An atheist buys an ancient lamp at an auction, takes it home, and begins to polish it. Suddenly, a genie appears, and says, “I’ll grant you three wishes, Master.” The atheist says, “I wish I could believe in you.” The genie snaps his fingers, and suddenly the atheist believes in him. The atheist says, “Wow. I wish all atheists would believe this.” The genie snaps his fingers again, and suddenly atheists all over the world begin to believe in genies. “What about your third wish?” asks the genie. “Well,” says the atheist, “I wish for a billion dollars.” The genie snaps his fingers for a third time, but nothing happens. “What’s wrong?” asks the atheist. The genie shrugs and says, “Just because you believe in me, doesn’t necessarily mean that I really exist.”

When I pray for Christopher I feel part of something larger, a community of people who love him, all of us trying to deal with his illness in our own ways. When I pray for Christopher, I am reminded of the Jewish greeting at Yom Kippur, "May you have an easy fast." I wish him an easy time. When I pray for Christopher, I long for him to be able to, as he told me, "die with as much wit and style as possible." When I pray for Christopher I pray that his family is comforted by the many people who wish him well. When I pray for Christopher I hold an image of him in my mind, eating a great meal, drinking a wonderful wine, surrounded by people whose conversations will excite and engage him. When I pray for Christopher, I feel that, despite what Kant says, something indeed has been accomplished.

GEORGE ORWELL was one of the best essayists of his time, and Christopher Hitchens is one of the best essayists of his. Orwell is famous for his intellectual honesty and his willingness occasionally to anger his allies on the left. So is Hitchens. A book by Hitchens on Orwell seems natural and inevitable--like an Ali-Frazier fight or a Hepburn-Tracy movie. The publishers are not hyping things when they advertise this book as "a true marriage of minds."

Unlike Amis, Hitchens can’t stop acknowledging his debt to Hunter S. Thompson. There’s a weird Spice Girls structure to the Oxbridge “Blitcons” (a shortening of “British literary conservatives”) that Hitchens is a member of. Julian Barnes is ‘Froggy Blit,’ Ian McEwan is ‘Nerdy Blit,’ Salman Rushdie is ‘Curry Blit,’ Martin Amis is ‘Celebrity Blit,’ and Christopher Hitchens is ‘Gonzo Blit.’ The duties of Gonzo Blit include submitting to safe-word-protected waterboarding, bullying Arab youths, pretending to be a Bob Dylan fan, and, according to The Guardian, “courageously” asking people not to pray for him during cancer treatment (which shouldn’t matter to an atheist anyway). This is all pretty hardcore for Amis, though, when he claims that Hitchens is an all-round tough who ‘likes the smell of cordite’ (probably unaware the stuff’s been obsolete for over 50 years).

On “Why you shouldn’t be religious” he said he could go into criticisms of the Pope, the Ayatollah Khomeni, Cardinal John J. O’Connor, etc., but since he was in Marin County, he’d “piss on the Dali Lama.” “The Dali Lama says he’s a god and a hereditary god at that. A double affront to reason.” Hitchens denies he’s an atheist, but calls himself an anti-theist; as he believes all religions are wrong, and feels that recent discoveries regarding DNA research and the Big Bang theory will bear this out.

Christopher Hitchens accuses the Dalai Lama of claiming to be a “hereditary king appointed by heaven itself” and of enforcing “one-man rule” in Dharamsala, the town in the Indian Himalayas that serves as a capital for the more than a hundred and fifty thousand Tibetans in exile.

In 1998, Hitchens criticized Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama for a number of reasons, including: the Dalai Lama's acceptance of "45 million rupees, or about 170 million yen" from Shoko Asahara, the leader of the Aum Shinrikyo cult which released sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo Subway system; the Dalai Lama's proclamation that Hollywood actor Steven Seagal was a tulku and a reincarnated lama of Tibetan Buddhism; the persecution of followers of the Dorje Shugden deity whom Hitchens describes as having been "threatened with violence and ostracism and even death following the Dalai Lama's abrupt prohibition of this once-venerated godhead"; the Dalai Lama's specified sexual norms, which ban oral and anal sex, masturbation and explain the proper way to pay for prostitution; and, most importantly, the Dalai Lama's support of India's Pokhran-II thermonuclear tests. The World Tibet Network News service later said that the Dalai Lama was "saddened to hear about the series of nuclear tests conducted by India," and was "fundamentally against the existence and stockpiling of any wapons [sic] of mass destruction."

I am a simple Buddhist monk.

Compassion is not religious business, it is human business, it is not luxury, it is essential for our own peace and mental stability, it is essential for human survival.

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

I believe all suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their happiness or satisfaction. Yet true happiness comes from a sense of peace and contentment, which in turn must be achieved through the cultivation of altruism, of love and compassion, and elimination of ignorance, selfishness, and greed.

Human beings are of such nature that they should have not only material facilities but spiritual sustenance as well. Without spiritual sustenance, it is difficult to get and maintain peace of mind.

