Sunday is sermon time here at Hitchens Watch. And so, dearly beloved, I ask you to contemplate the abovementioned question raised by Christopher Hitchens in the course of the Turek debates, that I have yet to hear him answer in any sensible fashion. I have my own answer to this one, but rather than just roll it off, I'd prefer each of you you to think about it for yourselves.
Here in the midst of a tussle with Turek, Hitchens struggles with his inner deamons and his conscience, but despite spending over two solid minutes waffling, he is either unwilling or unable to tell us what he thinks morality is, where it comes from or what use it is. He brings up Socrates's daemon merely as a means of dodging Turek's question and he doesn't attempt to explain what the deamon was or what Socrates thought it was. Nor does he have anything to say about what the conscience is or whether and on what occasions we should heed its voice.
However, in this next one, Christopher in his most bullish of bully pulpits does condescend to take up the heathen's burden and attempt to prove that religion is the source of immorality, and that therefore, by implication, morality must come from somewhere else. But again, the question is from where?
When I watch or listen to Hitchens on morality, I get the distinct impression that his inner daemons—and there is a whole chorus line of them inside that Broadway theater of a conscience of his—are tap dancing across the base of his cerebral cortex singing "In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. But now, God knows, anything goes."
“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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