CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

What is pol's opinion on this guy?

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Sup Forums is too young to remember him

great debater though

His brother is better

youtube.com/watch?v=WI4cE1iHER0

Millennials remember everything, since it's on YouTube.

the right hitchens died

Peter kitchens is better

> talk shit about Allah all the time
> die of throat cancer

Poetic justice.

Disgustingly good debator and very good writer.

His narration of the God delusion is excellent.

Ive tried to think how he would react to everything that's happened since his death and the less cynical side of me says he would have gotten a red pill.

He hated the Clinton and he hated Hussein and his modern day Stalinism which I liked him for at the time.

His hitch slaps are still pretty nasty to this day.

damn they're identical

Wrong Hitchens died

don't worry, I'll tip my own fedora

>known for attacking Christianity
>(((turns))) out to be Jewish

Remarkable orator but his arguments were always quite flawed desu. He's the kind of guy who could convince a lot of people he's right, but when closely examining his arguments they're almost always shaky or outright bad. To me he's the perfect example of how it takes a smart person to believe a stupid idea. He's so smart he could dress bad arguments up well enough that even he believed them, a long with many others.

For example, he would (wisely) avoid whether or not God was real, since it's an impossible thing to argue on either side, and focus instead on the validity of Religions. He would criticize Religions as immoral, and almost everyone of his arguments was an appeal to the witnesses morality of why a religion is wrong. Yet, he could never explain what his basis for morality as an atheist is further than "dude I just feel it. I just know. It's immoral because duh". He criticizes religion as being based off of feelings and not objectivity yet when asked what morality is or how he can claim a basis for morality he has literally no argument other than "it's obvious. It's just there. Everybody knows it."

He could not give any answer for where his morality comes from other than "it exists because it obviously exists" yet tries to paint religions as immoral.

Overall I think he was a remarkably intelligent man but I think he got stuck up his own ass to the point where he couldn't see, and refused to see, his own flawed thinking. And unfortunately he infected many of his viewers with the same issue.

t. Hitchen's biggest fan before I read Aristotle

He was an interesting character and a fantastic and moralistic writer that was always funny and witty in pretty much any topic whether he was right or wrong.

Unless you know quite a lot of the topic he's speaking about, such as religion or politics. Then he becomes an insufferable hack.

The thing is if you straight up state that morality is not objective - it's just somebody's opinion (or even a lot of people's concurring opinion) then you just get dismissed as a 2edgy4u faggot

Like people will not consider that morality is not some absolute truth - ironically because it makes them subjectively feel bad

we all took philosophy 101 m8

C Hitchens apparently didn't

kill all muslims

you can be a secular moral absolutist though

the idea of universal ethics has been the mainstream thought in western philosophy ever since Kant

the idea that the only consistent or "logical" ethics are those based in religion is an infantile one

I liked the cunt, was really sad when he died. But my opinions and ideas have moved on, and I'd hate to have him still here acting as cucked as Dawkins and Harris are...

Most of his statements about morality are just bizarre claims from an atheist though. Not only does he make constant pleas to morality but he also famously makes arguments like "do you honestly believe your morality would change if you found out there was no God? would you see things as okay that you currently see as wrong? I mean come on" to which the obvious answer is yes. Things like lying for someones benefit, impure thoughts, or victim-less crimes obviously take on a completely different moral frame depending on whether or not there's a God but he would just use his orating skills to paint it up as as a pretty "are you serious?!?! are you kidding me!?" type of argument

Hitchens was a fierce advocate of Black Label, as I am, and for a good reason: it's the preferred drink of tyrants.

a philo-semite

wow hardcore

People like you scare me. Only reason you don't like, rape, steal... is because of God?

My morality didn't really change after I left the faith.... wasn't as paranoid about sex before marriage but that was about it.

>omg i'm literally shaking right now

Did you even read the post? my examples were:
>Things like lying for someones benefit, impure thoughts, or victim-less crimes
not rape or stealing

>the idea of universal ethics has been the mainstream thought in western philosophy ever since Kant
>ever since Kant

u wot

Try the Greeks.

And no one is making the argument that you need to appeal to religion for ethics, nor that secular moral absolutism does not exist.

Based. The wrong Hitchens died. Would've supported Trump.

