On January 26, well-known Christer Dinesh D'Souza and even-better-known Antichrister, Contrarian and Renaissance man Christopher Hitchens met in Boulder, Colorado, ostensibly to debate "Atheism vs. Reigion," and very probably bored most of their audience of 2,000 into a coma. We haven't picked up any reports of the outcome yet, but the Rocky Mountain News gave it a last-minute blast of pre-event publicity:
Earlier, D'Souza and Hitchens answered three questions posed by the Rocky. Their answers have been printed in full:
ROCKY: What's your opponent's best argument?
HITCHENS: The "fine tuning" of the universe, with its bias (at least in our infinitesimal locality) for human life. A useless argument but a memorable one, and of course impossible to disprove (another symptom of its weakness).
D'SOUZA: I think Christopher's best argument is that the world is so flawed in its design and with all the suffering in it that it doesn't look like there's an intelligent, all-powerful, compassionate designer behind it all.
ROCKY: How do you handle moments of doubt?
HITCHENS: Doubt is one of the foundations of our skeptical method to begin with, so only if I ceased to have moments of same would I feel any concern.
D'SOUZA: To me doubt is intrinsic to religious belief. "Belief" is not the same thing as "knowledge." If I knew for sure, I wouldn't have belief. Belief means trusting in God even when you have doubts. But this in no way shows that belief in unreasonable or irrational.
ROCKY: If your position "won" and became the world's gold standard of behavior, what would the world look like?
HITCHENS: Very much the way it does now, since the way humans behave is in fact determined by the laws of physics and biology and is only to a limited extent affected by theocratic exhortation. Life would and does improve of course, to the extent that theocratic exhortations are outgrown or ignored. In every country and society, the measure of freedom and education and prosperity can be directly correlated to the growth of secularization. (Tunisia vs. Libya, Ireland today vs. Ireland yesterday, Iran vs. Turkey, India vs. Pakistan, Italy and Spain and much of the rest of the Latin and Catholic world since the eclipse of the Vatican's alliance with fascism, the Jewish people once emancipated from the ghetto; numberless other examples.) The gold standard can already can be seen in operation, as can the opposite delights of religious rule and "faith-based" insurgency.
D'SOUZA: Imagine a Christian world in which everyone aspired to live by the commandments to love God and love their neighbor. Imagine a world in which people took seriously Christ's teachings and sought to apply them. Who can deny that such a world would be infinitely better than the one we have now?
If anyone was at the gig and can remember any salient details, please share them with us. And any criticism of Hitchensian determinism in the context of human behavior would also be welcome. From his response to the last question above, the Popinjay sounds like he may be an acolyte in the cult of B.F. Skinner, et. al. Please say it ain't so!
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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