The guest seems super lucid. The host, super bad at explaining others position. And they both seems to have a very american view of political views. Reasonable, but noticable. None the less, always great to hear people reminicing about Hitchens. xD
Thanks for this interesting conversation. What botherd me sometimes about his way of arguing was that he seems to play out the dummest version of religion he found against the best version of secularism - instead of puting the best version of religion(s) against the best version of his materialist scientism.
I regret having to dump on an honest jobbing author, but Christopher Hitchens was very small beer to be writing a book about this far past his sell-by date, and unfortunate to be presenting this on the day of the death of a far superior writer and thinker, of the Hitchens type, and an American to boot, P.J. O'Rourke, who many years ago expressed his dismay that Americans assume that Hitchens had worth simply because they find Received English accent and prose exotic, when the prose of ordinary sportwriters in Britain is indistinguishable from Hitchens's.
I liked Hitchens writing and I thought he was funny and smart. A writer that’s funny and smart is always worth reading. Was anyone else coming after Mother Theresa? Was any other Marxist pro Iraq? This dismissal of the Iraq war by its ends does not adequately address Hitchens reasoning for his pro war position. He was not a typical conservative hawk and this conversation about his Marxism makes that point.
It's not about the arguing backwards from a conclusion. After all, remember those unprecedented mass demonstrations held across the world against the drive to war in the lead-up to the invasion? _They_ were in the right, not the repugnant warmongering put out by the sophists and the talking heads like Hitchens. That he was in some ways a political oddity should hardly be a point of admiration by any serious standard.
@@janosmarothy5409 I'll never accept an apologist for mass violence. Very cerebral people such as Hitchens often disconnect from feelings. I think he became what he hated.
Yeah, but you can only honor Hitchen's spirit by not giving a fuck about what he wanted to be called. Hitch never payed much attention to how folks wished he would address them.
@@rooruffneck Chris Hitchens just sounds stupid. It's not about honoring his preferred pronunciation of his Christian name (as it were). It's about elegance and style.
This was like nectar! I'd been wanting to hear Bob talk about Hitchens for some time. What a great opportunity. I heard Bob interview him about his Iraq views on the Wright Show, but have not yet heard the religion debate. I will definitely check it out and listen to Mr. Burgis' commentary!
Regardless, I still miss that genius, contrarian, sometimes infuriating, idealistic curmudgeon. Hitchens was a series of contradictions- by choice. I think his right to be wrong or change his own mind about previously held views was one of his superpowers. I think he was an incredible thinker (BOB!) and spent a lot of time convincing himself he was NOT a byproduct of the circumstances in which he grew up; he had a stodgy brit stoic side (like his Royal Naval war hero father) that he had a blind spot about. This is defensible. Even with the indefensible Iraq war views and some other ridiculousness, like claiming "women cannot be funny", his body of work is solid. e.g., Did anyone, outside of George Packer, know more about George Orwell than Hitch? #RIP I think it is* fair to say that part of the contradiction was that he was rather condescending of his debate partners deeply held beliefs or scholarship (at times). I think his contrary nature eventually became one of opportunistic capitalism. He was quite open about wanting to make "obscene amounts of money." He always identified as a writer- that it was what he was, as important as breathing. Maybe he sometimes just wrote out of quick need for quick bucks, in between his more serious journalism. I would say, maybe Bob can argue this fact re God is Not Great, vs. panning every damn thing he ever said or wrote. I suspect most Hitchens critics re his take on religions, Mother Theresa, etc is the fact he lived as an avowed hedonist.
I still miss him as well. I was first sucked into the new atheist movement in my late teens,and fortunately I grew out of it. That said, it introduced me to Hitch. I read his collection of essay's Love, Poverty, and War, The Trial of Henry Kinssinger, Why Orwell Matters, etc. As well watching him debate a Neo-Nazi and Nute Gingrich. Hitch was breathtakingly articulate, funny, witty, and at times self-deprecating. He seemed like an authentic thinker and wasn't neccesarily afraid of being controversial. I think that is both something he willing knew to do, cause it made him money and notoriety, but also it may have been his intrinsic self at that point. I often think if he was alive today, not that I have evidence, but he may have retracted his pro Iraq war stance. I also would have been generally interested in his criticism of Trump and opinion of Bernie Sanders. That all aside, I still can't help but miss what new writing he would have produced. I just remember that either he or his wife mention that he was planning on writing a book about Proust. I feel like that would have been his greatest contribution....if at all. But his dead and he has a wealth of great work. Like him or not, God damn, the man could write.
Bob, if you knew a little bit about Christopher Hitchens, you would know that he detested being called Chris. Your way of dismissing and addressing him this way is reprehensible and shows how small you are.
Generally, I like Hitchens as a person but I'm not into his religion bashing and war apologetics. Christianity has done some pretty good things like Robert points out. Modern progressivism which is a religion itself IMO has done quite horrific things and possibly worse given its impact in such a short time. However if you read Nietzsche he makes a good argument for modern progressivism and liberalism being just incarnations of Christianity - the hysteria and moralizing is very similar to the witch burning moments in Christianity. So just playing devils advocate, if you consider the downstream effects of certain ideas in Christianity that have birthed and keep tht hysterical flame alive maybe his claim that it "poisons everything" is defensible. We don't know if these actions are just human nature or fostered by christian culture. I think that fingerprint puritanical hysteria with the modern SJW movements does owe a lot to certain undercurrents of Christianity. Those undercurrents don't have any origin in pagan Europe I would say.
Disappointing Discussion--Wright didn't give much room for Burgis to present his case. Hitchens' defense of "everything" is simply that religion poisons the foundational values of humanism-like evidence-based arguments, that consequently, religion has a widespread overall destructive influence. Personally, I don't agree with Hitchens' position, but I was hoping a better critique would be offered here. Further, I was hoping for at least a mention that Marxism/Stalinism turned out to be a form of "political" religion--with all the same trappings of worst aspects of religion.... (Blind faith in ideology/Marx the guru, salvation through becoming a "Soviet man", heaven as communist utopia and so on)---Ok...
Even if that was the argument, which I don't think it is, it's terrible. Religion was ESSENTIAL in CREATING humanism, as Erasmus is a perfect example of. Religious scholars more than most people were involved in preserving civic humanism, it's not like kings and merchants cared about that.
Some of the Hitchens + Harris vs. a couple of Rabbi were fun and interesting. I also like Hitchen's short book on Thomas Payne. At the end of his career, Hitchen's can be fit into one of Thomas Sowell's two visions, which is the "articulated vision," which believes in nation building, one can remake the world with reason, etc. He is still a liberal in this sense, the belief that certain anointed persons can remake the world, as opposed to the market signals, unarticulated customs and traditions.
