4.13.19
Flood
Babylon
洪水巴比伦
Hóngshuǐ bābǐlún
洪水バビロン
Kōzui babiron
ps137
Our tears flooded Babylon
as we wept for the waters to feed upon.
A flood of tears swept the gate of the gods.
The ascent to heaven was blocked. What were the odds?
We hung our harps on the tamarisk's trident
when we remembered Zion.
Those who led us captive asked for a song
as though the singing would help us to feel strong.
"Sing us one of the songs from your land.
It will help you to feel better about where you stand."
How can we sing of triumph on alien soil?
The Lord's song is not about enslavement to toil.
Let my right hand forget the skill to play with ease
should I ever forget the city of peace.
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth
should I ever disrespect the knowledge of our house.
The capital city was not our highest joy.
Our faith is in the love that cannot be destroyed.
We had been attacked by the kingdom of the red earth.
They had cursed us as though that would take our worth.
The pride of the gate to the gods was doomed to destruction.
Pride is blind to obsession with construction limited to official unction.
Happy is the one who will help you to feel the sorrow of defeat.
Your blindness will be removed. You will see what caused the deceit.
How are we to look at the value of money?
Doesn't national security without respect for boundaries sound funny?
Happy is the one who will set us free from captivity.
Success is the ascendance of love to perceptivity.
I want you to understand this mystery of history.
Hardness of heart will soften as mercy overcomes misery.
Our brother called for you when he felt weak.
The presence of your power was that which he did seek.
Now that he lies still as death in his body,
you can raise him from the fear of the ungodly.
We will learn the art of love with all love's loving parts.
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137 Super flumina
flood of tears
1 By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept,
when we remembered you, O Zion.
2 As for our harps, we hung them up
on the trees in the midst of that land.
3 For those who led us away captive asked us for a song,
and our oppressors called for mirth:
"Sing us one of the songs of Zion."
4 How shall we sing the Lord's song
upon an alien soil?
5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget its skill.
6 Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.
(7 Remember the day of Jerusalem, O Lord,
against the people of Edom,
who said, "Down with it! down with it!
even to the ground!"
8 O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy the one who pays you back
for what you have done to us!
9 Happy shall he be who takes your little ones,
and dashes them against the rock!)
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Jeremiah 31:28,33
Just as I have watched them pluck up, break down. overthrow, destroy and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the LORD.
I will put my law within them and write it upon their hearts. I will be their God. They will be my people.
------------------------------
I will write my law within their hearts.
They will learn the art of love with all love's loving parts.
======================
Romans 11:25, 30-31
So you may not claim to be wiser than you are, brothers and sisters, I want you to understand this mystery: a hardening has come upon part of Israel until the full number of the Gentiles has been saved.
Just as you had been disobedient to God but have now received mercy, so they not have been disobedient in that by the mercy shown to you, they too may now receive mercy.
------------------------------
I want you to understand this mystery of history,
hardness of heart will soften as mercy overcomes misery.
======================
John 11: 32
When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said, 'Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.'
------------------------------
Our brother called for you when he felt weak.
The presence of your power was that which he did seek.
Now that he lies still as death in his body,
you can raise him from the fear of the ungodly.
======================
The Razor
Christopher Hitchens
b. 4.13.1949 Portsmouth, England, UK
d. 12.15.2011, Houston, Texas
Portsmouth
Portsmouth is located 110 km (70 miles) south-west of London. It is mainly built on Portsea Island, a flat, low-lying island measuring 24 square kilometers (9 sq mi) in area, just off the south-east coast of Hampshire. It is the only island city in England. The population density exceeds that of London.
Portsmouth's history can be traced back to Roman times. The Romans built Portus Adurni, a fort, at nearby Portchester in the late third century. It was a significant naval port for centuries. It has the world's oldest dry dock.
The port was England's first line of defence during the French invasion of 1545. Henry VIII built Southsea Castle, financed by the Dissolution of the Monasteries, in anticipation of a French invasion in 1539.
He also invested large sums of money into the town's dockyard, and expanded its boundaries to 8 acres (3.2 ha). Henry witnessed his flagship Mary Rose sink with the loss of about 500 lives from Southsea Castle. The ship was going into action against the French fleet in the Battle of the Solent.
The mayor and most residents supported the parliamentarians during the English Civil War. The military governor, Colonel Goring, supported the royalists. The town became a major base for the parliamentarian navy. It was blockaded from the sea.
Parliamentarian troops were sent to raid it by land in the Siege of Portsmouth. The guns of Southsea Castle were fired at the royalist garrison in the town. Parliamentarians in Gosport joined in the assault across the harbor. Their guns damaged St Thomas's Church.
