Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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12/24/2001 - 12/30/2001
12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Thursday, January 3, 2002
11:01 - Look Both Ways Before Crossing History	(top)
Forum on NPR this morning had Chris Hitchens, self-proclaimed "anti-theist" who has just published a book exploring some of the less-savory aspects of people like Mother Teresa. His thesis, as he stated it on the show: "The thought that we are being supervised by a divine Deity, from dawn till dusk, from cradle to grave-- actually, from before we're born till after we die-- I can't imagine a more horrible thought. It would be like living in North Korea-- only your whole life, without any hope of the regime ever changing. And I'm sorry, but people who believe in that are simply asking to be slaves." I just thought that was kinda funny-- especially coming as it was in such proper British terms from such a proper British mouth. This is the kind of thing I would have just eaten up in high school. Since then I've developed a more thorough appreciation for religion, though really no interest in it myself-- but I can certainly see how it might help someone to center his or her ethical system in the absence of other means to do so. Hitchens did mention that people like Martin Luther King-- who are often held up before him as examples of the beneficial effects of religion-- are not good people because they are religious, but that they would be good people whether they were religious or not. A Dr. King can just as easily come from a person's own ethics and principles as from the pulpit. The only difference is that he'd be doing it of his own free will, rather than out of fear of going to Hell. You don't have to be religious to fall in love, to feed the starving, to give back to your community, or to go to Afghanistan to destroy al Qaeda and the Taliban in a retaliatory and preventive measure. However, you do have to be religious to forbid love to someone not of your faith or to discriminate because of religion or to turn September 11th into a reason to drop a bomb into the middle of Mecca and destroy all of Islam. Indeed, you do have to be religious to hijack planes and crash them into civilian buildings because God told you to. This may offend some people, but I don't mean it to. It's just something I've had on my mind since the attacks, since seeing the outraged ultra-right-wing Crusade-happy reaction to them, and this is as good a place as any to air it. There are good religious people and there are bad religious people, just as there are good and bad non-religious people. I'm not prepared to suggest the relative proportions of which there are. But we all need to accept the importance of analyzing things from an unfamiliar viewpoint once in a while-- for the non-religious, consider the scriptural. For the religious, consider the secular. Because Janus was truly the most gifted of the gods.