Steven Parmenius

  Browsing through the Salon the other day I was greeted with the following: “I remember watching clip after clip of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens debating Christians, Muslims and "purveyors of woo," exposing the fatuity of their faith-based beliefs in superstitious nonsense unsupported by empirical evidence, often delivered to self-proclaimed prophets by supernatural beings via the epistemically suspicious channel of private revelation. Not that Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens were saying anything particularly novel — the inconsistencies and contradictions of religious dogma are apparent even to small children. Why did God have to sacrifice his son for our sins? Does Satan have free will? And how can the Father, Son and Holy Spirit be completely separate entities but also one and the same?" Thus says a philosopher, Phil Torres, who has, he informs us, given up on the ‘New Atheist’ movement. He finds its story to be one of promise unfulfilled unlike t...

    Christopher Hitchens had no qualms expressing contempt for people and things he disliked so I am sure he would appreciate my candor in saying that, as a man who endorsed Rudy Giuliani in 2008 and defended the genocide of indigenous Americans, I think him a scurvy fellow. I say that as one pugilist to another knowing him to be a man who relished an exchange of insults in the fine British literary tradition. Now that the initial un-pleasantries are out of the way, however, let me give him a spot of credit. Hitchens has a fan base of people who lament him and complain of how the world has gone grey with his untimely passing. This, I suppose, is because he wrote well. I myself would forgive a man a great deal for writing well. I have long ago forgiven Kipling and Claudel, as Auden counselled, and indeed much worse men than they. Someday I may even forgive Hitchens for the sake of his admirable writing on Lord Nelson. Before that reconciliation takes place however, I hav...