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IanAG
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I’m not sure I disagreed with his right to criticise, but in the same debate with John Lennox he called her a fraud and a charlatan.
He gave no explanation as to why he thought that to be the case.
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He gave no explanation as to why he thought that to be the case.
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IanAG
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Thanks everyone for a lively discussion. It has helped me a lot. I’m going to withdraw now as I’ve devoted as much energy to this subject as I’m prepared to, but I will commit to readinh more of his writing in an attempt to better understand his position.
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Freddy
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You said this:Freddy:
I’m not sure I disagreed with his right to criticise…
I’ll check out his debate. Although I think I’ve seen it before. I’ll get back to you, Ian.
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IanAG
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Thanks for this.You said this:
IanAG:
You helped me to realise that in my anger I had fallen on my own sword…I believe strongly that we have to respect the individual whilst challenging their thoughts and behaviours.
We all have a God given dignity as human beings and that needs to be respected.
In future I will aim my challenges at Hitch’s ideology and not at his person.
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Freddy
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No problem, Ian. You’ll have plenty to work with in regard to his ideology!Freddy:
Thanks for this.You said this:
IanAG:
You helped me to realise that in my anger I had fallen on my own sword…I believe strongly that we have to respect the individual whilst challenging their thoughts and behaviours.
We all have a God given dignity as human beings and that needs to be respected.
In future I will aim my challenges at Hitch’s ideology and not at his person.
In passing, I just watched the debate. There was no misquote of the bible. And there was also no discussion of Mother Theresa - possibly there was a second debate at some time? An interesting and respectful debate nevertheless. I made some notes but they’re not really relevant to the op.
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neophyte
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An apt analogy. My wife once managed to drag me to one of his concerts with the E-Street. They all stunk… couldn’t play, sing or dance… NONE of them could… Clarence’s (RIP) best solo could be picked up by a seventh-grader in about five minutes. But it was a GREAT concert because he knows how to work a crowd.
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Freddy
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Gee, I have to disagree with your impression of their musical ability. But saw them in Sydney and was similarly blown away. You actually feel exhausted when it’s over. Listening to his new album this past week and reading his autobiography.Freddy:
An apt analogy. My wife once managed to drag me to one of his concerts with the E-Street. They all stunk… couldn’t play, sing or dance… NONE of them could… Clarence’s (RIP) best solo could be picked up by a seventh-grader in about five minutes. But it was a GREAT concert because he knows how to work a crowd.
Apologies to op for derailing the thread…
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scousekiwi
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Hitchens was certainly intelligent and knowledgeable, but I wouldn’t read too much into his being educated at Oxford. He “went up” to Oxford (as they say) in 1967. Things were different in those days to how they are today.
Hitchens was the son of a commander in the Royal Navy and was educated at The Leys School, a highly prestigious public school in Cambridge. In the 1960s, Oxford and Cambridge would still have been dominated by boys coming up from the public schools. Some colleges even had arrangements with particular public schools whereby some places at the college, sometimes with scholarships attached, were reserved for old boys of those schools, although I do not believe that The Leys School itself had any such arrangements. In the 1960s, admission to Oxford or Cambridge would not have been automatic for boys from public schools, but the admissions process would not have been anything like as competitive as it is today.
Also worth noting is that in 1967 all of Oxford’s colleges, with the exception of the graduate colleges, were single-sex. While girls would have made up 50% of the population of potential applicants, only five out of the university’s (then) 28 undergraduate colleges were women’s colleges, meaning that boys had almost five times as many colleges to which they could apply. With 50% of the population competing for admission to five colleges and the other 50% competing for admission to 23 colleges, boys obviously had much less competition than they do today.
A third-class degree at a British university is really so bad that one would almost have to make an effort to get one. In US terms, a third is equivalent to a GPA of 2.3-2.7 or a letter grade C+/B-. One can only assume that Hitchens spent his time at Oxford focusing on something other than his degree course. He was presumably capable of doing better, so the only plausible explanation is that he spent his time there engaging in extracurricular activities and having a good time.
(1) That is factually incorrect, and (2) I am not sure what your point is. Hitchens went to Balliol; Clinton went to Univ. If you are going to trash people’s reputations based on where they went to university, you will have to take into account that other Univ alumni include Clement Attlee, C.S. Lewis, and Stephen Hawking, and, perhaps more pertinently, Anthony Fisher, the current Catholic archbishop of Sydney, John Finnis, the very conservative Catholic legal scholar, and Neil Gorsuch, a US Supreme Court justice appointed by Donald Trump. Balliol alumni include Liberal prime minster H.H. Asquith and Conservatives Harold Macmillan, Edward Heath, and Boris Johnson. If none of them are respectable enough for you, the late Lord Bingham of Cornhill, once Britain’s most senior judge, was also educated at Balliol.
