I nearly jumped out of my chair and cheered when I heard that. Totally fucking awesome!
Yeah, but that only aligns him with Fred Phelps. Big woop.
Only in the same way that Fred Phelps and Jerry Falwell were alligned (i.e. both were anti-gay). Hitchens was indignant for much more sane reasons.
On the subject of Mother Teresa, I wasn’t aware of the “deathbed conversions” one, but I do agree with her detractors on her financial misdealings and squandering of money on convents rather than healthcare and on the evil of telling one of the poorest and most overpopulated places on earth that abortion and birth control are great evils that will see them damned, and on the undeniable “divorce is okay for rich and beautiful princesses but not for the mother of 8 starving kids who’s husband is an abusive drunkard dichotomy”. Rather than hijack this thread, however, you can bump the following or start a new one and I guarantee you’ll get a big response:
The largest thread devoted explicitly to the topic was, with 90 posts,
How was Blessed Mother Teresa Evil?. Instead of Hitchens, the most rational critic of the little nun is actually Dr. Aroup Chatterjee who was once a doctor who volunteered with her order. The first three chapters of his book Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict are available on his website.
When I first saw the title of this thread, I thought it was going to be about Hitchens’ stubbornly hawkish-beyond-reason support for the war in Iraq and his apparently related inability to call out the Bush Administration for its incompetence and abuses of power until they impossible and blindingly obvious to ignore. There’s certainly more than enough material there for a decent Pit thread.
I take it Vidal’s break with Hitchens over the latter’s being “too liberal” must have occurred some time ago because Hitchens has been drifting rightward ever since the Clinton Presidency (whereas Vidal has occasionally crossed over into certifiable lunatic-left territory–e.g., his claim that OK City bomber Timothy McVeigh was a left-wing martyr used as a convenient scapegoat by the government which was the real party responsible for the bombing). For a long time, Hitchens has usually displayed a good deal more contempt and venom towards his supposed political partisans on the left side of the spectrum than he has towards those on the right (some of whom he seems to have now developed a certain grudging respect for). He may write an occasional free-speech article or anti-religious treatise to remind people of where he used to be politically but lately his efforts have been as convincing as an in-the-closet actor’s attempt to convince the public he’s 100% hetero by being seen in public with a series of starlets and super-models. In both instances, you just want to say, “Oh please, just come out of the closet.”
Um, what they all said above.
Actually, it’s not really on point to comment on her nationality or stature, but it sure made it funny and memorable, which is part of what I like about Hitchens.
FWIW, I’ve read non-Hitchens sources, including a former nun from her order, lambasting her for such practical things as reusing needles when she pulls in millions, or forbidding the nuns to can tomatoes because it goes against the whole “consider the sparrow” crap, to her corrupt fund-raising and support of criminal donors, to her completely loathsome veneration of suffering, to the point of denying succor to patients so that they could “be like Jesus.”
As for nitpick versus total loss of credibility, I actually come down somewhere in the middle (I just have a violent reaction to ULs - they’re one of my pet peeves). But on the whole, I love to watch Hitchens, whether he’s half in the bag, with a whiskey in hand as he’s being interviewed, or he’s lambasting Falwell as a completely disingenuous con man on CNN. As I said, the rationality movement can use different approaches. I just wish when he puts something in print, he’d take a slightly less cavalier attitude.
Speaking of erroneous information, the fallout twixt Vidal y Hitchens is mostly due to Hitchens’ right wing views. It began with Hitchens’ open letter to Vidal during the Clinton impeachment (which Hitchens was for) and has escalated since Hitchens’ pro-war stance. The “too liberal” comment was on a televised Vidal interview on YouTube (no longer there) in which he made a quip about Hitchens finding religion illogical and loopy but how he gave Marxist dictators a pass because their lack of religion had nothing to do (per Hitchens) with their death tolls (which Vidal, himself an outspoken atheist since before Hitchens was born, thought absurd).
Perhaps, but when the entire thesis of your book is that you are a better person, intellectually, than the preacher, priest, or advocate, and that you don’t believe in fairy tales, then you have to admit that including egregious fairy tales of your own is extremely embarrassing at best.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that the very point of a hospice-it’s a place for those who are terminal? Mind you, they shouldn’t be filthy, primitive little huts, but comfortable, soothing places for those to live out their final days in peace.
