h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thank you so much for that vacuous, unsubstantiated, unlinked *quote* you so thoughtfully opined. I have faith it is accurate.

>his own sexual appetite<

Maybe Vicky has come under his spell and can't think straight?

I assume that's a reply to me, but it is empty of content.

Is there some kind of rule that everything must be accompanied by a link? Or does that apply only to me?

I've already told you why I can't find one, but I googled "Hitchens and views", and got a heap of hits..
http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2007/10/whats-matter-with-christopher-hitchens.html

This is particularly interesting! (Although bizarrely, it places Christopher on the left. In the unlinked interview I cited, Hitchens spoke about how useful it is to be thought a left wing proponent of war on Arabs... though it makes him rabid to be called left wing.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/newscomment.html?
in_article_id=459427&in_page_id=1787&in_a_source


This final one (Wikipedia) is also interesting.

Vicky

Ah, this is what I wish I'd had available yesterday...

http://intheparish.blogspot.com/

Extract: "He posits four irreducible objections to religion, which are weak, in my opinion. He writes:

it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos,

that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism,

that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and

that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.
His claim that religion is solipsistic is almost laughable, for when one looks at his irreducible objections, I believe it shows his own solipsism, particularly with objection number 3. It really is a shame that these are only excerpts, but to make an irreducible objection based on sexual repression, makes it sound to me that religion is bad because it does not allow him to put his member anywhere he desires. Who is more solipsistic here? Frankly I do not know if he understands the word "irreducible." "

*A mistake that one expects from simpletons like Bush and devious beings like Cheney, but not from sophisticated intellectuals like Hithens and Fallaci.*

*He is of the Left, lives in the United States and recently became an American citizen. I am of the Right and, after some years in Russia and America, live in the heart of England.*

*.. he was attracted to the foreign policy ideas of some on the Republican right*


The blog says nothing about his political leanings other than that he supports the war in Iraq, the (broken) link has his own brother calling him left and Wikipedia (which is at the best of times an iffy source) says he is right on foreign policy only. He considers himself a Trotskyite and is unhappy with one or two leftist foreign policies.


As to the second post, by quoting Pentacostal theologians are you finally defining *mainstream* Christianity?

<>

?

No, of course not. First, it's Pentecostal, not Pentacostal, and second, I quote the guy, I don't define him as anything!

Thanks to Taliesin for the link... Really!

http://www.tektonics.org/parody/fundyath.html

Extract:
You think questions like, "Can God create a rock so big that He cannot lift it?" and, "Can God will Himself out of existence?" are perfect examples of how to disprove God's omnipotence and ultimately how to disprove God. When someone proves to you the false logic behind the questions (i.e. pitting God's omnipotence against itself), you desperately try to defend the questions, but then give up and go to a different Christian site to ask them.
Related to the above, you spend a great deal of your spare time writing to Christian websites asking them these very questions.

You spend hours arguing that a-theism actually means "without a belief in God " and not just " belief that there is no god" as if this is a meaningful distinction in real life.
You consistently deny the existence of God because you personally have never seen him but you reject out of hand personal testimony from theists who claim to have experienced God as a reality in their lives.
You can make the existence of pink unicorns the center-piece of a philosophical critique.

That's it, ignore any part of a post that you don't like. Despite the misspelling, I did NOT say you were defining *him* I asked if by quoting him you considered Pentecostal sects to represent or define mainstream Christianity.

>>Right wing he is! In the early noughties, there was an interview with him in the NZ Listener, where he adopted this oh-so-sad tone about how when he'd 'seen the light', and left all his left-wing former colleagues in the dust, he realised what evil, stupid people they were.

Vicky...I actually agree with you somewhat. I have strong political misgivings about Hitchens myself. However - while he's definitely abandoned the mainstream left and has been very disparaging about conventional liberalism, I still don't thing he could be accused of espousing specifically right-wing views. Mainly. My one caveat over this is that I think he's increasingly guilty of blind Islamophobia.

My point was, though, that his views should be examined. It's unreasobale to dismiss anyone wholesale simply because one doesn't agree with part of what they say.

So I look forward to these five lies.

OK - so I now see there's more Hitchens links above...although I can't see them (one is Access Denied at work...I think I can hear the alarm goung off down in IT...and the Mail one is 'not found')

Here's a good source of Hitchenalia, though:
http://www.hitchensweb.com

On the religion being solipsistic...I'm in total agreement with him there. I also applaud him for standing the conventional wisdom on its head.

