God Is Not Great - Religion Poisons Everything

[Vaporous]

C-Span With Hitchens.

Pretty interesting.

[Durandal]

Saw Christopher Hitchens on The Daily Show tonight. It was nice to hear him not plugging the Iraq War and actually making sense. But I've always felt that Jon Stewart has a soft spot for religion. He has no qualms with pointing out the Bush administration's bullshit (which is just meant to make everyone feel better), but when it's religion that's meant to comfort people, oh well, then it's okay.

Indeed. It was quite disturbing to see the way he was basically arguing that it's OK to sell something that's totally false or illogical as long as it makes people feel good. Isn't that how America talked itself into the Iraq War?

Hitchens didn't exactly have the best responses, either. But then again, I also noticed that Stewart was interrupting him a lot more frequently than other guests with opposing viewpoints. (He let John McCain get several complete sentences that were bullshit right-wing evasions in there.) Hitchens just speaks very slowly, so he's easy to interrupt.

And of course, Stewart doesn't see religion as a harmful delusion, unlike the Iraq War. To him, religions are all good and pure at heart, and it's humans who "twist" them.

[Darth Wong]

That's a very common attitude among people who have not seriously inspected their own religious doctrines and scriptures. I suspect that Jon Stewart is one of those people who thinks that Christianity and Judaism are both these touchy-feely charitable belief systems and that all of the hatemongering you see from "extremists" is due to them taking some part of the Bible "out of context".

People like him really need to be forced to read the Bible, so they will see that it is not taken out of context, and the Bible really is rather intolerant. As Rebecca once put it, she didn't drop Christianity because I tried to de-convert her, because I never did that. In fact, I did not put up my anti-creationism website and webpages until after she stopped going to church. She dropped Christianity because I encouraged her to study the Bible before saying she believed in it. She studied it, and then said "I can't believe in this any more".