Comments by "wvu05" (@wvu05) on "Where Christopher Hitchens Went Wrong" video.

In a debate with Al Sharpton in 2007 on Hardball, the good reverend asked him what our source of moral justice if there is no god. Hitchens refused to answer even though Sharpton repeated the question several times.
5
@kait2972 I guess you've never seen the comedy styling of Ricky Gervais, such "Atheists don't kill people, that's nonsense!" I have heard plenty say that if you eliminate religion, you eliminate war. My point was not to denigrate atheists, but to point out that it is no more fair to saddle every atheist with Stalin and Mao as it is to saddle every theist with suicide bombers or the Crusades or Westboro, and the latter is what anyone does when he/she says that if you eliminate religion you eliminate war.
3
@kait2972 In the debate, Sharpton was refuting the argument that many of the New Atheists made at the time (that still pops up from time to time) that religion is inherently violent and leads to religious wars. I would have liked to have seen Sharpton ask him about the fact that more Christians were killed in the 20th century (mostly by communists) in the name of their faith than the previous 19 combined. The question that Hitchens refused to answer was one that was directly related to an argument that was being made by him and his ilk, so I'd argue that fits the notion of refuting his argument.
1
@kait2972 I do not, but if that question arises from one of his elemental theses, that certainly shows a weakness in the argument.
1
Flightof2Owls Yes, you are getting at something that has bothered a lot of people on both sides of the theism/atheism debate: the fallacy that all who believe in a religion must subscribe to the strict fundamentalist understanding ("Religiulous" is a prominent example of this). Would those same people argue that abolitionists who used the Bible to argue against slavery were not real Christians because they didn't use the textualist arguments that allowed slavery? The irony being that fundamentalism itself is a response to modernity, not the traditional understanding of religion. (On a related note, many argue that Westboro violates the spirit of the faith because they violate the understanding of the value of the person, which is the same argument abolitionists made 150 years ago.)
1