In an interview a few years back with The Sun magazine, atheist bigwig Sam Harris had this to say about the comparable (de)merits of religion and rape:
If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.
You can read the whole interview starting here.
And some people wonder why so many atheists have broken with Harris and the rest of the Old School New Atheist Boys Club to start Atheism Plus.
EDITED TO ADD: Hadn’t noticed that the interview was from 2006, so maybe this is old news to a lot of atheists. Still horrible.
Not a bit of it. Telling people repeatedly that Hitchens is a great writer and that anyone disagreeing is motivated by hate, envy etc; ignoring the criticism of his opinions as coming from the same source; using idiotic terms like “haterade” and resorting to name-calling – those are things that say “troll”. You’ve commented on the site often enough, so I’m guessing you’ve read comments by the long-term trolls here. Have a look at what you wrote on this thread and see if it doesn’t read in much the same way. If nothing else, totally ignoring or waving away the importance of Hitchens’s misogyny, when you’re commenting on a site dedicated to mocking misogyny set the Troll Alarm bells ringing.
Waffling about how atheists owe him some sort of debt of gratitude and never saying why despite being asked repeatedly didn’t help, either.
This actually strikes me as an example of remarkably shoddy, pretentious writing.
When alluding to a famous work, there are really two ways to do it. You can put in an allusion because something in that quotation supports or deepens the point you are making – or you can put in an allusion because OOH LOOK AT ME EVERYBODY I’VE READ SHAKESPEARE. This is a freaking textbook example of the latter. The context of the original quotation has nothing to do with what Hitchens is talking about. The meaning of the words, extracted from their original context, makes very little sense here – reading is not an actively particularly associated with nighttime, and seven very thick novels is not what most people would call “a little touch.” There is exactly one connection – the word “Harry.” The exact same message could have been conveyed, and more clearly, without the allusion to Shakespeare. As it stands, for any reader who does not recognize the quotation, it sounds like a completely nonsensical sexual innuendo, and for any reader who does recognize it, it sounds like, well, OOH LOOK AT ME EVERYBODY I’VE READ SHAKESPEARE, because discussing how a particularly good general interacts with his troops has fuck-all to do with Harry Potter introducing kids to reading.
(Incidentally, I am virtually certain that there must exist Harry Potter slashfics entitled “A Little Touch of Harry in the Night” – and I’d argue that they’re using that allusion far better than Hitchens did.)
OK, genuine question – has anyone ACTUALLY met one of these people in the wild? Because I never have but I feel like I should be checking under my bed for them. In my experience, people proselytise more about bacon.
“Hello ma’am, we’re here to share the truth about the Love of Bacon with you!”
I’ve met evangelical vegans! Then again I do live in hippie central.
We have people who’re evangelical about bacon too. Basically people here talk about food a lot.
I’ve just never seen it. I’ve always experienced the opposite – when people hear I don’t eat meat it’s immediately “but what about bacon? Do you not miss bacon? Or fried chicken? I don’t know how you can live without meat. It’s ridiculous. What do you even EAT? If there were [convoluted, could-only-exist-in-hypothesis scenario], would you eat meat THEN? Well if you would eat it in that scenario why don’t you eat it now? Don’t you worry you’re not getting enough vitamins*? I think you’re just being fussy. We were clearly designed to eat meat. Are you sure about not missing bacon?”
(*Ah yes, Vitamin Meat. Seriously, I’m the only person I know who has a chart with what vitamins/minerals/etc are in what and plans meals this way. The people asking me are usually eating a burger while they have a go at me about my ‘unhealthy’ lifestyle of cooking food from scratch every day.)
I must confess the whole bacon obsession thing passed me by. I get the feeling it’s a very US (or is that US and UK?) sort of thing, it doesn’t seem to be so omnipresent here.
Forgot to add I’ve only known one person whose vegetarianism was unhealthy – and that was simply because he wasn’t eating well, not because he wasn’t eating meat. He wasn’t getting enough protein, and got so unwell his doctor apparently told him to start eating meat (that’s what he told me, anyway). This was in the early 90s, mind you.