Really comes down to how you stand on your principles though dunnit
Like if there is an omniscient god then my usual strategy of pragmatism (i.e; projecting a facade of acting morally on principle to cover up acting moral when its pragmatic to) will fall down as deception is impossible

Then it's a question of accepting coercion via hell vs taking a stand and taking the consequences (metaphysical civil disobidience if you like)

If you're taking a stand based on principle then your morality shouldn't change just because you'll be punished for it

Black label is the best johnnie walker but it's not a patch on even 12 year glenfiddich; let alone 15 or 18

eh western ethics took a pretty massive detour from the greeks to where it was essentially synonymous with christian ethics
Kant and other enlightenment thinkers were among the first to almost entirely disregard religion in forming modern western philosophy

>And no one is making the argument that you need to appeal to religion for ethics, nor that secular moral absolutism does not exist.
that is quite literally what the leafposter just did or at the very least that Hitchens in particular had no consistent moral base because he was an atheist

How can you come up with a secular principle against a victim-less crime though? There's certain things I don't think you can make a secular argument for that aren't based on some kind of superstition, even if it's unconscious.

Either way, the point is not what your answer to his argument would be. The point is that it's a bad argument, yet it was always one of his favourites.

I did not argue you need Religion for ethics, only that as an atheist you cannot claim ethics are a given. You'd have to first make your argument for your "secular moral absolutism" first before you can start making arguments as though it was an obvious universal given like Hitchens always did

don't know shit about him but this video is funny as fuck
youtube.com/watch?v=PW4dYG9VjgA

Faggot atheist and worst Hitchens

This is now a Morality Man thread

Who the fuck is this guy?

>literally the thread title and file name

Author of a quote is a fucking anglo.

a hitchens with a gun. this pleases me.

>> literally meine opinion

>eh western ethics took a pretty massive detour from the greeks to where it was essentially synonymous with christian ethics


Absolutely not, the same system of natural law that eventually came from the Greeks (not saying this is the first Greek attempt at "universal ethics") was refined into the natural law of the medieval era. You could remove God and focus on teleology and get the basically the same ethics, said differently.


Modernity is a revolution away from Scholasticism (which is one part a revolution against "organized religion" and another part against Aristotelian thought) but still struggles to recover some replacement answer to the system they moved away from, which is why they continued to use the Scholastic idea of individual rights and yet severed all the necessary elements to establish it logically, such as final causes.


>that is quite literally what the leafposter just did or at the very least that Hitchens in particular had no consistent moral base because he was an atheist


user, that's literally never said. You're imagining things.

>morality without religion

No. One of the problems atheists have is the unbelievers' assertion that it is possible to determine what is right and what is wrong without God. They have a fundamental inability to concede that to be effectively absolute a moral code needs to be beyond human power to alter.

On this misunderstanding is based a supposed conundrum about whether there is any good deed that could be done only by a religious person, and not done by a Godless one. Like all such questions, this contains another question: what is good, and who is to decide what is good?

Left to himself, Man can in a matter of minutes justify the incineration of populated cities; the deportation, slaughter, disease and starvation of inconvenient people and the mass murder of the unborn.
I have heard people who believe themselves to be good, defend all these things, and convince themselves as well as others. Quite often the same people will condemn similar actions committed by different countries, often with great vigour.
For a moral code to be effective, it must be attributed to, and vested in, a non-human source. It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself.

Its most powerful expression is summed up in the words 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends'.

>not posting morality man instead

what a wanker

>based post
>1933

My point is ethics are a given to a certain value of a given
If you're seen to be acting consistantly unethically then you're likely to be shunned and/or jailed
Obviously then it makes sense to act ethically under observation

But you can't argue there must be a god because otherwise ethics cant be absolute
Thats argument from consequences and it dosent work
Just because the idea of there being no absolute ethics displeases you dosen't make it wrong

Morality innate to reality coming from God via a book along and not also present in the study of nature is a modern conception. A major element of medieval natural law is teleology, for instance.

To be fair, even as a theist you must defend on rational grounds your system of ethics and its legitimacy.

>If you're seen to be acting consistantly unethically then you're likely to be shunned and/or jailed

Hence why I used examples of victim less crimes or impure thoughts, because then the utilitarianism you just tried to invoke cannot apply. Universal absolute ethics cannot be a given as an atheist.

>But you can't argue there must be a god because otherwise ethics cant be absolute
No one is arguing about whether or not there is a God. Don't goal post shift.

>debater
A master, if you will.

