Religion Do you ever feel a strong emotional bond to someone? (alive or dead......)

Jan 26, 2006
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#1
Christopher Hitchens for me...

I'm not a hardcore atheist more agnostic/protest atheist) but I respect ANY ONE who can argue like him against organised religion in this way....



Don't know if a single person on this forum would ever feel the same but that's life

(BTW Not his weaselly grifting ethno-nationalist cuck of a younger brother Peter...)
 
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Behrooz_C

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#2
I listened to Hitchens years ago, long before his death. He was very educated, articulate and loved putting religious people in their place, specially muslims. He was a Trotskyite in his youth but as he grew older he saw bullshit through that and changed his views. Much like his younger brother, Daily Fail columnist, who I don't like very much. They had a rivalry, almost animosity towards each other and had a famous TV debate on religion.
He once likened Islam to a hell like North Korea, saying that at least you can die and leave North Korea. In Islam the torture begins when you die :D


Politically he became very pro-US towards the end and supported US activities in the Middle East.

Every once in a while I like listening to his old interviews, specially this one;

 
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Pooya

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#3
In my opinion, the only LOGICAL thing is being agnostic.
Can you PROVE to me there is god? NO
Can you PROVE to me there is NO god? No

Until someone can provide a scientific evidence, I am going to remain agnostic. However, just like you said, I have no problem with people going to Church/Mosque, I have no problem with people saying there is no god. BUT, I do have a problem with those who want to force their idea to society.
Just like how I respect your views, you have to respect mine.

PS) BTW, in my opinion, the god that is defined by religion does not exist, as in some dude watching us and recording our action bla bla, however, a god which I refer to as the initial energy, who knows?
 
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Jan 26, 2006
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#4
I listened to Hitchens years ago, long before his death. He was very educated, articulate and loved putting religious people in their place, specially muslims. He was a Trotskyite in his youth but as he grew older he saw bullshit through that and changed his views. Much like his younger brother, Daily Fail columnist, who I don't like very much. They had a rivalry, almost animosity towards each other and had a famous TV debate on religion.
He once likened Islam to a hell like North Korea, saying that at least you can die and leave North Korea. In Islam the torture begins when you die :D


Politically he became very pro-US towards the end and supported US activities in the Middle East.

Every once in a while I like listening to his old interviews, specially this one;

Pretty sure Christopher wasn't too keen on populism and personality cults...

You must practice some Olympian-level doublethink to prefer Christopher, given his stance on ethno-nationalism, to Peter.. Christopher was always proud about how he was viewed by the likes of Maggie and for him uneducated nationalists were as bad an obsessive cult as religious people.

Even as a contrarian, he would be disgusted at the direction both his home and adopted countries took, whoring themselves to the lowest common denominator and devaluing education and expertise to the extent that we are seeing today...
Imagine him commenting on the likes of Priti Patel...
 

Behrooz_C

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#5
I am sure he would have felt the same about populists on the other side, like Corbyn and McDonnel, but also pan-European populists who hide their nationalistic feelings behind their EU flag waving and t-shirts. He would have been intelligent enough to understand that the route EU has taken is gradually giving rise to resentment, division, and return to traditional and more dangerous form of state nationalism.

Anyway, apparently his last word on his deathbed was "Trotsky", but other than that, he wasn't "keen on populists and personality cults" :D
 
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Jan 26, 2006
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#6
Due to his own family tragedy, he wasn't too keen on suicide.

As someone with a brain, he was disgusted with the corruption of entities like the EU, without wanting to commit geo-political and economic suicide by leaving it based on ethno-nationalist whims. Pretty sure he wouldn't be keen on the jokers and game show panellists deciding his birth country's future now.
 

Behrooz_C

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#7
There were lots of people on the traditional left who supported leaving the EU. In fact "Labour for Leave" had 5 million members, and probably many others who weren't members but felt the same way. They weren't represented in the media. Of course many Brexiteers were so based on ethno-nationalist ideals but many also had other reasons. The brush that every Brexiteer was painted by was far from reality.

