Women aren't funny

women aren't funny

Heaven hates ham

Este texto, retirado do livro, 'Deus não é grande', de Christopher Hitchens, foi lido por Salman Rushdie na homenagem póstuma a Hitchens.

Há vida depois da morte?

"It will happen to all of us that at some point you will get tapped on the shoulder and told, not just that the party is over but, slightly worse, the party is going on but you have to leave. And it's going on without you. That's the reflection that most upsets people about their demise.

All right then, because it might make us feel better, let's pretend the opposite. Instead, you will get tapped on the shoulder and told, great news! This party is going on forever and you can't leave. You've got to stay. The boss says so and he also insists that you have a good time."
Christopher Hitchens

Eu também quero acreditar

"I believe that we can recover the lost connection between Athens and Jerusalem. We could get back a world where philosophy was valued. Where the beauty of science was considered worth studying, worth revering even. Where literature would be the key to the study of ethics and morality. And if you wanted the transcendente, you would have love and sex and music. And you wouldn't need any supernatural permission for any of this nonsense. I miss it terribly. I feel like something was torn away from me when I was born."
Christopher Hitchens

What's So Great About God

"What we risk if we take the supernatural route is the idea of an unchangeable, unalterable authority. One apparently benign, one apparently wicked. Both of them eternal, both of them unchanging and unchangeable, and ourselves as their play things and their objects and their raw material. This is where the idea of tyranny begins. With the eternal unchanging tyrannical authority. Where we must try with our poor power to guess what's wanted of us and to spend our lives on our knees."
Christopher Hitchens

Deus existe?

Um debate muito interessante e muito politicamente correcto, salpicado com aquele humor inteligente que nos faz sorrir. Apesar da minha simpatia pender mais para um dos oradores, e achando este tipo de debates pertinentes e até úteis, não deixo de achar que continuamos a discutir o sexo dos anjos. Paradoxal? Provavelmente. Gostaria de ter ouvido alguém a referir a obra de Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Saliento a questão colocada por CH a WLG: "How many religions in the world do you believe to be false?", respondida por WLG: "I don't know how many religions there are."

A propósito da vida fazer sentido ou ter um sentido, CH afirma: "What is meaningful to me is trying to be free and trying to help others to be free too. Emancipate yourself from the idea of a celestial dictatorship and you will have taken the first step to becoming free." e acrescenta, "one obstacle to liberty is the poisonous role played by fellow primates of mine who think they can tell me what to do, in the name of God, because God has told them that they have this power."

At the end of the day, a minha opinião é que quando se 'acredita' numa coisa, é irrelevante provar que ela existe ou não existe. Acreditar tem pouco a ver com objectividade científica, com raciocínio lógico. É emocional. É cultural.

"seek and you will find. If you can't get good evidence you will get junk evidence [the human pattern seeking brain]". Até porque Deus escreve direito por linhas tortas.