Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011)
English-American, Literary Critic, Journalist, Author,
Essayist, Polemicist, and Outspoken Anti-theist
The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
Source: Fallen From Grace
In barely a century’s time, the population of the United States has more than tripled, to 313 million. We are a clattering, opinionated cluster of nearly all the world’s races and religions, and many of its languages, under one flag.
You would not know any of this looking at who is voting in one of the strangest presidential primary campaigns in history. There is no other way to put this without resorting to demographic bluntness: the small fraction of Americans who are trying to pick the Republican [i.e., Reactionary] nominee are old, white, uniformly Christian [i.e., willfully ignorant literalists] and unrepresentative of the nation at large.
None of that is a surprise. But when you look at the numbers, it’s stunning how little this Republican [i.e., Reactionary] primary electorate resembles the rest of the United States. They are much closer to the population of 1890 than of 2012.
Book review By DarkSyde for Daily Kos
The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From The Front Lines
By Dr. Michael Mann, Ph.D
Columbia University Press; Cost $10 to $30 (Available in paperback )
Imagine a place where you and your family are threatened, your employer pressured by the most powerful people on earth to fire you, your email hacked and posted by the usual suspects in accusatory snippets, and where a mysterious letter containing white powder mixed in with tons of traditional hate mail land in your inbox. A suspected communist sympathizer during the McCarthy era, or a Muslim in the wake of 9-11? Nope. All because you helped make one of the most important scientific discoveries in a generation. That’s life in the land of the free and the home of the brave for prominent climate scientists these days, which is why I’m personally thrilled to feature one today who not only didn’t shrink an inch, he is fighting back, hard. . . .
Can you describe the process by which you lost your belief in the teachings of your Church?
An interesting thing happened while I was studying at East Texas Baptist University: I was told not to read Rudolf Bultmann. I asked myself: Why? What were they protecting me from? I picked up Bultmann’s work, and that decision is the catalyst that ultimately paved the road to today. Throughout my educational journey, which culminated in an Ordination from the United Methodist Church where I’ve served for seventeen years, I’ve continued to ask the question “Why?”
Ironically, it was seminary that inaugurated my leap of unfaith. It was so much easier to believe when living in an uncritical, unquestioning, naïve state. Seminary training with its demands for rigorous and intentional study and reflection coupled with its values of reason and critical inquiry began to undermine my naïveté. I discovered theologians, philosophers and authors I never knew existed. I found their questions stimulating but their answers often unsatisfying. For example, the Bible is rife with vileness evidenced by stories of sexual exploitation, mass murder and arbitrary mayhem. How do we harmonize this fact with the conception of an all-loving, all-knowing God? While many have undertaken to answer this question even in erudite fashion, I found their answers lacking. Once I concluded that the Bible was a thoroughly human product and the God it purports does not exist, other church teachings, such as communion and baptism, unraveled rather quickly. To quote Nietzsche, I was seeing through a different “perspective” – a perspective based on critical thinking, reason and deduction. By honing these skills over time, reason and critical thinking became my primary tools and faith quickly diminished. Ultimately, these tools led to the undoing of my faith rather than the strengthening of it.
But reason has an enemy…
Its name is religion. Religion has the ability to amplify the desire to be understood, but nearly nullifies the desire to understand others who are not like-minded. Religion retards intellectual growth, represses individual thought, is the adversary of science, the restraint against invention and the stalwart of what would otherwise advance our species into a peaceful existence, without want.
The Incredible Shrinking Apology…
Every day the pool of apologetics gets smaller while the ocean of evidence that counters religious doctrine, dogma and superstition grows deeper. Every day, by default, the fundamentally religious become more willfully ignorant.
Progress…
The voices of reason are getting louder, more prevalent and numerous. We are making slow and steady inroads into areas of our existence that, fifty years ago, would have seemed impossible.
Mightier Than The Sword…
But we will prevail, because if evolution has taught us anything, the desire to explore new ideas and learn new ways of doing things is almost unavoidable. From the time some of our ancestors started to write things down, other ancestors carried those words abroad, bringing new ideas and instructions for new technologies with them.
. . . [M]ost people value [Christian privilege] as an abstract principle, they don’t make decisions based on abstractions. They tend to look at the concrete manifestations of those abstractions. . . . So while many people will say they support [Christian privilege], they are going to be angry if [women workers] access to their contraceptive services are taken away. The situation is similar to those older Tea [Bagee] supporters who say they support getting government out of health care as an abstract principle but will fight tooth and nail to retain their Medicare.
How did American [reactionism] end up so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality? For it was not always thus. . . .
The point is that today’s dismal [White-Wing Party] field — is there anyone who doesn’t consider it dismal? — is no accident. Economic [reactionaries] played a cynical game, and now they’re facing the blowback, a party that suffers from “severe” [reactionism] in the worst way. . . .
Always Question Authority 