Hitchens
Hitchens diagnosed with esophageal cancer
British-born author Christopher Hitchens has cut short a book tour to undergo chemotherapy.
Media outlets including America’s CBS News reported that Hitchens, known to be a heavy smoker and drinker, has been diagnosed with cancer.
“I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my esophagus,” the 61-year-old said in a statement released through his publishers Twelve.
“This advice seems persuasive to me.
“I regret having had to cancel so many engagements at such short notice,” he added.
A representative for Twelve offered no details beyond the statement.
WASHINGTON — British author Christopher Hitchens says he must undergo chemotherapy on his esophagus and has canceled some engagements.
The 61-year-old Hitchens, whose most recent book, “Hitch-22,” is on Publishers Weekly’s best-sellers list, posted a message on his publisher’s website that he had been told by his doctor that he must undergo a course of chemotherapy. Hitchens expressed regret for having to cancel engagements on short notice.
His publisher issued a statement saying the author was being given his privacy during the treatments.
The author, essayist and columnist lives near DuPont Circle. He has written more than a dozen books and enjoyed surprising commercial success three years ago with “God Is Not Great,” a direct attack on religion.
Is the Vatican a Soverign State?
© Slate
Elena Kagan and her colleagues in the solicitor general’s office say it is. They should be ashamed, writes Christopher Hitchens.
Those scrutinizing the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court might want to pay some attention to the recent decision of her office—the office of the solicitor general of the United States—to take the side of the Vatican in the continuing scandal of child rape and the associated scandal of a coordinated obstruction of justice.
Faced with a number of court cases in the United States that have named the pope himself as a defendant in the enabling and covering up of many rapes, the Vatican has evolved the strategy of claiming that the Holy See is in effect a sovereign state and thus possessed of immunity from prosecution. It has now been announced that the Obama administration will be advising the Supreme Court to adopt this view of the matter.
There are a number of fascinating ramifications of this opinion. It is not usually considered polite to mention that the majority of Supreme Court justices are practicing Roman Catholics. (Writing about this delicate matter during the argument over the nomination of John Roberts, I did warn that there might come a day when it could pose a double conflict of interest, both in respect of church teachings and in respect of the Vatican’s decision to shelter Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston after he skipped town to avoid a subpoena.
This was before it came to light that the current pope had been so deeply and personally involved in the church’s strategy of delay and obfuscation.) We will soon have a Supreme Court that contains no Protestants and no secularists and which is being asked to rule on a matter central to the religious beliefs of a majority of its members, who are bound to regard the man formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger as the vicar of Christ on earth. If they now take refuge in the lesser claim that he is the bureaucratic head of a foreign government, will that serve to assuage their consciences?
Even if they do decide the matter in this way, they will not succeed in banishing the terrible question of Vatican responsibility for the destruction of so many childhoods and the protection of so many hardened criminals. To give just one example that has not so far had the attention it deserves, the State Department is required by Congress to make an annual report on the human rights record of every government with which we have relations. Yet there is no annual human rights report on the Vatican—or Vatican City or the Holy See, if you prefer. When questioned on this rather glaring lacuna, officials at Foggy Bottom say that for human rights purposes, the Vatican is not a state.
It enjoys, for example, only the status of an observer at the United Nations. Very well then, if the Supreme Court rules that it is a sovereign government, then it necessarily follows that it must be subjected to official scrutiny on its rights practices, which in international law include the treatment of children.
It will be interesting to see how the Obama administration gets itself off the horns of that dilemma. (It is also perhaps a pity that this question was not resolved earlier, so that we could have had an official U.S. government report on, say, the open complicity of the Catholic Church and the papacy in sheltering the men who organized the genocide in Rwanda.)
Full article: http://www.slate.com/id/2255270/
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Thou Shalt Re-chisel
The Ten Commandments were set in stone, but it may be time for a re-chisel. With all due humility, the author takes on the job, pruning the ethically dubious, challenging the impossible, and rectifying some serious omissions.
