Was he the most respectable, least fedora-ish of the New Atheists...

Hey butterfly! I am posting after 3 years. You still like Pynchon? Are you still a female?

He proves that any middle-class child, with enough determination, can develop an accent.

I'm still kind of indifferent to Pynchon. Saw that movie, and it was pretty good.
I've always been a woman.
Congrats on the long absence. Looks like the old neighborhood just gets worse. I only check in from time to time myself.

I have to respect a man who was willing to see for himself whether or not waterboarding constituted as torture.

Worst Hitchens

yes, he is the only one who could almost go toe-to-toe with Dennis Prager in debate. Prager still won, of course.

>dancing that imitates sex is somehow "immoral"
I guess I shouldn't expect a pasty middle-aged guy to really be into dancing, but most of it is sexual in some way. Has been for millennia.

Honestly I find Dawkins the most respectable. His ideas on religion are arguably the worst, but he is a great biologist who vastly contributed to our understanding of genetics and evolution. Hitchens has always struck me as a dilettante. I watched his appearance on Firing Line and all the mystique around him vanished.

>Rubbing your genitals against someone in public
kys degenerate

Are you honestly defending grinding

Why do middle-aged British men hate fun so much?

because your version of "fun" has become so central to most people that it is crumbling western civ.

Nobody takes responsibility any more.
Nobody is willing to sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term stability.

We're inches from total collapse, and the majority of people (who would all die horribly) couldn't care less.

That's mostly a problem with the commodification of the fun and a ruthless advertising culture that urges people to overconsume.

No, I'm talking about the tendency of Brits to piss about and moan instead of appreciating their life.

You're probably one of the least intelligent posters on Veeky Forums

oh shit! I knew I recognized that stupid symbol

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>Was he the most respectable, least fedora-ish of the New Atheists?
Oxymoron. But he's dead so he's the best by default.

Hitchens's writings regarding Mother Theresa were quite good and I like some of his other books, but I prefer Dawkins out of the Four Horsemen.

I'm a Harris man myself but Hitchens close behind

It seemed very simplistic and odd when he spoke about the Soviet Union in that debate with his brother. The Soviet union, North Korea and Iraq were all "religion" based in his eyes. When we all know their doctrine was socialism, and he still believed in socialism.

One of his main criticisms of religion was the that he hated the idea of wanting to be a slave to an all powerful father figure. He just saw roughly the same thing in those societies. I'm sure if pushed he'd concede that they aren't technically religions, but I think he was just making a point that they were bad for the same reason religion is.

What's wrong with it?

Just about everything enslaves you and forces you to behave they way "they" want to. Even family. Time to do away with family too, I guess.

I was primarily interested in his political books, essays and speeches, but i always thought his anti-religious stance was his blind spot. Since he was a self proclaimed socialist and still believed in the tennants of socialism. But never condemned it, like religion, for what it created.

To a degree. Not quite to the degree of the great leader, or an abrahamic god

That's reducing it to an absurdity. It is undeniable that you are influenced by things that surround you, but you are allowed to make your own decision no matter what. A dogmatic religion places rules that cannot be broken. Forces you to be a pawn in society and roll with the tide even when the direction is wrong.

So does a government, a school and a family. Is this not self-evident?

Not to the extent that something like Islam does. And it is not self-evident.

They both use rules of their own chosing and have the ability to enforce them by punishment. And if you don't submit you will be punished or exiled.

You're right.

A family might disown you, punish you. A government might execute you/banish you. Schools reinforce a similar authority, they try to control your actions and make you conform to society.

If they limit you, they make you accept and conform to standards deemed undesirable is it then not worth it to fight them too? Overthrow governments that oppress you, disown your family if they hold you back. Turn your back to religion, if it is false and not fruitful.

Just another Jew who made his sheckles decrying god.

>muh didactic ravings
>$1000 plz

> jewish

half-jewish. But he wasn't raised a jew.

I feel like Hitchens, as a lifelong atheist, was incapable of considering the idea that God might exist whether you wanted him to or not.

>One of his main criticisms of religion was the that he hated the idea of wanting to be a slave to an all powerful father figure.

