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Christopher Hitchens, How to be a public intellectual:

“One might do worse than to say that an intellectual is someone who does not attempt to soar on the thermals of public opinion. There ought to be a word for those men and women who do their own thinking; who are willing to stand the accusation of “elitism” (or at least to prefer it to the idea of populism); who care for language above all and guess its subtle relationship to truth; and who are willing and able to nail a lie. If such a person should also have a sense of irony and a feeling for history, then, as the French say, tant mieux.”

Prospect Magazine, Portrait Christopher Hitchens by Alexander Linklater:

“His father couldn’t find it in himself to go to Athens, so Hitchens went alone to bury his mother. A note that she had left revealed that it had been a suicide pact. He also discovered that she had been trying to contact him in the days before her death.

In May 1973, Georgios Papadopoulos’s military junta, which had seized power six years earlier, was busy suppressing an attempted counter-coup. “One thing that defined the late 1960s for a lot of us, and that is forgotten now, was the unbelievable fact that in 1967 the army had taken over Greece in a fascist coup.” What had been, for the teenage Hitchens, a politically catalysing event—evidence of US complicity in the overthrow of a Nato member state which also happened to be the birthplace of democracy—was now the backdrop to a personal catastrophe.

The bodies hadn’t been discovered for two days, and even with the room cleaned, the stench was appalling—she had taken pills; he, shockingly, had gutted himself with a knife. “So I go to the window because I think I’m going to be sick… and suddenly I get my first view of the Parthenon, across from the hotel, in brilliant sunlight. And down below there are tanks, and armed men, and bloodstains in the streets.” When Hitchens talks about this moment, he associates it with his first memory of sailing into Valletta harbour with his mother. “I’ve had that feeling several times,” he says. “I’ve felt it in Cyprus and Lebanon, in Crete, and recently in Tunis. It’s how I felt about the Mediterranean. The flash of light, the coincidence of the white, the green and the double blue. It makes me feel that I’m still at home.”"

The Four Horsemen - Hour 1

The Four Horsemen - Hour 2

RichardDawkins.net, The Four Horsemen: on Christmas:

“All four authors have recently received a large amount of media attention for their writings against religion - some positive, and some negative. In this conversation the group trades stories of the public’s reaction to their recent books, their unexpected successes, criticisms and common misrepresentations. They discuss the tough questions about religion that face to world today, and propose new strategies for going forward.”

Salman Rushdie en Sam Harris over Ayaan Hirshi Ali:

“Most shamefully, Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister, has recommended that Hirsi Ali simply quit the Netherlands and has refused to grant her even a week’s protection outside the country, during which she might raise funds to hire security of her own. Is this a craven attempt to placate local Muslim fanatics? A warning to other Dutch dissidents not to stir up trouble by speaking too frankly about Islam? Or just pure thoughtlessness?”

Eerder: Christopher Hitchens, The Price of Freedom.

Richard Dawkins reviewing Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great in the Times Literary Supplement. Bible belter:

“If you are a religious apologist invited to debate with Christopher Hitchens, decline. His witty repartee, his ready-access store of historical quotations, his bookish eloquence, his effortless flow of well-formed words, beautifully spoken in that formidable Richard Burton voice (the whole performance not dulled by other equally formidable Richard Burton habits), would threaten your arguments even if you had good ones to deploy.”

While Dawkins makes a strong case for why one doesn’t require a thorough grounding in theology to refute religious certainties (you don’t need to be an expert in fairyology to dispute the existence of fairies), and Hitchens draws on his acute observational skills and tireless globetrotting to report on the way “religion poisons everything” – from “Belfast to Beirut to Baghdad, and that’s without leaving the B’s”– Onfray takes another tack entirely. As befits his role as “France’s most popular philosopher” (is there another country in the world where these two words go together?), Onfray delves deep into the internal logic of the three monotheisms, performing what he calls “a pitiless historical reading of the three so-called holy books”. Nor is he alone in his battle: he enters the field backed by a gang of thinkers as bizarrely incongruous as the Dirty Dozen – Epicurus, Nietzsche, Georges Bataille and Jean Meslier, Baron d’Holbach and Michel Foucault, Jeremy Bentham and Freud.

Caspar Melvill: Atheism à la mode

WSJ:

“Says Barbara Meade, a co-owner of the Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.: “Part of the appeal is that he’s a personality; we sold 106 books when he visited our store.”"

Deze week in Slate drie voorpublicaties van Christopher Hitchens’ boek God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Woensdag: God Is Not Great.
Donderdag: Was Muhammad Epileptic?
(update) Vrijdag: Mormonism: A Racket Becomes a Religion