redjohn1971
GODLESS COMMIE BASTARD
It's not easy being Green
environmentalism
...So anyway I ordered some Green Party gear off of CafePress for the hell of it. The last time I picked up any Green Party swag was at my first Fort Bend County Green Party Meeting---it was also the last meeting whereafter the party voted to disband. I voted against, but was out-voted. Anyway, what had driven me to the meeting to begin with was the utter despair I was feeling sitting through the unbearable jingoism of the DNC.
I just couldn't take it anymore...in some ways not unlike a parallel foreshadowing of my moment to decide to seek the path of recovery from alcoholism. 
Anyway, my new gear arrived and I'm pretty pleased with most of it. Both shirts are XL, but the white shirt I got seems smaller than the lime-green shirt I got, even though it also is XL and I wear XL. Anyway, the Lime-Green shirt in question was allegedly designed by someone who is anti-Green, belonging to OpinionNation.net; the shirt even has this URL under the logo. The logo itself is basically the word "Green Party" written out, but instead of a proper "G", it is actually a Hammer-and-Sickle symbol. The "creator" taunts on Cafe Press "Don't let these 'watermelons' fool you---Green on the outside, but Red inside".
It's a good thing that Houston lacks Zoning...that truly is good---the bad thing is, all its suburbs DO have it, and how. I hate this city's crappy, weak hearted attempt at "Mass Transit". It's pathetic for a city in the top 10 largest in the USA. I saw a billboard showing an SUV and the caption had it, seemingly without irony "Houston's Mass Transit System"; This was without doubt, shocking TRUTH IN ADVERTISING that was breathtakingly refreshing for its bold callousness. If it's still up I gotta run over and snap a photo of it someday and put it up on Flickr...it's so exquisitely distasteful and stupid.
The best Green critique of political economy I have read in recent years has got to be:
Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train: Errant Economists, Shameful Spenders, and a Plan to Stop them All (Paperback)
by Brian Czech
The analysis is spot-on brilliant, and worth the price of the book all by itself. The second half of Czech's book, however, is woefully disappointing and inadequate, as it addresses his tentative proposed solutions to the mess he so carefully lays out in part 1.
Czech, as I understand him, basically advocates that to reign in wealthy, conspicuously consuming elites who are raping and destroying the planet, is that 1) we must SHUN them in all social settings even up to including 2) REFUSING TO BREED WITH THEM.
Holy Crap. The Bilderberg Group must surely be shaking in their finely pressed Armani suits. They won't last another week if we put this devastating plan into action!
*Giggle, snort* The problems with Czech's theses are 1) these FUCKERS HAVE NO SHAME and 2) they don't inbreed with working class scum or middle class riff-raff like Czech or me anyway.
Now a book that actually makes an excellent companion piece to this one, and actually gives a realistic prescription for what has to be done to fix things, is:
Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century (Paperback)
by Stan Goff
Stan Goff is a retired Army Special Forces Master Sergeant and a was a regular contributor to Mike Ruppert's now defunct newsletter From the Wilderness and an ongoing contributor to Counterpunch. Although Goff is tackling a lot of different subjects all at once, there are some points of convergence with Czech's book, and the basic lesson for Marxists is that Socialism had better become Eco-aware or it will die. Goff also provides a careful analysis of Empire; How it works, etc. And he also is pretty straight up about what he believes it will take to put things right for ordinary people. You'll have to read it yourself to find out, but I'll tell you it doesn't involve love beads, peace marches, flower-power or writing your congressman.
Ecological collapse goes hand in hand with societal collapse, population overshoot and crash, and a die off if not a complete die out. The stakes really are that high this time, much higher than at the dawn of the 20th Century, when Socialists were able to be much more hopeful about the future prospects of humanity.
MindSay Musings, etc.
One of the things I like about MySpace the best, over more solidly "community" blog sites like, say, MindSay, is that I can block other people's comments altogether. So I'm not entirely sure that MindSay is the appropriate forum for this blog.