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Freddy
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Quite a life he lived. Should anyone be interested, here is a well written obit in The Guardian: Christopher Hitchens obituary | Christopher Hitchens | The Guardian
You are obviously more informed about the British university system, and Oxbridge in particular, than I am, however, I don’t come at it from a position of total ignorance (not saying you suggested this, you didn’t).HomeschoolDad:
Hitchens was certainly intelligent and knowledgeable, but I wouldn’t read too much into his being educated at Oxford. He “went up” to Oxford (as they say) in 1967. Things were different in those days to how they are today.
Hitchens was the son of a commander in the Royal Navy and was educated at The Leys School, a highly prestigious public school in Cambridge. In the 1960s, Oxford and Cambridge would still have been dominated by boys coming up from the public schools. Some colleges even had arrangements with particular public schools whereby some places at the college, sometimes with scholarships attached, were reserved for old boys of those schools, although I do not believe that The Leys School itself had any such arrangements. In the 1960s, admission to Oxford or Cambridge would not have been automatic for boys from public schools, but the admissions process would not have been anything like as competitive as it is today.
Also worth noting is that in 1967 all of Oxford’s colleges, with the exception of the graduate colleges, were single-sex. While girls would have made up 50% of the population of potential applicants, only five out of the university’s (then) 28 undergraduate colleges were women’s colleges, meaning that boys had almost five times as many colleges to which they could apply. With 50% of the population competing for admission to five colleges and the other 50% competing for admission to 23 colleges, boys obviously had much less competition than they do today.
A third-class degree at a British university is really so bad that one would almost have to make an effort to get one. In US terms, a third is equivalent to a GPA of 2.3-2.7 or a letter grade C+/B-. One can only assume that Hitchens spent his time at Oxford focusing on something other than his degree course. He was presumably capable of doing better, so the only plausible explanation is that he spent his time there engaging in extracurricular activities and having a good time
I suppose I am looking at the matter through the tunnel vision of someone in the United States who was the first generation to go to university, and had high enough GPA and test scores (ACT/SAT) to get a full scholarship to an unassuming, utterly unprestigious state university. I view any higher education, regardless of how humble it might be, as better than nothing at all. Your description of the background and education of Hitchens, while far from having been the best, is still a description of something that is far better than what most people have. Many intelligent people spend their entire lives at menial labor and in humble circumstances because they do not have these kinds of privileges.
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scousekiwi
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I can certainly see where you are coming from, so I hope that I do not come across as uncharitable. I suspect that I am somewhat older than you, as it’s been a couple of decades since my children were in any kind of schooling, but I probably come from a similar perspective in that I grew up in a working-class family in Liverpool, and it was considered to be an achievement to end up working in an office, let alone going into higher education and a professional career.
I am probably a little mean-spirited because I meet quite a lot of these older chaps who went to Oxford or Cambridge from a privileged background. Many seem to be of no more than average intelligence, but managed to get into a prestigious Oxbridge college because it was a family tradition and they’d gone to the right kind of school. When I first began to know educated professional people, I was still in awe of anyone who had gone to Oxbridge, as I had always been told that these were the intellectual crème de la crème. However, I soon realised that while some were genuinely brilliant, there were also many who had ended up there more or less as their birthright.
I am probably a little mean-spirited because I meet quite a lot of these older chaps who went to Oxford or Cambridge from a privileged background. Many seem to be of no more than average intelligence, but managed to get into a prestigious Oxbridge college because it was a family tradition and they’d gone to the right kind of school. When I first began to know educated professional people, I was still in awe of anyone who had gone to Oxbridge, as I had always been told that these were the intellectual crème de la crème. However, I soon realised that while some were genuinely brilliant, there were also many who had ended up there more or less as their birthright.
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FiveLinden
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I wasn’t aware (or have forgotten) this, in the Guardian obit:
It was while working for the Statesman that he experienced a “howling, lacerating moment in my life”: the death of his adored mother in Athens, apparently in a suicide pact with her lover, a lapsed priest.
Anyone know more?
Edit: found his account. Buried in this:
It was while working for the Statesman that he experienced a “howling, lacerating moment in my life”: the death of his adored mother in Athens, apparently in a suicide pact with her lover, a lapsed priest.
Anyone know more?
Edit: found his account. Buried in this:
Loading…
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
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I am 60, for what that’s worth. Some of my views of higher education are becoming a bit dated, for instance, thinking of residential college away from one’s hometown as the ideal, when that is a far more pricey proposition than it was 40 years ago.
