--LOL, oh shit, Hitch just does not give a fuck and I love it!!! I hope he continues to keep kickin'em in the nuts!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leora-tanenbaum/christopher-hitchens-to-g_b_48617.htmlLeora Tanenbaum
If I were sitting in the pews listening to Christopher Hitchens delivering a sermon on his new book, a denunciation of religion, I would roll my eyes, perhaps doze off, maybe even walk out. This is what believers in houses of worship do when confronted with overblown, out-of-touch, and insulting words from the pulpit.
But as Hitchens imagines it, we sit docilely to even the most inane homilies from our religious leaders, listening and absorbing. Then we go off, clutching our sacred texts, to abuse, oppress, and murder.
Unlike most preachers, admittedly, Hitchens is entertaining and erudite, and he studs the pages of his book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, with golden nuggets of rhetoric. But as an observant Jew myself, who also happens to be involved in the movement for women's meaningful participation and leadership in Orthodox Judaism, I read this book feeling as if I were watching the local news with its endless worst-case scenarios and hyperreal depiction of daily life.
Hitchens calls all religions --not only Judaism, Christianity, and Islam-- to task for being transparently man-made ("the 'revelation' at Sinai and the rest of the Pentateuch was an ill-carpentered fiction, bolted into place well after the nonevents that it fails to describe convincingly or even plausibly"). They are foolish and delusional ("The real 'miracle' is that we, who share genes with the original bacteria that began life on the planet, have evolved as much as we have"). They're not even functional ("Thanks to the telescope and the microscope,
no longer offers an explanation of anything important"). They're stupid (in 2005 in Nigeria, a group of Islamic religious leaders "declared the polio vaccine to be a conspiracy by the United States" against Muslims. Believers refused the vaccine and within months, polio was back and spreading fast).
And of course, they are abusive --witness the Vatican's complicity and cover-up of "a huge racket of child rape and child torture, mainly but by no means exclusively homosexual, in which known pederasts and sadists were shielded from the law and reassigned to parishes where the pickings of the innocent and defenseless were often richer." And murderous --"I leave it to the faithful to burn each other's churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can always be relied upon to do"; "Conceivably, some readers of these pages will be shocked to learn of the existence of Hindu and Buddhist murderers and sadists. Perhaps they dimly imagine that contemplative easterners, devoted to vegetarian diets and meditative routines, are immune to such temptations?"
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