The remaining royalists in the garrison at the Square Tower were forced to surrender on 5 September 1642. Goring threatened to blow it up with gunpowder. He and his garrison were allowed safe passage in return.
Robert Blake used the harbor as his base during the First Anglo-Dutch War in 1652 and the Anglo Spanish War of 1654 during the Commonwealth. He died within sight of the town in his return from Cádiz.
The Protectorate might have continued if Oliver Cromwell's son Richard, who was made Lord Protector on his father's death, had been capable of carrying on his father's policies. Richard Cromwell did not have the confidence of the New Model Army.
The New Model Army differed from other armies in that it was intended as liable for service anywhere in the country including in Scotland and Ireland. It was not tied to a single area or garrison. Its soldiers became full-time professionals, rather than part-time militia. The army's leaders were prohibited from having seats in either the House of Lords or House of Commons to establish a professional officer corps.
This new model was raised partly from among veteran soldiers who already had deeply held Puritan religious beliefs and partly from conscripts who brought with them many commonly held beliefs about religion or society.
Many of the soldiers held dissenting or radical views. This was unique among English armies. Although the Army's senior officers did not share many of their soldiers' political opinions, their independence from Parliament led to the Army's willingness to contribute to the overthrow of both the Crown and Parliament's authority.
The Grandees in the New Model Army removed Richard Cromwell after 7 months. They reinstalled the Rump Parliament on 6 May 1659. General George Monck entered London in February 1660 and restored the Parliament that had rebelled against the monarchy under the condition that it would dissolve itself after elections were held.
King Charles II was invited to be the English monarch in what has become known as the Restoration of the House of Stuart. He ruled until his death in 1685.
The world's first mass production line was set up in Portsmouth Dockyard's Block Mills by the early 19th century. The mills mass produced block pulleys with a mechanized production process. This made Portsmouth the most industrialized site in the world. It was the birthplace for the Industrial Revolution.
The area was also the most heavily fortified town in the world. It was considered "the world's greatest naval port" at the height of the British Empire throughout Pax Britannica. The city gained its first railway link in 1847 with a direct route to London arriving in 1859.
Defenses known as the Palmerston Forts were built around Portsmouth in 1859 in anticipation of another invasion from continental Europe.
The Evening News began publication in 1877 and came under common ownership with the Hampshire Telegraph in 1883. The Portsmouth Times gained a sister paper called the Evening Mail in 1884. It was later renamed to the Southern Daily Mail.
The city was considered "the world's greatest naval port" when the British Empire was at its height of power at the turn of the 20th century.
The city purchased the private horse-drawn tram lines in 1901.
The boundaries of Portsmouth were extended to finally include the whole of Portsea Island in 1904. The boundaries were further extended in 1920 and 1932 to take in areas of the mainland.
The city experience its first aerial bombardment when a Zeppelin airship bombed it during the First World War.
The city was bombed as a major naval base and dockyard during the Second World War. Nazi German Luftwaffe night-time air raids began on 24 August 1940. The city was hit by 67 air raids. The bombardments destroyed 6625 houses and severely damaged 6549 of them.
The Guildhall, 30 churches, 8 schools, and 1 hospital were damaged. 930 people were killed and 1,216 people were injured. While most of the city has since been rebuilt, to this day developers still occasionally find unexploded bombs.
Southsea beach and Portsmouth Harbour were military embarkation points for the D-Day landings on 6 June 1944.
Much of the city's housing stock was damaged during the war. The wreckage was cleared in an attempt to improve the quality of dwellings after the war. Portsmouth City Council built prefabs for those who had lost their homes before permanent accommodation could be built. More than 700 prefab houses were constructed between 1945 and 1947.
Portsmouth was affected by the British Empire's decline in the latter half of the 20th century. Shipbuilding jobs fell from 46% of workforce in 1951 to 14% in 1966. The manpower in the dockyard was drastically reduced.
Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens was born on 13 April 1949 in Portsmouth, Hampshire. He was the elder of two boys. His brother Peter was a Christian and socially conservative journalist. Christopher did not get along well with Peter.
His parents, Eric Ernest Hitchens (1909–1987) and Yvonne Jean née Hickman (1921–1973), met in Scotland when both were serving in the Royal Navy during World War II. Eric became an accountant for boatbuilders, speedboat-manufacturers and a prep school after the war.
His mother had been a Wren, a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service. She was a Jew. Christopher would come to identify himself as an anti-theist Jew, later in life.
