Clipmarks | Antara's 'christopher hitchens' clips

Hello All You Godless Infidels And Happy Heathens

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 15:43:32 GMT

clipped by: cptenaud
clipper's remarks: Gaylor said this to start her show,

Hello all you godless infidels, out-of-the-closet atheists and happy heathens. You can turn on the radio or TV 24/7 to be preached at. This is one hour a week of the public airwaves that offers an alternative. This program is an antidote to the domination of public airwaves by the religious right.

Your humble correspondent eagerly await the nauseating and hypocritical outcry from Fox Noise and the religious right in this country which is sure to come. For to them, freedom of religion has never meant freedom from religion and certainly not from our own brand of home-grown Christianity which more and more Americans are viewing as blatantly hypocritical, judgmental and overbearing.

Clip Source: bravenewfilms.org

So said Annie Laurie Gaylor of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, as she kicked off her inaugural, one-hour weekly radio show that began broadcasting on Saturday on Air America.

Atheist Christopher Hitchens, author of the bestselling book “God Is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything”, was Annie Gaylor's first guest. Imagine that, true freedom of expression in America; who would have guessed it was possible.

Small wonder that atheism and agnosticism seem to be gaining some momentum among people who are tired of the hypocrisy of organized religion; you can see it in literature and a variety of public forums including the Internet, as more free-thinkers confront different religions and urge other questioning persons to come out of the shadows.

Tags: when, religion, becomes, sin

Unbelievable,That's what religion is

Mon, 21 May 2007 11:29:02 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.boston.com

Unbelievable

That's what religion is, says Christopher Hitchens in his profoundly skeptical manifesto

By Daniel C. Dennett

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
By Christopher Hitchens

In earlier ages reliable information was rather hard to get, and in general people could be excused for taking the founding myths of their religions on faith. These were the "facts" that "everyone knew," and anybody who had a skeptical itch could check it out with the local priest or rabbi or imam, or other religious authority. Today, there is really no excuse for such ignorance. It may not be your fault if you don't know the facts about the history and tenets of your own religion, but it is somebody's fault

So only atheists are in a comfortable position to cast the first stone, and Christopher Hitchens, in "God Is Not Great," relishes the role.

For some reason, many religions force themselves to think of the birth canal as a one-way stree

Tags: book review, religion, atheism, daniel dennett, god, christopher hitchens

Tribal Religion, Transcendent Religion

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 21:02:53 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: newsweek.washingtonpost.com

All religions have both types of people – the tribal and the transcendent. The tribal type see in the particular narratives of their tradition a narrowing of concern, and therefore care only about the people who look like them, talk like them and pray like them.

The transcendent see in the same particularity a universalizing of care, and therefore focus their energies on all people, especially groups most in need, regardless of creed.

If tribal religion wins, it necessarily pits groups against one another based on identity, and it means that people like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris are right – religion will destroy everything.

If transcendent faith wins, it opens the possibility for different identity groups to use their particular narratives to articulate a collective vision that includes everybody.

If that isn’t the future, there will be no future.

God isn't the problem, it's the followers that kill me!

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 05:49:25 GMT

clipped by: ouyangwulong
clipper's remarks: Ross Douthat raises a very valid criticism of Christopher Htichens' book God is Not Great.

Most people attacking religion in books are going after God. I think this is a waste of time, normally promoted by personal grudges and emotional baggage. As a general rule, scientists should never try to prove a negative statement.

On the other hand, if Hitchens hasn't answered Douthat's question, allow me to offer my ten cents in the following response:

Clip Source: www.claremont.org

A review of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens

The book has been written with two main purposes in mind: to show that all religions are false, and to prove that their effects are near-universally pernicious.

He succeeds in demonstrating that many faiths are frauds and many prophets have been fakers, that believers commit all sorts of terrible crimes and that Buddhists are no more pacific than Southern Baptists, and that the Bible is neither a work of academic history nor a biology textbook. Then again, I was convinced of these points already, and hoped that Hitchens would pick a fight on more contested territory, such as the origin and nature of spiritual experience, which seems a more likely source for man's persistent religiosity

But like most apologists for atheism, he evinces little interest in the topic of religion as it is actually lived, preferring to stick to the safer ground of putting the godly in the dock

Tags: god, atheism, hitchens, religion, evil, right, left, prayer, faith, miracles

NeuroBuddhism

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 20:24:44 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: richarddawkins.net

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It's going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it's going end up challenging faith in the Bible

Tags: inner life

Christopher Hitchens on the waterboard

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:40:59 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: blog.newhumanist.org.uk

Here's a proper bit of journalism - following his earlier claim that "waterboarding" doesn't amount to torture, but rather "extreme interrogation", New Humanist honorary associate Christopher Hitchens agreed to let some scary-looking ex-special forces guys in balaclavas try it out on him for his latest Vanity Fair assignment.

