I got to talk with Christopher Hitchens

This isn't that exciting, but I think it's neat. Some time ago, Christopher Hitchens was on a local NPR show called Radio Times. Marty Moss-Coane was interviewing him about his new book and towards the end they take callers.

For those of you who don't know, Christopher Hitchens is, among other things, a strong advocate of Atheism. His most recent book, which he was discussing on this occasion, is entitled God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. His argument is that because religion requires abandoning reasoned thought for dogma, all religions are inherently bad and he cites all these examples of negative behaviors that can be attributed to belonging to a religion. He's pretty equal opportunity about it, too. He hits everyone pretty equally, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, even His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Anyway, so he was going on about how every religion under the sun is bad and we would be so much better off without them all. And of course everyone was calling in to say their religion was different and he would tell tem why he thought that their way of worshiping an invisible man in the sky was just as bad as everyone else's.

Well, I guess I wasn't any different. I called in and told him I was a Quaker, which is one of the Peace Churches along with the Mennonites and the Amish and the Church of the Bretheren, and that to my knowledge the Quakers hadn't hurt anyone in the last 200 years, and I asked him if maybe since tolerance of others and promotion of equal rights and social justice were core components o Quakerism that there was some way we might distinguish ourselves from all the religions that were causing problems.

This is where things get cool. He said that because Quakers don't push their beliefs as the only way to heaven, as if we had some divine knowledge that we were right and everyone else was wrong, he didn't consider Quakerism to be a religion. He even mentioned that he has his daughter enrolled in a Quaker-run school. I said that I felt it just made us an honest religion. And its true, virtually every Quaker I've ever met has been slightly agnostic in that we are perfectly willing to accept that whatever our personal beliefs are, we could be wrong and/or someone else could be right. Maybe we're all right. Heck, maybe we're all wrong. Who knows?

Well, he commented that it seemed as if some massive wave of Agnosticism had swept over the country because everyone that called into the show that day had the same point that they don't judge other religions because they might be wrong themselves. He then commented that he could tell that I was not a particularly religious individual.

I was going to argue with him about whether or not Quakerism is a religion and how religious I am, but I decided instead that if Christopher Hitchens doesn't think you're religious, you should just take that as a compliment and move on.

Let's get to know each other...

OK, so you might be wondering about my name. Well, it's a two part thing. I'm calling myself a Colonel because my friends sometimes refer to me as The Colonel, or Colonel Sanders, because I raise chickens. I raise chickens for two reasons. One, I like to produce as much of my own food as possible, and one of the cheapest and easiest ways to do that is by keeping a flock of half-wild chickens in your yard for meat and eggs. Seriously, it takes less than 15 minutes a day to take care of several dozen chickens and I eat like a king from it.

The Hayduke part is a reference to the character of two Edward Abbey novels, George Hayduke. If haven't read The Monkeywrench Gang and Hayduke Lives, get off your ass and read them. I'm not going to explain George Hayduke any further because I don't want to ruin the books for the ignorant among us.

Now this is the internet, so I'd like to maintain some level of anonymity so I can feel free to say whatever the Hell I want. So suffice it to say that my real name is Gavin and I'm a grad student somewhere and I'm an Ecologist. If you really wanted to track me down I'm sure you have enough information from here at this point but I'm betting that almost everyone that reads this blog either already knows me or isn't going to care enough.

Anyway, this blog isn't supposed to be me ranting about myself all the time so I guess that's enough for now. If I blog about something that I have personal experience with I'll divulge that when it comes up. Besides, hardly anybody is going to read this post anyway. I could put anything in here, nobody would know. Cucumber. Octopus.

First blog

Woo! I have a blog! Now all I need is stuff to blog about. I decided to set this thing up so I have somewhere to write about all the goofy stuff I see around me and all the stuff that pisses me off, but right now I don't really have much to tell y'all. I suppose I could go ahead and introduce myself, give you my bio-stats and whatnot, but to be perfectly honest I'm too busy getting crap done right now and just setting this thing up has been about the perfect amount of procrastination for me, so I'll go ahead and tell you about myself next time!

Peace.