His witty repartee, his ready-access store of historical quotations, his bookish eloquence, his effortless flow of well-formed words, beautifully spoken in that formidable Richard Burton voice (the whole performance not dulled by other equally formidable Richard Burton habits), would threaten your arguments even if you had good ones to deploy. A string of reverends and ?theologians? ruefully discovered this during Hitchens?s barnstorming book tour around the United States.

I really love it when they send the unarmed to a battle of wits. If they hadn’t devolved, there would have been tails literally set firmly between the legs on this one. Keep ‘em running, Hitchens!

Can’t believe the two haven’t met. That really must be remedied, I think.

I love this line by Hitchens, which I put in bold. The rest of the paragraph is for context, in response to the old Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin were atheists meme.

“For hundreds of years, millions of Russians had been told the head of state should be a man close to God, the Czar, who was head of the Russian Orthodox Church as well as absolute despot. If you?re Stalin, you shouldn?t be in the dictatorship business if you can?t exploit the pool of servility and docility that?s ready-made for you. The task of atheists is to raise people above that level of servility and credulity.“

They have met. There is a video discussion between Dawkins,Dennet, Harris, and Hitchens on the Dawkins web site. Look under, The Four Horsemen.

Ack! Thanks. I didn’t even look at the date. And I have seen the 4 Horsemen ads, though I haven’t watched the vid(s?). What can I say? I had an attack of teh stoopid.

They met at the AAI Convention last year. They all signed my Bible.

Dadnabbit! I knew I should have come. That’s pretty cool.

The fact is that I had never heard of Hitchens. But, I do know of Dawkins, and though I have never read any of his books, assuming they are written for those sitting on the fence of the issue of religion, I have seen a number of his interviews and was struck by his ability to eloquently make a point and back it up with inarguable fact. His endorsement of Hitchens has made me curious enough to look at him more closely.
If it turns that what you say is true, that he supported the war in Iraq, then he would be little different from me. I was like Eve, when the serpent spoke to me, I believed that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that being a state sponsor of terrorism ($20000 paid to the family of every Palestinian suicide bomber) that it was only a matter of time until he made his statement on our soil. And I heard and understood the arguments that France, Germany, and Russia made, that Hussein was the bottle cap preventing all out civil war, but I thought the risk was outweighed by the necessity of prevention.

I know now that the Iraq war was probably the greatest blunder in American history. But, they lied to me, and I have come to forgive myself for my stupidity, and have added yet another tier to my fence of skepticism and distrust of our government.

NeoWolfe

Just curious, but…

How is it any different that Saddam was paying $20,000 to the families of Palestinians that had ‘martyred’ themselves in what Americans don’t fully understand, is an ongoing war with their occupiers, Israel, and the US Government paying dead American soldier’s families $400,000 in Servicemembers Group Life Insurance, (SGLI) when they were killed in an illegal war of agression in Iraq? Doesn’t that make US state sponsors of terrorism? Just ask any Shia or Sunni what the last 5 plus years have been like and I’m sure they will say it has been pretty terrifying.