Christopher Hitchens - your thoughts?

I love his stuff, but he is mean. He's right, but he can be mean about it.

But on the other hand, you have Richard Dawkins who is so incredibly polite, yet not willing to suffer a fool to their whims in an argument. And he gets accusations of being mean - so damned if you do, damned if you don't.

He had to grow on me, though. Check out the "Hitchslap" series on YouTube. It's awesome.

I think he's a brilliant writer and thinker. I traveled down to Washington to attend a rally he held in 2006, in support of Danish free speech.I made a video, if anyone's interested, which you can find here: http://youtu.be/qGd-dbCxPDk

It's been awhile since then. At the time, I was a senior in high school, and hadn't really decided my political principles, but I still think that we should support a person's right to criticize religion.

I "liked" it on Youtube.

He might give the impression of being "mean spirited" in debates but when I "read" him, he seems incredibly nice.

He's a crude boor and a drunk, but I enjoy his writings.

I actually thought the finger was remarkably ballsy, and I respected it - he was wrong, of course. But that was ballsy.

What he was wrong about was the Iraq War - at the time he thought it was a great idea

He can be a guilty pleasure, but his politics are all over the map.

When he speaks... I listen. I can't NOT.

I agree with most of what he says. I think he is one of the best spokesman for atheism in the world. I have seen many debates where he absolutely humiliates a theologian or clergyman trying to make a rational case for the existence of god.

...meanness is deliberate. One of the things CH seems most annoyed about is religion's claim to respect regardless of how it self behaves or how stupid it's arguments are.

Or "bitter," or "militant," or "fundamentalist." Does not matter in the least how you state your lack of belief. One's unwillingness to defer to and praise the status quo of religious faith is what makes one "mean."

I like him.

When he wrote for The Nation, his columns were generally enjoyable. But, I never took them too seriously. He was often sloppy on the details, particularly in ignoring unpleasant facts. Then, after he came out in support of the Iraq War, he became mostly pathetic.

He can come across as rude to some - but he does not suffer fools gladly. And pretty much all Theist arguments, based on reason, are pathetic.

Ray Comfort's Banana Argument comes to mind.

He had the guts to expose Mother Teresa as the complete fraud that she was. She was socking away millions of dollars in her Swiss bank account and not spending any money to give people health care. It wasn't a hospital - it was a parking lot for dying people.

Although he's loathe to admit it...

a while. I did not know that he had gone back on his Iraq War support. I for one did so too, I bought Colin Powell's propaganda hook, line and sinker.

I ask, because he was still in favor of it at the beginning of last year.

Anti choice, pro war. The only thing I agree with him on is his atheism.

Although now that he's facing down cancer, I wonder if he'll change his views on that as well.

I am
not a fan.

that if he changes his views on religion during his final moments, it is because the pain has overwhelmed him and he is no longer himself.

In his book God Is Not Great he writes that there is a conflict of interests involved, but rejected the "life begins at conception" meme. Did he write more on this in one of his articles?

I really like him, but he has a cocky personality and that annoys me

simply put, I think Hitchens realizes this and just decided "Fuck'em", you have to admire that.

-- who thought there was any question about which candidate to support in the November 2004 presidential election -- doesn't deserve much respect: Hitchens vacillated between "lean Bush" and "neutral"

You will find few things in life more caustic than the attitude of a person who is right, who knows it, and who has been questioned at every possible turn for decades.

I don't always agree. I thought his criticism of Michael Moore on Moore's movie and criticisms of the Iraq war were dead wrong, silly even. I find his selective hatred of Bill Clinton while being an apologist for much of what Bush did to be hypocritical. I cannot understand how he can be so vitriolic toward Kissinger, but maintain a personal friendship with Wolfowitz. I found parts of his autobiography unnecessarily maudlin, specifically the details of of the soldier who wrote to him. I also found his denial of being a "piss artist" (habitual drunkard) to be a bit disingenuous, especially when it was followed by a description of how much alcohol he considers to be moderation.

On the other hand, I find he is usually spot on, especially when writing about religion, pseudoscience or anything else that the gullible minds of human beings are prone to accept on something less than solid evidence. He has an unwillingness to afford sacred cows the protection of sentimentality from the biting criticism--indeed, the condemnation--they almost universally deserve. Apart from the edifices of organized religion, Hitch has turned his critical eyes to the Beatitudes and the other supposedly good parts of religion, Mother Theresa, misplaced notions of tolerance, pacifism and his disillusionment with the intellectual elite of political left (specifically its tendency to blame the West for everything automatically.) His writing, unlike many of the scientific atheists, carries the reader on a lucid and compelling journey, often by the force of derision. He describes people, places and events with a rich vocabulary, but without a brushstroke of varnish. Despite his shift to the right, he remains a democrat and a skeptic at heart with nothing but contempt for the artificial distinctions people invent for each other.