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johnnyFive  ·  2128 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Ignominy of Hitchens’ “Razor” Failure

    I don't ever see people criticizing Hitchens' ideas - and those of any of the Four Horsemen. It's as if you're either a stouch atheist or might as well burn in Hell.

Not sure what this means.

    How did he/they create their opponent when it comes to religion?

The problem is right there in your question. "Religion" is a massively broad term, and means wildly different things to different people. Even when they talk about Christianity specifically, they just decide that Christians believe X even when that's either a misinterpretation, outright wrong, or at best something only believed by the minority. They isolate elements of religion without looking at them in context, and then act like it's some major rhetorical victory when that element seems strange.

Quoting again from the review I linked in my previous post:

    Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. [...]

    Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.