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The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality
by Andre Comte-Sponville

224 pages, $19.95

by Chauncey Mabe

The last couple of years have brought an unprecedented flurry of books touting the virtues of atheism. Cultural critic Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great) and scientist Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) are but two of the more prominent apostates to enjoy surprise best-sellers by attacking God and the benighted mortals who love Him. Alas, this flowering of popular atheism has been marred by a chest-thumping triumphalism that even a fellow atheist—myself, say—might find unseemly.

For belief is not a character flaw, but a trait fostered in us by evolution, one with powerful, still poorly understood survival value. For Hitchens to mock belief in, say, Allah, when he so publicly worships his own ego, displays not only a logical inconsistency but also a stunning lack of human sympathy. The same goes when Dawkins, who has the discipline and values of science to console and inspire him, derides the faith of those who are consoled and inspired by the values and discipline of belief in God.

Fresh thinkers are rushing to fill the conceptual gap, among them Andre Comte-Sponville, a middle-age French intellectual being promoted here as a leading continental philosopher with the publication of Little Book of Atheist Spirituality. Comte-Sponville’s simple and obvious thesis is that human beings, whether or not they believe in God, still require a spiritual life. For evidence he points to his own experience. Like many atheists, Comte-Sponville was raised religious, in his case Catholic, and acknowledges not only that much of his character developed from his exposure to Christianity, but also that his morality and sensitivity remain virtually unchanged since his conversion to unbelief: “Even my way of being an atheist bears the imprint of the faith to which I subscribed throughout my childhood and adolescence.”

Spirituality, however, “is far too important a matter to be left to fundamentalists,” writes Comte-Sponville, who argues that by allowing spirituality to be conflated entirely with religion we have lost touch with a more basic notion of spirituality which, if recovered, might serve to unite rather than divide people, regardless of their beliefs. He seems well aware that such an idea would be fatal to evangelizing faiths like Christianity or Islam, the adherents of which view themselves as in exclusive possession of revelation. As with all uniters, he is indifferent to the sensibilities of the dividers.

Thus, Comte-Sponville argues, atheism need not dispense with traditional values, even those most commonly associated with church, temple and mosque. Among the most important, he says, are what he calls “community” and “fidelity,” arguing that while civil society is possible without God, it is not possible without the binding values religion has transmitted through the ages. “This does not prove, however, that these values need God in order to subsist. On the contrary, everything tends to prove that we need them—an ethics, a sense of communion and fidelity—in order to subsist in a way we find humanly acceptable.”

Seldom have I so disliked a book in which I find so many points of agreement. Part of this no doubt rises from a personal animus toward Comte-Sponville’s regard for the splendid labors of his own mind. Yet for all the philosophical craftsmanship on display—he goes through the motions of developing logical arguments, thought experiments, coining new terms and phrases—the results are thin and unsatisfying.

Indeed, the needless coinages are among the hardest bits to choke down. Comte-Sponville takes common concepts, familiar to all, and coins new terms for them. In a coarser business than philosophy this practice would be known by its true name, “branding.”

In a similar vein, Comte-Sponville’s frequent recourse to examples from his own experience are neither as charming nor as illuminating as he thinks. More troublesome, Comte-Sponville’s thinking is almost entirely circular. As an atheist, he sees the great enemy as not religion but what he calls “nihilism.” As though making a factual statement, he writes, “What nihilists feel is not despair but disappointment (and one can be disappointed only with respect to a prior hope); they are weary and embittered, filled with rancor and resentment.”

Everything about that statement is objectionable. Who is Comte-Sponville to pontificate on how nihilists feel? What they think, what they say, what they believe—all these are open to discussion. But attacking how they feel—their subjective experience—is the height of rhetorical cheek, displaying a lack of sympathy exactly of the kind the philosopher ostensibly condemns.

Besides, have you ever known a declared nihilist? Me, neither. Here as elsewhere in this mercifully brief volume, Comte-Sponville erects a straw man that he may dismantle with the bravado of someone who knows his opponent cannot strike back. Nihilists, he implies, are those who feel not despair but disappointment, and those who feel not despair but disappointment are nihilists. To such a construction as Comte-Sponville’s nihilists, all manner of rhetorical abuses are allowed.

