13 thoughts on “Harris on Hitchens”

  1. I remember Dawkins saying something like “We really do have the best writers on our side.”

    Reading Dawkins’ and Harris on Hitch makes me agree. They are just so good…

    Vaal

  3. I can’t seem to get enough of these first person memories.

    Did you ever have the chance to meet Hitch, Jerry?

    Of note, Sam Harris has a new book coming out in February, “Free Will”, possibly a book(let) like “Lying”.

    1. I met him once, in November, 2009 in Puebla, Mexico—at the City of Ideas meeting (you can see the photo I took of him here). I introduced myself, and he remembered me from my New Republic critique of Robert Wright’s book on God. We chatted briefly about how annoying Wright was, and then I had to catch a bus to the airport. I didn’t even get to see him talk.

        1. Thanks for the pictures, looking wonderful. The food, especially! I also like the photo with Dinesh and the comment below; I didn’t know his girlfriend was Ann Coulter. A lot to learn.

  4. “One of the joys of living in a world filled with stupidity and hypocrisy was to see Hitch respond.”

    So true.

  5. I had the misfortune to watch “Up with Chris Hayes” on MSNBC this morning. I like Hayes, and unlike all the other Sunday shows on politics this is not a shout fest and usually the discussions are informative. However, their segment on Hitchens quickly devolved into a direct attack on atheism and especially “militant” and “new” atheism.

    It was an embarrassment and the guests, especially two I’ve never heard of before (Anne-Marie Slaughter and Karen Hunter) could not have been more idiotic. Hunter was very upset that atheists are so insulting, questioning the intelligence of people who believe in the supernatural when we’re surrounded with miracles like birth (!); Slaughter declared that we should all believe in the impossible because that’s a good thing and wins revolutions or something (I dare her to jump out of a window and spout impossible wings). Another guest stated that he was a “militant agnostic,” and where would we be without religion since the Civil Rights movement was religious (guess he forgot that the overwhelming majority of churches in the South that were against civil rights for non-whites).

    There should be a video link soon at http://upwithchrishayes.msnbc.msn.com. I hope that someone with more patience and a higher profile than I have will watch and bother to debunk these fools. It’s bad enough to expect such BS from right wing outlets; it’s depressing to find the same misconceptions and vapid conversation points on a supposedly liberal show. The least Hayes should have done was to invite someone who actually understood Hitchens and atheism.
    ____________________________________________

    1. I don’t watch the program regularly but after watching a hockey game I had taped last night (my team won with a goal in the last 0.1 second – a miracle, right?) I channel surfed over to MSNBC just in time to catch the segment (another miracle!).

      I had to turn off my TV at the point where that one woman trotted out the “atheism is just another religion line” before I kicked in the screen of my perfectly serviceable TV. I don’t know Hayes’ stance on atheism but he did gamely try to interject some perspective on the “suffocating religiosity” of this country’s culture but was clearly swimming against the tide. Even the one dude on the panel who said he was an atheist pretty much said the Gnus had a “non-constructive tone”. Well, I guess that’s better than that Hunter woman who bemoaned atheists lack of civility because she got a lot of e-mails after telling atheists to STFU. Unreal.

      I sent a strongly worded comment to the show from their website and urged them to invite Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, PZ and Jerry to provide some balance to this issue. Jerry, please consider contacting the show’s producer to demand equal time.

    2. I ,too, was annoyed by the level of christian nonsense being sprouted by the women guests, especially by Karen Hunter who embodied the complete arrogance of all theist. One could see in her body language how eager she was ready to attack nontheist in support of her deluded thinking. The one guest who claimed to be an atheist was Prof. Gerald McWhorter and,to me, he came across as an accommodationist asserting the tiresome bullshit about ‘tone’ and respectful discourse.We needed to be better represented on these kinds of television shows in the future for such an important topic.

  6. “Unlike Ruse, however, Dinesh seemed like a nice guy. I shook the hand that fondled Ann Coulter!”

    is Dinesh’s one-on-one conversational motto the same as that he appears to espouse during debates: “When In Doubt, Shout!”?

  7. Not just a eulogy, but a mention of their brief acquaintanceship leading up to a shared debate with two Rabbis in LA last February, which the piece gives a link to. This was a great discussion, or debate if you insist, over not only the question of an afterlife, but of a philosophical discussion of life in toto, and I don’t mean Dorothy’s dog. Hitchens and Harris of course we all know well, as well as their philosophical views and criticisms of religion. Interesting that these two Rabbis, whom we don’t know, were somewhat in agreement regarding artifacts of monotheistic religions that don’t sit well with logic.

    At 30:00, Rabbi Wolpe takes on Calvinism, noting that few Judaist thinkers fall to that level of sophistry, and stated that “free will, and the ability to do horrendous things is built into the system.” My thots exactly, which explains in a sense so-called evil, and the results that ensue. ‘Natural evil’ is worse; actually a misnomer, and simply the result of natural laws and their logical results. No, we exist in ‘free domain’, or what I like to call ‘theme park earth’. God (or surrogates of higher authorities that may oversee) do not micro-manage.

    Rabbi Bradly Artson: “Everybody has great clarity in the god they don’t believe in. And … I don’t believe in that god either.”

    Harris: “Then tell us how you understand, gratuitous misfortune visited upon the innocent?

    Brad: “like being in a debate like this?” (laughter)

    Harris: “My condolences.” (more laughter)

    Brad: “It is a medieval mistake, based on Aristotelian thought, that god has to be a simple unmoved mover, and thereby eternal omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. Those are terms that don’t exist in Biblical or Rabbinical Hebrew. So I apologize for the way the philosophers kidnap the traditions, but it’s not in the Torah. There is no Hebrew word for omnipotent … and the concept is a nonsense concept.”

    and “I’m saying that what God has is a different kind of power, than the power of the dictator that Christopher Hitchens and I [and of course, RD and Jerry] both despise.”

    My own take, blogged about elsewhere but never phrased that well, is in agreement with the above. The the Old Testament, and in particular the Pentateuch, has some factual historicity, although to what degree is uncertain. But regarding morals and ethics, it is plainly cannon fodder, and much of the OT wording should relagated to bronze-age antiquity.

    In short, it may in fact contain actual revelation from a higher realm, but is plainly corrupted by man’s agenda based motivations, ergo quote mining to the extreme. If we despise creationists’ taking things out of context and adding in agenda based protocols, why not tell them to apply that same logic to Moses’ purported accounts of God’s dictates regarding taking the virgins as confiscatory property and more? Or of Muhammad’s citing of the seventy-two virgins in heaven as man’s reward for adhering to and complying to Islam?

    A reading of Bertrand Russell’s ‘Why I am not a Christian’ is not a valid argument against a god or gods’, much of which is recanted unending by skeptics including Dawkins in ‘the God Delusion’, but of organized [and corrupted] religion today, based of writings plainly seen via the ‘man filter’.

    Accolades for the moderator, who asked pertinent questions, and didn’t enforce the time restraints in place. I kind of hate the “you now have five minutes to rebut” format often employed in these discussions/ debates.

    To summarize, not just Hitchens and Harris, but Rabbis Wolpe and Artson are plainly rationalists to a high degree, and with many areas of agreement. It was primarily over the plausibility of an afterlife and of divine oversight where the two camps parted ways. But reality discerned, we’re actually all in the same camp.

    Trading this discussion for Netflix is well worth the 98 minutes.

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