Thank you very much. Letters is probably my favourite of his books, and frankly the amount of Hitchens debates I’ve watched on youtube is embarrassing.
One thing to be cautious of is that Hitchens teaches you polemics, i.e. really forceful rhetoric. This can be put in the service of anything, and sweep along everyone including the speaker. That he believed everything he said does not make this stuff not dangerous.
If you find yourself tangling with annoying theists a lot, god is not Great is just the source material you needed. However, its arguments are very easy to accept while forgetting to examine and kick them thoroughly. And bits of it do go off the rails IMO, e.g. the section on pigs.
Thank you very much. Letters is probably my favourite of his books, and frankly the amount of Hitchens debates I’ve watched on youtube is embarrassing.
Oh! The other Hitchens in the “read first” pile is HItch-22, his not-quite-autobiography.
One thing to be cautious of is that Hitchens teaches you polemics, i.e. really forceful rhetoric. This can be put in the service of anything, and sweep along everyone including the speaker. That he believed everything he said does not make this stuff not dangerous.
If you find yourself tangling with annoying theists a lot, god is not Great is just the source material you needed. However, its arguments are very easy to accept while forgetting to examine and kick them thoroughly. And bits of it do go off the rails IMO, e.g. the section on pigs.