© Vanity Fair: The New Commandments by Christopher Hitchens
Video by Jaques del Conte
What do we say when we want to revisit a long-standing policy or scheme that no longer seems to be serving us or has ceased to produce useful results? We begin by saying tentatively, “Well, it’s not exactly written in stone.” (Sometimes this comes out as “not set in stone.”)By that, people mean that it’s not one of the immutable Tablets of the Law. Thus, more recent fetishes such as the gold standard, or the supposedly holy laws of the free market, can be discarded as not being incised on granite or marble. But what if it is the original stone version that badly needs a re-write? Who will take up the revisionist chisel?
There is in fact a good biblical precedent for doing just that, since the giving of the divine Law by Moses appears in three or four wildly different scriptural versions. (When you hear people demanding that the Ten Commandments be displayed in courtrooms and schoolrooms, always be sure to ask which set. It works every time.) The first and most famous set comes in Exodus 20 but ends with Moses himself smashing the supposedly most sacred artifacts ever known to man: the original, God-dictated panels of Holy Writ.
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN61YYrY5BU
The second edition occurs in Exodus 34, where new but completely different tablets are presented after some heavenly re-write session and are for the first time called “the ten commandments.” In the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy, Moses once more calls his audience together and recites the original Sinai speech with one highly significant alteration (the Sabbath commandment’s justifications in each differ greatly). But plainly discontented with the effect of this, he musters the flock again 22 chapters further on, as the river Jordan is coming into view, and gives an additional set of orders—chiefly terse curses—which are also to be inscribed in stone. As with the gold plates on which Joseph Smith found the Book of Mormon in upstate New York, no trace of any of these original yet conflicting tablets survives.
Thus we are fully entitled to consider them as a work in progress. May there not be some old commandments that could be retired, as well as some new ones that might be adopted? Taking the most celebrated Top 10 in order, we find (I am using the King James, or “Authorized,” version of the text):
I and II
These commandments are in fact a mixture of related injunctions. I am the lord thy God.… Thou shalt have no other gods before me. This use of capitalization and upper- and lowercase carries the intriguing implication that there perhaps are some other gods but not equally deserving of respect or awe. (Scholars differ about the epoch during which the Jewish people decided on monotheism.) Then comes the prohibition of “graven images” or indeed “any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”
This appears to forbid representational art, just as some Muslims interpret the Koran to forbid the depiction of any human form, let alone any sacred one. (It certainly seems to discourage Christian iconography, with its crucifixes, and statues of virgins and saints.) But the ban is obviously intended as a very emphatic one, since it comes with a reminder that I the lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. The collective punishment of future children, for the sin of lèse-majesté, may not strike everyone as an especially moral promise.
III
Thou shalt not take the name of the lord thy God in vain, for the lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain. A slightly querulous and repetitive note is struck here, as if of injured vanity. Nobody knows how to obey this commandment, or how to avoid blasphemy or profanity. For example, I say “God alone knows” when I sincerely intend to say “Nobody knows.” Is this ontologically dangerous? Ought not unalterable laws to be plain and unambiguous?
IV
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. This ostensibly brief commandment goes on for a long time—for four verses in fact—and stresses the importance of a day dedicated to the lord, during which neither one’s children nor one’s servants or animals should be allowed to perform any tasks. (Query: Why is it specifically addressed to people who are assumed to have staff?)
Nobody is opposed to a day of rest. The international Communist movement got its start by proclaiming a strike for an eight-hour day on May 1, 1886, against Christian employers who used child labor seven days a week.
Full article here.
Ungodly semantics seek to pigeon-hole free thought
Atheism’s True Believers Gather
Jacqueline Maley, religion reporter writes,
Something you will never see: an atheist boarding a plane with a bomb strapped to him, waving a copy of On The Origin Of Species, before he blows himself up in a violent attempt to further his cause.
So says David Nicholls, the head of the Atheist Foundation of Australia, the man at the increasingly pointy end of the reinvigorated and freshly vocal atheism movement.