Over there I can say, "What part of MYspace don't you people understand? This is MY forum. You're welcome to poke around and read whatever you like, but I'm really not interested in your opinions."
Over there, if someone really wants to respond, they can always use MySpace's internal email system.
Nobody looks for profundity on MySpace. It's my virtual doodle-pad in cyberspace, even I don't take it seriously.
I also like my "professional" blogs over on Blogger and LiveJournal. One's anonymous, the other is under my real name. I end up being more "militant" in my opinions on the anonymous one. I'm still dickering with this here MindSay blog, which as careful observers know I've started then wiped out completely to start all over again about 3 times now. It's often too damn "personal", really beyond my comfort zones. So this blog may not stay here long. It seems that here you can SCREEN comments but you can't block them. All things being equal, I'd just as soon block them altogether than edit/screen them. To screen them, I still gotta read 'em, and, pardon me, but honestly I don't give much of a f*ck what most people have to say, so the most screening does is prevent OTHER people from having to read my visitors' verbal vomitings, but not me.
MindSay seems too "busy" to me--you can SEE who came and viewed your blog and go visit them. I often don't WANT to f*cking know who came here on a regular basis. If I want to meet somebody, I'll visit the forums on MySpace or elsewhere. Anyway, I don't know if this MindSay blog will ever finally get off the ground. I did change this blog so I'm not using my full, real name, but I don't know if that will prompt me to blog here more often or not. The points I am complaining of most about MindSay are the features that most people seem to like and choose MindSay for that reason. What can I say--it was my very first foray into the Blogosphere, and I just got really quickly self-conscious about what I was writing here. Whereas MySpace leaves me feeling "safer" due to the level of control I have there, and by virtue of the fact that nobody really takes "MySpace" all that seriously. When you hear "MySpace" in the media, you usually think 3 things....1) teenagers 2) new Rock Bands (and Bands playing in other genres just getting started out in the music biz) and 3) sicko pervs trying to score on potential underage victims. Don't know how accurate that is in reality, but that's the public perception. So given that perception, I feel relatively safe, perhaps paradoxically, by blogging there about anything and everything, since MySpace isn't taken seriously by serious minded people. Not a lot of people are just going to wander by, etc. Over here on MindSay, you get visited by Google's web "spiders", too. Oh joy. No one's going to say "I read this really provocative blog on MySpace..."; So I save my MySpace to just blog about whatever. I'm deliberately trying to be more focused and topical here. MindSay is funny, though, because many of the blogs are restricted to viewing by Members Only, unlike, say, BLOGGER, or WORDPRESS, or the other major blog platforms--many of them increasingly pay-per-use/subscription based. My aforementioned professional blogs also have to stay topical to remain focused and uncluttered. But Life is seldom focused and uncluttered, so I feel for me there's the need for MySpace, both in cyberspace and in the metaphorical sense of Life at Large. I plan to keep THAT blog, THAT account up and running no matter where I go or what I do. MindSay, however...
...Well, the jury's still out on MindSay. Right now I've started this here blog GODLESS COMMIE BASTARD. I don't plan to update frequently, just whenever I feel like it. Mostly to blog about atheism, irreligion, the humanist outlook, and to critique organised religion from a Marxian POV.
It's been my observation that most Humanist/Atheist/Agnostic communities are rather over-represented by people who are also Libertarian / Objectivist in outlook--friends & followers of Ayn Rand, in other words (and sometimes just as fanatical about their worship of "the miracles of the marketplace" as any religious believer).
I'm aware the same critique can be leveled at me, and I will owe up to a certain Socialist/Anarcho-syndicalist "faith", if by faith you mean merely some kind of vague hope for the future betterment of human life and society. I may yet transplant this blog somewhere else, but for now it's on MindSay, which is probably not the ideal platform for it, either, but here it sits--for now.
