Okay, so the next chapter is Hitchens on health, to which health the religion of your choice is almost certainly hazardous. We are only on the fourth chapter, and it is of average length, but the mistakes Hitchens makes are starting to accumulate, so it might take a little bit of extra time to get …
Foolishness to the Greeks
Chapter Three is “A Short Digression on the Pig; or, Why Heaven Hates Ham.” Since it is a brief chapter, it warrants a comparable response. In this chapter, Hitchens has a case of the cutes — there is a lot here to make fun of, this is something he is good at, and so he …
Wet Streets Cause Rain
The second chapter of Hitchens’ book is entitled “Religion Kills.” Well, in this world of hardscrabble Darwinism, nature red in tooth and claw, what doesn’t? Religion kills, but so does cancer, old age, hunting accidents, radiation from the sun, other predatory species, too much mayonnaise, and the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Actually, we need …
Lo, the Bombasticator Cometh
Comes now Christopher Hitchens in his new book, God is Not Great, and he thwacketh us believers upon the mazzard. The book promises to be an engaging read; Hitchens writes fluidly and well, and he knows how to go over the top rhetorically, but not by too much. More on this shortly. His rationalism is …
Irrelevant Details
I had seen on Richard Dawkins’ blog that he was going to be on the O’Reilly Factor, which he in fact was. He and Bill skirmished, as could have been predicted, and I only want to say one thing about it. O’Reilly brought up Stalin and Hitler, good job, and Dawkins pointed out that both …
Slavery and Atheism
In Letter From A Christian Citizen, I argue two basic points concerning slavery. The first is that atheism does not provide us with any solid ground for condemning slavery. This does not keep atheists from condemning slavery. It just keeps them from having a good reason for doing so. “From an atheistic perspective, how can …
Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Virginia Tech
Let’s tie two timely issues together. This is sometimes dangerous, because when issues are timely, they are also frequently raw, and this means that it is easy to be misunderstood. But I will try to state this basic argument against atheism as briefly and as clearly as I can. The first timely issue is the …
Lots of Things We Could Do
Letter from a Christian Citizen has drawn the attention of Richard Dawkins, and there was quite a discussion over at his blog. If you want to take a look, you can see it all here. I am not asking you to go over there to pile into the discussion — in fact I would recommend …
A Bowl of Sawdust Paste
In this last Dawkins installment, I want to do two things. The first is to briefly summarize his last chapter and respond to it. The second task is to develop something I mentioned in an earlier post — viz. that Dawkins is more than half ashamed of what he is doing — and for good …
In the Zone
The ninth chapter of Dawkins’ book is entitled “Childhood, Abuse, and the Escape from Religion.” The chapter is almost impudent in its intellectual dishonesty, and more than impudent in its proposal. Dawkins begins by telling a heart-wrenching story from 19th century Italy, in which a young Jewish boy (Edgardo Mortata) had been secretly baptized by …