(Although I do agree, from what I’ve heard-Mama T was not the saint she’s portrayed to be-Oscar Romero was so robbed).
I was speaking to the widespread misperception of her work, i.e., that she was running a medical service (hospital) rather than an hospice. Of course, this was quite a while ago, when hospice care was less widely known.
That is if you equate believing in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, and Gods who care whether you eat pig and condemn you to hell because of it with a story of what craziness humans can get up to. After all, humans wear all sorts of silly head gear, special underwear, and other assorted contraptions to differentiate themselves from those whom God will smite and those he won’t, so it is not too hard to believe that certain sects may practice their mating rituals in a similar ridiculous manner.
Would I have checked my facts on this if it was my book? Yeah, probably. Would a religious group being required to have sex through a sheet be out of the realm of possibility like Santa Claus? Not hardly.
I didn’t see the Vidal interview where he made that comment about Hitchens so I missed the irony in your earlier post. Taken in that context, it makes better sense.
This strikes me as circular reasoning.
If I understand correctly, the hole-in-the-bedsheet thing was being used as evidence that religion makes people do silly things. What you’re saying here is that, since religion is ridiculous and makes people do silly things, something like the hole-in-the-bedsheet is entirely plausible.
You can’t use “yeah, sounds like the kind of thing religious people would do” to show what religious people actually do do.
Of course. But I can say that if religious people do silly things (and they do) then it is entirely plausible that some other silly things that people attribute to them are within the realm of possibility even if that is not what actually happens. Imagine in the story of the boy who cried wolf that there was a wolf each time he said there was until the 10th time when there wasn’t one. “Oh, no wolf this time? That’s unusual.” It isn’t odd to expect ‘silly’ from silly people.
Lots of people who aren’t religious do silly things. And lots of people who are religious don’t do silly things. Plus, what is silly is entirely subjective. All in all, a very weak and massively inductive argument.
Ah, okay, never mind then.
ETA: the hole in the bedsheet sounds pretty kinky to me.
Then you’re putting Hitchens to less strenuous standards than you would put me or anyone else in this thread to, unless you’ve never asked for a cite. Anyone on here saying something like “Yeah, I hear that those evolutionary people figure we’re all monkeys” would be blasted, and rightly so, for providing an unprovable gross oversimplification of evolutionary tenets.
It’s quite a claim, one that a competent editor would catch and research. Certainly it’s easy to refute by anyone with a mind to; that is, anyone who doesn’t already have an agenda.
Those that do things because their invisible friend tells them to are starting further back in the silly field, imho. The rest are just humans being humans who don’t feel the need to pass off their desire to wear goofy hats on to the arbitrary demands of invisible sky pixies. Frankly, that you think my argument is weak does not cause me much alarm given that you’ve used the same type of logic to convince yourself that the tooth fairy, etc, actually exists.
I don’t think I am making any excuses for him, but if you are to put him to higher standards then those who make the extraordinary claims that most religions do should also be held to the same standards. As I said earlier, has anyone heard from Hitchens about this and what was his reaction? If he says he made a stupid mistake and should have checked it beforehand, then great. If his reaction is otherwise, then I’m willing to put him in the same category as any other believer who pushes their agenda onto others.
Doesn’t matter what I think; your argument is objectively weak, as are all inductive arguments based on nothing more than opinion. It isn’t even an argument; it’s just a long string of silly insults based of a profound ignorance about faith. In my experience, most hard atheists like yourself, who just can’t help but dehumanize believers, are closet believers projecting a low self-esteem born of petty jealousy. If you thought God wasn’t real, you wouldn’t get so emotional about Him. You wouldn’t feel the need to insult Him or those who believe in Him.
So the fact that some religious zealots make unprovable claims makes it okay for their critics to lie outright?
I’m willing to give him something of a pass, though, if he admits his mistake. He hasn’t yet, but I don’t know how long the mistake is out there. If he’s a big boy, I’ll think better of him.