Het woord op zondag: God is not great

Christopher Hitchens, een van de betere orators van onze tijd, predikt het ongeloof. En met verve.

“I said it already: whatever floats your boat. Just leave me out of it. I don’t want to hear this stuff, and it doesn’t give you the right to tell me what to do. How many times must I say this? How many times? - How long, o Lord; how long!”

Over de afschaffing van het voorgeborchte door Benedictus de XVIe: “What casuistry is this to say: Oh it wasn’t really real after all, we made that bit up. They can’t do this. It was real, it was a real place for those parents, and for the brothers and sisters of those children too, they wept at the thought of where the little one had gone. And to say: Oh never mind!?, Oh and by the way, we were wrong about this but we are now ready to be infallible all over again!? This is disgusting. And in the same week as he does this the pope repeats that we need to teach the children more about hell. Go back again, to terrify the composure of the young and the innocent with these horrifying stories told by maladjusted elderly virgins. This is wicked!”

Het vragenrondje. U bent gewaarschuwd: er zitten afschuwelijke vragenstellers tussen die het nodig vinden speeches te geven.

“I collect quotations that are dead wrong but that everyone believes. But the most salient one in this case, I think, is the belief that Karl Marx referred to religion as “the opium of the people” and it would serve as an ending just to show that I do not propose that everyone live without the numinous or the spiritual or the transcendent. What Marx said was, - having announced that the criticism of religion was the beginning of all criticism, because it was the beginning of philosophy - he said that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world, the spirit of the spiritless situation, an opium for people”, and he added that the demand to give up the illusion in it was the demand to give up the condition that required illusions. He ended rather beautifully by saying that criticism had plucked the flowers from the chain. Not so that we would wear the chain without consolation; but so that we could break the chain and cull the living flower.”

Deze entry werd gepost op Sunday, 24 June 07 om 14:13 uur in de rubriek Spiritualiteit. Je kan een reactie achterlaten, of backtracken vanaf je eigen site.