Kid arrested for not standing for pledge...

[fredd bear]

Interesting post.

I agree ,except for including Chris Hitchens.

Didn't like the personality.  Then I read "God Is Not Great". (it was a gift)  A pretty nasty polemic, but the guy  was no philosopher , imo.

Blunt yes, nasty no. Truthful by every stretch.

Maybe you missed the part of the book where he made it clear, if invited to holy places, and he accepted he'd follow the customs in person.

The entire book was not anti human rights, but saying that religion does cause more divisions in humanity than it claims to solve.

I look at Hitchens as merely a blunt version of Sagan.

I said nasty and I meant nasty,

Imo Hitchens was a bigot. He made claims about an entire group of people. viz Muslims. I think that's the very definition of bigotry,. 

Obviously, his and my life experiences were different. I lived in a Muslim country,(Malaysia) with many Muslim friends.I never saw anything approaching the kind of  extreme behaviour he mentions. YES such behaviour could at times be seen in KL, which has religious police.AND a Muslim apostate will be put in prison for 2 years.  That does not represent ALL Malay Muslims, let alone all Muslims everywhere..

The people I knew were not even all that devout; no praying 5 times a day, not always even going to mosque on Friday ,,women did not wear head coverings.


 I think the linked article quoted below is worth reading-

While a scientist like Richard Dawkins might be forgiven for not having his philosophic/aesthetic house in order, no such tolerance should be allowed for his notorious comrade-in-arms Christopher Hitchens. In spite of the fact that Hitchens regularly invokes the authority of empiricism and reason—he condemns anything that “contradicts science or outrages reason,” and he concedes something that no poet would: that “proteins and acids ... constitute our nature”—he was not a scientist but a literary critic, a journalist, and a public intellectual. So, you would think that the perspective of the arts, literature, and philosophy would find a prominent place in his thought. But that is not the case. He proposes to clear away religion in the name of science and reason. Literature’s function in this brave new world is to depose the Bible and provide an opportunity to study the “eternal ethical questions.”

Hitchens’s "God Is Not Great" is an intellectually shameful book. To be intellectually shameful is to be dishonest, to tell less than you know, or ought to know, and to shape what you present in a way that misrepresents the real state of affairs. In this sense, and in Hitchens’s own term, his book lacks “decency.” (You may think that I lack decency for attacking a man so recently deceased, but I do no more than what Hitchens himself did. Speaking of Jerry Falwell, Hitchens pointedly refuses a “compassionate word” for this “departed fraud.”)


https://www.salon.com/2013/06/23/christo...no_favors/