For Night Gaunt,

I agree wholeheartedly. It is always wise to be prudent. Skipticism is one way to accomplish it.

Keep it up going on…..

Since you are what you are,I refrain from wishing you a Merry Christmas,but I wish you pleasant days ahead and of course a Happy New Year and beyond.

Although eloquent in the English language,from time to time,Chrostopher Hitchen has a serious drinking problem with alcohol and he needs to overcome this problem,if I am going to take what he writes seriously.

As to his hawkish position on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,he is a HYPOCRITE. Reasons.

(1) He was born and raised in Britain and thus he was a British citizen before becoming a naturalized American citizen. In Britain,he was known to be a liberal in the full meaning of the word. He is now like his former country man,journalist Tony Blenkly of the Washington Tlme newspaper. Either for obtaining American citizenship or after getting it they both became as hawkish as the neoconservatives who pushed hard and fast to bomb,destroy and occupy Iraq,using weapons of mass destruction as an excuse for a hidden agenda,well defined by the neocons. Both are no different from their neocons comrades in their BRAVADO that is
morally and financially corrupting America in blood and treaures. Although the neocons have been totally discredited,Hitchens and Blenkly still preaching the discreditted neocons hawkish lines. PITY!!

(2) British citizens are usually well aware of what has happened to their British empire which then,at its apex of ruling the world did not know what the sunset looked like,because its rule had stretched from India to Aden(Yemen)to Afghanistan,to Iraq to Jordan to Palestine to Egypt to Gibralter and to the Faulkland isle in South America,with no known Time-Zones. The empire’s hakish policy has led to its collapse. But some humanbeings will never learn from the hard lessons of history.

(3) In every land the British occupied,they followed a “DIVIDE AND RULE” strategy of which the indigenous people or rather inhabitants of the occupied lands paid a heavy price during the occupation and after the British were forced to leave. Vivid examples: current conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmire,current conflict between the Palestinians and Zionists over Palestine,current conflict between Turkey and Greece over Cyprus. These are just examples that came spontaneously to mind.

(4) The whole humanity is still suffering from the former British strategy,“DIVIDE AND RULE” till this very day. Pakistanis hate Indians and Indians hate Pakistanis. Arabs hate Zionists and Zionists hate Arabs.Turks hate Greeks and Greeks hate Turks. And it looks like there is no end to this waste of mutual hatred.

It seems to me that the sins of the British empire should have been an eye-opener to all people with a degree of rationality. Chrostopher Hichens’ hawkishness has none.

I am not for politicizing religion-all religions.Period. I have the instinct that tells me that Hitchens vicious assault on all religions is done as a prelude for a hidden agenda or at least for a purpose known only to Hitchens.

Therefore,I read his writings with a great quantity of skipticizm.

For those who are interested to know more about America’s fanatics of evangelism,I highly recommend reading the following book:

American Fascists
By
Chris Hedges

You may be able to find the above book in your local library. It is a must read for anyone interested to know the activities and ultimate goals of the fanatical evangelists. I cannot reemphasize the words “fanatical evangelists”  enough,because not all evangelists are fanatical. Many of them are almost as rational as Albert Einstein. Thus,one has to be extra careful as one touches evangelism as a whole.

Generalizing is always dangerous—and I tend to do it too often, especially in
these comments.  Thanks for calling me on it.  The fear I had in mind was
primarily fear of death—and of course of the heaven/hell syndrome we are all
brainwashed with as kids.  But even without the brainwashing, there is probably
an innate fear of dying in humans which motivates us to do some kind of
“believing” that tends to reconcile us with our end.  Judging from my own
personal experiences, religious beliefs and rituals seem to help people get
through experiences that shake them to the core. 

In the case of war, there is also the (usually buried) fear of punishment for
killing, which would tend to drive soldiers toward religious conversions.

A paradigm that may be universal is in the Puritan preachers who projected
trouble onto individuals, then killed them as witches in order to “cleanse” the
community of “believers.”  We do the same thing, but in a veiled way, picking
on immigrants, for instance, or other “minorities who are different” and then
justifying our persecuting them (relegating them to 3rd class or worse (read
“terrorists”). thus “getting rid of” fear of evil, fear of being different, fear of
disobeying the law, fear of job competition, by projecting it into others and
killing them.  (As most of this kind of thing is repressed and not conscious, it
gets into murky territory quickly where nothing can be “proven” beyond doubt.)

I’ve seen evangelists literally drive people into a belief in their sins and fear of
hellfire in order to literally charm them out of it.  They began by recognizing
people who were fearful, zeroed in on it to the point of hysteria, then
performed what seemed to be a kind of hypnosis, and presto!  Everything
changed for the better—at least for a while.  Fear encourages a lot of scary
business in the world. (There I go generalizing again!  Take everything I say
with a grain of particularization.)