Objectivist/Libertarian folks I run into in my local Freethought & Humanist groups write & talk about a kind of idealized (I'd say romanticized) Capitalism, their own idiosyncratic Capitalism-as-it-Ought-to-Be, still singing the praises of a capitalism that Marx himself credited with banishing the Medieval World of superstition, ignorance, etc. All proponents of modern Capitalism invoke Adam Smith without really understanding Smith...i.e. the Smith who said things like:
============================================
We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate… [When workers combine,] masters… never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen.
============================================
Adam Smith would be considered far, far "Too Lefty" to write for the Wall Street Journal today.
A socialist POV, on the other hand, deals with really existing capitalism, warts and all. Libertarians don't care for that. When a Socialist points out some egregious capitalist horror or other, the Libertarian is quick to blame government policy, which is often only part of the story. Libertarians have an idealized vision of capitalism as a benign, mostly wholly good force, and Government as always a dark-and-evil force. (It certainly can be, to be sure, but when control is temporarily wrested from the hands of elites and put in the service of the common people, it can, however temporarily, be made to act as a force for justice.);
Libertarians I know locally say wacky things like "in a true Free marketplace without Government involvement...", ignoring the fact that markets are CREATED and MADE POSSIBLE by government action...talk about commodity fetishism...shit. Corporations & Government work hand in hand, side by side. The contemporary U.S. Federal Government is nothing if not the national & global Gendarme of trans-national Capital.
My Libertarian atheist friends seem blinded to certain truisms like "The CIA is Wall Street, and Wall Street the CIA."; That's not just a slogan but literal truth, not the least given the backgrounds of so many DCIs (Directors of Central Intelligence). Their previous careers? Wall Street investment bankers, Wall Street lawyers, etc. They all know damn good and well where their class interests lie, and they actively defend them by any means necessary.
I guess too the idea of doing a blog along the lines of my vision for GODLESS COMMIE BASTARD is to shock, provoke, rattle some chains, etc. It's also sometimes lonely being the only Socialist among fellow Freethinkers. Don't get me wrong...some Libertarian-leaning Freethinkers ARE spot-on brilliant when talking of the evils & danger of religion, etc, and some well received atheist books have been penned by followers of Ayn Rand, etc. And yes, there is some ground to argue that Socialism & Communism aren't as completely incompatible and antithetical with religious beliefs and practice as they are popularly portrayed to be by their traditional antagonists serving the moneyed elites practicing an operatively Straussian world view. There are and were Christian socialists, however naive. But as many a repressed/censured/defrocked Catholic Liberation Theologian can tell you, religious views and practice are NOT 100% compatible with Socialism either, nor can they ever really be so. Liberal / Moderate Religion became possible as a cultural practice thanks to the moderating influence of scientific inquiry, humanism, and the ability to shame and ridicule religion into behaving more humanely. Absent the material basis for scientific, rational culture, we could quickly see affairs slide back into an utterly violent, barbarous, tribalistic , and superstition-dominated world, which has been, sadly, the norm for human history and society rather than the exception.
What to I mean by material basis for culture? Simply put I mean the infrastructure of culture and learning embodied by printed books and distribution systems for those books, including Libraries, which own large collections of books in common for community use, partly obviating the need to purchase all books for one's own personal consumption, a privilege previously accorded only the personally wealthy. In Ben Franklin's time, most Libraries--such as existed, were by paid subscription only. Better than exclusively private collections, but still far short of the Public Library ideal. By material basis I mean also Colleges and Universities and compulsory public education provided to all and supported by all through taxation, rather than left exclusively to the Church hierarchy. Whatever faults one can lay at the foot of real, existing Public Education today (and one can find fault with a great deal of it--it could be so much better than it is), it's still better to have it--however flawed--than not have it at all. A College education is increasingly being priced out of the reach of ordinary citizens again, becoming once more an exclusive purview of the wealthy, and a good way to discipline and punish those middle class folks who still seek one--with onerous student loan debt schemes increasingly replacing and displacing grants and scholarship funds, which are drying up or becoming less and less able to meet the rising costs of education, etc. Let's not even get started on the beginning of the end of the Age of Cheap Oil, which adds a whole other layer of complexity and difficulty to the mix.