State propaganda and think tanks and their influence on the left (in this case anyway) are still just as important today as they were during the Iraq War. The fact that the left even today still haven't really fully disowned the new atheists and the rest are in fact active is fascinating. Seems worthy of discussion especially with the recent incarnation in the form of the "dark web intellectuals" who pull their fan base sort of equally from both the left and right. It's a good topic still.
Bob, on the question of if Hitchens was an "honest arguer", I think you would really benefit from listening to this whole 20 minute long TV debate thing he was on about Mother Teresa : th-cam.com/video/DWSU9Y2Fa8E/w-d-xo.html or at least go to 10:30 ish. He was simultaneously a great rabble rouser and someone who really didn't want to pander to his readers and peers. (This sounds paradoxical but it's true about him) He's a complicated man and I think you dismiss him way too quickly throughout your years of talking about him every now and then.
Love old Robert warts and all (such as endlessly interrupting his long suffering guests!). But they graciously always seem to forgive him. Happy Buddha's birthday to those out there of Buddhist inclination. It's celebrated this weekend in parts of Asia.
1:10 interesting criticism of Sam Harris; that he whispers his utilitarianism to avoid it's problems, but then "yada yadas" or emphasizes about the way that science can help us maximize goal that we have already chosen
Mr. Wright simply doesn’t understand what Hitchens put forth. There is a little difference between good done with or without a religious prompting. The good done is rather obvious to our species. The many evils done, directly due to religion, are viewed as a ‘good’ by religions and as detestable by the secular.
A part of these arguments is semantics. It's more precise to call Christianity, Islam, and Stalinism manifestations of group psychology with tribal in-group/out-group dynamics that _can_ be marshaled to commit atrocities (which Bob agrees with), but it's not exactly wrong to describe even Stalinism as having religious characteristics (which Hitch would contend). On the point of intellectual honesty, Ben is conceding a lot to Bob, IMO. Bob is saying here that he completely forgives Hitch for his book's subtitle, although in the debate they are referencing, THAT IS THE ONLY DAMN POINT BOB MAKES. "Sure, Christopher, religion is responsible for a lot of bad things, but you don't seriously mean it's poisoned this cup of water right here, do you?" Then there's some banter about the good/bad balance sheet where Hitch has example after example (including on Civil Rights) to establish that there's more bad than good. Bob doesn't actually try to claim there's more good than bad, he just returns to saying, but your subtitle says religion poisons EVERYTHING! I actually don't think either has a very strong position versus the other, but that is largely because they are both guilty of talking past each other and would agree a lot more if they weren't so interested in being argumentative. Ben, however, is not nearly argumentative enough. He just let Bob grind all his axes for an hour and 20 minutes, and, after all of that, I'm still not sure why we are supposed to give a damn about Christopher Hitchens today.
Ben, for the love of GOD, please count the number of times you stammer "You know" in the course of your discussion. If I know, stop telling me already.
I agreed with Hitchins on many things. However, he definitely had some blind spots where he was clearly wrong (coincidently, these were the things I disagreed with him on!).
I hate to think what his book is like when he's so inarticulate in every interview I've seen him in. Not to mention it looks like an embarassingly slim boom at that for one of the great iconoclasts and debaters of our age. To ask 3 big questions about Christopher Hitchens in a fucking pamphlet...
As someone who appreciates Jordan Peterson, I would like to hear intelligent (not ad hominem) arguments against him. Both these gentlemen claim to have produced such arguments. Can anyone recommend some good articles or videos?
Ben's podcast, Give Them An Argument has several videos on Jordan Peterson. On top of that, Ben, and several other philosophers, wrote a book called Myth and Mayhem. Worth a listen and a read.
Hitchens claimed that religion did a lot of harm. As we heard in this discussion, Hitchens didn't have a leg to stand on. I wonder how much harm Hitchens did to lots of people by poisoning their view of religion?
Really? You want to claim that religion is in every way beneficial? You will find that countless Agnostics and Atheists have arrived there after suffering years of poisonous religion in their life, some stories are sickening and depressing.
@@Zipper696969 claiming that religion is not universally harmful is not the same as saying that religion is beneficial in every way. The claims are opposite extremes.
Bob's long standing vendetta against Christopher Hitchens continues and is catalyzed by referring to him as Chris despite being corrected in real time by Hitchens previously. So many ad hominem and inviting an unserious opportunist for a hand ringing/back patting 90 minute smear.
Dont confuse Hitch's oratory for intellect. The man was a wordsmith, no doubt. But, his political analysis was childish, his understanding of philosophy was embaressing , and above all he had no moral compass.
@@yaserthe1 I think it’s disingenuous to say that Hitchens had no moral compass when he spend a huge chunk of his life and career exposing the suffering and evils that can arise from unconstrained religious ideology, including doing a debate about the effects the Catholic Church has had regarding the treatments of homosexuals, and the sexual abuse of children. You might disagree with his particular values, but to say he had no moral compass is incontrovertibly untrue.
@@yaserthe1 Yeah, you can only have a moral compass if it’s drawn from religion …ignore that Hitch endlessly spoke and wrote about the suffering of men, women and children as a result of totalitarian ideologies, which includes religions.
I've always had the opinion of Hitchens that Bob has here I think he was a facile thinker. But I've also come to appreciate him more in his absence because there are so few figures like him that remain, old school debaters who are animated by a love of debate and rhetorical contest. While his ideas were often facile the molten moral indignation was profound and lingers still, while the ideas of New Atheism have lost whatever luster they once had. The primary problem with the whole school of thought is viewing ideas as causal of human behavior rather than as vehicles for human desires and needs
Your view is the one with the problem I'm afraid, and it's a popular one too. For example, how could you conceivably then account for the fact that religion, just as often, compels people to go precisely against their desires and needs. Like a young girl in a muslim community enthusiastically putting on her first veil, the conservative christian wife for suppressing her sexual desires for the young attractive men she sees around her for a lifetime of sexual unsatisfaction in her monogamous marriage with the man who's never heard of a clitoris, and the countless religious peoples subjecting themselves to starvation, flagellation, and endless self-sacrifice. What about the Palestinian nationalist who accepts no compromise, and no negotiation with "the Jew" and no amount of pleasing his political and economic concerns will change the fact that Jews occupy 'the holy land'/ Or for that matter, the young man who blows himself up in a western supermarket. He's solely compelled by self-interest and preservation, and opportunism too? Please... it's always been merely a strawman of new atheism to say that we never acknowledge other contributing factors to behavior; the view is merely that you cannot honestly discount it completely either. The common denominators just keep coming back around.
For what it's worth, here's a little something that makes Hitchens matter to me. There is an interview/debate Jon Stewart does with Hitchens during the Iraq war, and I think it's fair to say Stewart "won" the exchange. Here's the thing though. At some point during it, Hitchens makes the following rejoinder "You go to war with the president you have". Never mind what it was a rejoinder to, here you have encapsulated, with sublime concision, the whole ethos of republicanism. When you further notice that it is an inversion of Rumsfeld's stodgy statement that "you to go war with the army you have", someone on who's putative "side" Hitchens was -- the irony, the dialectic finesse simply takes your breath away. Here you have him, on a bad day, while drunk, casually attaining economy of expression worthy of a Hiroshige. My copy of the Federalist papers is well thumbed, but I might as well go with the Hitch if I need a definition of democracy.