Atheists, he says, oppose the extremism that sometimes characterises their religious counterparts. They do not believe in shoving views down throats. They mistrust group-think and are suspicious of institutions. Unlike their believer brethren, atheists are, by definition, not joiners.
”I am not really comfortable with the whole ‘movement’ thing, although I suppose there are other atheists around,” Nicholls says.
How galling, then, that atheists have lately had to collectivise, organise and unite against what they regard as common enemies: religious extremism, the blurring of church and state, and the denial of the theory of evolution.
The new age of activist atheism, which began with the publication of bestsellers such as Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006), and Christopher Hitchens’s polemic God is Not Great (2007), has grown into a loose global coalition of civil libertarians, liberals and gay rights activists.
Australians, notorious for their political complacency, have begun to join up. Membership of the Atheist Foundation has increased since 2001, Nicholls says, although he refuses to release numbers.
Next month the incipient Australian movement will come together for the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne. Speakers include Dawkins, the movement’s supreme deity; the philosopher Peter Singer; and Dan Barker, a prominent American atheist activist and former Christian preacher.
Organisers say it is the largest such event to be held in Australia, and perhaps in the world. The 2500-capacity convention is sold out and there is even a waiting list.
”It started with the scandals of the televangelists in America, the [paedophilia] scandals of the Catholic Church, and then there were the attacks on the Twin Towers,” Nicholls says of atheism’s recent popularity.
”People began writing books that gelled with the population. People realised if they wanted change in society, they had to make it happen. Religion was getting a free ride.”
Tanya Smith, a 35-year-old financial services professional and one of the volunteer organisers of the convention, says the religious lobby is a well-funded, well-organised force that has a disproportionate influence on politics. Atheists would like to ”neutralise” that influence.
”I want laws that will make society better, not laws based on a book that was written two thousand years ago,” she says.
‘The God Fraud’ by Sam Harris
© Sam Harris:
In her article (“Think Again: God,” November 2009), Karen Armstrong discovers that Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and I have mistaken “fundamentalism” for the totality of religion. (Sorry about that.) But do Richard and Christopher really hold religion responsible for “all human cruelty”? That is a surprise. I hadn’t realized that they were idiots.
In any case, I am hopeful that Armstrong’s winsome depiction of Islam will shame and enlighten them, as it has me. They will discover that Hassan al-Banna and Tariq Ramadan are paragons of meliorism and wisdom, while we are ignorant bigots who know nothing of theology (of course), politics (Christopher, are you listening?), human nature (what’s to know?), or the proper limits of science (um … narrower?).
I can’t quite remember how we got it into our heads that jihad was linked to violence. (Might it have had something to do with the actual history and teachings of Islam?) And how could we have been so foolish as to connect the apparently inexhaustible supply of martyrs in the Muslim world to the Islamic doctrine of martyrdom? In my own defense, let me say that I do get spooked whenever Western Muslims advocate the murder of apostates (as 36 percent of Muslim young adults do in Britain). But I now know that these freedom-loving people just “want to see God reflected more clearly in public life.”
I will call my friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali at once and encourage her to come out of hiding: Come on out, dear. Karen says the coast is clear. As it turns out, those people who have been calling for your murder don’t understand Islam any better than we do.
Continue reading at SamHarris.org
Karen Armstrong replies:
It is clear that we need a debate about the role of religion in public life and the relationship between science and religion. I just wish this debate could be conducted in a more Socratic manner. Socrates, founder of the Western rationalist tradition, always insisted that any dialogue must be conducted with gentleness and courtesy, and without malice. In our highly polarized world, we really do not need yet another deliberately contentious and divisive discourse.
When I was a student, I was taught to listen to all sides of a question, examine the evidence impartially, and be prepared to change my mind. For many years, I wanted nothing to do with religion and would have agreed wholeheartedly with Sam Harris; my early writing definitely tended to the Dawkinsesque. But my study of the history of world religion during the past 20 years has compelled me to alter my views.
Continue reading at SamHarris.org
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