Oh well, I was getting tired of civility, anyway
You'll find this fellow sounds a LOT like a rational leftist, and this article discusses in huge detail how Julian was originally 'slandered'.
Ah, 'he sounds like a leftist', to gobucks, so the article must be false. That's logic, that is.
There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever." [Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, 1937]
Of course, in the standard duplicitous creationist manner, gobucks omitted to note that Huxley was simply setting up a point of view to argue against. Let's post the rest of what the link says about Aldous Huxley, shall we?
As mentioned above, a conservative editor in 1966 printed a paragraph from Aldous Huxley on "the philosophy of meaninglessness" and "sexual mores," and added a title above the paragraph that read, "Confessions of a Professed Atheist." But what the editor failed to reveal to his readers was that Aldous was not an "atheist" when he wrote that paragraph, but was arguing against "atheism." The paragraph itself was taken from Aldous Huxley's book, Ends and Means, written in 1937 (chapter 14, the chapter on "Beliefs"), and he was not speaking about why people in Darwin's day "leaped at the Origin," but speaking about the rise of the "philosophy of meaninglessness" and materialism among the "masses" after the First World War, the generation of the 1920s.
And speaking of Aldous's generation in the 1920s and 30's, John Derbyshire wrote: "The second and third decades of the twentieth century were notoriously an age of failed gods and shattered conventions, to which many thoughtful people responded in obvious ways, retreating into nihilism, hedonism, and experimentalism. Literature became subjective, art became abstract, poetry abandoned its traditional forms. In the 'low, dishonest decade' that then followed, much of this negativism curdled into power-worship and escapism of various kinds. Aldous Huxley stood aside from these large general trends. Though no Victorian in habits or beliefs, he never entered whole-heartedly into the spirit of modernism. The evidence is all over the early volumes of these essays. James Joyce's ground breaking novel, Ulysses, he declares in 1925, is 'one of the dullest books ever written,and one of the least significant.' Jazz, he remarks two years later, is 'drearily barbaric.' Writing of Sir Christopher Wren in 1923, he quotes with approval Carlyle's remark that Chelsea Hospital, one of Wren's creations, was 'obviously the work of a gentleman.' Wren, Huxley goes on to say, was indeed a great gentleman, 'one who valued dignity and restraint and who, respecting himself, respected also humanity.' In his thirties, in fact, Huxley comes across as something of a Young Fogey."
-- John Derbyshire, "What Happened to Aldous Huxley," The New Criterion Vol. 21, No. 6 (February 2003)
Is gobucks going to argue that Derbyshire is a leftist? Wonder why National Review keeps him on, then?
So let's summarize. The link gobucks provides shows that one line is pulled out of Aldous Huxley's 'Ends and Means' to make it appear that Huxley believed the exact opposite of what he actually believed. gobucks, having read this, proceeds to extract the exact same line and do the exact same thing that the link he himself cites debunks.
It's not just crassly mendacious, it's bizarrely stupid. Why would you post a link pointing out someone else's duplicity, and then commit the exact same duplicity?
BTW, for the information of others, Huxley was actually profoundly interested in religion, particularly after he went nearly blind at an early age; he wrote extensively, for example, about Meister Eckert, the Christian mystic. If gobucks weren't profoundly ignorant, he'd know he could hardly have chosen a worse example of an atheist hedonist. Gosh, even reading 'Brave New World' would tell you that.
I don't know how these guys sleep at night. I really don't.
I guess you must be right, again, RWP. I must be bizarrely stupid. That's why I included those links ... so someone could find the stuff you found, and expose the 'truth' about what Huxley really meant. I must just hunger for the ridicule. But you didn't say thank you for the slow pitch ... I agree, you must be tired.
By the way ... Huxley lost his Mom at the age of 14. Isn't funny how these famous leftists have so much in common? Kant could surely relate as you well know.
Oh yes, that wasn't all. His sister died the same month he lost his mom. Major bummer. And then, lo and behold, an older brother committed suicide - hanged himself after suffering a nervous breakdown a few years later. Julian himself suffered a breakdown and spent time in a nursing home ... during the exact same time. (All this while Dad is happily impregnanting a new wife ... funny, strange like).
Here is more from Answers.com:
In his later years: His ideas were foundational to the forming of the Human Potential Movement. He was also invited to speak at several prestigious American universities. At a speech given in 1961 at the California Medical School in San Francisco, Huxley warned:
"There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it."
Funny/strange again ... a really weird vegatarian wrote this - and Prozac American stoned on wide band porn moves blythly along....maybe he wasn't really 'predicting' but prophecying? There is a critical difference you know. One is respectable, the other is beloved ... if you are on his side of the fence for either.
One last tidbit: In 1938 Huxley befriended J. Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired. He became a Vedantist in the circle of Swami Prabhavananda, and he also introduced Christopher Isherwood to this circle. Not long after, Huxley wrote his book on widely held spiritual values and ideas, The Perennial Philosophy, which discussed teachings of the world's great mystics. (Are you seeing the pattern RWP?)
He started meditating and became a vegetarian. Thereafter, his works were strongly influenced by mysticism and his experiences with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline, to which he was introduced by the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in 1953. Huxley's psychedelic drug experiences are described in the essays The Doors of Perception (the title deriving from some lines in a poem by William Blake) and Heaven and Hell. The title of the former became the inspiration for the naming of the rock band, The Doors. Some of his writings on psychedelics became frequent reading among early hippies."
Oh, yes, his Dad was a professional herbalist. And Wow ... I didn't know that about how the Doors got their name.
Ends and Means indeed...