BOOKED

i need a dose of good high enegry electronic dance music to raise myself from weekend torpor today and so i went to ares the free file sharing program and chose an internet radio (genre: electronica www.djradio.ch which happened to be playing martinez restructured layers live from central records zurich) and now i'm pumped up... and ready to write nonsense again.

and according to christopher hitchens god and religion are the biggest nonsense of all...his latest book god is not great is yet another assault on organized religions that seems to be the rage lately. I don't have the opportunity to read it yet but sounds mouth watering enough if this review in NYT is anything to go by. It is selling well although not yet nearly as well as the other great prophet of atheism Richard dawkin's god delusion which apparently has to date sold over 500,000 in the US and 300,000 in the UK alone. I've not seen hitchens' book but saw a few copies of dawkin's at borders the curve a few weeks back.

i don't know very much about christopher hitchens though this excerpt from the NYT review above i think gave a pretty good idea about this guy and he sounds like my kind of writer.

Hitchens is an old-fashioned village atheist, standing in the square trying to pick arguments with the good citizens on their way to church. The book is full of logical flourishes and conundrums, many of them entertaining to the nonbeliever

and this amusing the digested read on the book gives a good idea about the book too i suppose.Definitely will look up for the book one of these days.

but at the end of the day i think i'll find it difficult to take this guy seriously. for one thing as the NYT review mentioned ...

...and recently, he became the most (possibly the only) intellectually serious non-neocon supporter of George W. Bush's Iraq war.

any thinking guy who support iraq war can't possibly think straight and is a right bloody bastard in my book. and he is besotted with salman rushdie too and consider the guy his great friend but of course nobody should fault anybody whom he chooses to be his friends and obviously these two guys have a lot in common in terms of their outlook and regard towards religions.

but interestingly as this article showed, as much as he is opposed to god and religions he did at least pray once ...

Have you ever prayed in your life?
I probably once did pray for an erection, but not addressed to anyone in particular. Nor completely addressed to my cock. You’re too polite to ask if the prayer was answered.

Was it?
No. There was an answer, but I don’t think it was the result of the prayer. After all, if one was not a mammal, and could get erections on demand, there’d be no need for prayer in the first place.

ah yes, make sense...perhaps the only way to make an athiest turn to god is if they have problems with their er johnsons...


but like richard dawkin says...

... On a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is certitude that God exists and 7 is certitude that God does not exist, Dawkins rates himself a 6: “I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable....

and so, although many are absolutely clueless about god and will never be certain about absolute truth of any religion a great many people are not as brave as the richard dawkin or christopher hitchens of the world and they rather choose to believe in any one of the multitude of kooky religions of the world than nothing at all... as for me my sympathy lies squarely on the side of my fellow muslim extremists....