random notes

CNN Belief Blog
Thoughts before debating Christopher Hitchens

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CNN's Anderson Cooper interviews Christopher Hitchens tonight at 10 ET on "AC360
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But praying to God for the Great Unbeliever seems like something akin to sacrilege (and not against the divine).

Not so ripping into him. In a scathing review of Hitchens' "God is Not Great" published in the Washington Post, I wrote that I had "never encountered a book whose author is so fundamentally unacquainted with its subject." I also wrote, however, that "there is no living journalist I more enjoy reading."

I stand by both statements. This post is prompted by the latter
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I teach a course at Boston University called "Death and Immortality," and in it we read remarkable work about the "undiscovered country" of death and whatever (if anything) lies beyond. Hitchens wrote this week in a piece in Vanity Fair of "the unfamiliar country" of people with cancer, and his reflections rank up there with the best writing I know on that sickness unto death.

The Provincetown poet Mary Oliver has written of prayer as paying attention. And so she does - to the humpback whales and peonies and red-tailed hawks that animate her native Cape Cod (and mine). Hitchens pays equally attention to literary and political things, and writes down what he sees with care and courage.

It would be more Hitchenesque of me to body slam him while he is down. This is, after all, the man who called televangelist Jerry Falwell "an ugly little charlatan" just hours after his death, adding that "if you give Falwell an enema, you could bury him in a matchbox." But I don't have it in me, and not because I am a better man.
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... it depends what you may want to call god ...
... thats why it is more significant to use a different term ...
... not to be confused with the scumbags ...
... prayer is also something yet to be sufficiently analyzed ...
... because believers are in "conflict of interest" ...
... to understand prayer ...
... is better to ask an atheist or a rationalist ...
... they may give you answers not affected by "conflict of interest" ...

... now "what is a prayer" ? ...
... prayer as rite, exercise of synchronization of minds ? ...
... prayer as rite, exercise of concentration ? ...
... prayer as desire ? ...
... prayer as exorcizer of fears ? ...
... are those not all prayers, but with different purposes ? ...

... so far we see the preying power of institutionalized religions ...
... but we also see the spiritual power ...
... connecting the minds of the non religious and probably 5% of the religious the same ...
... so maybe there is power in prayer, but on the other side ...
... is other people, not god ...
... is either telepathy or hallucination ...
... and now whoever is familiar with both knows the difference ...
... now the fact that the hypocrites of the nation under god ...
... use daily a polygraph with a 55% accurateness ...
... but won't talk to you of telepathy with a 70% of accuracy ...
... should mean something ...

... yes, great kkkristian example ...
... jerry falwell that wanted the superior jewish-kkkristian race to lead the world ...
... and abolish barney because is gay ...
... yeah, somebody make the new nazi-jew party in his memory ...
... as a symbol they can use a purple dinosaur nailed on a cross ...
... Hitchens probably used too rough language ...
... but nevertheless falwell is a sad example ...
... to promote the cause of believers ...

... anyhow, we hope Hitchens may resist and maintain his courage ...
... even at the end and in the most troubled moments ...
... the religion of the churches is bully-ism and a mock of spirituality ...
... the religious "institution" is the mafia of the afterlife ...
... profiting from people fears, from human ignorance, and for monetary interests ...
... the religious institution has no ground on bejond-humans powers ...
... is just a social fraud ...
... made tax exempt for the benefit of the status quo ...

... spiritual people should walk away from the filth of religious institutions ...
... and ask the cosmologists, physicists and rationalists ...
... for the answers they are looking for ...
... there is only "one" unified system of the universe ...
... is not an old man with a white beard that tells you what you want to hear ...
... is "facts" predictable in theorems and formulas ...
... and confirmed empirically and experimentally ...
... with a great effort indeed ...

... now under the above light ...
... a believer praying for an atheist ...
... and an atheist praying for a believer ...
... may not seem as "strange" as the institution of the religious business ...
... would like the sheep to believe ...

... may the great gardener bring light to you all ...
... and may you all find what you are looking for ...