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Freddy
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If you enjoy his writing (a little overblown for some), the book is worth reading. The story of his mother’s death could have been taken from an E. M. Forster novel.
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FiveLinden
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My problem with his writing is that he uses facts as needed to bolster his opinions rather than seeking and revealing them as of interest in themselves and then expressing a conclusion. He’s basically the writing opposite of Darwin!
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Freddy
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I don’t think anyone could accuse him of lacking opinions…Freddy:
My problem with his writing is that he uses facts as needed to bolster his opinions rather than seeking and revealing them as of interest in themselves and then expressing a conclusion. He’s basically the writing opposite of Darwin!
As we would say here in deepest red-state America, “you got THAT right!”
(And I still say that the mainstream media dubbed conservative, Republican states “red states” because red carries connotations of being “hot”, temperamental, angry, irrational, emotional, and what have you, whereas blue carries connotations of coolness, calmness, cerebrality, and rational tranquility. Read Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders. Eppur si muove!)
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goout
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Mystery is integral to being Christian. We can talk about having a sure faith, but it’s not the stuff of facts. I can recite the creed with all my heart and believe it. But at the end of the day, if Christianity is said to have certitude, it’s trust in Christ. These are personal qualities of relationship not material evidence. (although the material world reinforces this also in ways)Dan_Defender:
You’re lucky to have the faith. But as for the certainty, I’m with Voltaire.Freddy:
No uncertainty, because I have faith.
“I know my wife is continually faithful to me” would be an expression of that type of certitude. I do have material experience that reinforces my faithful trust, and I have personal knowledge of her that goes beyond material evidence.
“I know God exists and loves us” is something I am personally certain of, but cannot give factual proofs for. And there are times where skepticism appears in this faith, and doubt begins to creep in. Reason cannot always satisfy this gulf between us and God.
That is where trust holds the day. Faith and reason work together. Mystery is an accepted part of faith. There are unknowns, and those unknowns are not cause for rejection, but draw us in to deeper searching. Paul expressed this well as “seeing dimly through a glass”.
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scousekiwi
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That is usually the preferred method of contrarians and polemicists. I didn’t read the whole of The God Delusion, but I read enough to get the impression that Dawkins had to a large extent trawled fundamentalist Christian websites seeking heterodox and anomalous opinions that seemed to prove all his worst assumptions about Christianity. He then struggles when he encounters moderate Christians, because it often seems that the only kind of Christians he really wants to engage with are the ones who are completely unreasonable and easily rebutted. A third strand of his thinking is his odd cultural attachment to Anglicanism, which he seems to regard as an acceptable form of Christianity on the grounds that it is the default religion of upper-class English people such as himself. I appreciate that his deviates from Hitchens, but I find it difficult to think of the one and not the other.
Religious people, of course, are equally guilty of this sort of reasoning. I have often come across hopelessly illogical arguments such as:
- The Nazis tried to replace mainstream Christianity with an incoherent and contradictory amalgam of heterodox Christianity, northern European paganism, Indian religions, and atheism and sporadically and haphazardly persecuted Christians. Therefore Christianity must be the one true religion and the antithesis of fascism.
- Tens of millions of people were murdered by atheist regimes in the Eastern Bloc, communist China, etc. Therefore atheism is inherently murderous and atheists had better quit harping on about the crusades, the inquisition, etc.
- Men who have sex with men are statistically more likely to have STIs than heterosexuals. This proves that prohibitions against homosexuality in the Abrahamic religions have been revealed by God.
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Freddy
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I’ve just done some reading on that and was astonished to find out that the colours have only been recognised as ‘official’ since 2000. I always assumed that they’d always been red for Reps and blue for Dems. Even though there is almost universal association of red with left wing parties. And even though I have followed all recent elections quite closely (I go back far enough to remember JFK).Freddy:
As we would say here in deepest red-state America, “you got THAT right!”
(And I still say that the mainstream media dubbed conservative, Republican states “red states” because red carries connotations of being “hot”, temperamental, angry, irrational, emotional, and what have you, whereas blue carries connotations of coolness, calmness, cerebrality, and rational tranquility. Read Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders. Eppur si muove!)
Interesting wiki on the matter here: Red states and blue states - Wikipedia.
And an interesting factoid: Up until the Second World War, boys were generally dressed in pink and girls in blue. Pink was seen as more ‘masculine’. Then for some obscure reason it flipped. Go figure.
I’ll put the book on my ‘pending’ list. I’m buying them quicker than I can read them at the moment (Curse you Kindle!)
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