The religious would argue, presumably, that they are subservient to god. They're not solipsistic because they see themselves as part of a greater whole. But what they're actually doing is imagining a universe in which they have special status. God created the universe specifically for them. They have a special place in it. God has their interests at heart. The universe revolves around them. And all of this is reflected in a belief that they are able to know something about god's will and make unsubtantiated claims about how life ought to be, for everyone, plucked from nowhere other than their own minds.

Atheism lacks this solipsism. We are insignificant specks in an impersonal universe, and don't you forget it. There are no Absolute Truths. The process of leading our lives requires negotiation with others.

Hi Vicky,

'Is there some kind of rule that everything must be accompanied by a link? Or does that apply only to me?'

Well, it is only a couple of posts since you criticised Hitchens for making unsubstantiated allegations. It would be good form to substantiate that allegation, no? Neither of your links backs that up. And most people here do go to some effort to provide links, especially for controversial statements. (Although, for the record, from the little I have seen of Hitchens I find him rather more reliant on negative emotion and less on evidence and logic than I would like.)

(Broken link was:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/newscomment.html?in_article_id=459427&in_page_id=1787&in_a_source - hope it works for me)

That list is bizarre - is it a parody of the views of Christian fundamentalists? Otherwise, it's just disturbing. It seems to be equal parts a mixture of claims that atheists are 'shrill' / hypocrites / ill-informed, Creationism (Point 25 states that anyone with a passing knowledge of the difference between biology and cosmology 'may be a fundy atheist' ) and stuff that's demonstrably true - Hitler wasn't an atheist (61), the Ritual Decalogue is an alternate set of 10 Commandments (181), 187 is basic logic, etc.

Is there anything on that list that anyone on this thread has claimed that you don't agree with? And isn't point 9 something that NPF claimed at some length?

(And no, I didn't read them all - just a few that caught my eye as I scrolled through.)

Gif

Ta for re-posting Vicky's link.

Do you think that we should let her know that little brother Peter really *is* a notorious lunatic right-winger, and that The Mail is a despicably right-wing newspaper?

btw - please, PLEASE don't get the idea that I take my Atheism (still less my politics) from Hitchens. My ideas are different to his. However, he's an entertaining writer with a knack for provocation.

This podcast is worth a listen:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/culturevulture/archives/2006/05/08/listen_to_steph.html

Yeah I found it quite amusing that the Mail described Hitchens as Left Wing.

Anyone left of Attila the Hun, is considered Left Wing, by that 'newspaper'.

Hi Zoomer,

'He considers himself a Trotskyite'

Don't know if it's just a typo, but he considers himself an ex-Trotskyite. It's possible to move quite a long way to the right from Communism and still be left-wing; perhaps this (combined with his support for the Iraq war) is where some of the confusion arises?

Gif

http://www.viruscomix.com/page433.html

Gif

George Galloway called him,
"A drink-sodden, former-Trotskyite popinjay." Which is about right.

In one of the interviews on Hitchensweb, he says that his loyalty was always towards Luxemburgist socialism, and that he still retains much of that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Luxemburg

This counterblast to Dawkins, Hitchens, et al from Saturday's Grauniad Review:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,,2265446,00.html

What's interesting for me there is that nowhere, as far as I can see, does the author give a positive justification for religion, nor define the acceptable kind of religion which he maintains the critical Atheists ignore.

From the above link:

'Writing of the Trotskyite-Luxemburgist sect to which he once belonged, Hitchens confesses sadly: "There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb." He need not worry. His record on Iraq shows he has not lost the will to believe. The effect of the American-led invasion has been to deliver most of the country outside the Kurdish zone into the hands of an Islamist elective theocracy, in which women, gays and religious minorities are more oppressed than at any time in Iraq's history. The idea that Iraq could become a secular democracy - which Hitchens ardently promoted - was possible only as an act of faith.'

I totally agree.

I read (well, ended up glancing through it for interesting bits) that article as well. It didn't seem to defend or argue *for* the object of religious belief; ie magic supernatural stuff of various descriptions. For me, that is the heart of why I'm an atheist.

Discussing anything else is missing the point.

Hi Gif, I was reading from Wiki that he was a Trotskyite. I was trying to prove a negative again, silly me. I am only interested with what he *isn't*.