Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D'Souza: A Classic

It brought me great pleasure to discover that there's a very recent (26/01/2009) debate between Christopher Hitchens and his long-held adversary, Dinesh D'Souza hosted on Richard Dawkins' website. I say though gritted teeth that when these two met back in late 2006 for the early portion of Hitchens' book tour for god is not Great you would be hard pressed to claim that Hitchens won on that occasion (though this simply acts to compound my subsequent point), but it brings me great pleasure to say that Hitchens steamrolled D'Souza in this one. He was worryingly sharp, incredibly astute, even more so than I think I've seen previously. At one point, Hitchens embarresses D'Souza with an off-hand, seven or eight line quotation from one of Shakespeare's sonnets that supports the notion that, yes, in fact, Shakespeare was, at least momentarily defamatory of religion. Perhaps two years of road-hardened confrontation has purified his thoughts, augmented his positions, and amplified his questions to the point of indestructibility. D'Souza comes across as mildly likable, as usual, but refrained from raising some of his "tier two" arguments about free-will and cosmic intelligence that appeared to catch Hitchens off-guard last time. It's another classic debate that sees quite a different, more focused Hitchens (he was notably intoxicated when they last met) and the minutes sail by. I've somehow managed to embed the video below for your convenience, dear reader, but before I leave you to it, I bring you a not-unusual moment of humour that had me throwing my head back in delight from the opening moments of Hitchens' opening gambit.

One of the very few times I've thought about being a Christian is when one of the early church fathers, lost for an account of why it is fun to be in paradise (the alleviation of the first hundred million years of saying 'thank-you', for example), would say, well, at least you can go to the lip of the thing and look down and see the screams and wails and torments of the damned when you want to be cheered up; and I remember thinking: that's me. I'd be religious on that basis. One of my very few pleasures actually is crowing over the misfortunes of other people and trying to add to those misfortunes. I'm hoping, in fact, to score a few points of that sort tonight.