p.s. It would be cool to have a listing on this site of all the free arts and culture related events in Hartford.

But I started realistically thinking about it: the CT Forum is a nonprofit and I bet it costs a LOT to get these big name people there. I know nothing about this, but don’t you think it probably costs thousands/tens of thousands of dollars to get these famous people to come?

Of course the Forum has some corporate support, but they also run the CT Youth Forum, and it says on their site that they give away 1,000 tickets every year to high schoolers and community members.

So I don’t really think that realistically they could make this completely free to everyone, although I wish it was!

By this definition, it should be free to the public. Sorry, I’m a word nerd.

Your guess is correct about the Catholic thing. And yes I wish there were more faiths represented. The Jewish and Christian faiths have so much in common it would have been cool to hear a different perspective. In the program book they had a really interesting chart listing info about a few dozen of the most popular religions around the world, some of which I’d never even heard of.

Sounds like Catholicism. I wish that a Catholic was represented among the panelists, and how about a Muslim?

Great write-up.

There is a part of me that sometimes wants to cheer for Hitchens’ brand of atheism because he *sometimes* emphasizes the incredible scientific and social progress that can be directly attributed to the rejection of religious ideas and superstition. It’s similar to the way that I feel about early Soviet poster campaigns that denounced the Orthodox Church as a promoter of czarism, reaction and bigotry. Sometimes challenges to institutional religion are absolutely necessary.

But you have to take a step back and look at Hitchens’ whole agenda. Hitchens has for the last decade been part of what commentator Edward Herman calls “the Cruise Missile Left”:

http://musictravel.free.fr/political/political36.htm

Essentially, these are liberals who actually support U.S. imperialism and war. In the lead up to the Iraq War, Hitchens played the cynical role of posturing as an opponent of the war while attempting to drive wedges in the movement . . . red-baiting socialists and communists and using his critique of religion to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment. In the last analysis, he wasn’t against the war on Iraq at all, he simply wanted to turn it into a modern day secular Crusade in which liberal Americans would lead the fight to destroy evil fatwah-issuing Muslim clerics.

And even in his current incarnation in which he focuses on the negative impact of religion and superstition in society, it often seems to me that there is a strong flavor of the White Man’s Burden in this thinking…in which “western” rationalist ideas and values represent the pinnacle of “civilized” society that must be shoved down the throats of the superstitious heathens.

As for the other panelists…well, I think they are absolutely correct that in the current atmosphere of social dislocation and disorientation and individualism, religion is a powerful source of solace for many people who are suffering (that’s the real meaning, of course, of Marx’s adage that religion is the opiate of the masses…it helps individuals to kill the pain of living under capitalism). That doesn’t mean that the religious formulations that people cling to can or should be accepted as factual, much less as appropriate determinants of social policy.

A friend of mine grew up in a dirt-poor family in a small working class town in New York state. The kind of family, as he often said, where as a kid he was often sent to school with lunches consisting of a mustard sandwich because bread and mustard was all they could ever afford. His mother was an ardent fundamentalist christian. He always felt that this was in no small measure because she was married to an alcoholic man who physically and emotionally terrorized her and she felt she had no means of escape because she was a woman with no job skills, no source of income except for her husband, and no way out.

Although my friend grew up to be fiercely atheistic in his beliefs, he always remembered that his mother’s religion was the only comfort that she had in her life. His take on it was that until we had fashioned a better world for people like his mother to live in, we had no right to ridicule her for the faith that she clung to in order to survive it.