Yeah, I think bacon adoration started in the US then came over to the UK, but it’s all online. Just this morning a load of my friends were sharing a picture on FB about bacon ‘being grown from stem cells’. I think it is just a meme thing, but it’s really odd to an outsider!
Doctors can be surprisingly shitty about vegetarian/vegan diets. I’ve learnt not to tell my doctor about my diet, because as soon as you do *every* symptom is caused by ‘lack-of-meat-itis’. I mean, just looking at my wall-chart you can get protein from beans, tofu, beansprouts, lentils, chickpeas, soya milk, wholegrains, seeds, nuts etc.
My mum’s a pescatarian and every month or so will get a bee in her bonnet about something she has ‘heard’ vegans don’t get enough of. This invariably ends with me listing every source of that vitamin/mineral/food group I’ve had in the past week and her going very, very quiet when I ask her if she thinks she’s getting enough.
It’s not that I don’t like bacon, but I’m a bit baffled by the whole OMG MOST AMAZING THING IN THE UNIVERSE IS CURED PIG thing that happened a few years back. And then people started putting it on sweet things like donuts and I was all, um, why?
It’s just an internet thing really, isn’t it? This weird obsession with being ‘manly’. What do manly men do? Eat MEAT and not give a shit about consequences. What meat have people been advised to limit their intake of? BACON. Then you get the whole one-upmanship thing that the internet breeds so well – “I can put it in bread.” “I can put it on a burger. “I can put it on a burger AND make the bread out of bacon.” “I can put it on a burger and make the bread out of bacon and put bacon in the mayonnaise.” “I can put it on a burger and make the bread out of bacon and put bacon in the mayonnaise AND FRY THE ONIONS WITH BACON GREASE AND INSTEAD OF CHIPS I’LL HAVE BACON AND I’LL ALSO INJECT THE CHEESE WITH BACON AND HEY WHY AM I HAVING A HEART ATTA…”
Cassandra, thenat – yeah, me too. I like bacon on occasion, but this “most amazing food” stuff? It’s salty cured pig fercryinoutaloud. And the whole sweet-and-salty thing makes me gag a little. I like my sweet and salty/savoury foods separate. It’s one reason I don’t like the mayonnaise we have here; it has a sweetish flavour.
Donuts, good. Bacon, good. Bacon donuts – why would you do that? The only bit of the bacon I like is the lean meat part anyway – not for health reasons, I just hate the taste and texture of animal fat, and I’d prefer my bacon to lean much more salty than sweet, and people always seem to want to make pork sweet. I like Chinese bacon, tiny pieces stir fried with green beans! Basically I think it’s best as a sort of condiment.
I’ve seen stage magicians on tv use folding wands. Which really makes no sense in the context because one of the reasons they fold is so they can do fake tricks. I would agree that no one in a ‘magic is real’ universe would use a folding wand.
I dislike eating fat too, for the same reasons. Did you ever read James Herriot’s books? There’s a terrifyin’ chapter where he has to eat two huge slabs of pork fat. Cold, boiled pork fat.
*boke* 🙁
Ugh, that sounds horrifying. I can’t even manage pork belly when it’s done all fancy.
Yeah, it grossed me out reading it. JH hated fat of any sort. He only managed this (it was served up by really nice clients he didn’t want to offend by refusing) by smothering it with piccalili.
That is, assuming he didn’t make the story up completely! 🙂
Regarding Buddhism and Gods; The existence of the Hindu gods isn’t questioned in their oldest texts, rather there are lots of references of Buddha interacting with them. So the belief in gods have been part of Buddhism from the beginning – only it’s the case that the gods can’t save you from the cycle of birth-death-rebirth, only reaching enlightement can do that. (But gods can help you with lots of stuff in this life.)
There are also many strands of Asian Buddhism which teaches that there are heavens and hells – only they’re not for eternity, as in Christianity, merely for a very long time and then you’re reborn again.
Now Harris says that you can be a Buddhist if you believe in the “core teachings” (by which I guess he means ethical teachings) of Buddha, even if you don’t believe in reincarnation or anything. But you can’t be a Christian unless you believe that Jesus was born by a virgin etc. That seems completely arbitrary… If one can be a Buddhist by merely believing in Buddhist ethics, it should analogously be possible to be a Christian merely by believing in the ethics of Jesus.