The video's up on the VF website, as is Hitchens' article on the experience. As you'll see he doesn't last very long, and he now admits that waterboarding is most certainly a form of torture.

For more on America's continuing use of torture in the "war on terror", read Stan Cohen's column from our January issue.

Clip Source: www.vanityfair.com

The Atheist Avalanche

Mon, 07 May 2007 02:16:00 GMT

clipped by: willhelm

Clip Source: www.washingtonmonthly.com

Last September Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion and Sam Harris published Letter to a Christian Nation. In January Victor Stenger published God: The Failed Hypothesis. This month Christopher Hitchens is out with God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

I'm curious: have I just not noticed books like this before? Or is it really true that there's a sudden avalanche of popular books extolling the virtues of atheism? (Or, in any case, denigrating organized religion.) Is there any particular reason for this?

Tags: materialists, atheism, christianity, faith, religion

The transformation of Andrew Sullivan

Tue, 29 May 2007 03:46:19 GMT

clipped by: ouyangwulong
clipper's remarks: Although it may well annoy people on both sides of the political spectrum, I have to say, with no small amount of admiration, I find it a promising sign that such people can change their minds, rather than lead a life locked in to a single ideology.

In all fairness, this is also a quality I can also admire going the other way, as in the cases of Christopher Hitchens and Charlton Heston.

Ideological stagnation seems to be a sign of decline in civilizations.

Clip Source: www.nybooks.com

For more than two years, Sullivan relentlessly shilled for Bush and for the war on terror, including its "central front" in Iraq. It wasn't until the early months of 2004 that he broke with the "shrewd," "quiet," "underestimated" figure of the President, first over Bush's endorsement of a constitutional ban on gay marriage, then in moral repugnance at the evidence of government-condoned torture at Abu Ghraib. In October 2004, he "endorsed"—as he rather grandly put it, as if he were an editorial board—John Kerry as "the lesser of two risks." Since then he has attacked the administration with all the vehemence he formerly lavished on its detractors. Nowadays, on Sullivan's blog, Rumsfeld is labeled a "war criminal," Bush a "boneless wonder."

Tags: politics, democrats, republicans, bush, andrew sullivan

Why Atheists are So Smart

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 07:22:41 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks: Thus when Christopher Hitchens and other atheists routinely dismiss religious claims on the grounds that "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence," they are making what philosophers like to call a category mistake. We learn from Kant that within the domain of experience, human reason is sovereign, but it is in no way unreasonable to believe things on faith that simply cannot be adjudicated by reason.

When atheists summarily dismiss the immortality of the soul or the afterlife on the grounds that they have never found any empirical proofs for either, they are asking for experiential evidence in a domain which is entirely beyond the reach of experience. In this domain, Kant argues, the absence of evidence cannot be used as the evidence for absence.

Notice that Kant's argument is entirely secular: It does not employ any religious vocabulary, nor does it rely on any kind of faith.

Clip Source: news.aol.com

atheists have been duped by a fallacy.

The Fallacy of the Enlightenment is the glib assumption that human beings can continually find out more and more until eventually there is nothing more to discover. The Enlightenment Fallacy holds that human reason and science can, in principle, unmask the whole of reality. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant showed that this premise is false. In fact, he argued, that human knowledge is constrained not merely by how much reality is out there but also by the limited sensory apparatus of perception we bring to that reality.

The implication of Kant's argument is that reality as a whole is, in principle, inaccessible to human beings. Put another way, there is a great deal that human beings simply will never know.

Ours is a world of appearances only in which we see things in a limited and distorted way, "through a glass darkly," as the apostle Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians 13:12.

Tags: christianity, religion, faith, philosophy, immanuel kant, atheism

Bible Quotes, Part 2

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 04:28:09 GMT

clipped by: CrazyRedHead

Clip Source: richarddawkins.net

88

"What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof."

