The Missionary Position

An excellent piece of investigate journalism.

Hitchens is no doubt motivated by his antagonism towards organised religion, but the sources included in this brief analysis of Mother Teresa support a view that - at the very least - we should all judge people on their actions and not their reputation.

Well worth a read.

Hitchens is to atheist science-ists what C. S. Lewis is to American Evangelical Christians.

There; I got it out of my system. I've been wanting to write that sentence for a long time, but never had an excuse.

I read this book and pretty much hated it. As I have done so often in the past, I tried reading one of the “new atheists” in the hopes of finding calm, dispassionate, unemotional discourse. Instead, I find petulance and nastiness take over, just like when I read any kind of fundamentalist, whether it be Christian, Islamic, liberal, feminist, American exceptionalist, or whatever. Fundamentalism is fundamentalism, and Hitchens is as fundamentalist as they come.

Here is the biggest problem: Given the author and subject, the book practically writes itself. I don't think he is capable of putting himself into another person's mind and seeing the world from any perspective but his own narrow fundamentalism. If I had made up some details, I could have written a near word-for-word parody of the book without having even read it.