Biographer Evan Thomas tackles 'His Life'

Robert F. Kennedy. Author Evan Thomas delves into the contradictions and promise of his life in "Robert Kennedy: His Life"

(CNN) -- For anyone who lived through the tumultuous 1960s, Robert F. Kennedy's presidential campaign -- indeed, his life -- remains the great "what if."

In "Robert Kennedy: His Life," Evan Thomas uses the Kennedy era's prodigious documentation and talks with the people who were there to deliver an account that both dismantles the Kennedy mystique and polishes it. His masterful biography charts the life of the third son of Joseph P. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy with an almost breathless excitement, starting from the very first line:

"Robert Kennedy liked to plunge into cold water."

From the beginning, Thomas plunges in as well, navigating the political and emotional depths of the Kennedy family with insightful explanations and illuminating anecdotes.

"To me, the most interesting decade is the '60s," Thomas, an assistant managing editor at Newsweek magazine, said of his reasons for examining RFK. "And he is pretty much in the middle of everything that was going on."

Indeed, if it happened in the '60s, it seemed that RFK was somehow involved: Civil rights. The Cold War. Striking farm laborers. Combating organized crime. Vietnam. And, of course, as a central figure in the assassinations that bloodied the decade: standing in grief as his brother was laid to rest, calming a crowd after Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder, and finally himself a victim on June 6, 1968.

At the table

RFK (right) served as John F. Kennedy's attorney general. The two brothers had a strong bond, with RFK often serving as JFK's "enforcer"

Thomas' gift for storytelling puts the reader at the table during meetings of the ExCom, the committee of cabinet officers and statesmen whose deliberations shaped the American response to the 13-day Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. RFK was in the thick of it.

"He sometimes wouldn't even sit at the cabinet table," the president's patrician national security adviser McGeorge Bundy recalls of Kennedy. "But it didn't make much difference, because ... wherever he sat was one of the most important places in the room."

RFK played a vital role on the ExCom, beginning as an impassioned hawk whose evolution toward controlled compromise helped to defuse the crisis.

He was also "dead center" for the equally impassioned battle for civil rights, beginning with attempts to integrate the Universities of Mississippi and Alabama. Initially a skeptic (whose authorization of wiretaps on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King would later cause him political grief), Kennedy became a fierce believer in economic opportunity and equal rights for minorities.

Among the illuminating personal glimpses Thomas uncovers is a Kennedy penchant for grim humor in extremis. As members of ExCom learned that armed Cuban missiles were poised to strike the U.S., RFK dryly asked: "Can they hit Oxford, Mississippi?"


RFK (far left) was a key adviser during the Cuban Missile Crisis


"Half the missile crisis is on tape. You can listen to them," Thomas said with evident relish. "Listening to the last day of the missile crisis is really quite powerful."

Thomas' book also features other, less wholesome discoveries, such as:

Patriarch Joseph Kennedy pre-empting concerns about developmentally disabled daughter Rosemary becoming too involved with the opposite sex by sending her to a hospital for a then-experimental frontal lobotomy. He informed his wife only after the procedure, telling her that it was best she not think of Rosemary for awhile. The children were told nothing. Their sister simply disappeared.
Bobby -- who accepted the diminutive form of the name only from family members and close friends -- suggested staging a "sink the Maine or something" approach to provoking an invasion of Cuba.
The still-murky connection between Bobby, Jack and the CIA's efforts to get Fidel Castro assassinated. While definitive evidence is scarce, indications are that Bobby knew something, but didn't want to know details.

Insights on a younger brother

As in any Kennedy story, the expected characters are here: Joe, the patriarch; Rose, the long-suffering wife and mother; the doomed "golden trio" of older siblings Joe, Jack and Kathleen; Jackie, the tragic widow; adoring wife Ethel; shattered star Marilyn Monroe and shadowy gangster Sam Giancana.


Evan Thomas

But other, peripheral figures also make intriguing appearances -- an unscrupulous political operative named Paul Corbin, whose dirty tricks Kennedy sometimes ignored; football friend David Hackett, who became a valued member of the attorney general's staff; and a Washington hostess on whom it was rumored Kennedy had a crush.