Christopher Hitchens

90

"Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear."

Thomas Jefferson

83

"I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."

Mark Twain

"During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live.

during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood.

Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry."

Mark Twain

Tags: religion, bible, quotes

Angry Atheists Are Hot Authors

Fri, 25 May 2007 07:45:13 GMT

clipped by: MomLes
clipper's remarks: These guys have many good points, but fundamentalist atheists are just as dangerous as fundamentalists of any other religion. And I always want to ask them, "Which particular god don't you believe in?" - because God is unimaginably more than we can imagine.

Clip Source: www.beliefnet.com

The time for polite debate is over. Militant, atheist writers are making an all-out assault on religious faith and reaching the top of the best-seller list, a sign of widespread resentment over the influence of religion in the world among nonbelievers.

Christopher Hitchens' book, "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," has sold briskly ever since it was published last month, and his debates with clergy are drawing crowds at every stop.

The writers see themselves in a battle for reason in a world crippled by superstition. In their view, Muslim extremists, Jewish settlers and Christian right activists are from the same mold, using fairy tales posing as divine scripture to justify their lust for power. Bad behavior in the name of religion is behind some of the most dangerous global conflicts and the terrorist attacks in the U.S., London and Madrid, the atheists say.

Tags: atheism, fundamentalism, books

Heathen Tv

Fri, 23 May 2008 00:47:05 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks:

Clip Source: heathen.tv

Tags: heathens, infidels, rabblerousers, interesting

"Believe me, it's torture": Christopher Hitchens gets waterboarded

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:07:05 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Hitchens decided to experience waterboarding for himself. He lasts about twenty seconds and describes having nightmares and panic attacks ever since. Also check the video at http://snipr.com/2sv2d

Clip Source: www.vanityfair.com

The author catches his breath after undergoing his first waterboarding session. Photographs by Gasper Tringale.

Believe Me, It’s Torture

by Christopher Hitchens

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose.

I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

Tags: torture, gwot, journalism, violence

christopher hitchens articles

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 00:26:24 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks: I digg him!

Clip Source: www.buildupthatwall.com

Aug 29 2007

"Teresa, Bright and Dark"

	Dec 2007	"On the Limits of Self-Improvement, Part II"
	Nov 2007	"A Death in the Family"
	Oct 2007	"On the Limits of Self-Improvement, Part I"
	Sep 2007	"God Bless Me, It's a Best-Seller!"
	Jul 2007	"At the Desert's Edge"
	Jun 2007	"Londonistan Calling"
	Jun 2007	Q&A on "Londonistan Calling"
	Apr 2007	"Holiday in Iraq"
	Jan 2007	"Why Women Aren't Funny"
	Sep 2006	"I. F. Stone's Mighty Pen"
	Jul 2006	Q&A on North Korea's Nuclear Threat
	Jan 2006	"Childhood's End"
	May 2005	"O Brother, Why Art Thou?"
	Mar 2005	"Ohio's Odd Numbers"
	Dec 2004	"Kissinger Declassified"
	Nov 1994	"African Gothic"
		[back to top]

Tags: christopher hitchens

Atheists Stunned by Amazing Toast that Does Not Resemble Charles Darwin Whatsoever

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 22:23:33 GMT

clipped by: Jorjor
clipper's remarks: The image, said nonbelievers, was further evidence that there is no God, and that the universe is what it is by chance, not the hand of a creator. But religious leaders were quick to say that the toast may still be significant .

Details appeared on the Atheist News Service, based in Massachusetts, which specializes in irreligious broadcasts. They reported that the toast, served to Richard Dawkins at breakfast one Tuesday, did not reflect the image of the man who first advanced the concept of evolution.

Noted atheist P.Z. Myers, a scientist and someone who did not ever meet Charles Darwin, said he was convinced the toast did not show Darwin.

"As you can see from the photo, this toast doesn't look anything like Darwin. Just plain, ordinary toast. Maybe if you squint, you can see a squid...no, I'm just kidding. It just looks like toast."

"I'm sure it's delicious with butter, but it doesn't even resemble Christopher Hitchens, much less the author of The Origin of Species."

Clip Source: shakespearessister.blogspot.com

Tags: humor, religion, evolution, atheism, darwin