On a slightly different tac, if you're going to read and accept Sam Harris's primary thesis in The End of Faith, if only partly, or especially in toto, do yourself a favor and pick up this book next:
Terror and Civilization: Christianity, Politics, and the Western Psyche (Paperback)
by Shadia B. Drury
Drury is also, like Harris, like Hitchens, a regular contributor to that fine periodical, Free Inquiry, and her book is very eye opening, very chilling, providing a window on a "once and future" world we, that is humanity, once contended with, and may yet be forced to contend with again.
Also painful but necessary reading is:
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (Paperback)
by Susan Jacoby
Jacoby chronicles the alliances and compromises that made possible the secular U.S. Constitutional, and why those historical alliances are shifting and breaking down, imperiling us all. It will definitely leave an impression on any thoughtful American, religious or not. A fine contribution to American Intellectual History.
I read both of these tomes some time ago, but both still stand out in my mind as profoundly important works.
Over there I can say, "What part of MYspace don't you people understand? This is MY forum. You're welcome to poke around and read whatever you like, but I'm really not interested in your opinions."
Over there, if someone really wants to respond, they can always use MySpace's internal email system.
Nobody looks for profundity on MySpace. It's my virtual doodle-pad in cyberspace, even I don't take it seriously.
I also like my "professional" blogs over on Blogger and LiveJournal. One's anonymous, the other is under my real name. I end up being more "militant" in my opinions on the anonymous one. I'm still dickering with this here MindSay blog, which as careful observers know I've started then wiped out completely to start all over again about 3 times now. It's often too damn "personal", really beyond my comfort zones. So this blog may not stay here long. It seems that here you can SCREEN comments but you can't block them. All things being equal, I'd just as soon block them altogether than edit/screen them. To screen them, I still gotta read 'em, and, pardon me, but honestly I don't give much of a f*ck what most people have to say, so the most screening does is prevent OTHER people from having to read my visitors' verbal vomitings, but not me.
MindSay seems too "busy" to me--you can SEE who came and viewed your blog and go visit them. I often don't WANT to f*cking know who came here on a regular basis. If I want to meet somebody, I'll visit the forums on MySpace or elsewhere. Anyway, I don't know if this MindSay blog will ever finally get off the ground. I did change this blog so I'm not using my full, real name, but I don't know if that will prompt me to blog here more often or not. The points I am complaining of most about MindSay are the features that most people seem to like and choose MindSay for that reason. What can I say--it was my very first foray into the Blogosphere, and I just got really quickly self-conscious about what I was writing here. Whereas MySpace leaves me feeling "safer" due to the level of control I have there, and by virtue of the fact that nobody really takes "MySpace" all that seriously. When you hear "MySpace" in the media, you usually think 3 things....1) teenagers 2) new Rock Bands (and Bands playing in other genres just getting started out in the music biz) and 3) sicko pervs trying to score on potential underage victims. Don't know how accurate that is in reality, but that's the public perception. So given that perception, I feel relatively safe, perhaps paradoxically, by blogging there about anything and everything, since MySpace isn't taken seriously by serious minded people. Not a lot of people are just going to wander by, etc. Over here on MindSay, you get visited by Google's web "spiders", too. Oh joy. No one's going to say "I read this really provocative blog on MySpace..."; So I save my MySpace to just blog about whatever. I'm deliberately trying to be more focused and topical here. MindSay is funny, though, because many of the blogs are restricted to viewing by Members Only, unlike, say, BLOGGER, or WORDPRESS, or the other major blog platforms--many of them increasingly pay-per-use/subscription based. My aforementioned professional blogs also have to stay topical to remain focused and uncluttered. But Life is seldom focused and uncluttered, so I feel for me there's the need for MySpace, both in cyberspace and in the metaphorical sense of Life at Large. I plan to keep THAT blog, THAT account up and running no matter where I go or what I do. MindSay, however...
...Well, the jury's still out on MindSay. Right now I've started this here blog GODLESS COMMIE BASTARD. I don't plan to update frequently, just whenever I feel like it. Mostly to blog about atheism, irreligion, the humanist outlook, and to critique organised religion from a Marxian POV.
