Muzman on 16/12/2011 at 22:04

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It isn't really for Hitch to explain how the religious could sidestep or ignore the origins of their faith and then still hold to its books, ceremonies et all you know guys.
(and it isn't just one religion he's going after, although in that version he shorts himself on the dates. Usually he goes back to Abraham and even Islam is Abrahamic, let's not forget)

DDL on 16/12/2011 at 23:03

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Plus a large part of his arguments focus around the fact that if you're going to claim to be of "religious faith X", then you have to accept all that comes with that, including all the utterly stupid stupid crazy stuff, or you're simply lying when you say you're of faith X.

...Which to a certain extent is spot on, really: "I'm sort of catholic" is (while a perhaps understandably moderate position) not really what catholicism is about. And I think (from what I've read) he was incredibly confrontationally "shit or get off the pot" about it.

"Are you religious?"
"..sort of?"
"Then you're not religious. Stop being a fucking waste of space. NEXT!"

Personally I would prefer to let religion just quietly die rather than try and force people to grow out of it, but I still found his approach engagingly amusing. I could pick a lot of holes in his arguments (which amusingly, none of his opponents seemed to do, possibly because those holes would simply serve to make their beliefs seem even sillier - his constant citing of god ignoring human suffering for 98,000 years before intervening assumes that humans as they currently are have been around for 100,000 years, which if you're a short-earther, you have a snappy -albeit hilariously retarded- answer to), but I still like that he made them. And he was vastly less...frothy to listen to than dawkins.

Ho hum.


Also, lol @ Beleg & IT. Stay classy, guys.

jay pettitt on 17/12/2011 at 00:34

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Is it fuck. It was weasily-intentioned. Really not the same thing.

Speaking of weasilyness and failing to identify the bleeding obvious - the Hague just found Catholic Church Clergy responsible for, what was it, 10s of thousands of cases of child abuse in Holland. Or was it just thousands? Anyway, the repulsive thing is not that unbalanced people committed acts of sexual abuse against children (as unpleasant as that is) - but that in many cases the Catholic Church were warned that it was happening and made no attempt to protect the victims, who were in its care, or prevent the perpetrators from continuing the abuses.

It was sanctioned child abuse.

Christians have a really hard time with the idea that other Christians can be thoroughly reprehensible. Fellow christians can't possibly conduct the worst kinds of abuses, lie like children or just be oiks on the Internet. They're Christian after all...

Kaleid on 17/12/2011 at 01:47

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This is the best thing I read about it:

"I heard Christopher Hitchens had a deathbed conversion. He asked for a priest and converted him to atheism."
____
(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2075133/Christopher-Hitchens-death-In-Memoriam-courageous-sibling-Peter-Hitchens.html) In Memoriam, my courageous brother Christopher, 1949-2011

Vernon on 17/12/2011 at 06:50

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I remember at an early age seeing Hitchens' commentary during The Gulf War and being struck by his tone. Years later I came across his tirades (e.g. The Missionary Position; God Is Not Great), and while amusing, they came off as overly forceful and very much blinkered. After all, he was a fundamentalist himself.

His move to America was interesting - there he could speak loudly and eloquently and be applauded, no matter how much of a diabolical apologist for torture and genocide he might have been. His switch from Socialism was mind-blowing. He seemed to basically disown everything he had been saying for three decades, leaving both his admirers and critics astonished. I guess this is the lot of a polemicist...

Another thing to note is that try as he might, he would never be the kind of figure like those he admired and (poorly) emulated so much: Orwell, Swift, Franklin, etc. He did turn me onto a lot of good writing, particularly Swift's essays. I think he will fade into insignificance as the years roll on - he is easily dismissed as a person of too many contradictions - one who did too little research, changed his mind too often, and sought too much publicity on the back of a strength in articulation

The thing that most impresses me about him, in hindsight, was his admiration for the achievements of religion - in art, architecture, writing, etc... He diverged from Dawkins et al. in that regard.

I'll end my incoherent babbling here.