I mean, it sounds like a trite and cynical throwaway attempt at a zinger to me. Let's not lose sight of things: there was no reason whatsoever to stage an illegal invasion of Iraq, still less to do so under such a reckless and venal administration.
@@aamjon I mean, he matters enough that if we're talking about his legacy in 2022, then I'll chime in with my two cents. Especially timely today where we now have a new generation of Hitchenses, who if you asked them would bizarrely disavow his hawkishness on Iraq, giving "left" or "progressive" justifications for nudging NATO towards intervening directly in Ukraine using eerily similar lines of argument as he did two decades earlier.
@@aamjon Depends what you mean when you say someone's work does or doesn't matter. As a Marxist, I'd say the conditions that make the "Hitchens type" possible are the bigger and more interesting factor. Burgis also goes into this, I think he's right in pointing to Hitchens' trajectory as symptomatic of the political weakness of working class politics and the Left that became apparent in the 80s.
"God is Not Great" reads like it was all written the night before it was due, embarrassing bad work. Letters to a Young Contrarian is a great book tho.
The reason you guys are wrong on essential-ism, materialism and religion is two fold. 1. Ideas are also material forces in history. Base and superstructure is not a one way causal relationship, but a dynamic. 2. The varying material conditions reveal the limits and thus the essence, or the nugget of what makes that thing (islam) that thing. So it is not only the diversity you can see over centuries and thousands of cultures and material conditions you need to look at , but that which you can't.
In summary: if one admires Hitchens for his writing style & polemical vigor, and one shares his original leftist worldview, then his later venture to the imperialist right is interesting and makes it worthwhile looking into what made this guy tick.
I would amend hitches statement to “only confusion or fear can make well meaning people do bad things” instead of “only religion can make good people do bad things”. Its not at sexy, but its exactly true the way I posed it here. i hope thats a bit clarifying. hitches statement neglects 2 important things, first of all assuming there is such a thing as unqualified good people presupposes to already have an absolute way of judging that taxonomically, which would require us to know exactly what is good and why, which we don’t so the precise thing to say is that they are well meaning, they have a good will in general and wants to be good, that is much less of a thing to swallow i think than determining that someone is good, and the same problem applies to bad things, but its more reasonable to assume most people can identify bad things on e they reach a certain level, like murder, we are not going to like murder less by a wide margin no matter the ethically brilliant text some dude could publish tomorrow, so I’m taking that for granted even if its not really obvious in meta ethics prior to making an argument, but lets just let bad mean so bad most people would agree, like molestation or murder. The second thing is the obvious one ofc, he is giving religion a special place within the category of thinking we might call moral confusion, where a good will is not enough to act morally because of faulty understanding or data, for me its a non starter when you put it like this, because the actions might be immoral but when they are done in the context of true confusion mixed with a good will they are amoral to me, not moral at all but rather like an animal acting on instinct but having reasons be involved in it at least to some larger degree than when a shark eats a fish. So if I’m being honest i think hitch was a little confused about the role ignorance plays in ethics, because what we end up with is that only people with a bad will can do bad things, but a person who is confused can do bad things as an amoral action.
But we cannot discover a principle from which all good and bad actions can be sorted without knowing everything there is to know about everything and then willing the good of all based of the ability to see folly or suffering or whatever, basically if you saw it all and knew every possible pitfall you would conclude that what is ethical is just to have a good will and do your best to make people happy and self determining. i don’t think it’s possible to compress that into a principle from which you can skip learning about all the possible pitfalls. And look an argument about what i think is not really that good an argument but it seems to me that if every entity could perceive all their own possible futures and choose the one they would like most to experience, the compromise between all entities that coexist is the ultimate goal of our actions for them to be ethical, so moving towards that consensus is good, moving away from it is bad, but again this is an abstract idea that cannot be gotten at or implemented in any way, it takes on a sort of pragmatist view of morality and says that if they could experience it all and come back to their life unchanged but in attitude and knowledge all entities with a good will would act as ethically as it is possible to act. This is not a practical meta ethics, but diverging from it will be admission of the concerned entities be a mistake ethically because of self determination, so it is impossible to derive a plausible and practical meta ethics that is always consistent and that is usable in reasoning about examples.
Hey a guy just ran of with my beer, read last to first i guess. all the comments preferably Nikita and bob, and maybe ben if he sees it. Then i hope i can get your thoughts on those 2 comments lol.
So i end up mostly agreeing with kant, but denying that actions and consequences can be ignored in any reasonable sense. Morality is not a calculation problem but if you don’t do at least the calculations you reasonably could you are being irresponsible or confused and therefore you are to some degree reasoning amorally or irresponsibly and immorally based on how you perceive the consequences Of not making an effort turning out. aka if you kind of know you should be more careful and you ignore that implication then an act following it and the reasoning itself can be deemed immoral. things like saving a drowning child based on an immediate inclination to do so is amoral unless you would normally think that action is admirable and you think its a moral good to have and cultivate such inclinations, all such intuitive and instinctual drives towards the good are amoral in themselves but the will to inhabit and cultivate them can be a moral good in itself as well as the opposite situation being bad.
And just to make a simple Point, the thoughts and determinations of each entity concerned is the it we could get an ought from, the only kind we could, but it is impossible to do so by deduction, only thoughts revelatory experience could each determine what ultimate ends they would value and then we could get an account that is revelatory from then after they themselves have this experience, but given that this is impossible do to or to reason out the consequences of there is a is ought destination, or there is a problem of starting with an incomencerable problem so to speak, therefor our oughts have to be in some sense subjective and intuitively grounded as a practical determination as a starting point, but we cannot be sure we should be sure they are the right things to value, just like we can’t nail down the nature of the entities these values concern and what values concern those entities if we gave them the ultimate knowledge and self determination.
Read the bottom comment first i guess. the issue is that we are all to some degree confused, trying our best is always good, and thats it, we can’t discover a principle from which trying to be good is bad, unless it is by definition an amoral system.
Bob, the passage of Hitchens which you quoted where he claims that MLK was not a Christian because he did not condemn segregationists to hell is an elementary logical fallacy with a specific name: No True Scotsman. In effect, it represents Hitchens attempting to base his argument on his ability to define what Christians believe. By the same logic I could simply stipulate for the sake of argument that all atheists inherently believe in amorality and if they believe that there is a binding moral code then they are not an atheist "in the real, as opposed to the nominal sense." Hitchens was not smart. He was a sophist. He was persuasive to people who confuse "clever" with smart.