Which is quite an ironic Freudian observation. Because one could argue that atheists refuse to believe in God precisely because they didn't have a father figure in their real life.

Nah he has

"The atheist says no persuasive argument for the existence of God has ever been advanced or adduced without convincing rebuttal. No argument in favor stands or has been found to stand the test of argument and evidence. We cannot say that we know that there could be no such entity."

huh

Ok, so you rebel against religion. What do you change and if you scrape everything what do you replace it with? What fills its void.

This is what i was getting to and what i've noticed among atheists and socialists. That they're both:

1: anti-religion
2: equality

And the natural course of action after you rid yourself of the opressive religion is that you replace it with something that's similar to atheism, which is socialism. Socialist states always barred religion and dubbed it "the opium of the masses", since it was a competitor. What is a competitor, but a worthy equal?

Peter says they are 1/34 Jewish?

No, but he was so skilled in rhetoric that he could easily fool most into thinking he was much more intelligent, knowledgeable, and reasonable than he really was. A modern day Gorgias. Dennett is the smartest and most charitable of the lot, but also the least accessible to the layman.

>A modern day Gorgias

Except Gorgias admitted that he was a nihilist.

Brits appreciate by pissing and moaning. Don't be racist, they didn't choose to be born that way.

Didn't sam harris win an honorary degree from some university for his self studied work on neuroscience?

>Time to do away with family too, I guess
Now you're thinking with the materialist dialectic

No, I think he actually has PhD in neuroscience from UCLA.

Hitchens was the most overrated "intellectual" of his time.

Peter > Christopher

upvote if you agree

That is a failed slander. It has never reduced Christian posting.
Now I know why. It's a woman trying to gain dominance. Online.

He wasn't that great. Fairly well-read but he went from boarding school, to Cambridge, to Oxford -- his erudition isn't particularly surprising. I'm reading through Hitch-22 and I'm surprised by how empty his writing feels. It's good but it's do very shallow. A lot of his other works have a similar feel and it's kind of hard to determine just how deeply he thought about things.
Dawkins is clearly the superior fedorafag.

its in 'the neurology of religious belief' - I thought he actually had a real background in neuroscience but its just a pointless phd in a topic he invented, disappointing

As far as debates go, his entire argument consists of emotional appeals and (presumably)deliberate misrepresentation of the opponents' views. Respectable? Oh, my. He should've stuck to politics.
He's somewhat more charismatic than the others, I'll give him that.

You're delude if you don't think leftism isn't just more of the same individualistic crap. Libertarians are just minimalist liberals, demanding rights to life, liberty and property. Extend rights to equal chances, you get mainstream democrats, extend rights to hurt feelings and you get SJWs. It is all the same individualist hodgepodge.

Dennett is the lesser evil

Sauce on this?

you haven't proven that individualism is wrong.

Why, what did he change to, Lit crit?

what is respectable about him that isn't related to his career?

>
Leave

I see, so everything bad is religion and everything good is enlightened liberal communism

thanks for correcting the record

He's a pseudohistorian.

A complete pseud. He had the same knowledge of literature that you would expect from most college students in the UK. The scholarly points he put forward about Larkin or Wodehouse would be instantly recognizable for most undergrads.

He also made up shit for no good reason; in a piece about Nietzsche he bizarelly claims that nietzsche borrowed "Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker" from Goethe. If he had actually read these guys he would've known that Nietzsche loves those neat alliterations while Goethe is usually more "casual" in his writing. The piece he wrote on Chesterton also contains similar, minor errors and I'm sure he botched his analyses of other authors as well

not an argument

Reading Hitchens on Chesterton is offensive, especially when you know that if the situations were reversed Chesterton would be much more charitable and appreciative towards Hitchens.

There are no arguments left.

Chesterton is an incredibly lazy thinker though. His writings are sentimentalist garbage of the lowest order. The fucker looked like he looked, and wore a cape. As such, he was a fedora among Catholics.

Take his aphorisms. He does the same unwitty, unfunny thing, over and over again:

"It seems to me that the trouble with x and y, is that there is not enough y in x. Oh dear me I'm so fat and clever, darling fetch my muumuu I must run an errand now~"

Absolutely interminable.