Whether leaving the EU is geo-political and economic suicide (which by the way is quite a dramatic conclusion to reach), time will tell. Indications are that not only the consequences are not as disastrous as the so assured of their own righteousness pseudo-intellectuals predicted, but in time the benefits will outweigh the harm.

Let's wait and see.
 
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Jan 26, 2006
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#8
There were lots of people on the traditional left who supported leaving the EU. In fact "Labour for Leave" had 5 million members, and probably many others who weren't members but felt the same way. They weren't represented in the media. Of course many Brexiteers were so based on ethno-nationalist ideals but many also had other reasons. The brush that every Brexiteer was painted by was far from reality.

Whether leaving the EU is geo-political and economic suicide (which by the way is quite a dramatic conclusion to reach), time will tell. Indications are that not only the consequences are not as disastrous as the so assured of their own righteousness pseudo-intellectuals predicted, but in time the benefits will outweigh the harm.

Let's wait and see.
Of course there were people on the traditional left who supported leaving the EU. Who the heck is challenging that?

Corbyn was a Brexiter (but couldn't admit) and his quotes against the EU were far more aggressive than most Brexit-voting Tories, everyone I know who campaigned for him supported Brexit.

No one is saying "every Brexiteer", and of course many had other reasons. But we're talking about raw numbers here. The millions who voted to leave the EU to stop people from Africa or Syria coming in are a multiple more than the islington corbynistas who vote for brexit because they want systems to reset. The latter are neither here not there, the vote of the former is where the power lied.


People like Barnsley fella or this guy (who surreally I saw in the KLM frequent flier queue from Schiphol to Tokyo, presumably going to the Japan Rugby WC):


It's not about being an intellectual or pseudo-intellectual, it's just being pragmatic. FIFA is a corrupt monolithic institution but i guess people still want to play in world cups. It's the same issue with Queiroz, some people just live in a dream world and don't appreciate the so many things which exist to keep things ticking in systems which are so far away from perfect. That's the issue now with fisherman and fisheries who voted for Brexit, now seeing quite how bad an impact it will have on them and they are all up in arms as "this wasn't sold to us". The problem was that no one talks about the things that you will lose.

This is all a game anyway - empires rise and fall. To quote Curtis "we live in bewildering times".... The only advice is to go out and meet to people from different walks of life, not to get stuck in echo chambers.

Unfortunately with the incoming BBC chairman being so close to the current government from decades ago, and with two new 24 hour right wing TV channels in the UK coming out (GB News and News UK TV), it's going to be a fun decade for Britain with 24 hour news channels echoing things like FOX News US in its heyday (and OAN/Newsmax now).

. I think populist right-wing politics will dominate for 10-20 years now in the UK and indeed the world... the only populist leftie leader we've had has been López Obrador
 

Behrooz_C

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#9
Of course there are racists who supported Brexit on no other basis than race. Those isolated clips don't represent 17.4 million Brexiteers. At the same time, you can not tell me that there were no racists among the EU supporters. If anything, the EU is the "white man's club". The vast majority of immigrants to the UK are not from the EU, they are from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, many of whom voted form Brexit by the way.

That stuff about British empire is just cringeworthy. But it is worth noting that the EU is fast becoming a protectionist empire of its own, the fall of which is inevitable to me. There is no way you can bring 27 very different cultures and economies under the same umbrella and expect there to be no backlash. Perhaps the project went to fast for its own good, instead of taking its time so that new generations have the opportunity to get used to it.

Part of the complexity is the cultural attack that many people feel is happening to their ways of life, the Woke culture. No matter where you are, UK or Greece, France, Hungary or Iran for that matter, people don't like to be told they are racist because they like to preserve the traditions they were brought up with. Many people saw this as the result of further integration with the EU.

