Comment by ceilingcorner

5 years ago

Hitchens' knowledge of religion and philosophy borders on 0%. I would not reference him in any way if you intend to make serious arguments.

7 comments

ceilingcorner

ur-whale 5 years ago

>Hitchens' knowledge of religion and philosophy borders on 0%

A rather bold claim, backed by little evidence and easily debunked by a metric ton of counter-evidence.

As example of counter-evidence, I offer:

    - The man spent a large fraction of his life studying religions of all ilks

    - He wrote a number of carefully researched books on the topic of religion.

    - From his quoting the bible, the coran, jewish sacred texts on the fly in the middle of debates with random religious folks (and usually tearing them a new one in the process), I feel confident he had at least skimmed most of those.

    - No one can accuse Hitchens of being dumb, I very much doubt he'd get into high visibility, in-depth public debate about a topic without having researched it thoroughly.

Given the above, I would say the claim that "his knowledge of religion borders on 0%" is - to remain unsarcastic, however hard that is - highly unlikely to be correct.

ceilingcorner 5 years ago
Anyone with a modicum of knowledge on religious studies finds his, and all of the other books by the "New Atheists" (with the possible exception of Dennett) to be laughable. I'm sorry, they simply don't have much of an intellectual foundation in anything.
Here's an example:
Chapter eleven discusses how religions form, and claims that most religions are founded by corrupt, immoral individuals. The chapter specifically discusses cargo cults, Pentecostal minister Marjoe Gortner, and Mormonism. Hitchens discusses Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, citing a March 1826 Bainbridge, New York court examination accusing him of being a "disorderly person and impostor" who Hitchens claims admitted there that he had supernatural powers and was "defrauding citizens".[31][32] Four years later Smith claimed to obtain gold tablets containing the Book of Mormon. When the neighbor's skeptical wife buried 116 pages of the translation and challenged Smith to reproduce it, Smith claimed God, knowing this would happen, told him to instead translate a different section of the same plates.
And where does our concept of corruption or immorality come from? Hitchens just lacks basic knowledge of meta-ethics. He doesn't seem to realize that modern democratic rationalist values are themselves descendants of Christian ideas.
This is the foundational problem of the New Atheists and of the "rational" set in general. They either don't know or don't understand the foundations of modern ethics, all of which has roots in religion.
- ur-whale 5 years ago
  
  This is the second 100% dogmatic and not backed by any argument answer you provided.
  This is not really surprising coming from a religious person, dogma being after all the intellectual foundation of religion.
  But I wonder: is there anything else you could use in your discourse toolbox?
  
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