I miss this guy....

Christopher Hitchens is gone now and that is too bad. Although I frequently found him to be unnecessarily acerbic he was a brilliant mind. Well, I finally got to his book God is not great. It will certainly shake your faith, but there are many ways for that to be done. I have never bought the line that one must believe all the doctrines of a particular religion ... lock, stock and barrel ...or you are not a "true" believer. Pssshaw to that. This is when religion can be the "metal shackle" that Hitchens long claimed it to be.

Anyway he has true wisdom here that I am going to quote at some length. Here he is talking about his abandonment of Marxism:

"Those of us who had sought a rational alternative to religion had reached a terminus that was comparably dogmatic. What else was to be expected of something that was produced by the close cousins of chimpanzees? Infallibility? Thus, dear reader, if you have come this far and found your own faith undermined-as I hope-I am willing to say that to some extent I know what you are going through. There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking."

He went on in the book to say that he would be willing to posit that religion does some good in the world if the same religious people were brave enough and willing to say that religion was and is a source of great evil.

Here here old boy, and God bless your soul Hitch.

My faith is shaken but neither subverted nor abandoned. And I will not let it be a mental shackle. The crusades for an equitable income distribution and the scourge of corporate and personal taxation penance are all the mental shackles this country needs at the moment. Throw in the "(insert suitable color here) lives matter" gobbledygook and our national residence in purgatory is set for some time to come.