If "right-wing populists" dominate politics, it's because of the mistakes that were made by the other side. I mean seriously , how does the current UK Labour party represent the traditional working classes? It has become the party of gender identity and veganism fronted by the likes of Angela Raynor, Emily snob Thornberry, Jonathan Ashworth and campaigned for by middle class London metropolitan rich kids like Hugh Grant and that manwoman Eddie Izzard! And of course many people didn't forget Corbyn cosying up to the IRA when they were setting off bombs every where. Were you seriously surprised that their message did not resonate with the traditional Labour voters?

As I say, it's a very complex issue and of course the economy had a lot to do with it too as people saw the gap between themselves and those in the EU hierarchy. But calling them all uneducated and racist misses the point completely and doesn't help remedy the situation and alienates them even more. I am not sure Labour have learnt their lesson though. I don't see any way back for them for a while and it's all down to their won misjudgments.

 
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TeamMeli

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Feb 5, 2014
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#10
Several but most are musical classical masters; Sergei Rachmanioff, List, Motzart Wagner Beethoven and or scientists Newton( would love to discuss 2nd law of motion F+ MA A = DeltaV/DeltaT squared), Einstein, sure whom you mentioned but again to discuss Hawking black hole theory:


Hawking's Black hole Theory:
A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing—no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light—can escape from it. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole. The boundary of no escape is called the event horizon. Although it has an enormous effect on the fate and circumstances of an object crossing it, according to general relativity it has no locally detectable features. In many ways, a black hole acts like an ideal black body, as it reflects no light. Moreover, quantum field theory in curved spacetime predicts that event horizons emit Hawking radiation, with the same spectrum as a black body of a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. This temperature is on the order of billionths of a kelvin for black holes of stellar mass, making it essentially impossible to observe directly.
Forget about the noise-I would love to go in depth and pick the man's brain on this.
 

TeamMeli

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#12
Although my family are a combination of Lutheran, Russian Orthodox and or Moslem, and if you put a gun to my head and said what are you I would say LUTHERAN.
However, I am very much secular and believe that GOVERNMENT AND RELLIGION DO NOT MIX like oil and water or Jews and Arabs.
I think people in Iran have USED THE NAME OF ISLAM to set their own agenda just like what we had back in the Crusades only it's kind of different.
You see do I have a problem with the QURAN, the holy BIBLE or the Torrah PER SE no it's just a book.
Problems in Islam is this
1 IT IS OPEN TO INTERPERTATION there is a lot of ambiguity with the HADITHS it's not the QUR'AN it's those God damn Hadith's that are the problem! It's not Islam per se it's not Mohammad that was the problem, it was people and bad leadership after Mohammad ie Omar.
It is people like Ayatollah Khomeini and others who use Islam to their benefit. These people are the ultimate blood suckers and scum of the earth
@Pooya Do I believe some GUY IN A WHTIE BEARD IS WATCHING US no HELL NO
Do I believe that SOMETHING CREATED THIS that this is not by accident yes
Do I believe that the universe started with some big bang, NO
@just2viewgeneralforu I do not know if you are trying to gather information on the members to see if they are PRO OR ANTI this or that but I am an OPEN BOOK. You can ask me ANY QUESTIONS and I won't lie to you my friend.
 
Jan 26, 2006
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#14
https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2005/7/irans-waiting-game

Iran's Waiting Game - Christopher Hitchens 2005

DRIVING DOWN THROUGH THE DESERT, from Tehran to the holy city of Qom, I am following the path of so many who have made the pilgrimage before me. They either were seeking an audience with, or a glimpse of, Ayatollah Khomeini or, if they were journalistic pilgrims, were trying to test the temperature of Iran’s clerical capital. As I arrive, darkness is gently settling over the domes and spires of the mosque and the Shia theological seminary, the latter of which is demarcated by a kind of empty moat which doubles as a market. But I am not headed for these centers of spiritual and temporal power. My objective is an ill-paved backstreet where, after one confirming cell-phone call, a black-turbaned cleric is waiting outside his modest quarters. This is Hossein Khomeini. The black turban proclaims him a sayyid, or descendant of the prophet Muhammad. But it’s his more immediate ancestry that interests me. This man’s grandfather once shook the whole world.........