I've watched a couple of recent Christopher Hitchens debates on religion, and as someone who would like to see belief in God become even more widespread, all I can say is thank God for Hitchens. He acts like a prick on stilts. You could cut the hostility he gives off with a knife. He acts like every religious person that ever lived molested his daughter. He comes off like a rabid dog, and all right-thinking atheists should do what they can to get him committed. He helps the cause like Hitler helped patriotism. Maybe it's the drinking. Look at the photo: does the guy go to the john without booze? He keeps talking about how hateful church people are, but I can't think of a person on a TV talk show that has shown more venom, and I'm not proud to say that I've watched a lot of shows. I was an atheist for about 15 years, and even then I was disgusted with these types who think that the way you talk to believers is to call their mothers whores.
Update: It turns out that Chesterton agrees with me. He wrote that the enemy of religion is not atheism--it's growing indifference. And like Nisbet wrote, aggressive atheism reawakens and reinforces a person's religious values. Hitchens is a friend: the deepening secularization of life is the enemy.
3 comments:
Ah, he's not so bad. And the cracks about his boozing became tedious about three years ago (to paraphrase Lincoln, someone ought to find out what Hitchens drinks and send a case to every other pundit).
Hitchens brings a note of raucous, raffish Oxford Union-style debate to what is otherwise a tremendously boring, self-important, and over-earnest media atmosphere. And I say this as someone who disagrees with him about nearly everything (intellectually, I find his brother Peter -a journalist for the Daily Mail- much more congenial).
The main problems with Hitchens are that he seems to have a few rote-memorized monologues which he trots out during multiple interviews (this makes youtube-expedited-serial-Hitchens-viewing somewhat repetitive). And he has the annoying habit of conflating religions and using the obvious evils of particular ones (Islam, most obviously) to attack the concept in general.
Fred: The guy has zero sense of humor.
He gets paid for dunken rantings? I'm in the wrong line of work. I am a heavy drinker and can carry on with the best of them. However, read Hitchen's piece on ADD, it is actually quite good. But then again, as I said, I'm a drunk.
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