Who won this debate?

Who won this debate?

youtube.com/watch?v=We7DyKWw61I

I don't think it was possible for Hitchens to lose a debate t.b.h.

Not literature.

Fuck off, or make this about women or nonwhite inferiority to the white man

>2008

I know some people venerate his "hitchslaps" but this guy is extremely obnoxious. I can't stand his way of talking , posture etc. Nothing to do with religion, I'm an atheist.

I flicked through the copy of Hitchens book in question and it was pretty trite I have to say. He's good at preaching to the choir and getting his fellow atheists to pat themselves on the back by attacking ignorant fundamentalists and thats about it it seems.

No one ever wins a debate between internet gaytheism and christfagism. There is only a loser, and that loser is humanity as a whole.

Hitchens seemed to have a sharp mind. Imagine a world were he had used it for something else.

"It's blindingly obvious that I'm totally correct because my opponent is quite simply wrong on every conceivable level and I'm just a lot smarter than him"

Hannity should have just questioned him about his book and he would have fallen apart pretty quick, you're not gonna get anywhere if you just throw softballs at him.

I read that in his limey accent.

I don't know how to put this, but I don't think Christopher Hitchens was very intelligent.

He was a great debator and rhetorician but his arguments were always incredibly simplistic, . and he was opinionated to the point of being retarded. For some examples, in God's Not Great he opens with a rambling anecdote about a teacher who told him that God made plants and as a kid he Just Knew™ that she was wrong. You can see his approach to issues never developed beyond that, like in his famous article about female comedians. The actual kernel of his point was some vague evolutionary psychology (he didn't cite a scientist or paper) which was wrapped up in a huge amount of rhetoric.

In an interview I saw where he was asked about his opposition to abortion his argument came down to "it's wrong because it obviously is". That's a common pattern with his views. Like his support for attacking Iran, everyone knows the Iranian government is belligerent against the USA, but he thought pulling up a few quotes from the Ayatollah was enough to conclude that all-out war was the only option, no attempt to analyse foreign policy and the wider picture. Again, all wrapped up in his rhetoric so it sounds good, but is really about the rhetoric itself, not a solid argument backed up with facts.

I can't stop watching these Sam Harris JRE episodes

This. Impressive at it as he was, he was a sophist through and through.

And this is why, utterly unironically, Peter is the superior brother. His talking and writing isn't as pretty as Christopher's, but it's clear there's more thought put into them. Even when he's wrong, he's come to his wrongness through deliberation.

Never paid much attention to this guy, but I decided to look up his female comedians essay
>In any case, my argument doesn't say that there are no decent women comedians. There are more terrible female comedians than there are terrible male comedians, but there are some impressive ladies out there. Most of them, though, when you come to review the situation, are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three. When Roseanne stands up and tells biker jokes and invites people who don't dig her shtick to suck her dick—know what I am saying?
btfo

Christopher Hitchens was a charlatan who cared more about money.

What did the guy ever write? A propaganda piece about Teresa (no matter how true) to shoot himself into fame, a book about God and a shitty Jefferson biography.

Terrible.

you're mad because he used writing to make money and become famous?
???

He's written a lot more than that, including literally hundreds of articles

He was an essayist, not a philosopher. His work is only valuable as an illustration of the rhetorical techniques he utilized because that's all he really cared about. He came from the Oxford Union debate tradition.

George Galloway trounced him in their infamous debate. I've never seen such a angry man as Galloway

irrelevant, yet painfully relatable

...

Read again. Don't flick thru.

That's pretty much what I said, he could debate, but was bad at making an actual point. It's a shame he got a reputation as an intellectual.

Hannity is a non-factor in the debate but it's a shame that for someone who seems so careful with his wording that the conclusions Hitchens reaches, or at least the way he presents them, are total rubbish. This is the first time I've ever seen an argument from him but I can see why he's characterised as fedora or Reddit. He doesn't really have the depth of knowledge to develop a strong argument and it looks like he just makes do being able to put one together better than the opponent.

I guess Hitchens argument against creation is that the universe is so vast that us earthlings are irrelevant? That's incredibly weak, especially after he just chided Hannity for having the audacity to ask Hitchens to explain his position on the matter. I wonder if the universe were instead really tiny that Hitchens would see this as evidence for God?

Is that book title to be ironic?

At some point in that talk he says it would be foolish to be angry with god, so what the fuck?

He lost against Peter imo

>You can see his approach to issues never developed beyond that, like in his famous article about female comedians.

He was right about that, though.

Women aren't funny.

My point is that he wasn't trying to construct solid, well-supported arguments, he was trying to argue his opponents into submission. You're criticizing him for not being what he had no interest in being.

William Lane Craig was more than reasonable

What exactly is the source of your confusion? You can be upset with people who propagate the idea of god and not be upset with their imagined magical sky-man.

What unnerves me most about Hitchens is his eternal love for Trotsky. I sort of admire Trotsky's writing, but Hitchens regarded him as the only Bolshevik probably worth studying in the 21st century dunno if he deserves that sort of lauding.

But besides that, I'm glad Hitchens was perceptive and honest enough to point out that being a socialist nowadays is being a sort of sentimental idealist, and no one has the balls to start a Fifth International or anything like that. Most of the commotion in world politics is about globalization vs. anti-globalization, and the world sort of split into places that at least give lip service to rule of law to places that stand upon worship of power and other sorts of totalitarianism.

The point of a debate is not to establish a "winner" and "loser", it's to establish discourse so both parties learn something.

>Is god real
probably not
>Does Christianity have value and should it be maintained
yes

>>Does Christianity have no value and it should not be encouraged to be practiced, but if you don't study the bible you'll only be quasi-literate when it comes to western literature
>yes

ftfy