Hitchens attended Mount House School (now absorbed into Mount Kelly) in Tavistock, Devon from the age of 8. This was followed by instruction at the independent Leys School in Cambridge.
He enrolled at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was tutored by Steven Lukes and Anthony Kenny. He read for the Philosophy, Politics and Economics degree. He graduated in 1970 with a third-class degree.
Hitchens joined the political left, drawn by disagreement over the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, racism and oligarchy in the 1960's. The argument against oligarchy included that of "the unaccountable corporation."
He expressed affinity with the politically charged counter-cultural and protest movements of the 1960's and 1970's. He avoided the recreational drug use of the time. He said "in my cohort we were slightly anti-hedonistic...it made it very much easier for police provocation to occur, because the planting of drugs was something that happened to almost everyone one knew."
Hitchens joined the Labour Party in 1965. He was expelled in 1967 along with the majority of the Labour students' organisation, because of what Hitchens called "Prime Minister Harold Wilson's contemptible support for the war in Vietnam."
He forged an ideological interest in Trotskyism and anti-Stalinist socialism under the influence of Peter Sedgewick. Sedgewick translated the writings of Russian revolutionary and Soviet dissident Victor Serge. Hitchens joined "a small but growing post-Trotskyist Luxemburgist sect."
He began working as a correspondent for the magazine International Socialism early in his career. The journal was published by the International Socialists, the forerunners of today's British Socialist Workers Party.
This group was broadly Trotskyist, but differed from more orthodox Trotskyist groups in its refusal to defend communist states as "workers' states". Their slogan was "Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism".
Hitchens went to work at the Times Higher Education Supplement where he served as a social science correspondent in 1971. He admitted that he hated the position. He was fired after six months in the job.
He was a researcher for ITV's Weekend World next. He went to work for the New Statesman in 1973. He acquired a reputation as a left-winger. He reported internationally from areas of conflict such as Northern Ireland, Libya and Iraq.
He reported on the constitutional crisis of the military junta while in Greece in November 1973. It became his first leading article for the New Statesman.
He interviewed Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla in December 1977. He later described the conversation as "horrifying." He became unhappy at the New Statesman after the interview, so he defected to the Daily Express. He became a foreign correspondent there. He returned to the New Statesman to become the foreign editor in 1979.
Hitchens moved to the United States in 1981 as part of an editor exchange programme between the New Statesman and The Nation. He wrote vociferous critiques of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and American foreign policy in South and Central America after joining The Nation.
The American author and polemicist Gore Vidal was apt to speak of Hitchens as his "dauphin" or "heir." Hitchens attacked Vidal in a Vanity Fair piece headlined "Vidal Loco" calling him a "crackpot" for his adoption of 9/11 conspiracy theories in 2010. Vidal's endorsement of Hitchens as his successor on the back of the memoir Hitch-22 is crossed out in red and annotated "NO, C.H."
Hitchens's strong advocacy of the war in Iraq gained him a wider readership. He was named as fifth on the list of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines in September 2005 in an on-line poll. The article noted that the rankings of Hitchens, Noam Chomsky and Abdolkarim Soroush were partly due to their respective supporters' publicising the vote. Hitchens later responded to his ranking with a few articles about his status as such.
Hitchens did not leave his position writing for The Nation until after the September 11 attacks. He stated that he felt the magazine had arrived at a position "that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden."
The 11 September attacks "exhilarated" him, bringing into focus "a battle between everything I love and everything I hate" and strengthening his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy that challenged "fascism with an Islamic face."
His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative. He insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind." His friend Ian McEwan described him as representing the anti-totalitarian left.
His memoir stated that he had been "invited by Bernard-Henri Levy to write an essay on political reconsiderations for his magazine La Regle du Jeu." He gave the piece a partly ironic title: 'Can One Be a Neoconservative?' Some copy editor became impatient with this and put the title the cover as 'How I Became a Neoconservative' on the cover.
Hitchens quipped that this was an instance of the Cartesian principle as opposed to the English empiricist one. He wrote, "It was decided that I evidently was what I apparently only thought." Indeed, in a 2010 BBC interview, He later stated in a BBC interview in 2010 that he "still [thought] like a Marxist" and considered himself "a leftist."
Hitchens wrote a monthly essay in The Atlantic. He occasionally contributed to other literary journals. One of his books, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, collected these works.
He defended Orwell's writings In Why Orwell Matters as relevant today and progressive for his time. Many literary critiques are included of essays and other books of writers, such as David Horowitz and Edward Said in the 2008 book Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left.