Wrong number of comments but that how to invent numbers just say the number of things you have said, i said i said, i said i said i said, i said i said i said i said, ex said dra.
This all comes down to when a person understands his actions to a degree where it is possible to judge his will as good or bad, and then there is just a bunch of amoral actions that are under the threshold of being judged. there can be no sharp edges here because hitler certainly didn’t understand everything about his choices, we need some reasonable assessment to assert that his will was bad and that he understood his actions. That is perfectly acceptable intuitively, we can’t get to a much clearer case of it, but meta ethically its not something we can define in absolute terms. It has to remain a subjective judgment as far as hitler being confused enough that his actions where bad ethically and not just like if a brown bear committed genocide, where the actions themselves are bad but the entity who committed them can be reasonably assumed not to have a bad will in an ethical sense because of the cognitive deficiency of the entity. so we can judge actions based on assumptions about these categories of good and bad will, which are in themselves subjective and have their own sandpile problems to them, then there are good actions, amoral actions and bad actions. good actions are committed by entities with a good will that understand the implications to a reasonable degree, and reasonable here just refers to the ambiguity i alluded to earlier. amoral actions i have already explained, then there are bad actions that are committed by an entity with a bad will, and again with a reasonable understanding that what they are doing is bad. all of this predicated on that we assume the use of the word reasonable makes sense, which it doesn’t in the absolute because of the problem of knowledge in ethics. so here i think i have to stop for now, because its clear to me that there is no pre analysis of examples that can go any further than this. I contend that meta ethics is impossible beyond such a superstructure about will and knowledge.
And you need to read all my comments to get a coherent view of my view here btw, sorry for making you find them all, they are all from the same hour at least.
Oh so btw the best we can do is a system which takes ignorance for granted and makes this reasonable assessment, a practical ethics which uses the meta ethical framework to set the terms of practical engagement in good or bad actions as an entity with blindspots, its a given at the outset that we will not be able to fill these gaps perfectly and that is why we cannot build a deterministic ruleset for meta ethics but we can frame what constitutes a good faith effort to act morally and how to try to do it. Thats it imo
I'm listening distracted by the idea rattling around that: I suspect the past wrongdoings of a group (at least distant past) can't really hold weight in a debate over its current goodness/badness. I haven't got it quite figured out. It seems like an obvious truth that what happened in the Spanish Inquisition, for instance, doesn't have anything at all to do with the church today. It's fermenting.
You are right! Much of the rhetoric now is based on this idea that nothing can be fixed, nothing can be improved At some point in the past it was broken so it's broken and bad forever
I love you Bob, and I always will, but you have got to work on letting other people finish a sentence. Maybe it's too late to ask you to change, so I forgive you, just like MLK would, even though, like me, MLK was not really a Christian...
I really like Robert and listen to him all the time, but am also a Hitchens fanboy (to put it mildly). With that disclaimer, a set of comments (this is part 1). I don't think this was a great conversation even within its own terms. Ben Burgis unfortunately was quite ineloquent (I felt bad for him, really) and also dominated by the usually reticent Robert. As a result, he couldn't even get to his premise until, I don't know, an hour in. Which is quite simply this: Hitchens is interesting for a socialist only as a famous case of a socialist going bad. But see, not being a socialist, Robert doesn't care about this. What he cares about is the (lack of) greatness of Hitchens as such, a topic Burgis is not going to fight him on, or even add any interesting nuance to. This made the whole thing very boring very quickly.
Hitch turns in his grave and mumbles "bobby..." every time Bob calls him Chris. 🤣 Good conversation - looking forward to Ben's dissection of the old dialogue on How Religion Poisons Everything.
If you want an example of a "motte and bailey" argument, watch any of his book-tour debates with proponents of received religions on the subject of whether something we could describe as "God" does or doesn't exist. TH-cam seemingly has them all. Time and again, he promises to show that existence of the universe and the evolution of life just happened by chance, but spends the rest of the debates supporting that assertion with irrelevancies such as: Joseph Smith was a fraud, or Hitler and Pius XII were BFFs.
He promises to show that existence of the universe and life just happened by chance? That's not a position he (or any other atheist I know of) would defend. Some of Hitchens' arguement were pretty bad, but theists certainly beat him in the race to the bottom every time.
I listened for 9 minutes and was appalled by by the lack of erudition of the two proponents. For all his faults neither of the two could hold a candle to Hitchens intellectual prowess.
Hitchens was a great orator and great fun to listen to, but... In his role as Horseman he did a tremendous amount of damage to the West. The Horsemen made available a large amount of dialectic material which they thought was a general deconstructionist toolkit against 'religion,' but which ended having the highest deconstructive efficiency against Christianity because that was the religion the Horsemen themselves were most familiar with. The further you get from Christianity the less effective the toolkit becomes, with polytheists being almost immune. And of course with the Horsemen being Anglos the material is most widely available in English, so it spread very quickly through the Anglosphere and much more slowly elsewhere
Dont confuse Hitch's oratory for intellect. The man was a wordsmith, no doubt, and his ability to slay his oponents with rhetoric was not matched. But, his political analysis was childish, his understanding of philosophy and science was embaressing , and above all he had no moral compass.
Did this guy even read the book.. the point is doing a good thing in the name of religion is corrupted. There would be more goodness if you set up an orphanage for its own sake, not as some sort of token to a deity. That doesn’t mean setting up an orphanage is a bad thing to do.
Delighted to see Hitch still gets Bobby boy all worked up .
Comment of the year, I’d say.
The guest seems super lucid. The host, super bad at explaining others position.
And they both seems to have a very american view of political views. Reasonable, but noticable.
None the less, always great to hear people reminicing about Hitchens. xD
I don’t think anything beyond that can be said in terms of meta ethics tbh.
Thanks for this interesting conversation. What botherd me sometimes about his way of arguing was that he seems to play out the dummest version of religion he found against the best version of secularism - instead of puting the best version of religion(s) against the best version of his materialist scientism.
5* sorry lol
I regret having to dump on an honest jobbing author, but Christopher Hitchens was very small beer to be writing a book about this far past his sell-by date, and unfortunate to be presenting this on the day of the death of a far superior writer and thinker, of the Hitchens type, and an American to boot, P.J. O'Rourke, who many years ago expressed his dismay that Americans assume that Hitchens had worth simply because they find Received English accent and prose exotic, when the prose of ordinary sportwriters in Britain is indistinguishable from Hitchens's.
The lesser Hitchens of course!
Bob calm down
Are you kidding? Bob getting this worked up is a rare treat
I liked Hitchens writing and I thought he was funny and smart. A writer that’s funny and smart is always worth reading. Was anyone else coming after Mother Theresa? Was any other Marxist pro Iraq? This dismissal of the Iraq war by its ends does not adequately address Hitchens reasoning for his pro war position. He was not a typical conservative hawk and this conversation about his Marxism makes that point.