But Kennedy himself, a beguiling mix of underdog and overachiever, Machiavellian protector and pensive questioner, remains the most intriguing. As he was described by a civil rights activist, "He was this younger brother full of pain."

What surprised Thomas about his subject?

"How scared he was, which is another way of saying how brave he was," he said. "He was a pitiful little boy -- by his own description -- who fell down a lot, a poor student and a mediocre athlete."

Kennedy "always had to overcome something," continued Thomas. "But he faced it, sometimes in rash ways -- plunging into rivers -- but he stepped up to it, morally, spiritually and intellectually."

Overcoming myths


There is no question that the assassination of JFK changed life for all of the Kennedys. But perhaps it changed the most for RFK, who blamed himself for his brother's death. Robert Kennedy had spent much of his time in the late '50s and early '60s prosecuting organized crime. Now he thought the Mob had gotten to his brother.

But Thomas doesn't buy it.

"A lot of what I do in the book is debunk these conspiracy theories," he said, professing -- though it's hard to tell how seriously -- "to be the last person who believes the Warren Commission" report's finding that assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

He was also determined to defog the rose-colored glasses with which many look at RFK.

Through exhaustive research in written and oral histories, as well as interviews with survivors of the Camelot years, Thomas sheds new and compelling light on Kennedy and his times.

"The Kennedys have been written about a lot," said the author. "Many of the people who worked for Bobby Kennedy are still alive, and most of them have their marbles."

Thomas has seen the Roger Donaldson film "Thirteen Days," which he called "for Hollywood, astonishingly accurate." New Line, the same film company that made the Kevin Costner movie, has picked up an option on Thomas' book as well.

Thomas' narrative in "Robert Kennedy: His Life" remains clear-eyed to the end. Still, it's hard not to get misty as the book descends on its steady trajectory to tragedy.

"Each time a man stands up for an ideal ... he sends a tiny ripple of hope," reads the words on Kennedy's simple tombstone, near the grave of his brother the president. And we are left to wonder, yet again, "What if?"

From The Sunday Times

When Stephen King wrote Misery in 1987, making the hero a writer was an unusual departure for him. Recently, however, centring his novels on creative types has become a habit. In Cell, the protagonist is a comic-book artist. Lisey’s Story involves a dead author whose widow struggles to protect his legacy. And Duma Key’s narrator, Edgar Freemantle, is a painter whose work gives him paranormal powers – to know everything about people hundreds of miles away, to predict events, even to heal or kill someone.

Edgar was a successful building contractor in Minnesota, until a collision with a crane left him minus an arm and suffering from memory, sight, speech and anger problems. His wife Pam divorced him, and returning to work was impractical. So his shrink recommended relocation as therapy, and he chose the eponymous island, one of the Florida Keys.

Installed in a rented seaside house he calls Big Pink, he lives alone and has only two neighbours. Wireman, who becomes his buddy and mentor, is a macho former lawyer, also severely injured, who now works as a carer and caretaker. Elizabeth Eastlake, the eccentric elderly heiress he looks after, is showing early signs of Alzheimer’s and is still haunted by the enigmatic death of two sisters back in the 1920s. It is Elizabeth, you gradually realise, who is the author of the “How to Draw a Picture” chapters that punctuate the main narrative.

Edgar starts off painting sunsets, but soon discovers that art gives him amazing abilities. He can describe his younger daughter Ilse’s new boyfriend without having met him, confidently assert Pam is having an affair, and save a former colleague’s life by predicting his suicide bid – all by daubing away in a kind of prophetic trance. When a child killer dominates the news in Florida, he ensures his death by copying a photo of him but leaving the body blank. King drops in a mention of the phenomenon of “amputee psychics”, and his hero’s special talents are directly linked to his disability: only when his stump itches can he can produce clairvoyant or telekinetic paintings.

Admired for its visionary or surrealist qualities, his prolific artistic output attracts a local gallery’s attention. Every painting is sold when it’s exhibited. Yet while art can bring fame, wealth and paranormal gifts on Duma Key, it can also be a curse. As Elizabeth is aware when she warns him to store his work away from the island, the same sinister force there that empowers him is also made angry by his paintings and the knowledge they bring.

