1. Christopher Hitchens on Religion

Comment #48358 by Priapus on June 7, 2007 at 3:06 pm

Mr. G. Teapot,

Mr. C. Hitchens meant to say "we didn't know that the earth went round the sun". NOT, as he said, "...we didn't know that the sun went around the earth".

As, as I have just noticed, Mr. F. Giskard pointed out in comment 6, Mr. C. Hitchens has made this error a few times. If he is not careful, and falls prey to trigger-happy misquoters, then this error will be used against him.

Regards,

Priapus.

2. Christopher Hitchens on Religion

Comment #48350 by Priapus on June 7, 2007 at 2:35 pm

Note, at 6 minutes and 48 seconds:

Hitchens, "...we didn't know that the sun went round the earth...".


(Ha, ha).

Regards,

Priapus.

3. Religion & Culture Panel

Comment #36288 by Priapus on April 30, 2007 at 8:30 pm

A frequent 'blue herring' pervades these debates...... namely...... the espoused inevitability of the manifest proliferation of religion, conceived as a fundamental 'side salad' to our human disposition, into the future.

But, what is this future they speak of...?
10 years....... 20 years........ 100 years....... 200 years.......... 1000 years....... 2000 years....... 10,000 years........... 20,000 years.......... 100,000 years........... 200,000 years......... indeed.... a million years..... two million years..... Heaven forbid....... a billion years........ or even two billion years.........!!! Lol out loud!!!


Would these temporally sophistic, 'dummy-sucking' 'apologists du jour' really wish to project such an ungainly vision onto our oh-so-evidently blighted future?!

Regards,

Priapus

4. Debate between Alister McGrath and Peter Atkins

Comment #28036 by Priapus on March 27, 2007 at 4:42 pm

That McGrath character is a bloody monomaniac; monomaniacally obsessed with Dawkins. Throughout this debate, McGrath's monomaniacal proclivity manifests itself numerously and arbitrarily and without provocation; he simply conjures Dawkins out of nowhere, almost foaming at the mouth. McGrath needs to learn that, in endeavouring to negate the arguments put forward by Richard Dawkins, he is not providing any evidence or argument of his own. Dawkins, brilliant as he is, is just one man amongst billions who have lived and billions who will live; all of whom may have been given over to the occasional bout of fallibility...

Why is he so obsessed with and fixated on Richard Dawkins? There are plenty of 'infidels' out there putting forth a multifarious welter of arguments against God and indeed against the ludicrious manifestions of belief in God, the miasmatic ooze of which is plaguing the potential for progressive 21st century discourse; c'mon now McGrath... I am waiting with fervid anticipation for The Pinker Delusion, The Harris Delusion, The Dennett Delusion, The Sagan Delusion, The Hitchens Delusion, The Russell Delusion, The Priapus Delusion etc etc etc etc etc etc etc.......

5. Hell is real and eternal: Pope

Comment #28029 by Priapus on March 27, 2007 at 4:17 pm

Friday September 30, 2005
Guardian Unlimited

The top 100 intellectuals, in alphabetical order:

