>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.