.”

Now, let’s go back and look at the title that Burkes chose. Turn a deaf ear to whispers of hatred. What kind of discussion can you have about faith and politics when one side refuses to even listen to the other?

“These evangelical atheists would have you believe that all our problems stem from all forms of religious faith.” This is an outright lie. Hitchens, Harris and Dawkins claim that some of our problems come from religious faith, not all of them.

I can’t speak for all atheists, but I can speak for myself. This atheist is “on the offensive” because I’m tired of being lied to by hypocrites. The hypocrites who aren’t supposed to lie. The hypocrites who resort to calling other people names when they lie. Let’s be clear about something here. Religion is by its definition and practice “insidious and intolerant.” I would not describe atheists as insidious, but we can be intolerant of religion and religious people. So what? Each side can be intolerant of the other. It goes with the territory. Get used to it.

Burkes quotes Nicholas Kristof:

“Every time I travel in the poorest parts of Africa, I see missionary hospitals ... churches (that) galvanize their members to support soup kitchens, homeless shelters and clinics that otherwise would not exist. Religious constituencies have pushed for more action on AIDS, malaria, sex trafficking and Darfur’s genocide, and believers often give large proportions of their incomes to charities that are a lifeline to the neediest.”

As far as I know, no atheist is denying the good things that religious people have done. We just don’t think that doing good and charitable work requires a belief in a god. Simple as that. So the Kristof quote is totally irrelevant to the point that Burkes is trying to make. Which I see as another lie from Burkes.

Here is more from Burkes:

Kristof concludes, “We’ve suffered enough from religious intolerance that the last thing the world needs is irreligious intolerance.”

Amen, Kristof. We can’t allow intolerance of either kind. We must allow room for the conversation.

This is a typically arrogant viewpoint that atheists must deal with when faced with those of faith. Absolutely no empathy with the other side. How rude can you be? The thought of showing tolerance toward the atheist never, ever enters their small, closed minds. “We must allow room for the conversation.” Again, I remind you of the title: Turn a deaf ear to whispers of hatred. The only conversation that Burkes will tolerate is a one-sided one. He gets to talk. Don’t ever listen to those goddamned atheists.

Burkes does at least have some awareness:

Fortunately, I have friends and readers who are the kind of atheists who put the human in “humanist.” When I ask them what they want from the faithful, they tell me two things. First, they are tired of people making the assumption that an atheist can’t possibly be a moral, upstanding, civic-minded person and not believe in God.

It is a myth that atheists have no morals. It is a good thing that Burkes is aware of this.

Burkes closes with something else I agree with. A call to end all the hate. Perhaps Mr. Burkes could start with himself. First, he could stop hating atheists. Second, he could encourage others to stop hating atheists. Try to love your enemies. Love for Hitchens! Love for Harris! Love for Dawkins!

Yes, let’s try to end all the hate. However, before we can do that, we need to end all the lies.

I doubt that people like Burkes will do that. Lies are the best they’ve got.

Bad Old Boys

From Huck's Free Pass: Why are the media ignoring Mike Huckabee's remarks about the Confederate flag? By Christopher Hitchens:

But this drivel, it turns out, is all a slick cover for racist incitement, and it ought not to be given a free pass.

And not merely racist incitement. So slack is our grasp of history and principle that we seem unable to think of the Confederacy as other than "offensive" to blacks. But there are two Republican candidates in this election—the absurd and sinister Ron Paul being the other—who choose this crucial moment in our time to exalt those who attempted to destroy the Union by force, and those who solicited the help of foreign powers in order to do so, and whose treason led to the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Should their patriotism be questioned? I would say most definitely yes, and questioned repeatedly, at that, perhaps especially if they are seeking the nomination of the party of Lincoln.

There is no way to put a positive spin on the Confederacy. The Confederacy was about one thing, and one thing only. Treason. Southerners today that glorify the Confederacy are glorifying treason. The Confederate flag is symbolic of treason. Politicians that pander to the votes of these Southerners should be ashamed of themselves.