From the viewpoint of absolute truth, what we feel and experience in our ordinary daily life is all delusion. Of all the various delusions, the sense of discrimination between oneself and others is the worst form, as it creates nothing but unpleasantness for both sides. If we can realize and meditate on ultimate truth, it will cleanse our impurities of mind and thus eradicate the sense of discrimination. This will help to create true love for one another. The search for ultimate truth is, therefore, vitally important.

I believe that the very purpose of life is to be happy. From the very core of our being, we desire contentment. In my own limited experience I have found that the more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being. Cultivating a close, warmhearted feeling for others automatically puts the mind at ease. It helps remove whatever fears or insecurities we may have and gives us the strength to cope with any obstacles we encounter. It is the principal source of success in life. Since we are not solely material creatures, it is a mistake to place all our hopes for happiness on external development alone. The key is to develop inner peace.

Each of us in our own way can try to spread compassion into people’s hearts. Western civilizations these days place great importance on filling the human “brain” with knowledge, but no one seems to care about filling the human “heart” with compassion. This is what the real role of religion is.

I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in this religion or that religion, we all are seeking something better in life. So, I think, the very motion of our life is towards happiness…

Christopher Hitchens, looking all too svelte in his tan suit, his scalp gleaming under the lights, took to the stage at Cooper Union last night to argue against the existence of an afterlife, only to have his adversary, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, tell him he was destined for eternal happiness—because of his support for the war in Iraq, “because of his stand against Halabja” (where Saddam gassed 5,000 Kurds). “For this, I got on the shuttle?” Hitchens exclaimed, referring to the short flight to New York from his home city of Washington, D.C.

In an effort to mix things up a bit, Hitchens said the afterlife was “a verdict against which there is no appeal,” and called the Orthodox Boteach a “Jewish secularist,” and Pope Benedict an “overdressed little ponce.” As an example of what draws people to religion, Hitchens cited Louis Farrahkan’s exhortation at Madison Square Garden in the mid-1980s: “Remember, Jews, when God puts you in the ovens, it’s forever.”

He also said, “call someone an imam, a priest, a reverend—look at the Reverend Al—and there’s nothing you can’t get away with.” The audience, which seemed to have come to see Hitchens and to wish him well in his ongoing battle against esophageal cancer—”You’re looking great, Hitch,” one questioner said—erupted in the biggest applause of the night.

The article also noted that “Of the allegations reported in 2009, six involved children under the age of 18 in 2009.” It is easy to see why this story was not front page news in the New York Times: it is hard to use such numbers to convince the public to demand the resignation of Benedict XVI.

That, of course, is the object of the recent media campaign against the Pope, one that has seen everyone with an axe to grind against the Catholic Church clamber on board. Richard Dawkins, writing on the Washington Post website, described Benedict as “A leering old villain in a frock,” the leader of a “profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution,” one that is destined to tumble about Benedict’s ears, “amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch sacred hearts and preposterously crowned virgins.” One wonders if the Post or the Times ever published similar condemnations of the Soviet Union, let alone such a description of any non-Christian religion. Dawkins declined to tell those lapping up his purple prose that, in 2006, he had written that “we live in a time of hysteria about pedophilia” and that “All three of the boarding schools I attended employed teachers whose affection for small boys overstepped the bounds of propriety. That was indeed reprehensible. Nevertheless, if fifty years on, they had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child murderers, I should have felt obliged to come to their defense, even as the victim of one of them (an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience).” Dawkins even wrote that “I can’t help wondering if [the Catholic Church] has been unfairly demonized over this issue.”

Dawkins’ fellow atheist and close ideological ally Christopher Hitchens has never expressed any such doubts about the perfidy of the Catholic Church. Hitchens, after all, opposed John Roberts’ nomination to the Supreme Court, in essence, because Roberts is Catholic, has said of Mother Teresa that “I wish there was a hell for the bitch to go to,” and recently described Thomas More as “one of history’s wickedest men.” It should come as no surprise, then, that Hitchens devoted three successive columns to attacking the Pope. To Hitchens, Benedict is cut from the same cloth as Mother Teresa and Thomas More. He is a “grisly little man,” whose “whole career has the stench of evil.” But Hitchens’ case against the Pope, relying on the reporting of the Times and Hitchens’ own flights of fancy, falls short.

Asking for Christopher Hitchen’s opinion on the Catholic Church is like asking for Hitler’s on Jews. The Cromwell of our age is in traditional English anti-Catholicism and knows it full well. No doubt he wishes he were back leading the mobs of the Gordon riots.

I must say that even acknowledging the odious Hitchens is distasteful to me, but I understand that you are correct in taking him on, since he gets so much media attention. (attention that only seemed to become significant after he became a supporter of our Middle Eastern adventures, but I digress) So we can look at this duty to call Hitchens to task on his many ludicrous statements as we would the job of cleaning the commode – hardly an enjoyable exercise, but necessary considering the alternative.

