Christian Johann Heinrich Heine (13 December 1797 – 17 February 1856)
German Poet, Journalist, Essayist, Literary Critic. His verse and prose is distinguished by its satirical wit and irony. His radical political views led to many of his works being banned.
Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.
Laughter and Hitchens were inseparable companions, and comedy was one of the most powerful weapons in his arsenal. . .
Behind the laughter was what his friend Ian McEwan called “his Rolls-Royce mind,” that organ of improbable erudition and frequently brilliant, though occasionally flawed, perception. The Hitch mind was indeed a sleek and purring machine trimmed with elegant fittings, but his was not a rarefied sensibility. He was an intellectual with the instincts of a street brawler, never happier than when engaged in moral or political fisticuffs. . .
On his sixty-second birthday – his last birthday, a painful phrase to write – I had been with him and Carol and other comrades at the Houston home of his friend Michael Zilkha, and we had been photographed standing on either side of a bust of Voltaire. That photograph is now one of my most treasured possessions; me and the two Voltaires, one of stone and one still very much alive. Now they are both gone, and one can only try to believe, as the philosopher Pangloss insisted to Candide in the elder Voltaire’s masterpiece, that “everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”
It doesn’t feel like that today.
People engage in pretty much the same sexual acts, with the same frequency, whether they’re believers or atheists. Religion and atheism does affect people’s sex lives — sexual guilt diminishes, and sexual satisfaction increases, when people let go of religion. But the actual details of people’s physical sex lives, on average, don’t change. . .
. . . [S]ocieties with high rates of atheism are also, overwhelmingly, societies with high rates of happiness, stability, and social functioning. They’re societies with some of the lowest rates of violent crime in the world, some of the lowest levels of corruption, excellent educational systems, strong economies, well-supported arts, free health care, egalitarian social policies, and more. . .
. . . Peter Hitchens is full of shit[!]
Source: MoveOn.org
What is it those Christians say about Christianity being a religion of peace?
Well, alrighty then. . .
Source: Mark Winter Atheist Nexus
Cee Lo Green’s small change to the lyrics to John Lennon’s song “Imagine” is causing a very big uproar.
Charged with singing Lennon’s famous solo-era tune on NBC’s New Year’s Eve show shortly before the ball dropped in Times Square , Green changed the lyrics from “Nothing to kill or die for, And no religion too” to “Nothing to kill or die for, And all religion’s true.”
Always Question Authority 