Comment by 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?
> This is not really surprising coming from a religious person, dogma being after all the intellectual foundation of religion.
First off, I'm not religious. Second off, this kind of personal attack is not welcome here.
As I already said, every scholar of religious studies finds the books by Hitchens, Dawkins, etc. to be amusing at best. I can't educate you on the academic study of religion in a HN comment. If you are actually interested in reading criticism of such people and not just bashing non-atheistic people, I suggest looking into comparative religion and religious studies.
> his kind of personal attack is not welcome here.
This is not a personal attack.
You stated facts without backing them up. Twice. This is being dogmatic. My apologies for assuming you were religious given the fact you're defending religion, it was a fairly reasonable assumption to make
> As I already said, every scholar of religious studies
You are now moving from being dogmatic to using "appeal to authority" [1], another well known logical fallacy [2]
I'm still waiting for a properly argumented backing of the various statements you made above.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
[2] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=appeal+to+autho...
> This is not a personal attack.
Yes, it is, and again, it's not welcome here.
Read the criticism section of the Wikipedia article you posted yourself. There are more than enough intelligent criticisms written of the book.
If you think that my not writing you a lengthy essay explaining why Hitchens is uninformed is somehow indicative that he isn't, I'm not sure what to tell you. Religion is a complicated topic. Pretending that we can solve it in a paragraph is naive at best.
As I already said, if this interests you, read more about religious studies. I am simply saying that "the educated opinion on this topic is that Hitchens is just a popular writer, not a serious thinker on religion." If you disagree with that, well, take it up with the academic community?
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