This is a copypasta.

Moreover, I dare you to prove to me that Hitchens is any better. Hitchens is a sophist.

>The fucker looked like he looked
This copypasta is vastly overrated

>there are people who actually believe this
>mfw life will go on as their opinions continue to be completely irrelevant

You're welcome.

I respect him for challenging the canonizing of Mother Theresa - monster that she was. At the same time, I feel conflicted about his stance on the Iraq War.

Wherever you stand on these issues, I'm of the belief that you shouldn't judge a person by their political stances, but rather by the strength and merit of their mind and spirit. In this regard, Christopher Hitchens was a good man, and if you disagree you ought to watch this video.

youtube.com/watch?v=CXAYCymVHaI

I'm no fan of his vitriol, his militant nature, or his hawkish worldview, but there are aspects of his character that shine through in this video. These aspects affirm to me that Hitchens was a man of noble character.

What's philosophy?

This desu. Listening to these cucks you'd think they'd be happier shoveling shit most every day back in þe olde dægs, crying about how shovels are making work too easy and that non-priests being able to read is crumbling the foundations of Western civilization.

Too much of an intellectual, he made too many flubs that someone less well-read but more world-wise would see past right away. It's kind of hard to take his "divine tyranny" rhetoric all that seriously when he never went to any of the tyrannies he compares religion to.

Or to put it another way.
Christopher = INT
Peter = WIS

It's easy to be a hawk when you're a fat alcoholic who'll never have to see battle.

Stalinism mine as well be a religion.

>fedora
Literally means nothing. They were all great and a much needed loud and open critique of dogma.

>and he at least had a wide range of interests beyond just repeating "religion is bad" like Dawkins.
That's what their "hobby specializations" were, that's what they saw as a big problem at the time and thus most strongly opposed. Why should they have to fit your mold of a renaissance man? There's nothing wrong with specialization.

>I thought he actually had a real background in neuroscience but its just a pointless phd in a topic he invented, disappointing

I know, it's the whole pretension of this that irritates me. Like he'll use to imply that he's actually a legit expert of the mind in order to justify the idea that he knows what he's talking about in order to sell his books, but his degree is basically just him vouching for what he states in his book, so the whole thing is circular.

>They were all great and a much needed
For what purpose? All their critique works against {purpose} just fine.
>loud and open critique of dogma.
Loud? Indeed, 'freedom of speech' seems to necessitate access to megaphones. Yet they are property.

Christopher = CHA. Not low on INT, just a charismatic figure. Hence the amount of viewers. High INT is boring, and will not result in 'PWND' videos.

This, what Christopher was a master of debate, he had the right blend of intelligence and charisma to make other people look like fools and skewer them with his wit, without really being a genius in any particular area himself.

You can appreciate the advances of modern civilisation whilst still criticising its obsession with pleasure. I don't need to starve myself to find obesity distasteful. Moderation in all things.

>No fun allowed ever

Are you just salty that you never get invited to parties?

>We're inches from total collapse, and the majority of people (who would all die horribly) couldn't care less.

suicide by gun would become much easier with the collapse of civilization so I don't care

This is really trite. Like all half-baked moralists, Hitchens asks us to love, but doesn't bother to say anything more substantive or structural. It's like what you get at the end of Harry Potter.

Chesterton is near right about everything

He was one of many middle-brow atheists who spurned religious worship in place of that of the state. When he was in University, his peers called him Hypocritchens, because of his proclivity for preaching socialism and equality by day, while attending the most exclusive cocktail parties by night; a habit he would continue for the rest of his life.
His literary pieces were almost uniformly mediocre. He was one of those journalists who tended to begin with a random, vaguely related pointed such as 'Jihad means struggle' so as to give himself false airs of expertise which would never really solidify throughout the rest of the piece. He always tended to pace around the outside of the subject, without actually piercing its structure, settling instead for gossip about the author, and very vague outlines of his ouvre.

His push towards neoconservatism was morally bankrupt, and without any lasting intellectual thought.

For the life of me, I don't understand why people still worship the guy, while ignoring legitimately impressive writers like Gore Vidal. Even his brother had a much better political thought than him