Thursday, February 14, 2013

A Perfect Coda: Hitchens On Faith and Thinking For Yourself


The above clip is Christopher Hitchens closing arguments in a debate with intelligent design advocate William Dembski (available in full: here) that seems to me to be a perfect coda and summation of the differences between the certainties of  faith (belief without evidence) and this risks of thinking for oneself.

On another tack, I recently finished Hitchens' book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and found it to be a thoroughly enjoyable read. It has been criticized on a number of points of minor  inaccuracy, such as conflating the synoptic with the canonical gospels, which is disappointing and provides a superficial basis for dismissal,  but I don't think the handful of slip ups distract overly from the central thesis of the book that religion is obviously man made and abounds in absurdities, that thinking people cannot accept religion as a true or adequate explanation of how and why things are the way they are.      

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