Like Dawkins who was raped by his priest they were all butthurt alter boys but at least some snapped out of it and went public with the abuse, life is short. The more often this happens the more often parents will think twice before leaving their children in the custody of holy monsters, child traffickers, sodomites and clergy in general.

there is no reason to reinvent the wheel every time you make a comment on morality m8
in fact the statement that you must lay out a complete moral code to argue that child molestation is bad is absurd to the point of inanity

no one is suggesting that there was no such thing as ethics in the middle ages
point is medieval scholasticism but one ethical base and one whose entire foundation is religion
truly and fully secular ethics emerge in the early enlightenment period and the point is those ethics, as exemplified by Kant's own work, are just as complete as the older Aristotelian-Aquinasan view

the idea that because the metaphysics are not based on Aristotelian thought there is something missing is willfully ignorant

Those are grand claims with no arguments of substance

no you don't
the only legitimacy is you need is that it's the word of god
is it good because god says so or does god say it because it's good? doesn't really matter because god knows better and you follow his will

You can argue for or refute the legitimacy yes, but arguing as a theist means by definition you can claim universal moral absolutes. It is a given with being a theist, you can only refute it by refuting the legitimacy. Atheism is different, it has no absolute morality attached to its claim, in fact it has the opposite. If you accept atheism as legitimate then you are accepting that there is no absolute moral standard

That's a common argument i've heard as an atheist though

As for victimless crimes, they simply need less of a performance of justification (outside of law enforcement) to be accepted by peers
For example i'll smoke a joint with my friends but i'd not kill somebody infront of them
It's pragmatism not utilitarianism (as utilitarianism is the greatest good for most people, my system is simply the greatest good for myself)

Claiming an absolute unchanging morality untouchable by human interpretation as an atheist is most certainly not "the wheel". It can hardly be established in the first place, let alone established well enough that it's a given forever.

>the only legitimacy is you need is that it's the word of god
That's not a rational argument though, just an appeal to authority

>germany in 2016

Exactly my point. Victim-less crimes as an atheist compared to a theist take on an entirely different frame and will no doubt come to different conclusions. Exactly my point of why HItchens argument that morality wouldn't change between the transition between a theist to an atheist is a bad argument.

You also go on to demonstrate why atheist morality is not absolute which Hitchens always argues as though it was.

I think you're slipping to far into trying to argue our world views against each other when I'm just pointing out how flawed Hitchens arguments are. Not that there's anything wrong with have an argument on that topic, just that I'm really not interested in a long winded Sup Forums debate about our world views. I'm only pointing out how flawed HItchens arguments are

He loved men's butts and complaining about religion. That sums it up.

I think he, like Bill Hicks, was poisoned by the globalists to silence popular voices of dissent, especially free-thinking men who didn't worship women.

>no one is suggesting that there was no such thing as ethics in the middle ages

Of course not, what I'm doing is deliberately contending the line "the idea of universal ethics has been the mainstream thought in western philosophy ever since Kant".

I do this by arguing that they have been present since the early days of the western intellectual tradition and are present in intellectual traditional that modernity moved away from (Scholasticism) as well.


>point is medieval scholasticism but one ethical base and one whose entire foundation is religion. truly and fully secular ethics emerge in the early enlightenment period and the point is those ethics, as exemplified by Kant's own work, are just as complete as the older Aristotelian-Aquinasan view


I would say the claim of "foundation" is very shaky as the Scholastics carry the intellectual torch of the Greeks for some time but you new focus on secular ethics is totally new and seems like a moving of goalposts. Ethical systems that do not need to relate to theism directly exist as early as the Greeks and I've already told you how well natural law is still viable without the appeals to God.


>the idea that because the metaphysics are not based on Aristotelian thought there is something missing is willfully ignorant


...?

What?

>the only legitimacy is you need is that it's the word of god

No, you need to ensure it is the word of God. But more importantly, you shouldn't be commenting about a judgement about "theists" with a view only relatable to a few religions.

>If you accept atheism as legitimate then you are accepting that there is no absolute moral standard
this is blatantly false
you should have told me at the start that you don't know anything about modern philosophy

there are two things wrong here
>Claiming an absolute unchanging morality untouchable by human interpretation
the assumption that this is needed

>It can hardly be established in the first place
and this is nonsense
Kant's categorical imperative is one such formulation

if you believe in the Christian god appealing to god is equivalent to appealing to the fundamental will of the universe
almost by definition everything god wills is good

>In 2006, in a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania debating the Jewish Tradition with Martin Amis, Hitchens commented on his political philosophy by stating, "I am no longer a socialist, but I still am a Marxist".[16] In a June 2010 interview with The New York Times, he stated that "I still think like a Marxist in many ways. I think the materialist conception of history is valid. I consider myself a very conservative Marxist".