It's been my observation that most Humanist/Atheist/Agnostic communities are rather over-represented by people who are also Libertarian / Objectivist in outlook--friends & followers of Ayn Rand, in other words (and sometimes just as fanatical about their worship of "the miracles of the marketplace" as any religious believer).
I'm aware the same critique can be leveled at me, and I will owe up to a certain Socialist/Anarcho-syndicalist "faith", if by faith you mean merely some kind of vague hope for the future betterment of human life and society. I may yet transplant this blog somewhere else, but for now it's on MindSay, which is probably not the ideal platform for it, either, but here it sits--for now.
Objectivist/Libertarian folks I run into in my local Freethought & Humanist groups write & talk about a kind of idealized (I'd say romanticized) Capitalism, their own idiosyncratic Capitalism-as-it-Ought-to-Be, still singing the praises of a capitalism that Marx himself credited with banishing the Medieval World of superstition, ignorance, etc. All proponents of modern Capitalism invoke Adam Smith without really understanding Smith...i.e. the Smith who said things like:
============================================
We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate… [When workers combine,] masters… never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen.
============================================
Adam Smith would be considered far, far "Too Lefty" to write for the Wall Street Journal today.
A socialist POV, on the other hand, deals with really existing capitalism, warts and all. Libertarians don't care for that. When a Socialist points out some egregious capitalist horror or other, the Libertarian is quick to blame government policy, which is often only part of the story. Libertarians have an idealized vision of capitalism as a benign, mostly wholly good force, and Government as always a dark-and-evil force. (It certainly can be, to be sure, but when control is temporarily wrested from the hands of elites and put in the service of the common people, it can, however temporarily, be made to act as a force for justice.);
Libertarians I know locally say wacky things like "in a true Free marketplace without Government involvement...", ignoring the fact that markets are CREATED and MADE POSSIBLE by government action...talk about commodity fetishism...shit. Corporations & Government work hand in hand, side by side. The contemporary U.S. Federal Government is nothing if not the national & global Gendarme of trans-national Capital.
My Libertarian atheist friends seem blinded to certain truisms like "The CIA is Wall Street, and Wall Street the CIA."; That's not just a slogan but literal truth, not the least given the backgrounds of so many DCIs (Directors of Central Intelligence). Their previous careers? Wall Street investment bankers, Wall Street lawyers, etc. They all know damn good and well where their class interests lie, and they actively defend them by any means necessary.
I guess too the idea of doing a blog along the lines of my vision for GODLESS COMMIE BASTARD is to shock, provoke, rattle some chains, etc. It's also sometimes lonely being the only Socialist among fellow Freethinkers. Don't get me wrong...some Libertarian-leaning Freethinkers ARE spot-on brilliant when talking of the evils & danger of religion, etc, and some well received atheist books have been penned by followers of Ayn Rand, etc. And yes, there is some ground to argue that Socialism & Communism aren't as completely incompatible and antithetical with religious beliefs and practice as they are popularly portrayed to be by their traditional antagonists serving the moneyed elites practicing an operatively Straussian world view. There are and were Christian socialists, however naive. But as many a repressed/censured/defrocked Catholic Liberation Theologian can tell you, religious views and practice are NOT 100% compatible with Socialism either, nor can they ever really be so. Liberal / Moderate Religion became possible as a cultural practice thanks to the moderating influence of scientific inquiry, humanism, and the ability to shame and ridicule religion into behaving more humanely. Absent the material basis for scientific, rational culture, we could quickly see affairs slide back into an utterly violent, barbarous, tribalistic , and superstition-dominated world, which has been, sadly, the norm for human history and society rather than the exception.
