/lit/ - Literature

>>14333912
The 2000s were a different time. You wouldn't understand.

Anyone have the HQ version of pic related?

>>14333932

>>14333912
The book is based. 90% of philosophers and scientists are atheist for a reason.

>>14333940
Saved. Fucking thank you I've been looking for this for a long time.

>>14333912
Hitchens was a mega pseud.

>>14333912
>How anyone could even read this book after that high school tier subtitle is beyond me.

Good thing I read it in high school then.

>>14334127

Your feelings are wrong. Ivan was correct, and the sufferings depicted in the Comedy, like the unfortunate predilection in humans toward belief in a deity, are wrong. It is no sort of defense of religion to observe that humans get on well (to a point) with it-because this clearly breaks down when confronted with certain scientific realities (yes, evolution, sanitation, (local) heliocentrism). It is not a vindication of religion to observe that humans tend to do better with it in certain ways (as with comforting lies), because reality always militates against it (religious feeling). Religious feeling in humans is only ever a weakness, in the very long term. This is the advantage of the Chinese, their insectoid lack of need for its succour. The Chinese are better adapted to reality itself.

>>14333912
>>14334160
Implying Hitchens chose the title

>>14334204
this. hitchens didn't want this subtitle. and he's a great thinker except when it comes to religion when he becomes a dumb reactionary. i find it kind of suspicious he is half-jewish from his mothers side and bashes white supremecists over the head but also lets zionists have it with both barrels. he was a very confused man.

>>14334201

> thinks the Chinese aren't religious.

Jfl pseud

>>14334233
Wasn't he clearly against circumcision?

>>14333940
Someone should remake this chart but with, say, Prometheus Unbound as the atheist book. I mean you could even put down Ulysses, although Joyce seems to have been periodically reseduced by Catholicism throughout his life. Whereas Shelley was something of a "militant" atheist

>>14334251
yes. doesn't mean he wasn't circumcised himself. (he was)

>>14334233
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens
>Later in life, Hitchens identified as a secular Jew—since Judaism is matrilineal and he discovered his mother was Jewish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_M._Krauss
>He was raised in a Jewish household.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Harris
>His father came from a Quaker background and his mother is Jewish but not religious.[12] He was raised by his mother following his parents' divorce when he was aged two.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker
>Pinker was born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1954, to a middle-class Jewish family.
There's a suspicious amount of Jews spearheading the New Atheism and metaphysical physicalism. And Christianity is their usual target, except for maybe Hitchens.

After skimming through some of Hitchens' book, I can say it's definitely shallow from an argumentative case, and only substantial to the already-atheists (I suppose I can see its pertinence to that group). But I have no respect for the intellect of those who apostatized over it. While it's hasty to call it sophistry, the apostates for this book are driven by sophistry.
Hitchens himself is bit of a sophist and a salesman. For his reputation as "rational," he does near nothing in rational thinking. Rarely does he define his terms and ask his opponent to do the same, coming to a common understanding to actually refute something through reason or evidence. He's the eternal cop out, and the drones behind him prove it. Say something against atheism, and watch how they say atheism doesn't really exist, because it's not a religion like Christianity, but is merely an absence of faith. "I just believe in one less god than you do." That's obviously a disingenuous debate strategy rather than a philisophical statement, because atheism is clearly a philosophical position that there is no divine or deity, and it's inverse isn't a specific faith but is theism itself. But the Hitchens crowd will turn around, hypocritically, and blend all theists or Christians or whatever into one encompassing idea, to blow apart in their sophistry as some brutish unenlightened horde.
His mode is too spin a case of how religion is some negative force in society, but never does Hitchens explain why we should accept his ephemeral ideas of good and bad, when he operates under a hypermodern kind of ethic that's existed for less than a couple of centuries. Why should we accept this as a universal? Maybe there's a good argument why, but I've never seen it so far from my reading/listening to Hitchens.

>>14334233
Yeah I loved it when he said something along the lines of..

"I would be against an israeli state even if there were no palestinians there"

>>14333942
90% of the great philosophers are theist