Believe Me - It's Torture

October 10, 2011

BBC Radio 4
By Christopher Hitchens. A selection of the polemical journalist's essays. Read by Roger Allam.

Listen here (15 minutes). Available for 7 days.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

wow has the thinking of hitchens ever changed a lot through the days. his mammoth account of henry kissinger won't change though, but i don't even remember anymore about those previous governments.
may everyone be on their own clock and may everyone smoke their own cigarettes.

Anonymous said...

Indeed, he himself would tell you that he disagrees with most of what he used to think.
But so what?
What does that tell you?
Well, consider that Indian leaders have made it clear that they, like every other nation, are allowed to have a history; they can transform their Adivasis. The problem is many Adivasis, like the elephants, think they don't belong to Delhi. And not too long after we see that a significant portion of Adivasis make their move, change and agree.
Is it not kinda upside down?

Anonymous said...

Every intellectual has his or her own history, excepting maybe Chomsky who said he thinks basically the same as he did when he was seven years old. Pretty amazing. Hitchens, I suppose, would probably tell you that the only thing he's ever been against is the idiocy of solipsism. And it builds, if not transparently, in an understanding of the rotten foundation of the greedy and religious.

ephemerally abysmal said...

Well then, to put maturation in deific language - he, if he existed, as the religious often enough dubiously enunciate, would in unmitigated implausibility have had no youth, that is no juvenile stage of private experimentation.
Imagine it as it stands in America, if we connect the torah and bible as the old and new testaments, that god would have himself had to of had something of an nth dimensional awakening (I hesistate to use the word religious for any individual) to send his compassion to the bipedal realm as jesus after a long and lunatically-hormoned delusion, or more simply as just a simple horrendous episode of jealous hatred and blood-spilling racism.
The babblings of the christians, thoroughly it seems unaware of this "the deep incredulity" of the unabridged political bow, are not altogether meaningless to the critical thinker as anti-theists should hope to one day render them, for each believer is an ego groping to add a dimension to his or her badge of honor, whilst in a Scandinavian dungeon of sight helping to threaten civilization in suicidal foreplay.
Further, I think it is not often enough appreciated or admitted how uneducated American people are about un-isming Judaism, since her advocates often enough represent it subjectively as softened poetic natural philosophical introspection. Is there no room in civilization for a demilitarized cultural pasttime? Unfortunately for nature it seems it has been at least usually the clear and present economics and nationalism that dogmatize it as religion, a degenerative and heart-breaking shift in paradigm that only unconditioned introspection could reclaim, as it is as lost upon later generations as is the evolution of human language, for example.

D S Tillit said...

@e.a
I have time to share some footage of events on two tribal groups near the cone of India, if you would suffer to see it.

 
 
 

Christopher reads from Hitch-22: A Memoir