This isn't really anything new. There's a cottage industry of people like Hitchens or Dawkins who write nonsense about religion to the enjoyment of neckbeards everywhere. After all, it's easy to take something you don't understand and then write about it for a target audience made up of people who also don't understand it. It's also easy to refute something when you create your opponent for the sole purpose of refuting it. My favorite discussion of this comes from this review of Dawkins' The God Delusion by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It begins:[Hitchens' Razor] is presented as universal, and it is taken that way by Atheists who intend to deny any responsibility for giving rational reasons for their rejection of theist evidence (either disciplined deduction, or material empirical evidence).
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.
I don't ever see people criticizing Hitchens' ideas - and those of any of the Four Horsemen. It's as if you're either a stouch atheist or might as well burn in Hell. How did he/they create their opponent when it comes to religion?It's also easy to refute something when you create your opponent for the sole purpose of refuting it.
Not sure what this means. The problem is right there in your question. "Religion" is a massively broad term, and means wildly different things to different people. Even when they talk about Christianity specifically, they just decide that Christians believe X even when that's either a misinterpretation, outright wrong, or at best something only believed by the minority. They isolate elements of religion without looking at them in context, and then act like it's some major rhetorical victory when that element seems strange. Quoting again from the review I linked in my previous post: Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.I don't ever see people criticizing Hitchens' ideas - and those of any of the Four Horsemen. It's as if you're either a stouch atheist or might as well burn in Hell.
How did he/they create their opponent when it comes to religion?
Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. [...]
I see. So, they're criticizing food without taking care to see what different kinds of food there are and how people eat it. They also don't take into account that "food" means different things to different people: there are people who enjoy the sensations food brings (kinda like spiritualists), there are people who enjoy cooking food by recipe (sorta like theologists), there are people who eat certain kinds of food because it's the social norm (a bit like the "social" churchgoers)... and so on. Thank you for elaborating. Ever seen Hitchens criticized in the mainstream media by anyone other than a pastor or a bishop?I don't ever see people criticizing Hitchens' ideas - and those of any of the Four Horsemen. It's as if you're either a stouch atheist or might as well burn in Hell.
I see what you mean, and you're right, I think that's a problem. Unfortuantely the media generally has this binary and arbitrary idea of "balance," and so naturally the only person who could balance out a militant atheist would be a professional theist. The rest of your comment is, I think, a fair analogy. Or perhaps to tweak it a little: Hitchens (or whomever) once saw someone carrying a pineapple. He thought to himself, that potato is all spikey, it must be really unpleasant to eat. But that person is surely eating it, so they must be really dumb. It's like, he (and Dawkins before him) didn't even understand how this thing is used.Ever seen Hitchens criticized in the mainstream media by anyone other than a pastor or a bishop?
Fuck me. Are you actually telling me you agree with me? After this rattling me to no end for the whole day... I dunno how I feel about your comment, but it's a good feeling. I can see how that unfolds. I've said it before: I don't understand religion. I don't understand how a person can be religious, or can believe in a deity (or multiple), or follow religious texts with that special reverence. I'm a natural atheist. I'm also an angry motherfucker. I've been angry for a long time, and I expect to continue to be angry for a long time in the future. I've ranted about religiosity and religion before. I was of very low opinion of religion and the believers. What Hitchens et al. seem to me are myself if I hadn't stopped ranting. It's what would happen had I not met rd95, who, to me, represents the brightest side of human existence - and just happens to be religious. "So maybe religion is not an awful thing after all" that came to me because of that didn't occur to Hitchens et al., so they kept on ranting. That's my take. I expect to be many layers of wrong about it, because life and human beings are complex and can't be represented by a single event. It does seem strikingly similar, though, and I'm trying to project my blueprint onto the situation to see how well it fits.It's like, he (and Dawkins before him) didn't even understand how this thing is used.
The complexity you describe is basically the point, and why those folks are wrong and shitty.