>Hitchens was an admirer of Che Guevara, yet in an essay written in 1997, he distanced himself from Che, and referred to the mythos surrounding him as a "cult".[19] In 2004 he re-emphasized his positive view of Che, commenting that "[Che's] death meant a lot to me and countless like me at the time. He was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant to do—fought and died for his beliefs."

>He continued to regard Leon Trotsky and Vladmir Lenin as great men,[21][22] and the October Revolution as a necessary event in the modernisation of Russia.[11][13] In 2005, Hitchens praised Lenin's creation of "secular Russia" and his discrediting of the Russian Orthodox Church, describing the church's power as "absolute warren of backwardness and evil and superstition".[13]

>According to Andrew Sullivan, his last words were "Capitalism, downfall."[23]

>In a 2005 Vanity Fair article, he endorsed Tony Blair in the 2005 general election

I would hardly call him a voice of dissent to globalism desu lad

>this is blatantly false
>you should have told me at the start that you don't know anything about modern philosophy
not an argument

You're still trying to give an absolute unchanging morality as a given as an atheist, and you've still yet to give a single argument as why, when the claim of atheism implies directly the opposite of this

>leaf
I meant specific globalists, user.
He hated >pic related and wife particularly.

JFK Jr.'s plane crash is very suspicious too, and right before he was going to run for the very NY Senate seat Hillary took.

???

Atheism is literally just "not theism". Atheism isn't a viewpoint or position or belief but a vague characteristic useful to only a few specific question. There is no "atheist position" as atheism manifests in very different ways, akin to how theism manifests in various different ways.

Yeah his statements on the Clintons were based as fuck. He still supported the invasion of Iraq and Tony Blare though, so I can't see someone say he's an enemy of globalists without pointing that out

Yes the stance of "not theism" is a direct stance that there is no higher power dishing out morality. If there's no higher power dishing out morality, that means morality is not absolute. If morality is not higher than human authority then it cannot be absolute, and if it is higher than human authority then you've got to make a good argument for how it is as an atheist.

Chris was more intelligent and better than his brother that pol pretends is more intelligent and better

He came here and warned everybody at a university talk when the cucked government here passed stronger 'hate speech' laws. His speech was almost cancelled as every liberal on campus tried to have him banned.

"Beware as you are creating the rod for your own backs"

After he died there were these insufferable liberal muslim cocksucking cucks in Quebec who held an Anti-israel protest. Hilariously enough they were arrested for violating hate speech laws. They should have listened to Hitchens and not try to ban him because he told the truth about their shitty religion.

A great Hitchens vid is his talks about 'Why Orwell Still Matters', and one talk he gave that compares the Koran, the New Testament/Old, and the Talmud plus all their various hadiths or other scrolls that didn't make it into official volumes. "These are all plagiarisms upon other plagiarisms, here is the same Sumerian and Babylonian texts they ripped off".

The argument for the absoluteness of god's moral authority is that he absolutely will punish you though
It's just appeal to authority writ large

The only reason that what god says is right is that he says so, and he carries the world's biggest stick

I think silencing smart masculine voices was equally the goal. Comedians like Patrice O'neal, George Carlin and Greg Giraldo were degenerates so nobody would think twice. Maybe degeneracy killed most of them so they added one more.
It's more in line with Worst Korea and their crazy woman cultist president Park, psychotic feminist SJWs.
Like the Khmer Rouge said:
To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.

>Yes the stance of "not theism" is a direct stance that there is no higher power dishing out morality.

Theism has no immediate connection to "dishing out morality", akin to how Mars does not create morality innate or how Susano-o does not either. You're conflating a very common element of theism in Abrahamic thought with theism generally.

>What is pol's opinion on this guy?

he got the point, but he was too obsessed with religion,
seeing the religion as the cause of some disasters, where clearly the reason was 100% political

t. read one of his books

Correct. Now what is the secular claim for an absolute morality?

DEMOSTHENES of our times.

I had to tell a black guy I work with about Patrice O'Neal. Fucking shame.

>George Carlin
>degenerate

>too obsessed with religion
No, religion was too obsessed with everything he loved. What a fatuous remark!

