Greg Laden's Blog

Hitchens really does seem to try to mess with the format here and he does seem to be really rude in this and his rudeness allows Souza to look better. Hitchen scores some good points but Souza does really come out ahead. Souza ignores Hitchen's point about how early facism was connected to Christianity, but does come out well with his comments on later dictatorships. Souza's comparison however to the Inquisition should strike anyone watching as immediately bad for one simple reason; the world population was much smaller then and humans were in many ways not as well organized.

Hitchens in general seems to be making what I would see as a critical error here that he seems to frequently miss (and PZ actually seems to get): the argument that religion causes evil isn't necessary. The argument that people are about as bad with religion as without is sufficient. It is a much easier argument to make and it has almost identical consequences.

All of that said, debating this sort of issue to a large extent at all implicitly accepts the fallacy of the appeal-to- consequences. Whether or not religion is good overall is not very relevant to whether or not some religion is correct (I say not very relevant rather than irrelevant due to a simply hypothetical- imagine if a certain religion believed that there was divine intervention to keep their true believers moral and the religion had a significant number of people and the fraction of that religion that was convicted of crimes was very tiny. Then the appeal-to-consequences isn't an appeal to consequences but a test of divine intervention).

Overall though I really think Hitchen's needs to work on his debate presentation and rhetoric.

Posted by: Joshua Zelinsky | December 19, 2007 10:55 PM