What to I mean by material basis for culture? Simply put I mean the infrastructure of culture and learning embodied by printed books and distribution systems for those books, including Libraries, which own large collections of books in common for community use, partly obviating the need to purchase all books for one's own personal consumption, a privilege previously accorded only the personally wealthy. In Ben Franklin's time, most Libraries--such as existed, were by paid subscription only. Better than exclusively private collections, but still far short of the Public Library ideal. By material basis I mean also Colleges and Universities and compulsory public education provided to all and supported by all through taxation, rather than left exclusively to the Church hierarchy. Whatever faults one can lay at the foot of real, existing Public Education today (and one can find fault with a great deal of it--it could be so much better than it is), it's still better to have it--however flawed--than not have it at all. A College education is increasingly being priced out of the reach of ordinary citizens again, becoming once more an exclusive purview of the wealthy, and a good way to discipline and punish those middle class folks who still seek one--with onerous student loan debt schemes increasingly replacing and displacing grants and scholarship funds, which are drying up or becoming less and less able to meet the rising costs of education, etc. Let's not even get started on the beginning of the end of the Age of Cheap Oil, which adds a whole other layer of complexity and difficulty to the mix.
On a slightly different tac, if you're going to read and accept Sam Harris's primary thesis in The End of Faith, if only partly, or especially in toto, do yourself a favor and pick up this book next:
Terror and Civilization: Christianity, Politics, and the Western Psyche (Paperback)
by Shadia B. Drury
Drury is also, like Harris, like Hitchens, a regular contributor to that fine periodical, Free Inquiry, and her book is very eye opening, very chilling, providing a window on a "once and future" world we, that is humanity, once contended with, and may yet be forced to contend with again.
Also painful but necessary reading is:
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (Paperback)
by Susan Jacoby
Jacoby chronicles the alliances and compromises that made possible the secular U.S. Constitutional, and why those historical alliances are shifting and breaking down, imperiling us all. It will definitely leave an impression on any thoughtful American, religious or not. A fine contribution to American Intellectual History.
I read both of these tomes some time ago, but both still stand out in my mind as profoundly important works.
Book reviews of some recent atheist books
I've recently finished several atheist books that I rather enjoyed, though not all equally.
They were:
Letter to a Christian Nation
by Sam Harris
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
by Sam Harris
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Hardcover)
by Christopher Hitchens
Before proceeding to review these, I should state that I "read" all of these as audiobooks, as part of my daily commute to work, and out and about doing chores about town. Otherwise I simply wouldn't have the time to read them. I do read printed books of course, and very much enjoy doing so, but there's only so much time I have to devote to this. While with my drive times, what usually happens is that I will sicken and tire of commercial radio yet again and rebel by either checking out or purchasing good quality non-fiction Audiobooks.
By far my favorite of the three was the last one, read by the author himself, Christopher Hitchens, in his solemn, educated British voice. I don't always agree with Hitchens, but like a broken clock, then man can still be right at least twice a day. God is Not Great is a brilliant tour de force of the evils and stupidities of religion that still threaten our world and, as the subtitle has it, "poisons everything".
Next favorite on my list was Sam Harris's painfully short but concise Letter to a Christian Nation, his answer to objections sent to him by theists in response to his earlier book The End of Faith. In condensed version, it is a point-by-point polemic against mainstream North American Christian-Conservative ideology as it now stands and its decidedly negative impact on public discourse and rational public policy (or lack thereof--rationality that is--on account of religion's still considerable influence in these United States.).
The End of Faith starts out strong, and I must admit of a need to adjust my own position and views as a result of reading this provocative book. I was at least partially persuaded of Harris's thesis. But not completely. While I suspect he is right in his assertion that mere secular liberals understate and downplay the harmful & hostile aspects of religion, in particular in Islam, by the same token, though he pays lip-service to anti-Imperialist critique, he quickly dismisses such critique out of hand as irrelevant, to hammer home his own brand of Islamophobia. Harris over-stretches, I think, and cites some pretty dubious "Liberal Hawks" to shore up his thesis....Alan Dershowitz? Paul Berman of Dissent (which, by the way, should be more properly called Assent these days--assent to the project of Empire, which has always been a bipartisan affair)...that Paul Berman?? Um, no.
