I don't want to leave Part 3 of the Perspective and Apologetics series hanging out in the wind by itself. It comes across, I think (and hope), as combative. There's a reason for that. But it could also come across as scolding and/or whiny, which I'd rather avoid.
I'm hoping to get Part 4 up tomorrow, but I'm not sure if I'll have time.
Fortunately, Ed over at Gin & Tacos managed to write a post that I kinda wanted to write, except for my lack of desire to get bogged down in details. He goes after Hitch, that late, lionized spokesman for all things atheist. It's...well...Ed doesn't seem to feel any compunction to speak well of the dead.
Let's get one thing straight: I respected Hitchens for his eloquence, willingness to speak his mind, and absolute refusal to back down for the sake of convenience. I also despised Hitchens for the fact that his refusal to back down meant that he often held and defended some absolutely awful positions. I'm genuninely unhappy that he's one of the first people that non-atheists think of when they think of atheists, since he was belligerent, uncouth, and held some genuinely atrocious positions.
I'll let Ed spell it out:
At his worst, Hitchens was little more than an unusually eloquent drunk, a misogynist, xenophobe, and warmonger who seemed to take leave of his critical thinking skills when the question of scary brown foreigners reared its head. He described his pro-Western worldview as a matter of "defending civilization", but in practice it looked a lot more like garden variety Islamophobia (arguing that the Iraq War death toll was "not high enough") and neocon foreign policy frames. He argued that women are not funny in a manner that he considered unbiased, rational, and unemotional, but the end result was a rant worthy of any drunk in a bar ranting about his ex-wife. He painted Michelle Obama as a race-baiting militant out for Whitey on the basis of a paper she wrote in college suggesting that black students feel alienated on campuses that are almost entirely white. These are not the attitudes of a critical thinker – they are the knee jerk reactions of an old man quite comfortable with the social hierarchy that places white Anglo-Saxon men firmly at the top. We'd expect to hear such arguments from Glenn Beck, and we often do.
Hitchens was an apologist. The subtitle of his most famous work, god is not Great, was "How Religion Poisons Everything." The title or subtitle still get passed around on a regular basis. He focused on the worst aspects of the behavior of the religious and then argued that the acts of the worst proponents somehow infected all the proponents. His message may have been different, but his tactics were no better than a Pat Robertson or Bryan Fischer blaming natural disasters or the downfall of western civilization on atheists or the gays. It was mere demagoguery and villainizing those outside the tribe.
Either way, go read Gin & Tacos. It's pretty much exactly what I would have written on this subject were I not trying to be more general in my approach.
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