It's not about the arguing backwards from a conclusion. After all, remember those unprecedented mass demonstrations held across the world against the drive to war in the lead-up to the invasion? _They_ were in the right, not the repugnant warmongering put out by the sophists and the talking heads like Hitchens. That he was in some ways a political oddity should hardly be a point of admiration by any serious standard.
@@janosmarothy5409 I'll never accept an apologist for mass violence.
Very cerebral people such as Hitchens often disconnect from feelings.
I think he became what he hated.
Your off to a terrible start: Hitchens notably hated be addressed as Chris. He always went full Christopher
True, however you also started your rebuke by misspelling you're.
Yeah, but you can only honor Hitchen's spirit by not giving a fuck about what he wanted to be called. Hitch never payed much attention to how folks wished he would address them.
@@wherestheoptoutoptionmfs Nice notice
@@rooruffneck Chris Hitchens just sounds stupid. It's not about honoring his preferred pronunciation of his Christian name (as it were). It's about elegance and style.
This was like nectar! I'd been wanting to hear Bob talk about Hitchens for some time. What a great opportunity. I heard Bob interview him about his Iraq views on the Wright Show, but have not yet heard the religion debate. I will definitely check it out and listen to Mr. Burgis' commentary!
Regardless, I still miss that genius, contrarian, sometimes infuriating, idealistic curmudgeon. Hitchens was a series of contradictions- by choice. I think his right to be wrong or change his own mind about previously held views was one of his superpowers. I think he was an incredible thinker (BOB!) and spent a lot of time convincing himself he was NOT a byproduct of the circumstances in which he grew up; he had a stodgy brit stoic side (like his Royal Naval war hero father) that he had a blind spot about. This is defensible. Even with the indefensible Iraq war views and some other ridiculousness, like claiming "women cannot be funny", his body of work is solid. e.g., Did anyone, outside of George Packer, know more about George Orwell than Hitch? #RIP I think it is* fair to say that part of the contradiction was that he was rather condescending of his debate partners deeply held beliefs or scholarship (at times). I think his contrary nature eventually became one of opportunistic capitalism. He was quite open about wanting to make "obscene amounts of money." He always identified as a writer- that it was what he was, as important as breathing. Maybe he sometimes just wrote out of quick need for quick bucks, in between his more serious journalism. I would say, maybe Bob can argue this fact re God is Not Great, vs. panning every damn thing he ever said or wrote. I suspect most Hitchens critics re his take on religions, Mother Theresa, etc is the fact he lived as an avowed hedonist.
I still miss him as well. I was first sucked into the new atheist movement in my late teens,and fortunately I grew out of it. That said, it introduced me to Hitch. I read his collection of essay's Love, Poverty, and War, The Trial of Henry Kinssinger, Why Orwell Matters, etc. As well watching him debate a Neo-Nazi and Nute Gingrich. Hitch was breathtakingly articulate, funny, witty, and at times self-deprecating. He seemed like an authentic thinker and wasn't neccesarily afraid of being controversial. I think that is both something he willing knew to do, cause it made him money and notoriety, but also it may have been his intrinsic self at that point. I often think if he was alive today, not that I have evidence, but he may have retracted his pro Iraq war stance. I also would have been generally interested in his criticism of Trump and opinion of Bernie Sanders. That all aside, I still can't help but miss what new writing he would have produced. I just remember that either he or his wife mention that he was planning on writing a book about Proust. I feel like that would have been his greatest contribution....if at all. But his dead and he has a wealth of great work. Like him or not, God damn, the man could write.
Bob, if you knew a little bit about Christopher Hitchens, you would know that he detested being called Chris. Your way of dismissing and addressing him this way is reprehensible and shows how small you are.
Generally, I like Hitchens as a person but I'm not into his religion bashing and war apologetics. Christianity has done some pretty good things like Robert points out. Modern progressivism which is a religion itself IMO has done quite horrific things and possibly worse given its impact in such a short time. However if you read Nietzsche he makes a good argument for modern progressivism and liberalism being just incarnations of Christianity - the hysteria and moralizing is very similar to the
witch burning moments in Christianity. So just playing devils advocate, if you consider the downstream effects of certain ideas in Christianity that have birthed and keep tht hysterical flame alive maybe his claim that it "poisons everything" is defensible. We don't know if these actions are just human nature or fostered by christian culture. I think that fingerprint puritanical hysteria with the modern SJW movements does owe a lot to certain undercurrents of Christianity. Those undercurrents don't have any origin in pagan Europe I would say.
Disappointing Discussion--Wright didn't give much room for Burgis to present his case. Hitchens' defense of "everything" is simply that religion poisons the foundational values of humanism-like evidence-based arguments, that consequently, religion has a widespread overall destructive influence. Personally, I don't agree with Hitchens' position, but I was hoping a better critique would be offered here. Further, I was hoping for at least a mention that Marxism/Stalinism turned out to be a form of "political" religion--with all the same trappings of worst aspects of religion.... (Blind faith in ideology/Marx the guru, salvation through becoming a "Soviet man", heaven as communist utopia and so on)---Ok...
Even if that was the argument, which I don't think it is, it's terrible. Religion was ESSENTIAL in CREATING humanism, as Erasmus is a perfect example of. Religious scholars more than most people were involved in preserving civic humanism, it's not like kings and merchants cared about that.
Some of the Hitchens + Harris vs. a couple of Rabbi were fun and interesting. I also like Hitchen's short book on Thomas Payne. At the end of his career, Hitchen's can be fit into one of Thomas Sowell's two visions, which is the "articulated vision," which believes in nation building, one can remake the world with reason, etc. He is still a liberal in this sense, the belief that certain anointed persons can remake the world, as opposed to the market signals, unarticulated customs and traditions.
Not to be a pain, but it's Thomas Paine...
10 yrs gone and Robert is still trying to settle the score.
Trust Robert Wright to try and dunk on a dead guy he had a disagreement with 10 years ago lol.
State propaganda and think tanks and their influence on the left (in this case anyway) are still just as important today as they were during the Iraq War. The fact that the left even today still haven't really fully disowned the new atheists and the rest are in fact active is fascinating. Seems worthy of discussion especially with the recent incarnation in the form of the "dark web intellectuals" who pull their fan base sort of equally from both the left and right. It's a good topic still.
Bob, on the question of if Hitchens was an "honest arguer", I think you would really benefit from listening to this whole 20 minute long TV debate thing he was on about Mother Teresa : th-cam.com/video/DWSU9Y2Fa8E/w-d-xo.html or at least go to 10:30 ish. He was simultaneously a great rabble rouser and someone who really didn't want to pander to his readers and peers. (This sounds paradoxical but it's true about him) He's a complicated man and I think you dismiss him way too quickly throughout your years of talking about him every now and then.
Love old Robert warts and all (such as endlessly interrupting his long suffering guests!). But they graciously always seem to forgive him.