Hitchens is also nominally pro-war, and has been more belligerently so in other fora, but he soft-pedals this in God is Not Great. And I would be the first to say that anyone accusing either Hitchens or Harris of being Bush-lovers are wrong and way off base.
Part of my biggest parting of ways with both of them stems from the fact that I am a 9/11 Skeptic, while they basically accept the "official" story at face value. If I were not a 9/11 Skeptic, I would probably see the world much more as Harris and Hitchens do. But because I am, I cannot.
They were:
Letter to a Christian Nation
by Sam Harris
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
by Sam Harris
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Hardcover)
by Christopher Hitchens
Before proceeding to review these, I should state that I "read" all of these as audiobooks, as part of my daily commute to work, and out and about doing chores about town. Otherwise I simply wouldn't have the time to read them. I do read printed books of course, and very much enjoy doing so, but there's only so much time I have to devote to this. While with my drive times, what usually happens is that I will sicken and tire of commercial radio yet again and rebel by either checking out or purchasing good quality non-fiction Audiobooks.
By far my favorite of the three was the last one, read by the author himself, Christopher Hitchens, in his solemn, educated British voice. I don't always agree with Hitchens, but like a broken clock, then man can still be right at least twice a day. God is Not Great is a brilliant tour de force of the evils and stupidities of religion that still threaten our world and, as the subtitle has it, "poisons everything".
Next favorite on my list was Sam Harris's painfully short but concise Letter to a Christian Nation, his answer to objections sent to him by theists in response to his earlier book The End of Faith. In condensed version, it is a point-by-point polemic against mainstream North American Christian-Conservative ideology as it now stands and its decidedly negative impact on public discourse and rational public policy (or lack thereof--rationality that is--on account of religion's still considerable influence in these United States.).
The End of Faith starts out strong, and I must admit of a need to adjust my own position and views as a result of reading this provocative book. I was at least partially persuaded of Harris's thesis. But not completely. While I suspect he is right in his assertion that mere secular liberals understate and downplay the harmful & hostile aspects of religion, in particular in Islam, by the same token, though he pays lip-service to anti-Imperialist critique, he quickly dismisses such critique out of hand as irrelevant, to hammer home his own brand of Islamophobia. Harris over-stretches, I think, and cites some pretty dubious "Liberal Hawks" to shore up his thesis....Alan Dershowitz? Paul Berman of Dissent (which, by the way, should be more properly called Assent these days--assent to the project of Empire, which has always been a bipartisan affair)...that Paul Berman?? Um, no.
Hitchens is also nominally pro-war, and has been more belligerently so in other fora, but he soft-pedals this in God is Not Great. And I would be the first to say that anyone accusing either Hitchens or Harris of being Bush-lovers are wrong and way off base.
Part of my biggest parting of ways with both of them stems from the fact that I am a 9/11 Skeptic, while they basically accept the "official" story at face value. If I were not a 9/11 Skeptic, I would probably see the world much more as Harris and Hitchens do. But because I am, I cannot.
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My atheism quiz results
Appropriate enough for a scientific socialist....
((The formatting's a little off, as the HTML didn't carry over from MySpace.))
=========================================================
"....You scored as Scientific Atheist. These guys rule. I'm not one of them myself, although I play one online. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be, these are the people who will bring us into the future."
Scientific Atheist
92%
Militant Atheist
67%
Angry Atheist
67%
Spiritual Atheist
67%
Apathetic Atheist
50%
Agnostic
50%
Theist
8%
================================================================
"What kind of atheist are you?"
created with QuizFarm.com
((The formatting's a little off, as the HTML didn't carry over from MySpace.))
=========================================================
"....You scored as Scientific Atheist. These guys rule. I'm not one of them myself, although I play one online. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be, these are the people who will bring us into the future."
Scientific Atheist
92%
Militant Atheist
67%
Angry Atheist
67%
Spiritual Atheist
67%
Apathetic Atheist
50%
Agnostic
50%
Theist
8%
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"What kind of atheist are you?"
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