I enjoy controversy and Hitchens was always a bruiser who enjoyed a good scrap. And I wouldn't have liked to be on the receiving end of one of his barbs. Eg: "If you give [Jerry] Falwell an enema you could bury him in a matchbox". When I came across his book God is not Great I enjoyed his skewering of mainstream religion but was very disappointed with his off-hand treatment of eastern faiths. The only relevant chapter (There Is No "Eastern" Solution) was devoted to Rajneesh, ie the most controversial guru of recent times! What about Buddhism, Vedanta, Taoism . . ? So I found the following response to Hitchens' book by (former?) Osho press officer Krishna Prem of interest:
I find it odd that of all the supporters of organized religions on the vast Indian spiritual scene, you pick the one man who consistently criticized the religions for the damage they have done through promoting blind belief, blind faith and generating blind fear down the ages. Osho's attacks on Mother Teresa of Calcutta (is that where you got the idea for your book?) and her boss, whom he called "The Polack Pope" are well documented. His series of talks in America so often focused on the dangers of Christian fundamentalism that today they seem prophetic. Among the last series of talks he gave in public, two titles come to mind Christianity, the Greatest Poison and Zen, the Antidote to All Poisons as well as a series illustrating where Nietzsche and other atheists missed the boat, God is Dead: Now Zen is the Only Living Truth. To illustrate your premise that "there is no Eastern solution," why pick a mystic who, his entire life, through discourses and books, tried to alert mankind to the fact, as you say, that "religion poisons everything." And why pick one who left his body in 1990? Did he have that big an impact on you, or was it because you couldn't be bothered updating the "research" and I use the term facetiously you pretend to have conducted 30 years ago? Worth a look at the full text of the letter: http://sannyasnews.org/now/archives/538 <http://sannyasnews.org/now/archives/538>
