Matus1976

I highly recommend this book as well, and also purusing some of Hitchen's videos on YouTube, he can be quite an entertaining debater sometimes.

Hitchens views appear very similar to Objectivism in many ways, however for some strange reason he despises Rand. In one article I read on his on Slate, he was speaking sincerely of a soldier who was an atheist and decided to join the army and fight in Iraq, citing Hitchens as one of his biggest influences. The article mentions the books the soldier carried with him, one of which was "Atlas Shrugged" to that Hitchens (in this other wise somber article) said 'We'll, nobodies perfect' The dig at Rand was strangely out of place for the context of the article. In another debate I caught he spoke of being offended by flushing a book down a toilet, and made a reference that should he flush Atlas Shrugged down the toilet he should not fear for his life afterward.

His basis for morality, like most of the secular materialists, has no philosophical foundation. He seems to push 'the golden rule' and state that morality explicitly existed before religion (usually citing the good semaritan or the jews before seeing the 10 commandments) Obviously I find this to be his biggest weak point.

Similarly, frequent charges against his book were that many more people have been killed in the name of communism, whose atheism is seen as a counter, then in the name of the religion. I find his counter arguments weak, which generally center around the predominant psychological attitudes present in post czarist Russia, instead of focusing on religious type thought as the source of these ills, he seems to focus on specific religions. Hitchens usually points to 'enlightement era values' and says show me a society which killed in the name of those values' The lack of a philosophical foundation for morality seems evident to me in Hitchens, but I love his stuff. Shermer stands on stronger ground on this front, and is explicitly a supporter of free markets and individual freedoms, he also seems to like Rand, though certainly does not consider himself an objectivist. Shermer focuses on religious thought as the worse kind of evil, characterizing it as thought which is based on faith explicitly as evidence or despite it, and not faith in a particular god or story. Founding any belief system on anything other than reason is what he considers religious thought, and Soviet Marxism in nearly every form was a cultist like religion by that standard (and I think by any standard of religion which encompasses the worlds religions)