King creates three distinct milieux: Minnesota, a commonsensical northern land where those closest to the hero all live; the Florida Keys now, an ambiguously magical domain whose inhabitants are all damaged; and the privileged but blighted bygone world of the Eastlakes 80 years earlier. All three are realised with striking imaginative energy, and Elizabeth’s history – just a back-story emerging in fragments, but nevertheless remarkably detailed – could easily be a novel in itself in other hands.

Nods to his influences (Mary Shelley, Poe, Hitchcock) and to recent television fantasy dramas influenced by King (The X Files, Lost) suggest that his aim here is a composite flesh-creeper, layering different forms of the uncanny. There’s his narrator’s Poe-like house of dread, jutting over the ocean so that the tide-shifted shells beneath it sound like bones; the southern gothic of the Eastlakes’ saga; paintings that can either serve or destroy the painter, a device reminiscent of fairy tales or Oscar Wilde; and a final section that features a ghost ship, zombies in chains, an evil spirit and a wilderness where weird, lethal creatures lurk or hover.

But, oddly, Duma Key is rarely frightening. Almost three-quarters of it has passed before Edgar starts seeing spectres, and the first real jolt to the reader comes even later. The concluding journey into the bewitched, miasmic south of the island is typically inventive, but comes across as an afterthought designed to keep happy those who buy King for horror. His writing is far more engaged in the passages about painting, reflecting his preoccupations since 1999 when (in an episode clearly recycled in Edgar’s accident) he was nearly killed by a car. Obsessed with art’s powers and penalties, he here follows Edmund Wilson’s The Wound and the Bow in exploring its link to suffering. He has become a fascinatingly paradoxical figure, still seen as ultra-commercial but, in fact, increasingly highbrow and self-conscious.

Hacking: The Art of Exploitation


In the preface to his book Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, author Jon Erikson does a crisp job laying out the counter argument to letting the art of hacking flourish unfettered by artificial legalities. "There's nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge". Being unfamiliar with actual hacking techniques (beyond what I chuckled at in Die Hard 4), this happened to be a really good way to begin the book.

Its important to understand what this book tries to cover. Erikson covers specific hacking techniques. He stays close to Linux and C to illustrate the techniques and he exploits a lot of open source software. The goal is to familiarize the reader with the different modes of exploitations.

Later in the book (Chapter 6), he explains: "The state of computer security is a constantly changing landscape...if you understand the concepts of the core hacking techniques explained in this book, you can apply them in new and inventive ways to solve the problem du jour. Like LEGO bricks, these techniques can be used in millions of different combinations and configurations. As with art, the more you practice these techniques, the better you'll understand them." Clearly, Erickson is passionate about the subject matter he covers in his book.

Any ability to exploit vulnerabilities requires a thorough understanding of the underlying subject. Here, Erikson's book offers a number of quick primers on topics such as C programming and network protocols. These introductions are valuable because they introduce the subject and give you deep dives into specifics. They give you some sense of how hacking can lead to a greater understanding of the system under exploit. For example in Chapter 4, Erikson goes from introducing us to the OSI model to socket programming in four pages. But because of a very engaging writing style, it doesn't feel like a hurried course.

After the introduction in which he covers C programming language basics, Erikson introduces us to exploitation via a buffer overflow example. He covers network hacking techniques such as denial of service, TCP/IP hijacking and port scanning. He delves into the more involved topic of spawning shell code to gain control of a system. In a very entertaining Chapter 6, he shows you how to bypass security measures that detect and track hackers. In the final chapter, he covers hacking techniques for cryptography.

Given its structure, Hacking is part introduction, part handbook. If there is one recommendation I would make, it would be to embellish the source code with figures. The issue here is that you have to read through reams of code to understand how the hack works. Which is as it should be, but when you are reading about a particular hack, it breaks the flow of thought considerably.

If the code could have instead been explained with a flowchart or pseudo code and the hack shown with a diagram, the reader would get a quick understanding of how the hack worked and would be better positioned to work through the code. In addition, the book could address a wider audience - especially those that are interested in learning more about hacking without necessarily being hackers themselves.


Source:Blogcritics,written by Aspi