Hedges Debates Hitchens

Those Truthdig readers who attended or are following the Chris Hedges vs. Sam Harris debate on our site may be interested to read that Hedges subsequently faced off with atheist author and provocateur Christopher Hitchens for a debate in Berkeley about religion and politics.

Also, check out this funny and insightful interview with Hitchens.

AlterNet:

Visualize this spectacle: a debate between a neocon and a progressive. The subject is religion. One of them is there to defend religion, to praise God, to cheerlead for even the most devout. The other—his opponent—is an atheist. He skewers deities and those who follow deities. He calls them evil. Toxic. Childish. He mocks doctrine. Railing that the devout want to kill us and control the world, he is on a mission, as it were, to vanquish missions. You’d expect the liberal to be the atheist and the neocon to vouch for the devout. No-brainer, right? Well, no.

As Christopher Hitchens debated Chris Hedges in a Berkeley auditorium last Thursday night, it was Hedges who praised the pious. And it was 9/11-neocon Hitchens who railed against “Abrahamic man-made filthy propaganda,” proclaiming that “human emancipation begins when this nonsense ends.”

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