Chinua Achebe, 74, Nigeria, novelist
Yusuf al-Qaradawi, 79 - Egypt, cleric
Ali al-Sistani, 75 - Iran/Iraq, cleric
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, 35 - (female) Somalia/Netherlands, politician
Jean Baudrillard, 76 - France, philosopher/cultural theorist
Gary Becker, 75 - US, economist
Pope Benedict XVI, 78 - Vatican, religious leader (Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha...!!)
Jagdish Bhagwati, 70 - India/US, economist
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 74 - Brazil, sociologist/former president
Noam Chomsky, 76 - US, linguist/author/activist
JM Coetzee, 65 - South Africa, novelist
Gordon Conway, 66 - Britain, agricultural ecologist
Robert Cooper, - Britain, diplomat and writer
Richard Dawkins, 64 - Britain, biologist and polemicist
Hernando De Soto, 64 - Peru, economist
Pavol Demes, - Slovakia, political analyst
Daniel Dennett, 63 - US, philosopher
Kemal Dervis, 56 - Turkey, head of United Nations Development Programme
Jared Diamond, 68 - US, geohistorian
Freeman Dyson, 81 - US, physicist
Shirin Ebadi, 58 - (female) Iran, human rights activist
Umberto Eco, 73 - Italy, philosopher and novelist
Paul Ekman, 71 - US, anthropologist
Fan Gang, 52 - China, economist
Niall Ferguson, 41 - Britain, historian
Alain Finkielkraut, 56 - France, essayist and philosopher
Thomas Friedman, 52 - US, journalist and author
Francis Fukuyama, 53 - US, political scientist and author
Gao Xingjian, 65 - China, novelist
Howard Gardner, 62 - US, psychologist
Timothy Garton Ash, 50 - Britain, historian and commentator
Henry Louis Gates Jr., 55 - US, theorist of race
Clifford Geertz, 79 - US, anthropologist
Neil Gershenfeld - US, physicist and computer scientist
Anthony Giddens, 67 - Britain, social and political theorist
Germaine Greer, 66 - (female) Australia/Britain, writer and academic
Ha Jin, 49 - China, novelist
Jürgen Habermas, 76 - Germany, philosopher
Václav Havel, 69 - Czech Republic, playwright/statesman
Christopher Hitchens, 56 - Britain/US, essayist and contrarian
Eric Hobsbawm, 88 - Britain, historian
Robert Hughes, 67 - Australia, art critic
Samuel Huntington, 78 - US, political scientist
Michael Ignatieff, 58 - Canada, human rights theorist
Shintaro Ishihara, 72 - Japan, politician and author
Robert Kagan, 47 - US, political commentator
Daniel Kahnemann, 71 - Israel, psychologist
Sergei Karaganov, 53 - Russia, foreign policy analyst
Paul Kennedy, 59 - Britain/US, historian
Gilles Kepel, 50 - France, expert on Islam
Naomi Klein, 35 - (female) Canada, anti-globalisation journalist
Rem Koolhaas, 61 - Netherlands, architect
Enrique Krauze, 58 - Mexico, historian
Julia Kristeva, 64 - (female) France, philosopher and feminist
Paul Krugman, 52 - US, economist and commentator
Hans Küng, 77 - Switzerland, theologian
Jaron Lanier, 45 - US, virtual reality pioneer
Lawrence Lessig, 44 - US, law scholar
Bernard Lewis, 89 - Britain/US, historian
Mario Vargas Llosa, 69 - Peru, novelist and politician
BjØrn Lomborg, 40 - Denmark, environmental sceptic
James Lovelock, 86 - Britain, scientist and Gaia theorist
Kishore Mahbubani, 57 - Singapore, diplomat and author
Ali Mazrui, 72 - Kenya, political scientist
Sunita Narain, 44 - (female) India, developmental environmentalist
Antonio Negri, 72 - Italy, philosopher and activist
Martha Nussbaum, 58 - (female) US, philosopher
Sari Nusseibeh, 55 - Palestine, philosopher/diplomat
Kenichi Ohmae, 62 - Japan, management theorist
Amos Oz, 66 - Israel, novelist
Camille Paglia, 58 - (female) US, critic and feminist
Orhan Pamuk, 53 - Turkey, novelist
Steven Pinker, 51 - US, linguist
Richard Posner, 66 - US, judge and author
Pramoedya Ananta Toer, 80 - Indonesia, author and dissident
Robert Putnam, 64 - US, political scientist
Tariq Ramadan, 43 - Switzerland, writer on Islam
Martin Rees, 63 - Britain, astrophysicist
Richard Rorty, 73 - US, philosopher
Salman Rushdie, 58 - Britain, novelist and commentator
Jeffrey Sachs, 51 - US, development economist
Elaine Scarry, 59 - (female) US, literary theorist
Amartya Sen, 71 - India, economist and author
Peter Singer, 59 - Australia, philosopher
Peter Sloterdijk, 58 - Germany, philosopher
Abdolkarim Soroush, 60 - Iran, scientist/religious theorist
Wole Soyinka, 71 - Nigeria, playwright and activist
Larry Summers, 51 - US, economist and academic
Harold Varmus, 64 - US, medical scientist
Craig Venter, 59 - US, biologist
Michael Walzer, 70 - US, political theorist
Florence Wambugu, 52 - (female) Kenya, plant virologist
Wang Jisi, 57 - China, foreign policy analyst
Steven Weinberg, 72 - US, physicist
EO Wilson, 76 - US, biologist
James Q Wilson, 74 - US, criminologist
Paul Wolfowitz, 61 - US, head of World Bank
Fareed Zakaria, 41 - US, journalist and author
Zheng Bijian, 73 - China, political scientist
Slavoj Zizek, 56 - Slovenia, sociologist/philosopher

6. Atheist banned from committee on religious education

Comment #27799 by Priapus on March 26, 2007 at 6:48 pm

Hmmm... Perhaps it is time to adopt a more dexterous and Machiavellian approach to these matters. Surely one could get a great deal more done by pretending to be a 'believer' in order to get elected, only to use the position as a trench from which to unleash a fusillade of subtle measures that gradually erode the seemingly implacable grasp of religious backwardness on our education system.