One of the good things that comes from a steady stream of viciousness and vitriole is that it defines the lines of combat. For years we Christians have mistaken our enemies for something else,which tends to lessen the gigantic burden of trying to love them,but it does at least put them in the right category and identify another truth about fallen man and his nature. Whatever the Popes are, whatever people like the late Mother Theresa represent, they remain a far more noble image of men and women than the contorted face, twisted heart and mind of hateful,mad-men like Hitchens and Dawkins.

The time has come for us believers in God to take the gloves off. Let us recall that Prof. Dawkins’ belief that the source of life on Earth is that Space Aliens flew over our planet and spinkled spores or the equivalent that seeded life on Earth. Of course this begs the question of where or how the Space Aliens came into being. Prof. Dawkins is a crank and should be called one.

Christopher Hitchens is a crazed aetheist because his mother murdered herself and this been the fundamental source of his derangement ever since.

If these two aetheist Klu Klux Klansmen do bring suit againt the Pope in London, then the Pope should countersue them for defamation. An international warrant should be sworn out against Mr. Hitchens for being a collaborator in the anti-Vietnam War movement which was controlled, directed and subsidized to the tune of $1 Billion Dollars by the Soviet Union and Red China, whose American defeat inevitably led to the genocide of millions of Indochinese. Please remember that it was Fundamentist Darwinists who started World War II, bombed London in 1940, set up Auschwitz and the Gulag and have the blood of 70 million Chinese on their hands. Curse Christopher Hitcherson and Dawkins!

I'm not at all impressed with Berlinski, but then I never have been. He dredged up the rotting corpse of Hitler to claim he was under the spell of Darwin!

When Berlinski linked Nazism and Darwinism while connecting atheism with violent government regimes of the 20th Century, Hitchens bristled and went on the attack in his next turn at the podium.

Connecting Nazism with Darwinism "is a filthy slander," Hitchens said. "Darwinism was derided in Germany."

Hitchens said Adolf Hitler claimed in "Mein Kampf" that he was doing God's work with his policies against the Jews and that the first Nazi treaty was with the Vatican.

"To say that there is something fascistic about my beliefs, I won't hear said, and you shouldn't believe," Hitchens said to the audience, almost thundering despite his diminished voice.

Good grief, please. Hitler was a nominal Catholic with an extremist pseudo-scientific philosophy that excluded Darwin and evolution, and found justification in religious dogma. It's absolutely nuts that people still play this game of blaming Darwin for the Nazis; there's just no historical reason to do so. Why not settle on that mass murdering tyrant, Stalin, instead? He was no friend of Darwin, either, but at least he was openly atheist, so they'd at least have a tiny pinch of logic (but not much of one) in correlating atheism and tyranny. At least, pointing at one godless anti-Darwinian and blaming all his crimes on godless evolution is marginally more sensible than pointing at a god-walloping anti-Darwinian and blaming all of his sins on godless evolution.

“Underlying the Nazis’ belief in race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man, is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human being.

The standard biographies of Hitler almost all point to the influence of Darwinism on their subject. In Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock writes: “The basis of Hitler’s political beliefs was a crude Darwinism.” What Hitler found objectionable about Christianity was its rejection of Darwin’s theory: “Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest.”

John Toland’s Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography says this of Hitler’s Second Book published in 1928: “An essential of Hitler’s conclusions in this book was the conviction drawn from Darwin that might makes right.”

In his biography, Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris, Ian Kershaw explains that “crude social-Darwinism” gave Hitler “his entire political ‘world-view.’ ” Hitler, like lots of other Europeans and Americans of his day, saw Darwinism as offering a total picture of social reality. This view called “social Darwinism” is a logical extension of Darwinian evolutionary theory and was articulated by Darwin himself.

The key elements in the ideology that produced Auschwitz are moral relativism aligned with a rejection of the sacredness of human life, a belief that violent competition in nature creates greater and lesser races, that the greater will inevitably exterminate the lesser, and finally that the lesser race most in need of extermination is the Jews. All but the last of these ideas may be found in Darwin’s writing.

Like Hitler, Charles Darwin saw natural processes as setting moral standards. It’s all in The Descent of Man, where he explains that, had we evolved differently, we would have different moral ideas. On a particularly delicate moral topic, for example, he wrote: “We may, therefore, reject the belief, lately insisted on by some writers, that the abhorrence of incest is due to our possessing a special God-implanted conscience.”

In the same book, he compared the evolution of people to the breeding of animals and drew a chilling conclusion regarding what he saw as the undesirable consequences of allowing the unfit to breed:

“Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” In this desacralized picture of existence, to speak of life as possessing any kind of holiness is to introduce an alien note.

Most disturbing of all, in The Descent of Man, Darwin prophesied: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”

While it must be very clearly emphasized that the gentle-souled Darwin himself never supported ill treatment of any race or group, his words inspired a movement to “scientific” racism.