Hitchens was listed by Forbes magazine as one of the '25 most influential liberals in the U.S. media' in 2009. The same article noted that he would "likely be aghast to find himself on this list." It reduced his self-styled radicalism to mere liberalism.
He said of libertarianism and objectivism, "I have always found it quaint, and rather touching, that there is a movement in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough."
Hitchens supported Israel's right to exist, but he was critical of the Israeli government's handling of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
He began his break from the established political left after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the controversy over The Satanic Verses, followed by the left's embrace of Bill Clinton and the antiwar movement's opposition to NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990's.
He later became a liberal hawk and supported the War on Terror. He expressed some reservation over waterboarding as torture after voluntarily undergoing the procedure. He joined with four other individuals and four organizations including the ACLU and Greenpeace, as plaintiffs in a lawsuit in January 2006. The ACLU v. NSA, challenged the Bush administration's NSA warrantless surveillance. The lawsuit was filed by the ACLU.
Hitchens wrote book-length biographical essays on Thomas Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson: Author of America), Thomas Paine (Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography) and George Orwell (Why Orwell Matters).
He also became known for his excoriating critiques of public contemporary figures including Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger. They became the subjects of three full-length texts: The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton and The Trial of Henry Kissinger respectively.
He described the Christian evangelist Billy Graham as "a self-conscious fraud" and "a disgustingly evil man" in 2007 while promoting his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. He claimed that the evangelist who had recently been hospitalized for intestinal bleeding made a living by "going around spouting lies to young people. What a horrible career. I gather it's soon to be over. I certainly hope so."
Hitchens was an anti-theist. He said that a person "could be an atheist and wish that belief in God were correct", but "an antitheist, a term I'm trying to get into circulation, is someone who is relieved that there's no evidence for such an assertion."
He often spoke against the Abrahamic religions. He stated that he was against infant circumcision in a 2010 interview at New York Public Library. When asked by readers of The Independent (London) what he considered to be the "axis of evil," he replied "Christianity, Judaism, Islam—the three leading monotheisms."
He regarded concepts of a god or supreme being as a totalitarian belief that impedes individual freedom. He argued in favor of free expression. He argued that scientific discovery was superior to religion as an ethical code of conduct for human civilization. He also advocated for the separation of church and state.
He was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2010. He was a heavy smoker and drinker since his teenage years. He acknowledged that these habits likely contributed to his illness.
He died of hospital-acquired pneumonia on 15 December 2011 in the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston. He was 62 years of age. His body was donated to medical research in accordance with his wishes. Mortality, a collection of seven of Hitchens's Vanity Fair essays about his illness, was published posthumously in September 2012.
His position against theism was dismissive. He wouldn't admit that there was any evidence to support belief in the existence of God.
Traditional theists have admit that the divine nature is undefinable. It isn't to say that there isn't any reason to deny that God exists. There is only so much time to spend on any given debate. There is the tacit admission that evidence can be interpreted to affirm or deny the existence of deity.
While Hitchens wrote about things in places that many others would not dare to travel, he eventually adopted a position that played on his interpretation of the data that he observed.
He employed Locke's claim to universal authority for destruction as a basis for his justification that the terrorist is most likely a Muslim. Any amount of money spent on the war on terror would benefit his writing in support of the position.
He wanted to believe that the public would find it easier to condemn the foreign monotheism as the cause of terrorism. The practical value for the position is dubious. It is used to increase taxation for the precipitation of profit by military action.
Some journalists profit from the precipitation. The media industry risks increased liability for the aggressive promotion of a politically prejudiced opinion.
It seemed that he ditched his razor to favor the story about the war on terror because it sold his articles in magazines. He was a socialist who had been derived from the parliamentarian tradition, but he added an anti-theist position to emphasize his belief in the power of prejudice as the criteria of judgment for the public. He ultimately misdirected himself.
Christopher Hitchens
克里斯托弗希钦斯
克里斯托弗希欽斯
克 Ke gram 克 koku overcome Ku く ク Keu 크 big
里 li inside 里 ri village ri り リ li 리 lee
斯 si this 斯 shi this su す ス seu 스 switch
托 tuo support 托 taku pretend to と ト to 토 sat
弗 fu not 弗 futsu dollar fa ふぁ- ファ- peo 퍼 fur
希 Xi hope 希 ki hope He ひっ ヒッ Hi 히 hi
钦 qin royal 欽 kin respect chen ちぇん チェン chin 친 chin
斯 si this 斯 shi this su す ス seu 스 switch
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How are we to look at the value of money?
Doesn't national security without respect for boundaries sound funny?
==================
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