Ive read Hitchens, and I am not impressed.

Subjective morality is ultimately simple preferance and ultimately just a battle of wills. I, and most other religious people, do not consider such a "moral order" to be morality at all.

Objective morality, with a judge above all judges who is justice itself, is the only way "justice" and morality mean anything at all.

“Objective” morality is a misnomer for religious morality, it's just subjective morality ascribed to some mythical authority figure (and, even if that figure actually exists, for most religions, given the diversity of different moral systems ascribed to the divine judge, those are clearly misascriptions, largely reflecting the personal subjective morality of the people doing the ascribing.)

I'm personally religious, but the myth of objectivity is a very, very dangerous thing; in masks the ways that man creates God in his own image.

I am not claiming to have perfect vision of this order, but I am asserting that it exists and we have no choice but to sit in it's judgment. We can argue and and discuss about the specifics, but when I and other religious people are discussing morality, that is what we are trying to do. To make our morals and actions more in line with the ultimate objective morality.

I do not mean this as a flame, but I honestly do not understand why a person who believes in subjective morality would even discuss morality at all. If all morality is simply in the eye of the beholder, moral progress is impossible and it is not possible for one view to be superior to another.

As opposed to the actual battles engaged in by the various religious groups over morality.

To which I say: have at it. I'll get some popcorn. Too bad about all the bystanders. But I'm sure they'll be happy knowing that they died in the service of objective morality.

Hitchens' knowledge of religion and philosophy borders on 0%. I would not reference him in any way if you intend to make serious arguments.

>Hitchens' knowledge of religion and philosophy borders on 0%

A rather bold claim, backed by little evidence and easily debunked by a metric ton of counter-evidence.

As example of counter-evidence, I offer:

    - The man spent a large fraction of his life studying religions of all ilks

    - He wrote a number of carefully researched books on the topic of religion.

    - From his quoting the bible, the coran, jewish sacred texts on the fly in the middle of debates with random religious folks (and usually tearing them a new one in the process), I feel confident he had at least skimmed most of those.

    - No one can accuse Hitchens of being dumb, I very much doubt he'd get into high visibility, in-depth public debate about a topic without having researched it thoroughly.

Given the above, I would say the claim that "his knowledge of religion borders on 0%" is - to remain unsarcastic, however hard that is - highly unlikely to be correct.

Anyone with a modicum of knowledge on religious studies finds his, and all of the other books by the "New Atheists" (with the possible exception of Dennett) to be laughable. I'm sorry, they simply don't have much of an intellectual foundation in anything.

Here's an example:

Chapter eleven discusses how religions form, and claims that most religions are founded by corrupt, immoral individuals. The chapter specifically discusses cargo cults, Pentecostal minister Marjoe Gortner, and Mormonism. Hitchens discusses Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, citing a March 1826 Bainbridge, New York court examination accusing him of being a "disorderly person and impostor" who Hitchens claims admitted there that he had supernatural powers and was "defrauding citizens".[31][32] Four years later Smith claimed to obtain gold tablets containing the Book of Mormon. When the neighbor's skeptical wife buried 116 pages of the translation and challenged Smith to reproduce it, Smith claimed God, knowing this would happen, told him to instead translate a different section of the same plates.

And where does our concept of corruption or immorality come from? Hitchens just lacks basic knowledge of meta-ethics. He doesn't seem to realize that modern democratic rationalist values are themselves descendants of Christian ideas.

This is the foundational problem of the New Atheists and of the "rational" set in general. They either don't know or don't understand the foundations of modern ethics, all of which has roots in religion.

This is the second 100% dogmatic and not backed by any argument answer you provided.

This is not really surprising coming from a religious person, dogma being after all the intellectual foundation of religion.

But I wonder: is there anything else you could use in your discourse toolbox?

> This is not really surprising coming from a religious person, dogma being after all the intellectual foundation of religion.

First off, I'm not religious. Second off, this kind of personal attack is not welcome here.

As I already said, every scholar of religious studies finds the books by Hitchens, Dawkins, etc. to be amusing at best. I can't educate you on the academic study of religion in a HN comment. If you are actually interested in reading criticism of such people and not just bashing non-atheistic people, I suggest looking into comparative religion and religious studies.

> his kind of personal attack is not welcome here.

This is not a personal attack.

You stated facts without backing them up. Twice. This is being dogmatic. My apologies for assuming you were religious given the fact you're defending religion, it was a fairly reasonable assumption to make

> As I already said, every scholar of religious studies

You are now moving from being dogmatic to using "appeal to authority" [1], another well known logical fallacy [2]

I'm still waiting for a properly argumented backing of the various statements you made above.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

[2] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=appeal+to+autho...

> This is not a personal attack.

Yes, it is, and again, it's not welcome here.

Read the criticism section of the Wikipedia article you posted yourself. There are more than enough intelligent criticisms written of the book.

If you think that my not writing you a lengthy essay explaining why Hitchens is uninformed is somehow indicative that he isn't, I'm not sure what to tell you. Religion is a complicated topic. Pretending that we can solve it in a paragraph is naive at best.

As I already said, if this interests you, read more about religious studies. I am simply saying that "the educated opinion on this topic is that Hitchens is just a popular writer, not a serious thinker on religion." If you disagree with that, well, take it up with the academic community?

> If you think that my not writing you a lengthy essay explaining why Hitchens is uninformed is somehow indicative that he isn't, I'm not sure what to tell you.

I'm simply saying that since the beginning of this conversation, you're stating facts without providing a shred of evidence, other than "go educate yourself on the subject".

This is how conversations usually go in my experience: when you state a fact, you back them up by - at least - a modicum of evidence instead of dropping them as self-evident and walking away.

But given your last answer, one thing you definitely cannot be accused of is lack of consistency.