UPDATE: P. Hitchens’s post is up, “The leagee of the militant godless strikes back” (LOL!). It’s more or less as expected, and I have nothing to say about it except this: this man should learn the first lesson of being a literary figure, which is to avoid responding to criticism unless you have a very good reason.
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A comment from Peter Hitchens about my recent post, “The bad seed: Peter Hitchens blames atheism for Stalin and Hitler.”
I shall be replying to this ill-argued and poorly targeted diatribe on my blog (Google “Peter Hitchens Blog”), later today (Monday 15th April). I shan’t bother to reply here because it is a sad dead-end of angry closed minds, motivated by emotion more than by reason, and the only response will be yet more explosions of green bile and spittle-bombs. But contributors here are welcome to engage in rational argument over at my place.
I can’t wait! And let me save you the trouble: his blog is here.
That first link doesn’t go where it’s supposed to go.
But what a sad figure Peter Hitchens is. If only he knew what “rational discussion” meant…
“it is a sad dead-end of angry closed minds, motivated by emotion more than by reason”
He’s projecting enough to fill an IMAX screen.
“motivated by emotion more than by reason”
Well, yes. Our motivation is emotional: our anger at his monumentally stupid assertions and our joy in being able to rip him to shreds.
/@
*Grabs popcorn*
😀
+1 lol
Hahahahaha. I wouldn’t waste time at P. Hitchens’ blog though – I deal with enough nonsense each day.
O the poor martyr! Why do atheists hate god so much? Jesus dies a little more every day an atheist is born. I think Peter is actually less rational than even your typical theist.
Isn’t that sort of his job? I find religion so confusing.
We have all our cross to bear … no, wait, it’s just him.
could be worth a laugh although daily mail has got less interesting since they stopped being so heavy handed on the moderation and actually allowed dissenting comments so removing the challenge of sneaking one in.
I am amazed he got that anti thatcher post up though. Tempted to write a disgusted of tumbridge wells letter complaining about speaking ill of the dead.
The link sent me to a page where he was discussing Thatcher.
He starts at the rant level and gets louder as he goes on.
Link?
Its a link to the blog as a whole, which at the time had the Thatcher article at the top.
To be fair, I agree with a lot of what he says about Thatcher. Its by far the best right-winger article about her that I’ve seen.
I am sincerely angry that P. Hitchens could come out so aggressively against his brothers very articulate explanations of how religion is responsible for religious persecution, wars, regulations and general ghastliness.
But I am only angry about that in the context of P. Hitchens then trying to draw some sort of correlative explanation between the horrors of some secular dogmas (if he’d bothered, he could have picked the Khmer Rouge instead of the Nazis) and atheism — as he did in the original post you responded to.
This is especially true when you consider that his brother said to him that the dogmas of Pol Pot or other communist dogmas were troublesome because they were so much like a religion: an unquestionable ideology.
Even today in the secular society we have people against not just religion, but all “bad ideas” (to quote Sam Harris). In a broader sense, the atheist community is about discussing rational and ethical thinking (I’ll say that, but I still don’t want to be considered a part of A+) — and that is simply not compatible with a single secular travesty I can (with the assistance of Google) name. And P. Hitchens had this explained to him by his own brother.
Of course, the idea that he would then come to your blog and basically dismiss everyone who talked about it with what looks like ad hominem only paints him as a desperate man trying to escape the shadow of his brother. And it looks that way because he hasn’t expanded on and a single criticism.
Peter Hitchens imagines that his bludgeon is a match for his brother’s rapier. I’ve written about him myself before, and how he seems to think that we know no more than Darwin did about whale evolution: http://paulbraterman.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/bears-whales-god-darwin-and-peter-hitchens-part-i/
“… motivated by emotion more than by reason…”
Said the pot, unaware that it was seeing its own reflection in the kettle’s bright polished surface.
Well, he has “pompous ass” down to a tee.
There are many forms of lying. In this comment Phitchens is demonstrating a few of the more subtle methods. But still, to put it succinctly, he is lying. He sounds like a bitter, vindictive little person.
Rational argument over at his place eh? That’ll be novel.
I refuse to give any product of The Mail my page views. Even his poor attempt at a shot across the bows of WEIT sound like the laying of bait to simply get page views on a third rate (no, not even second rate) blog.
“I shan’t bother to reply here because it is a sad dead-end of angry closed minds, motivated by emotion more than by reason, and the only response will be yet more explosions of green bile and spittle-bombs.”
That’s rich, coming from a guy who, when talking to a world expert in evolutionary biology thought his silly rants could pass for an argument.
He does more harm than good for the conservative cause. I would happily listen to a right-winger who will put forward decent arguments, but Peter comes across as a caricature of a throthing at the mouth loony.
Hitchens says, “I did not in fact say (and don’t think) that the Bolsheviks were Bolsheviks because they were atheists. I tend to the opposite view, that they were atheists because, as self-admiring world reformers convinced of their own supreme rectitude and virtue, they saw God ( and particularly the Christian God) as a rival whom they wished to get rid of.”
This amply demonstrates the irrational mindset of the theist, who believes what he believes because he *wishes* it were true; and, seemingly oblivious to the fallacy, thinks that atheists can simply choose not to believe in something because (he thinks) they wish it were untrue.
I suppose that when you’ve only ever looked at life through a distorted lens, it’s difficult to imagine how it might look when seen clearly.
