Christopher Hitchens, you stupid git

The BBQ Pit
1

I knew he is a heavy drinker - who really cares?

I knew he tends to be rude and curmudgeonly - oh well, it can even be fun sometimes.

But I’m on page 110 of the 286-page God Is Not Great, and I’ve already encountered *two *freaking urban legends!

Page 54: “Orthodox Jews conduct congress by means of a hole in the sheet,”

Page 110: “(One recalls the governor of Texas who, asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that “if English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for me.” Rightly are the simple so called.)”

Christopher, I actually admire your gall a lot of the time. Who else on Earth would have dared call Mother Teresa a “thieving Albanian dwarf?” The fight against the dangers of religion benefits from staid, polite educators, but IMHO it can also use some pugnacious hilarity.

But for fuck’s sake man, you can’t just spew libels that coincide with your own prejudices, no matter how many literary references and fancy vocabulary words you sprinkle around them! Do you realize that you are acting like the atheist foil for Dr. D. James Kennedy, hearing an apocryphal story that fits your biases, and adopting it wholesale, without a shred of critical thinking or skepticism? It’s bad enough when the faithful engage in this behavior, but Jesus, what does it mean when it’s coming from the side that is espousing critical thinking and skepticism!

Not only am I pissed at your lax fact checking, and your playing right into the “immoral, lying atheist” stereotype, but I’m really annoyed that any “fact” you present with which I’m unfamiliar is now suspect. Your description of the Burgess Shale is really interesting - guess I’ll have to look it up myself to see if you got it right. I only believe your account of the mohel giving children fatal herpes because I recently saw references to it elsewhere. I suppose giving me lots of interesting topics to research in and of itself is not a bad thing. But by the power of Greyskull, it is just tragic that you have so undermined your trustworthiness!

2

Good pitting. I have one problem…

…doesn’t an untruth need to be about a certain person in order to be libel?

3

Find me an error free 286 page book and I may come more around to your way of thinking.

In many ways, I am like Christopher Hitchens, but without the talent.

4

Thanks. Yes, in a legal sense, libel must be about a specific person, who is alive. I was using it in a looser sense of “anything that is defamatory or that maliciously or damagingly misrepresents” (Dictionary.com). It may have floated to the surface of my consciousness because one of the items accuses Jews of bizarre and unsavory (though obviously less atrocious) behavior a la the blood libel legend.

ETA: Ah, the fallacy of the excluded middle. You’ll notice I didn’t harp on typos or minor editing errors. Just the repetition of dubious-sounding lies that have been repeatedly debunked.

5

There’s a fine line somewhere between error and assholery.

6

But the two do go well together.

7

Exactly. The whole book is supposed to be written in an assholish manner. Therefore errors are going to be especially assholish.

8

He made a couple of factual errors about New Testament scholarship in that book too, but I still thought it worked well as a general rant against religion.

9

The problem with such errors (beyond the fact that he might have drawn erroneous conclusions from them) is that people can use them to dismiss him entirely. Of course that would be a mistake on their part and not his, but the best way to counter it is to have as accurately researched a book as possible. Otherwise you’ll get “Good points? He thinks Orthodox Jews have sex through sheets! Clearly he has no idea about actual religion”.

10

Then he’s no worse than any preacher, priest, or advocate of any of the religions humanity has had inflicted upon itself past and present.
But the rub is if he has these errors pointed out to him, would he likely acknowledge that he made a mistake? There’s all the difference.

11

There is a difference between using polemic discourse as a form of persuation, and being an ignorant self-satisfied blowhard preaching to the converted.

Unfortunately debate these days seems increasingly dominated by the latter type, presumably because it gets attention.

I don’t single out Hitchens for this; he’s just representitive of a popular type, notable for their demonization of their perceived enemies, simplification of complex issues, certainty of self-righteousness.

To my mind, the value of an argument lies in whether the argument is likely to have any luck in persuading those of reasonably open mind on the other side (or not yet on any side) of whatever debate. Such arguments are a heck of a lot harder to make than assembling a buch of horror stories to “prove” that the other side is nothing but unmitigatedly bad - but the latter form is apparently more satisfying to those already confirmed in their beliefs.

That being said, it is just icing on the cake that some of the stories assembled for the purpose of deamonization are simply untrue. It is hard to imagine many Orthodox Jews being convinced of the toxic nature of their faith by an allegation that they have sex through a hole in a sheet.

12

You said it far better than I could. Thanks.

And I don’t mean to dismiss him or the book entirely. On the contrary, the only reason I’m bothered to get riled up is that I have some respect for him to begin with. There is some really cool stuff in the book, from serious citations to Bart Ehrman to pithy little quips. And it just makes me wince to think it might all be overshadowed (in some minds) by his ignorance and gullibility.

So once I’m done reading, I will be sending a letter to him, and I agree the reaction will be the most telling. Hell, I recently caught Paul Kurtz transmitting an old UL chestnut, sent in a letter to Free Inquiry, and had it printed verbatim. I have respect for that.

13

Well, it’s a fair point. If I want to pick someone to inform me about religion, someone who never bothered to see if Jews having sex through sheets was real of just another myth like them drinking the blood of Christian babies is not exactly high on my list.

Although this particular myth has always confused me: the only place I’ve ever actually encountered the sex through sheet hole thing in popular culture is in Like Water For Chocolate, with people who are very much not Orthodox Jews (I can’t remember for sure if they were Protestants or Catholics in the movie, but almost certainly Catholics).

14

I go there so you don’t have to: “sex through sheet hole.” lolz.

15

If you mean void of spelling, typography and punctuation errors, you may have a point. But if you mean a book free of completely indefensible and inaccurate assertions about whole ethnic groups, or lies about public officials, I can present any number of peer-reviewed non-fiction books from almost any university library. Hitchens isn’t just some schmuck writing a book about his beliefs. He’s a preeminent atheist and journalist who is expected to adhere to the highest standards of his profession. **Revenant ** is right – Hitchins does more harm than good by including these wild (and provably inaccurate) assertions in his book.

16

Might I suggest you start with SJ Gould’s Wonderful Life? It’s a little behind the state of the art on the Shale, but is a wonderful narrative for all that, and touches all the major points.

As to the errors you mention - there’s no need, in this day and age, to be spouting ULs as fact, but I’ll have to examine context to get my ire really going - what was the context of the Jewish one, for instance? I’d be more forgiving it was a throwaway item in a list of religious idiosyncrasies like Mormon magic underpants and snakehandling, a bit less so if it was the focus of a whole argument. The governer misquote, I think you gave enough context on to see that it was something that comes up quite a bit, and I don’t find it toooo annoying, anymore than all the cool quotes misattributed to Wilde and Shaw. But it would make me , like you said, make sure I checked any facts of his against a second source.

17

True, but it isn’t an error basic to the religion. One could believe in myths like that and still have good points to make, unlike, say, someone who thought all Christians believed Jesus and God were seperate and competing beings. One mistake does suggest his conclusions could be wrong, but it would be equally wrong to dismiss anything he had to say based solely on that.

18

Word. I thought it was hilarious.

19

Actually, I first heard that myth from an Orthodox Jewish girl who was saying it about the ULTRA-Orthodox Jews. FWIW.

20

I would love to hear when and where the existence of a higher power was “debunked”.