CassandraSays, I agree with bacon working well as a sort of condiment to flavour things. That’s the french way of cooking, where they use “lardons”, which are basically very fatty, salty bacon bits and they use them to flavour stews and things.
In supermarkets you can buy them ready chopped into bits in packets but if you go to a butcher you buy them in what looks like normal streaky bacon slices, but thicker and they are a darker color.
I’ve taken to cooking with bacon a lot this way, as it helps add kick to what might be an otherwise somewhat bland meal.
If you fry the bacon up first in the pan (before adding onions), you can do them in their own fat and then fry everything else in the same fat, so you don’t have to add as much oil which is good.
The French don’t fry them in thin slices and eat them just as they are and I kind of agree with them. I like a bacon sandwich once in a while, but I’d actually choose a sausage sandwich if you gave me the option.
Lardons are also great for flavoring drier meats like chicken. My favourite way is to get chicken pieces with the skin still on, and tuck pieces of lardons and also fresh rosemary and garlic underneath the skin then roast them. Soooo good, as it keeps the chicken moist and yummy.
I like eating chicken like this with courgettes simmered in butter and garlic and then cous cous with the pan juices poured into it.
It’s also great with ratatouille and buttery mashed potatoes with lots and lots of black pepper.
Now I want to go cook things 🙁 I made a really awesome carrot, tomato and roasted red pepper soup yesterday with black pepper and a dash of parprika which i’m having for lunch today, but it’s too damned early!
Are we absolutely sure Skyrimjob isn’t MRAL? I know, I know, douches who think they’re automatically superior due to their taste in X all sound alike, but “Hitchens is the greatest you’re all stupid haters you owe everything to him yeah okay I just started reading his stuff so what” is for whatever reason giving me massive flashbacks to “American Psycho/The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is horrible shit written by snivelling manginas okay I haven’t actually read it but I’ve seen the Wiki articles so I totally know what I’m talking about.”
@Skyrimjob: Coming in a bit late, but I’m an English professor so love the whole debate about style, meaning, reading, etc.
IF you do not intend to be a troll (and I agree with the others who pointed out that the trollishness was not in your liking Hitchens’ writing but in insulting people who didn’t), and if you want to make a case for Hitchens’ writing as good or important or whatever, then there are better ways of doing it.
First, calling people who don’t like what you like stupid, ignorant, or haters, is a really bad way to persuade anybody to listen to you, just saying.
Second, and I’m speaking here as somebody who teaches Stylistics, and who has been involved in the whole debate about what should be taught in English for *ahem* decades now, you cannot prove any author’s stylistic chops or greatness by tossing random quotes at people–as you’ve seen, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work with people who don’t know the author or the text, and it especially doesn’t work with people who are familiar with the author already and who have come to a different valuation of his work (especially the content/message of the work), or with those who are familiar with the genre (in this case, philosophy/theology). For one thing, you have to have (as I think Pecunium said) a criteria that you’re using to judge the quality of the style–and proof (more than one or two short quotes) that the style of the writing meets those criteria more often than not.
Third, you have to understand that there is no objective way to measure greatness or beauty as an inherent quality in a text (or any material object): and, related to this, fourth, there is no inherent connection between the beauty of the work (however defined) and its message (i.e. just because something is well written does not mean it’s not racist, or misogynist, or homophobic).
The idea that there is a correlation is a nice Romantic notion (truth beauty, beauty truth, right Keats, rest in peace), and people like to think it, but the subjectivity of concepts of beauty and for that matter truth undermine it.
I don’t do aesthetics, but one of my best friends in the dept. covers that theory area, and it’s bally complicated.
I don’t know HItchens’ work–but lots of evidence was supplied by people here who do that he advocated some neoconservative, racist, and sexist content.
