Hedges Debates Hitchens
Those Truthdig readers who are following the Chris Hedges vs Sam Harris exchanges 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.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.
WAIT BEFORE YOU GO...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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Americans’ discomfort with other peoples' religious faiths goes hand in hand with Islamophobia. Americans’ discomfort with other peoples' religious faiths goes hand in hand with Islamophobia.
"The majority of Americans identify technically as Christians,” writes Amanda Marcotte at AlterNet, “but a deeper look at how our people act, believe, and think shows that we’re not at all a ‘Christian nation,’ but a largely secular nation that suffers a small but vocal minority of theocracy-minded conservatives.”
People who knew the man accused of gunning down three Muslim American students in North Carolina -- an act many suspect to be a hate crime motivated by cultural differences -- describe him as angry and lacking compassion.
Primatologist Frans de Waal pays religion the ultimate atheist compliment: Religion is so great that we humans acquired it through the natural process of evolution.Primatologist Frans de Waal pays religion the ultimate atheist compliment in his book: Religion is so great that we humans acquired it through the natural process of evolution.
"The appearance of atheists, a growing wariness of religious controls on society, as well as the continuing lure of jihad and ultraconservatism signal a breakdown in the conformity and consensus that has marked the Saudi religious field in the recent past," Caryle Murphy writes at GlobalPost.
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