Happy Buddha's birthday to those out there of Buddhist inclination. It's celebrated this weekend in parts of Asia.
1:10 interesting criticism of Sam Harris; that he whispers his utilitarianism to avoid it's problems, but then "yada yadas" or emphasizes about the way that science can help us maximize goal that we have already chosen
Mr. Wright simply doesn’t understand what Hitchens put forth. There is a little difference between good done with or without a religious prompting. The good done is rather obvious to our species.
The many evils done, directly due to religion, are viewed as a ‘good’ by religions and as detestable by the secular.
A part of these arguments is semantics. It's more precise to call Christianity, Islam, and Stalinism manifestations of group psychology with tribal in-group/out-group dynamics that _can_ be marshaled to commit atrocities (which Bob agrees with), but it's not exactly wrong to describe even Stalinism as having religious characteristics (which Hitch would contend).
On the point of intellectual honesty, Ben is conceding a lot to Bob, IMO. Bob is saying here that he completely forgives Hitch for his book's subtitle, although in the debate they are referencing, THAT IS THE ONLY DAMN POINT BOB MAKES. "Sure, Christopher, religion is responsible for a lot of bad things, but you don't seriously mean it's poisoned this cup of water right here, do you?" Then there's some banter about the good/bad balance sheet where Hitch has example after example (including on Civil Rights) to establish that there's more bad than good. Bob doesn't actually try to claim there's more good than bad, he just returns to saying, but your subtitle says religion poisons EVERYTHING! I actually don't think either has a very strong position versus the other, but that is largely because they are both guilty of talking past each other and would agree a lot more if they weren't so interested in being argumentative.
Ben, however, is not nearly argumentative enough. He just let Bob grind all his axes for an hour and 20 minutes, and, after all of that, I'm still not sure why we are supposed to give a damn about Christopher Hitchens today.
Saw this thumbnail and ordered the book at Red Emma's! Excited.
1:08 did these two just say that the IDW is "right wing" because they are conspiratorial?
Ben, for the love of GOD, please count the number of times you stammer "You know" in the course of your discussion. If I know, stop telling me already.
I agreed with Hitchins on many things. However, he definitely had some blind spots where he was clearly wrong (coincidently, these were the things I disagreed with him on!).
Too many 'you knows' and 'like'.
I hate to think what his book is like when he's so inarticulate in every interview I've seen him in. Not to mention it looks like an embarassingly slim boom at that for one of the great iconoclasts and debaters of our age. To ask 3 big questions about Christopher Hitchens in a fucking pamphlet...
As someone who appreciates Jordan Peterson, I would like to hear intelligent (not ad hominem) arguments against him. Both these gentlemen claim to have produced such arguments. Can anyone recommend some good articles or videos?
Just read their books if you want to hear their arguments.
articles or videos in reference to what
Ben's podcast, Give Them An Argument has several videos on Jordan Peterson. On top of that, Ben, and several other philosophers, wrote a book called Myth and Mayhem. Worth a listen and a read.
This guy hasn’t bothered reading the book or watching hitchens in anyway. Hitchens was a genius and is missed dearly.
I’m a big Hitchens fan. I hate God is Not Great. Letters to a Young Contrarian is what you want when reading Hitchens.
The hagiography continues, but only in the comments ;)
50:10 He wasn’t dishonest in the sense that if you change the meaning of dishonest we can say no…………………..
Hitchens claimed that religion did a lot of harm. As we heard in this discussion, Hitchens didn't have a leg to stand on. I wonder how much harm Hitchens did to lots of people by poisoning their view of religion?
Really? You want to claim that religion is in every way beneficial? You will find that countless Agnostics and Atheists have arrived there after suffering years of poisonous religion in their life, some stories are sickening and depressing.
@@Zipper696969 claiming that religion is not universally harmful is not the same as saying that religion is beneficial in every way.
The claims are opposite extremes.
Bob's long standing vendetta against Christopher Hitchens continues and is catalyzed by referring to him as Chris despite being corrected in real time by Hitchens previously. So many ad hominem and inviting an unserious opportunist for a hand ringing/back patting 90 minute smear.
Chris Hitchens was an overrated imperialist fraud, cry more lol.
@@philmitchell91 hitch is a phase you go through and then cringe at the people still in it
Hitchens’ stay with the Kurds could have been enough to make him hate Husain. Backing a war for that reason though is disappointing.
Tell that to the Kurds.
@@dougdaniels7848 Tell that to the million people killed post 2003.
@@philmitchell91 I can't, they're dead.
I had a new atheist phase and looking back at it, my worldview was so toxic. And it’s not the atheist part, it’s the “new atheist” part.
Ben's red pill moment is getting closer.
How?
I watched the full conversation between Bob and hitchens. Bob got embarrassed and years later he still resorts to childish strawman arguments
I absolutely hate that Bob thinks he is in the same league as Hitch when he can barely holds his own against Mickey.
Dont confuse Hitch's oratory for intellect. The man was a wordsmith, no doubt. But, his political analysis was childish, his understanding of philosophy was embaressing , and above all he had no moral compass.
@@yaserthe1 I think it’s disingenuous to say that Hitchens had no moral compass when he spend a huge chunk of his life and career exposing the suffering and evils that can arise from unconstrained religious ideology, including doing a debate about the effects the Catholic Church has had regarding the treatments of homosexuals, and the sexual abuse of children. You might disagree with his particular values, but to say he had no moral compass is incontrovertibly untrue.
@@yaserthe1 Yeah, you can only have a moral compass if it’s drawn from religion …ignore that Hitch endlessly spoke and wrote about the suffering of men, women and children as a result of totalitarian ideologies, which includes religions.
Christopher Hitchens wasnt a great debater... There I said it.
I've always had the opinion of Hitchens that Bob has here I think he was a facile thinker. But I've also come to appreciate him more in his absence because there are so few figures like him that remain, old school debaters who are animated by a love of debate and rhetorical contest. While his ideas were often facile the molten moral indignation was profound and lingers still, while the ideas of New Atheism have lost whatever luster they once had. The primary problem with the whole school of thought is viewing ideas as causal of human behavior rather than as vehicles for human desires and needs
Your view is the one with the problem I'm afraid, and it's a popular one too. For example, how could you conceivably then account for the fact that religion, just as often, compels people to go precisely against their desires and needs. Like a young girl in a muslim community enthusiastically putting on her first veil, the conservative christian wife for suppressing her sexual desires for the young attractive men she sees around her for a lifetime of sexual unsatisfaction in her monogamous marriage with the man who's never heard of a clitoris, and the countless religious peoples subjecting themselves to starvation, flagellation, and endless self-sacrifice. What about the Palestinian nationalist who accepts no compromise, and no negotiation with "the Jew" and no amount of pleasing his political and economic concerns will change the fact that Jews occupy 'the holy land'/ Or for that matter, the young man who blows himself up in a western supermarket. He's solely compelled by self-interest and preservation, and opportunism too? Please... it's always been merely a strawman of new atheism to say that we never acknowledge other contributing factors to behavior; the view is merely that you cannot honestly discount it completely either. The common denominators just keep coming back around.
