Americans might think we should be proud to allow Christopher Hitchens to speak like this, but I disagree: this is the way it ought to be. Normal discourse. How ideas are weighed - with none being sacred.
There are so many things in the normal day-to-day that, unless you're on stage or television, can't seriously be talked about - much less disagreed with. Now'a'days an average conversation on the street can be fraught with danger. (Try talking to a fan of Oprah.) It's amazing how many believers (in whatever) will seek revenge for the blasphemy of hearing someone thinks they're wrong.
And it's my experience that lying, to get that revenge, is no hinderance to their actions.
That universal defense (which easily connects Osama bin Laden with the average NewAge environmentalist) is almost as amazing as the outlandish beliefs themselves, but of course, not quite. It's one thing to know that someone is out to get you. It's quite another to know they're out to get you because you don't think they can shoot invisible fire out of their fingers, or crystals have healing power, or water is medicine, or Buddha showed the way, or the planet is 3,000 (or however many) years old, or that Jesus is coming back to save some people and not others, or Allah knows everything, or you better recycle. This - even more than politics - is what we fight about.
Or don't. But it's still there.
So no, my fellow Americans, I don't think there's anything extraordinary about Christopher Hitchens being able to say the things he's said, here, over the years.
What's extraordinary is, in the year 2010 - in what the rest of the planet refers to as "The New World" - it's necessary that he's had to argue against these dangerously silly ideas at all.
keep in mind, you live in SF, and talking to a random person on the street is a lot different than many other places. believers congregate in SF.
ReplyDeletethe problem with atheism, and i say this as an atheist, is that origins have not been explained. the theory of abiogenisis has not been substantiated. The Miller-Urey experiment was interesting but the results show only that some material can be made spontaneously.
for replication, you need a machine, a protein. proteins are incredibly complex, and so far, science has not shown how a protein could spontaneously evolve. Although I do think we're close to finding this out. Check our the work of Jack Szostak and gerry Joyce if your interested in Rna based spontaneous life.
It's coming, but not all the theory is there yet.
Regards,
JON