05.03.07
Hitchens on Eastern religion
Hitchens’ book is stinkingly bad, and worse than that on the subject of Eastern religion. The instances chosen to debunk the subject are absurd, and the tale is capped with Hitchens inside dope on the subject of nirvana and mind.
I am left a bit non-plussed. How do you deal with this kind of organized hype picking up someone like Hitchens who is OK with playing ball with the ideology being promoted?
On the issue of Eastern religion, Hitchens can’t be that stupid. We all know about Rajneesh and his confused ashram, so what? Yogis have been meditating for millennia, reaching Enlightenment, if Rajneesh produced a fiasco trying to bring the subject to a larger public, that doesn’t change the reality of the depth of exploration of consciousness shown in the Indian tradition. The public getting Darwin crammed down their throat deserves know of that tradition, and the psychological potential of man, something no theory of the Darwin type can explain, as Wallace was honest enough to admit finally.
Hitchens arrived as a BBC documentary journalist (a shitty thing to do), going through the routine of, evidently, faking becoming a sannyasin, and gaping at the antic world of the so-called ‘sex guru’. He doesn’t provide much detail, and doesn’t provide anything helpful either about Rajneesh or Buddhism. But he was there, and can’t be serious in his remarks unless he was totally deaf and dumb. To conclude his ‘analysis’ with the absurd dismissal of nirvana as an illusion or as a rejection of intellect leaves me speechless, in the same way that Dennett left me puzzling over his ignorance of the history of religion. Hitchens is actually getting promoted as providing intellectual substance to the atheism debate (check out Lou Dobbs gushing over Hitchens’ intellect on his evening show).
One thing you notice about this hyped up scientism trying to match Darwin and atheism is the need to keep their public unaware of the reality of enlightenment traditions, and the complexities of human consciousness, and the techniques for their study and exploration. To admit such realities would show up Darwinism for what it is, a social ideology to keep idiots inline, nine to five, and fixed as socially robotic. They can’t be allowed to know about their ‘enlightenment potential’.
Actually, the current regime of bad science has no intelligent strategy on this issue, and is forced to get vulgar about to deflect attention from the emptiness of their world view.
What’s behind all this? It seems like there are some powerful people behind the scenes giving a green light to this kind of shlock atheism, as I suspect for Islamophobic endeavors. It is not the solution to 9/11.