This is another case where IMHO half the problem is clashing definitions.
JAC, and most of us, use “atheism” to mean just that, not believing in any gods, maybe with a side order of respect for evidence and rational thought. Hence to us it doesn’t make sense to say that the crimes of the USSR were done “in the name of atheism”, because they weren’t done in the name of not believing in any gods, they were done in the name of imposing a new ideology, state communism, and destroying anything that might oppose it.
However, PH views the crimes as being “in the name of atheism” because they were done in the name of an ideology that did not include any gods, and hence in that same dictionary sense was atheistic.
No-one disagrees over what happened, or that it was a bad thing, we just disagree over the definition of the phrase “in the name of atheism”.
The above also explains why I never call myself an atheist, because to me its the wrong word. I always say I’m non-religious, because I don’t follow any religions, whether they be theistic religions, other supernatural religions or political religions.
Just posted this at Hitchens blog.
It would be more interesting if Mr Hitchens responded to a previous post in which Jerry Coyne put him right over evolution and the origins of the Intelligent Design movement. Mr Coyne actually accuses Mr Hitchens of intellectual dishonesty. Regular readers of this blog will know if they made such a charge there would be demands for proof or a retraction and apology, and yet Mr Hitchens has up until now been uncharacteristically silent.
I have also posted this at WEIT.
I’ve just posted this at his blog:
PH: “Anyway, there is no doubt that young Germans were taught in the Hitler Youth to hate and despise Christ, as a Jew …”
You don’t present any evidence of this. Actually, the Nazis taught that Jesus was not a Jew, that he was an Aryan, and that the Jews (mostly Paul) had early on corrupted Jesus’s message.
The Nazis formed their own brand of Christianity, the Deutsche Christen, with this message. They formed their own theological institute pursuing this idea. Have a read of “The Aryan Jesus” by Susannah Heschel, Princeton University Press.
Hitler said: “My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them …”.
That does not fit with your idea that Hitler despised Jesus as a Jew, it fits with the idea that they saw Jesus as an Aryan who opposed Jews.
The Nazis were Creationists, anti-materialist, and anti-Darwinist. They also hated atheism because atheism was associated with Jews.
To quote Hitler himself:
Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on Oct.24, 1933 gloating that he closed down the last freethought society in Germany. The chairman of the German Freethinkers League was Max Sievers, who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and executed.
That’s a good point, actually. Sievers appears to have been one of the first people (among other members of the free-thinkers society) to be arrested and then expatriated by the Nazis—at the same time that they signed a treaty with the Vatican, which secured certain rights of the church as well as the right of the state to screen candidates for bishop for the suitability of their political views.
Take-home message: we will persecute free-thinkers, but an organisation that is just as committed in principle to authoritarianism as we are, we can come to an agreement with.
And it is a pity that it isn’t more widely recognized that the enemy of freedom has always been—and will always be—authority and its henchmen.
Did you get any response from him?
Read his blog. Peter Hitchins is a fanatic, believer in the unreal. I pity him, for once I was like him. One can only hope one day he too will be liberated from the slavish servitude he renders to his non-existent god.
Thanks for the info.
Peter is in dire need of a mirror.
Precisely. It seems that he is talking about himself when he says: “motivated by emotion more than by reason, and the only response will be yet more explosions of green bile and spittle-bombs.”
Explosions of bile and spittle. What is it with Peter’s fixation with bodily fluids?
Agreed – why the effluvia?
Juvenile fixations, juvenile arguments, juvenile behavior. It all adds up to a caricature of a little spoiled brat at the level of “I know you are but what am I.” If he had any decency he would be ashamed of himself.
Perhaps it is calculated on his part. If not, I sincerely hope that he somehow gets the help he needs, because he sounds like a pretty miserable person. And that sucks.
Heh, if he won’t bother to address the arguments here, I’m not going to give him the traffic. Does he have mostly open commenting?
In The Third Reich at War (Penguin, 2008) Richard Evans mentions in the chapter “German Moralities” that:
[p. 546]
Now unless one assumes that every crime of the Third Reich was committed by 3.5% to 5% of the population, it is clear that many theists were involved in German war crimes. Indeed, as Steigmann-Gall demonstrates in his The Holy Reich many committed Christians saw no conflict between their religion and the party (at least until Hitler gave up trying to “coordinate” the churches).
Just a note, Gottglaeubig does not really mean “deist”, it was the term preferred by the Deutsche Christen (German Christians), which was the Nazi version of Christianity, “positive Christianity” as they called it. e.g. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottgläubig
Peter Hitchens is an unapologetic antivaxer too! The man is shameless.
From a few days ago on his blog
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/04/some-reflections-on-measles-and-the-mmr-.html
Now be fair, what do you expect him to do? Acknowledge that he was wrong about something?
He’s just a bigoted little man trying to emerge from the shadow of his brother. Unfortunately he can’t write, and he can’t think – two things at which Christopher excelled.
This is why he writes for the Daily Mail, which is a right-wing tabloid masquerading as an intelligent broadsheet. A petty little newspaper.
” this man should learn the first lesson of being a literary figure, which is to avoid responding to criticism unless you have a very good reason.”
The thing is, he’s not a literary figure, is he? He’s a contrarian journalist, so he does have what he sees as a good reason for responding to criticism: provoking more attention. (I suspect he also enjoys it, and what better reason could there be than that?)