>"the idea of universal ethics has been the mainstream thought in western philosophy ever since Kant".
Point philosophy has been overwhelmingly secular since the enlightenment and that yet moral absolutism is by far the dominant view and that's because of the ideas of the enlightenment

>seems like a moving of goalposts
no the entire point was to contrast Christian ethics with modern secular ethics and to refute the leaf's argument that you can't have universal ethics without appealing to god

>I've already told you how well natural law is still viable without the appeals to God.
it is but it's not what Aquinas was arguing
the fact that it is is one of my major points when arguing with the underage leaf

>No, you need to ensure it is the word of God.
That's immaterial to the actual ethics
it's a factual matter whether it's the word of god and how to interpret them but it's absolute that it's to be followed with no arguments
if you're too dumb to understand why god thinks something is best it doesn't matter, you follow the word anyway

>you shouldn't be commenting about a judgement about "theists" with a view only relatable to a few religions.
this is just pedantic
this entire conversation is obviously based in Christian perspective
I know Islam is just as strict as Christianity is but I have no idea where other major world religions stand here

>You're still trying to give an absolute unchanging morality as a given as an atheist
what exactly are you looking for here? most atheists accept it and a small minority does not
there are many philosophical views that fit both absolute morality and no god and Hitchens evidently subscribed to one of those
I have named a few before
>the claim of atheism implies directly the opposite of this
how can you fit so much nonsense into your posts? do not conflate atheism with nihilism and do not conflate the fact that religion -> absolute morality does not imply no religion -> no absolute morality

This post is a perfect example of how an atheist can literally not scroll past a theist without trying to shift some goal posts to argument that no one is having.

I'm stating that an atheist cannot give absolute morality as a given, and has to make a compelling argument for it. If you'd like to make that compelling argument go ahead. If you'd like to make irrelevant statements like this post I guess you can go ahead too but I'm not going to reply to them anymore.

Is that really 'morality' though
It's no different to the opinion of an extremely powerful dictator

>Now what is the secular claim for an absolute morality?
Why the presumption that morality must be absolute in order to be useful?

>Would've supported Trump

I can't say for sure, but I really don't think so. He could spot an obvious fraud like any reasonable person, and often remarked during elections that none of the above was the answer.

It's what I've been saying and I'm glad to have been proven right.

>so you think clinton is better

>[shifting goal posts intensifies]

Do not jump into an argument at the end when you have no idea what the people are discussing

his post was more on point than your entire corpus of nonsense itt

>From where do these concepts of ethics derive

Most of our conception of ethics is religiously derived.

It's not shifting the goalposts
It's demonstrating that theists can't claim absolute morality either
They can manage absolute authority but at that point it's just a difference of degree between the authority atheists can appeal to
Morality itself is not moral if it's simply fear of punishment, whether by diety or by law/society

My point, which you've tried very hard to convilute since I've made it, is that as an atheist if you'd like to claim an absolute unchanging morality, you have to make an argument for it because it is not a given. And that Hitchens never made an argument for that and gave it as a given.

refering me to other philosophers and saying they made an argument is not an argument

meanwhile people who take (((abrahamic))) religions as serious as they can end up burning people alive, committing war crimes and becoming terrorists lmao

His point is irrelevant to my original point which you've all tried desperately to shift away from

True theists have committed many immoral acts. Irrelevant to all points being made though.

kys sand nigger

It is shifting goal posts. The point is that theists have a claim to absolute morality, as there is an authority higher than them which they cannot change. Atheists do not have this and so would have to make a very good argument for how there can be an absolute secular morality, which no one has been able to give me in this thread and instead keeps shifting the goal posts to things like your last post, which was just a criticism of the authority,

esophagus

it's from drinking all those theist tears

my friend Lora has absolute morality, so whenever I'm in a conundrum I just ask her.

>me as atheist

user, this is silly now.

I agree with you that an atheist needs to assert and defend their own moral system but also say that the theist needs to do the same thing.

I was arguing starting here precisely against your claim that "If you accept atheism as legitimate then you are accepting that there is no absolute moral standard" because this implies that theism deals with the establishment of morality innately, which it doesn't. If theism and atheism have nothing intrinsically to say about morality then both parties need to establish their moral system to get anywhere.


I'm out. This is silly.

What is Google?

I have read his works and watched a lot of interviews and debates with him.
>Great debater
>No. 1 at insulting
>Hated Hillary

His brother is a fucking idiot. Just listening to that whistle when he speaks is painful enough.

Simply put a sufficiently powerful earthly authority is enough if all absolute morality requires is an opinion and the means to enforce it

Kim jong un has absolute morality in north korea under that definition