For what it's worth, here's a little something that makes Hitchens matter to me. There is an interview/debate Jon Stewart does with Hitchens during the Iraq war, and I think it's fair to say Stewart "won" the exchange. Here's the thing though. At some point during it, Hitchens makes the following rejoinder "You go to war with the president you have". Never mind what it was a rejoinder to, here you have encapsulated, with sublime concision, the whole ethos of republicanism. When you further notice that it is an inversion of Rumsfeld's stodgy statement that "you to go war with the army you have", someone on who's putative "side" Hitchens was -- the irony, the dialectic finesse simply takes your breath away. Here you have him, on a bad day, while drunk, casually attaining economy of expression worthy of a Hiroshige.
My copy of the Federalist papers is well thumbed, but I might as well go with the Hitch if I need a definition of democracy.
I mean, it sounds like a trite and cynical throwaway attempt at a zinger to me. Let's not lose sight of things: there was no reason whatsoever to stage an illegal invasion of Iraq, still less to do so under such a reckless and venal administration.
@@janosmarothy5409 Well, then he doesn't matter too much to you I suppose :)
@@aamjon I mean, he matters enough that if we're talking about his legacy in 2022, then I'll chime in with my two cents. Especially timely today where we now have a new generation of Hitchenses, who if you asked them would bizarrely disavow his hawkishness on Iraq, giving "left" or "progressive" justifications for nudging NATO towards intervening directly in Ukraine using eerily similar lines of argument as he did two decades earlier.
@@janosmarothy5409 Its still not clear to me why he matters, since new Hitchenses with identical arguments are dime a dozen.
@@aamjon Depends what you mean when you say someone's work does or doesn't matter. As a Marxist, I'd say the conditions that make the "Hitchens type" possible are the bigger and more interesting factor. Burgis also goes into this, I think he's right in pointing to Hitchens' trajectory as symptomatic of the political weakness of working class politics and the Left that became apparent in the 80s.
"God is Not Great" reads like it was all written the night before it was due, embarrassing bad work. Letters to a Young Contrarian is a great book tho.
The reason you guys are wrong on essential-ism, materialism and religion is two fold.
1. Ideas are also material forces in history. Base and superstructure is not a one way causal relationship, but a dynamic.
2. The varying material conditions reveal the limits and thus the essence, or the nugget of what makes that thing (islam) that thing. So it is not only the diversity you can see over centuries and thousands of cultures and material conditions you need to look at , but that which you can't.
In summary: if one admires Hitchens for his writing style & polemical vigor, and one shares his original leftist worldview, then his later venture to the imperialist right is interesting and makes it worthwhile looking into what made this guy tick.
I would amend hitches statement to “only confusion or fear can make well meaning people do bad things” instead of “only religion can make good people do bad things”. Its not at sexy, but its exactly true the way I posed it here. i hope thats a bit clarifying. hitches statement neglects 2 important things, first of all assuming there is such a thing as unqualified good people presupposes to already have an absolute way of judging that taxonomically, which would require us to know exactly what is good and why, which we don’t so the precise thing to say is that they are well meaning, they have a good will in general and wants to be good, that is much less of a thing to swallow i think than determining that someone is good, and the same problem applies to bad things, but its more reasonable to assume most people can identify bad things on e they reach a certain level, like murder, we are not going to like murder less by a wide margin no matter the ethically brilliant text some dude could publish tomorrow, so I’m taking that for granted even if its not really obvious in meta ethics prior to making an argument, but lets just let bad mean so bad most people would agree, like molestation or murder. The second thing is the obvious one ofc, he is giving religion a special place within the category of thinking we might call moral confusion, where a good will is not enough to act morally because of faulty understanding or data, for me its a non starter when you put it like this, because the actions might be immoral but when they are done in the context of true confusion mixed with a good will they are amoral to me, not moral at all but rather like an animal acting on instinct but having reasons be involved in it at least to some larger degree than when a shark eats a fish. So if I’m being honest i think hitch was a little confused about the role ignorance plays in ethics, because what we end up with is that only people with a bad will can do bad things, but a person who is confused can do bad things as an amoral action.
But we cannot discover a principle from which all good and bad actions can be sorted without knowing everything there is to know about everything and then willing the good of all based of the ability to see folly or suffering or whatever, basically if you saw it all and knew every possible pitfall you would conclude that what is ethical is just to have a good will and do your best to make people happy and self determining. i don’t think it’s possible to compress that into a principle from which you can skip learning about all the possible pitfalls. And look an argument about what i think is not really that good an argument but it seems to me that if every entity could perceive all their own possible futures and choose the one they would like most to experience, the compromise between all entities that coexist is the ultimate goal of our actions for them to be ethical, so moving towards that consensus is good, moving away from it is bad, but again this is an abstract idea that cannot be gotten at or implemented in any way, it takes on a sort of pragmatist view of morality and says that if they could experience it all and come back to their life unchanged but in attitude and knowledge all entities with a good will would act as ethically as it is possible to act. This is not a practical meta ethics, but diverging from it will be admission of the concerned entities be a mistake ethically because of self determination, so it is impossible to derive a plausible and practical meta ethics that is always consistent and that is usable in reasoning about examples.
Hey a guy just ran of with my beer, read last to first i guess. all the comments preferably Nikita and bob, and maybe ben if he sees it. Then i hope i can get your thoughts on those 2 comments lol.
So i end up mostly agreeing with kant, but denying that actions and consequences can be ignored in any reasonable sense. Morality is not a calculation problem but if you don’t do at least the calculations you reasonably could you are being irresponsible or confused and therefore you are to some degree reasoning amorally or irresponsibly and immorally based on how you perceive the consequences Of not making an effort turning out. aka if you kind of know you should be more careful and you ignore that implication then an act following it and the reasoning itself can be deemed immoral. things like saving a drowning child based on an immediate inclination to do so is amoral unless you would normally think that action is admirable and you think its a moral good to have and cultivate such inclinations, all such intuitive and instinctual drives towards the good are amoral in themselves but the will to inhabit and cultivate them can be a moral good in itself as well as the opposite situation being bad.
And just to make a simple Point, the thoughts and determinations of each entity concerned is the it we could get an ought from, the only kind we could, but it is impossible to do so by deduction, only thoughts revelatory experience could each determine what ultimate ends they would value and then we could get an account that is revelatory from then after they themselves have this experience, but given that this is impossible do to or to reason out the consequences of there is a is ought destination, or there is a problem of starting with an incomencerable problem so to speak, therefor our oughts have to be in some sense subjective and intuitively grounded as a practical determination as a starting point, but we cannot be sure we should be sure they are the right things to value, just like we can’t nail down the nature of the entities these values concern and what values concern those entities if we gave them the ultimate knowledge and self determination.