As I think I mentioned in another string, war and religion are Siamese twins.
War creates a lot of people who injure or kill other people and that makes them
feel guilty, eventually.  They want forgiveness.  Presto!  Religion.  War injures a
lot of people and creates a lot of pain.  Victims search for a way to escape their
suffering.  Pray.  Believe.  Presto!  Religion.  People who fight require physical
and mental courage beyond ordinary.  They don’t have it, can’t find it.  What to
do?  Pray.  Presto!  Religion again. 

People want to believe what they are doing is right, especially when they kill
and injure other people.  If they cease to believe they are right, they will stop
fighting.  What to do?  Get the Church together with the military and develop a
set of “laws” that separate wars that are “just” from ordinary old wars that are
just “unjust.”  Make the definitions loose enough to translate into “Our wars are
just.  Your wars are not just.”  Presto.  Religion again, formulating the infamous
“Just War Theory” in the Middle Ages in Europe by the Roman Church and a
bunch of Christian kings who had (remember) Divine Right. 

Unreasonable, insane though it is, the theory still persists as part of military
protocol, pulled out and activated when needed.  We are right.  You are wrong. 
Therefore it is okay for us to kill you.  La-de=da!  Even the ancient Chinese got
into the rationalization act with that old geezer’s “Rules of War” or whatever it
was and whatever his name was.  It’s as old as the hills—and beginning to
stink to high heaven.

Evangelizing is a particularly sick form of exploitation and people ought to be
taught as children to recognize it and resist it, whether religious, political or
what.  Evangelizing works on people who are fearful.  That means any people
anywhere who lack adequate food, clothing, shelter, jobs, freedom of
expression. education, and any people who are facing death or are either faced
with a great loss, or just suffered a great loss.  Desperate people are desperate
for reassurance, someone or something to give them support and tell them
they will be okay if they just do such and such, say such and such, believe such
and such.  It almost doesn’t matter what god, what magic, what power.

Evangelists focus on such people’s feelings because they know from experience
that fearful people desperately want to escape from fear.  Evangelical
exploitation is made even more despicable by the fact that evangelists believe
that they themselves will be rewarded for “saving the souls” of frightened
people. Some go so far as to think they will be rewarded for killing
nonbelievers. 

Religion offers frightened people reassurance.  Probably that is the main
reason for its existence from the beginning of time.  Times of crisis are always
marked by a rise in religious sentiments.  Wars create times of crisis.  War and
religion are two kinds of enslavement in which individuals are asked (expected)
to give up their entire lives—body and soul—to military and/or religious
service. War and religion are intimately inter-related and it is very hard to keep
them separated in actual practice.  In spite of laws to the contrary they will tend
to blend because the circumstances of war provide the main ingredient for
religious conversion—that is, fear of dying and escape from the guilt/shame
of killing.

All wars are crusades of some kind, fought by two “sides” which believe
themselves to be opposite.  (Actually they may not be opposite, but the
operative word here is “believe.”) People fight for and against what they believe,
not what is.  In order to keep wars continuing it is necessary to make people
believe that wars are necessary and inevitable.

Moral:  Be careful what you believe.

Hitchens makes a clear point that the Crusaders within the military establishment are a real threat to the constitution. And let’s not forget the politicians who have become apostles of The Family on C-Street. Could the Spanish-type Inquisition be around the corner.

It is evangelicalism that makes Abramic religions so distructive and I mean Islam and fundamentalist Christianity. They are incapable of understanding that they only speak for their congregations and not for people as a whole.

A large percentage of people do not need a third party to moderate between their belief or unbelief and the only reason they don’t often get feed back into their overstepping of the line, is that most sane people have enough to do getting thru life without spending their energies arguing with a bunch of jerks.

Like so much in our country right now, there is an unwillingness to enforce the Bill of Rights for fear of being accused of being Politically Correct, or some such. The fact is each of us need to remember we have rights which end at the other fellows nose. The churches are arrogant, disruptive and dishonest. Why does anyone look to them for moral clarity?

This is illegal, just as George Bush saying “I don’t care what the voters want, I follow what God tells me to do.” It appears god told him to kill men, women and children in Iraq even though we had no cause to do so and still don’t”.

Maybe, we in the rest of the world should be a lot more concerned about Christian extremist in search of an raptureous apocalypse gaining control of nuclear weapons… Oops! they alread have.

This not new as it was already published by Barbara
Victor, “The Last Crusade Religion and the Politics of
Misdirection”. The following is a quotation from the
book; “Lieutenant General William Boykin uncensored
anti-Islamic sentiments, and his linking of America’s
war on terrorism with Jesus and Christianity;
illustrates that there is no reluctance on the part of
certain members of the military to view the war in Iraq
as a Crusade or Holy War waged between Judeo-Christian
values and Islam”. P.6 London, Constable, 2005. p.13)