Some food for thought: Hitchens

[Charlie_M]

Heard this show on the radio on my way home the other night:

http://www.cityarts.net/n.hitchens.html

Reminded me that I had not read nor heard from Hitchens in over a year.


Whether or not you agree with this guy on this topic or any other is not important. If you became well versed enough on a topic to be able to debate the guy, THAT would be important. It might also be a full time job. In this radio show they were discussing religion. Rather polite debate between the two.

Highly recommend his book "Love, Poverty, and War" as an interesting read. Better keep a dictionary handy though. Quite the odyssey, I thought.

[TAlderson]

It's always nice when two people with opposing viewpoints can have something besides a screaming match to debate their points...

I've heard some good things about this guy. I think I'll check out this book.

-Tyler

[brandondrury]

It's always nice when two people with opposing viewpoints can have something besides a screaming match to debate their points...

My old basketball coach had a saying that I never forgot. "If you don't cheat, you don't want it bad enough".

If two man are debating something like religion, I think they should either agree or scream at each other. If the people are getting pissed off, they don't feel strongly enough about the subject. The exception to this is when there is a higher priority than the actual issue at hand...maybe the desire to not look like a dumb ass is more important than the person's view on religion or whatever.

Of course, there are probably 100 billion exceptions to my almost humorous rant above. I would like to see more people getting into heated debates on issues they are ferociously passionate about. It would directly confront our complacent, PC culture we live in now.

Brandon

[Charlie_M]

Originally Posted by brandondrury

My old basketball coach had a saying that I never forgot. "If you don't cheat, you don't want it bad enough".

If two man are debating something like religion, I think they should either agree or scream at each other. If the people are getting pissed off, they don't feel strongly enough about the subject. The exception to this is when there is a higher priority than the actual issue at hand...maybe the desire to not look like a dumb ass is more important than the person's view on religion or whatever.

Of course, there are probably 100 billion exceptions to my almost humorous rant above. I would like to see more people getting into heated debates on issues they are ferociously passionate about. It would directly confront our complacent, PC culture we live in now.

Brandon

I remember a coach telling us that there is a line you don't want to cross but you should get close enough to have some chalk on your shoes. Similar kind of idea I guess.

Regarding the religion debate - imagine you went past first base though... past the "is there or is there not a God" which is kind of a limited kind of discussion to have anyway, and said - OK one guy thinks there is one another guy is, welll.. unsure, and another guy seems certain that there cannot be one. These are all different ways of looking at it. There are other ways too, like maybe you view it as a metaphor. Maybe it's a histoical way of trying to capture what the human spirit is about. Maybe it's also trying to couch that whole thing in a framework that conveys how one ought to behave also. Maybe somewhere along the line people realized that if you think there is a man looking down on you judging what you do, you're more likely to just bear down and do what every 5 year old knows is the right thing in the moment of temptation or other test. This is more like what Hitchens was talking about. In the end he summed up with a reference to a poem called "the churchgoing" which he was not able to fully recite but he summed up the meaning succinctly when he spoke very eloquently about the image the poem conjured of the inside of a church visited by a non-beliver in mid-week with nobody there and what an odd use of land and other resources this seemed to be from one point of view but at the same time even if you could never believe what the people in there would have you believe you would certainly have to face that fact that whatever it is those people are doing, it is somehow important and deserves to be respected. Anyway I'm probably butchering what he was trying to say. I googled the poem when I got home, read it and thought man how did he get that meaning from that poem? This is the brilliance of Hitchens in my opinion. Not many things or people will move me to pursue literature, but reading or hearing Hitchens always does (Bronowski is in this category also, but in a different way). He has an insight into literature that I do not and I find it inspiring. After reading Love, Poverty, and War I was inspired to pick up "Brave New World" and read it. I read it as a kid but it had a different meaning for me today - mostly "careful what you wish for..."

Anyway I think I'm glad they didn't have a shouting match in this case. The point was not to demonstrate how deeply you feel about your point of view or to talk the oher guy into your way of seeing things, but to get past the "is there a God" question to a question like "what would it mean if there is or is not?" "What if it were a construct?" "What's the upside or downside of each view on the question, both operationally (that is, in terms of what we do) and spiritually (i.e., how we feel about it). ?", "What does this debate or discussion or fiction or whatever say about who we are as a species?" etc... it was an interesting talk.

My own humble opinion is that if you could fundamentally understand why it is true that "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts", and explain that succinctly in english (or any human language) that would be a major step forward in understanding what all that stuff is about (the human spirit). I beleive that somehow it's connected with the second law of TD, even though it appears to contradict it on some level. But alas such an explanation has been elusive..... Meanwhile... on with the rock-n-roll!!