Based on the Harry Potter quote, which is in a genre I know well, I’d say that he’s missing a good deal about the work and the phenomenon: yes, it was a gateway fantasy for many readers (I know that because my students came to me asking for recommendations for other fantasies like HP when there was that gap in the publishing cycle–their child, who had never read before, now wanted to read). But it was also a work that attracted a large number of adults: some who were familiar with fantasy, some who were not. I’ve taught it in an intro to literature course (not a majors class, but my colleague who teaches Chaucer and Shakespeare, and who wrote on the Shakespearean allusions in Rowling’s work, has taught both upper level English and graduate English courses on it). As a cultural phenomenon, it’s fascinating–i.e. the huge fandom, the argument that the fandom was the first to “come on age” almost completely on the internet (as opposed to previous fandoms that had existed for decades, with some of us moving onto the internet), the cultural narratives around Rowling, and the cultural issues raised in the work (especially constructions of gender and race and ethnicity in Britain–something she’s developed in her most recent publication, CASUAL VACANCY).
I read Rowling’s work.
I read Pullman’s.
I enjoyed much of HP until the last two novels (I have a whole rant about what she set up and then did not follow through with, and what happened to Tonks, etc).
I loathed Pullman’s work (nothing like putting the female protagonist in a coma, and he’s even worse than Lewis at smacking his readers in the face with ALLEGORY–when Tolkien taught me about allegory–I was 10–I suddenly became aware of what had made me uneasy with Narnia). I donated the hardcovers to our English honors club book sale.
I not only bought and saved all of Rowlings, but bought her newest work as well.
There is a long tradition of elite (white straight cis) male intellectuals loathing popular works (yes, I’m looking at YOU Harold Bloom)–it came out in full force with Tolkien, and I think in ways it’s even worse when it’s a woman dares to write (although I wish she’d not fallen back on the default masculine by way of initials) a work that becomes massively popular (and not just with women and children). You might see what Hitchens said about HP as unique, original, shining, etc.–too me, it’s one more variant of the arrogant elitist male claiming that anything popular is garbage, and the plebes who are just too NOT LIKE HIM are {fill in the blank with insult of your choice}.
To some extent, your discourse fell into that category: the claim that people here are hating on Hitchens because his work is just too great, or whatever.
Rather than trying to make objective claims about Hitchens’ greatness (which seems to go hand in hand with insulting anybody who disagrees with you), you’d do better to shift to an “I” voice and a reader response in which you talk about what you found to like in his work, what impressed you, what made you think.
Share that sort of love, and you might find others to chime in with you, even if they changed their mind about the work, or critique the author’s later actions.
For example, I once loved Anne McCaffery’s work (in the late sixties, her work was amongst the few woman-centered texts out there). I eventually came to see problems with much of it–and passed the books on to be read by others. But I can understand why, for some readers at some points, her work is seen as empowering, even feminist–again, it’s not an inherent element of the text–it is what readers make of it.
Anne McCaffery rocks!! I loved her books as a kid! And she WAS one of the few authors who had a woman as the main character that was actually believable. Ahem, quick look at my bookshelves reveals a preponderance of women writers. I guess I was born feminist.
In my mind, McCafferys books are a bit fluffy, but her worlds were fresh (as is Rowlings who clearly had fun playing with the world she created and that’s what kids were responding to I think).
As far as Hitchens, some of his work I liked, but he’s no literary giant. My opinion is that it can be pleasant to listen to him ramble on a bit.
@Pillowinhell: what finally came to skeeve me out was some of the bodice-ripping/rape romance tropes in her work, and the elitism in some of her characters (the failed opera singer, crystal singer, being the last straw), and the later work’s sort of hack quality (rewriting a bunch of earlier episodes from the “drudges'” point of view which came across as horribly classist), and then (alas) some of her behavior and commentary on fans (especially the homophobic commentary, given the situation she set up herself in the Dragon books). But still–telepathic Companion dragons, FTW! And Menolly is still one of my FAVORITE characters. And in 1968 which is when (I remember!) reading the first Lessa story, it was a huge breath of fresh air, and a complete relevation. So some stuff I really loved, but the problematic stuff finally came to outweigh it–but I’m not going to lecture others who love the work against it.
Who are some of your other favorite women authors? *takes out list implements*