Read the bottom comment first i guess. the issue is that we are all to some degree confused, trying our best is always good, and thats it, we can’t discover a principle from which trying to be good is bad, unless it is by definition an amoral system.
Bob, the passage of Hitchens which you quoted where he claims that MLK was not a Christian because he did not condemn segregationists to hell is an elementary logical fallacy with a specific name: No True Scotsman.
In effect, it represents Hitchens attempting to base his argument on his ability to define what Christians believe. By the same logic I could simply stipulate for the sake of argument that all atheists inherently believe in amorality and if they believe that there is a binding moral code then they are not an atheist "in the real, as opposed to the nominal sense."
Hitchens was not smart. He was a sophist. He was persuasive to people who confuse "clever" with smart.
@@smittycity42 Sophists are known for speaking well. That's actually the problem. Pretty speech does not a good argument make.
Wrong number of comments but that how to invent numbers just say the number of things you have said, i said i said, i said i said i said, i said i said i said i said, ex said dra.
This all comes down to when a person understands his actions to a degree where it is possible to judge his will as good or bad, and then there is just a bunch of amoral actions that are under the threshold of being judged. there can be no sharp edges here because hitler certainly didn’t understand everything about his choices, we need some reasonable assessment to assert that his will was bad and that he understood his actions. That is perfectly acceptable intuitively, we can’t get to a much clearer case of it, but meta ethically its not something we can define in absolute terms. It has to remain a subjective judgment as far as hitler being confused enough that his actions where bad ethically and not just like if a brown bear committed genocide, where the actions themselves are bad but the entity who committed them can be reasonably assumed not to have a bad will in an ethical sense because of the cognitive deficiency of the entity. so we can judge actions based on assumptions about these categories of good and bad will, which are in themselves subjective and have their own sandpile problems to them, then there are good actions, amoral actions and bad actions. good actions are committed by entities with a good will that understand the implications to a reasonable degree, and reasonable here just refers to the ambiguity i alluded to earlier. amoral actions i have already explained, then there are bad actions that are committed by an entity with a bad will, and again with a reasonable understanding that what they are doing is bad. all of this predicated on that we assume the use of the word reasonable makes sense, which it doesn’t in the absolute because of the problem of knowledge in ethics. so here i think i have to stop for now, because its clear to me that there is no pre analysis of examples that can go any further than this. I contend that meta ethics is impossible beyond such a superstructure about will and knowledge.
And you need to read all my comments to get a coherent view of my view here btw, sorry for making you find them all, they are all from the same hour at least.
Bob, losing arguments so hard 10 years after his adversary dies he's still trying to win by shouting at some stand in loser not allowed to speak
Oh so btw the best we can do is a system which takes ignorance for granted and makes this reasonable assessment, a practical ethics which uses the meta ethical framework to set the terms of practical engagement in good or bad actions as an entity with blindspots, its a given at the outset that we will not be able to fill these gaps perfectly and that is why we cannot build a deterministic ruleset for meta ethics but we can frame what constitutes a good faith effort to act morally and how to try to do it. Thats it imo
6 why do i always end up defining numbers like this
Very boiled down stuff here but again its a hot take.
I'm listening distracted by the idea rattling around that: I suspect the past wrongdoings of a group (at least distant past) can't really hold weight in a debate over its current goodness/badness. I haven't got it quite figured out.
It seems like an obvious truth that what happened in the Spanish Inquisition, for instance, doesn't have anything at all to do with the church today. It's fermenting.
You are right!
Much of the rhetoric now is based on this idea that nothing can be fixed, nothing can be improved
At some point in the past it was broken so it's broken and bad forever
I love you Bob, and I always will, but you have got to work on letting other people finish a sentence. Maybe it's too late to ask you to change, so I forgive you, just like MLK would, even though, like me, MLK was not really a Christian...
Damnit now its 7 all of a sudden
3* comments
Oh 4* sorry
Thats my hit take anyway
I really like Robert and listen to him all the time, but am also a Hitchens fanboy (to put it mildly). With that disclaimer, a set of comments (this is part 1). I don't think this was a great conversation even within its own terms. Ben Burgis unfortunately was quite ineloquent (I felt bad for him, really) and also dominated by the usually reticent Robert. As a result, he couldn't even get to his premise until, I don't know, an hour in. Which is quite simply this: Hitchens is interesting for a socialist only as a famous case of a socialist going bad. But see, not being a socialist, Robert doesn't care about this. What he cares about is the (lack of) greatness of Hitchens as such, a topic Burgis is not going to fight him on, or even add any interesting nuance to. This made the whole thing very boring very quickly.
Hitch turns in his grave and mumbles "bobby..." every time Bob calls him Chris. 🤣 Good conversation - looking forward to Ben's dissection of the old dialogue on How Religion Poisons Everything.
If you want an example of a "motte and bailey" argument, watch any of his book-tour debates with proponents of received religions on the subject of whether something we could describe as "God" does or doesn't exist. TH-cam seemingly has them all.
Time and again, he promises to show that existence of the universe and the evolution of life just happened by chance, but spends the rest of the debates supporting that assertion with irrelevancies such as: Joseph Smith was a fraud, or Hitler and Pius XII were BFFs.
He promises to show that existence of the universe and life just happened by chance?
That's not a position he (or any other atheist I know of) would defend.
Some of Hitchens' arguement were pretty bad, but theists certainly beat him in the race to the bottom every time.
Goddamn didn't see this one comming, glad to see two of my favorite people talking :D
I listened for 9 minutes and was appalled by by the lack of erudition of the two proponents. For all his faults neither of the two could hold a candle to Hitchens intellectual prowess.
What? Nobody has tried doing a benefit-cost analysis for a religion? A start would be to make a list for each religion of pluses and minuses.
Hitchens was a great orator and great fun to listen to, but...
In his role as Horseman he did a tremendous amount of damage to the West.
The Horsemen made available a large amount of dialectic material which they thought was a general deconstructionist toolkit against 'religion,' but which ended having the highest deconstructive efficiency against Christianity because that was the religion the Horsemen themselves were most familiar with. The further you get from Christianity the less effective the toolkit becomes, with polytheists being almost immune. And of course with the Horsemen being Anglos the material is most widely available in English, so it spread very quickly through the Anglosphere and much more slowly elsewhere
Dont confuse Hitch's oratory for intellect. The man was a wordsmith, no doubt, and his ability to slay his oponents with rhetoric was not matched. But, his political analysis was childish, his understanding of philosophy and science was embaressing , and above all he had no moral compass.
Did this guy even read the book.. the point is doing a good thing in the name of religion is corrupted. There would be more goodness if you set up an orphanage for its own sake, not as some sort of token to a deity. That doesn’t mean setting up an orphanage is a bad thing to do.