It was billed as an evening with debating titans – former British PM Tony Blair and contrarian intellectual Christopher Hitchens.
To a sellout audience at Roy Thomson Hall Friday (scalpers were allegedly getting $500 for $80 tickets, which sponsor Peter Munk called “insane”), the?topic was “Be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world.”
The audience registered pre-debate views (22% agreed, 57% didn’t and 75% said nothing would change their view), and then they voted again after the 90-minute session – which Hitchens’ atheism clearly won by gaining 17% more support to Blair’s increase of 7%.
Blair, a convert to Roman Catholicism, was at something of a disadvantage, defending? religious faith against arguably the world’s best known atheist whose courage, verve and candor in dealing with his own terminal cancer of the esophagus has won the respect of even avowed enemies.
In fact, while Hitchens looked frail and wane, his voice was powerful and resonant and he clearly had the audience mesmerized with wit, irreverence, good humor and passion.
Author of books deflating the myth of Mother Theresa, and God is Not Great plus a memoir (Hitch-22) that tells more about him than many of us want to know, Hitchens rejected the idea of? God as a?“celestial divinity” that is judge, jury and enforcer of humans who are a product of creation rather than evolution, and who inflict horrible reprisals on one another.
Blair argued that while extremists did terrible things, religion was a source of good and “inspiration” to many who worked for the betterment of people. Regardless of differences in religious belief, moderation was a force for good in the world – especially in Africa today.
While Hitchens had the audience of 2,700 captivated, he wandered into strange ground when he praised goals of communism that sought to make the world better without formal religion. He praised Canada’s Dr. Norman Bethune, who devised a method of battlefield blood transfusions while with communist forces in the 1937 Spanish Civil War.
Hitchens failed to mention Bethune being a hero in China where he was a doctor with Mao Zedong’s army and treated only communists and ignored others.
Where both Hitchens and Blair seemed to agree, was that too much faith can blind reason and lead to extremism and be lethal. That also applies to too little faith (the Soviet Union, China, North Korea).
Blair and Hitchens clearly respect and like each other.
While Blair seems to have shed years and looks younger since giving up the job as Britain’s PM and leader of?the Labour Party, Hitchens has aged and by the end of the evening looked exhausted and drawn.
An embarrassment to him, has been how religious opponents have declared they are praying for his well-being. He has said he appreciates their concern, but wishes they would stop. He is a man reconciled to his fate, who neither complains nor whines, and whose loss, when it comes, will be felt more deeply than even he could imagine.
This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured article: Beyond Hiroshima - The Non-Reporting of Falluja's Cancer Catastrophe.
No comments:
Post a Comment