christopher hitchens = fundy.

[arachnophilia]

"real time with bill maher" has a somewhat informal tradition of inviting the token conservative, generally of the more bat-shit-crazy persuasion. who was this week's bat-shit-crazy conservative? christopher hitchens.

but wait, you say. yeah, i wouldn't have thought so either. but these are the points he brought up:

• al qaeda is not only in iraq, they were there before we were, and there was a connection between saddam hussein and al qaeda. and leaving now would only make them seem victorious.
  
• barack obama is connected to louis farrakhan
  
• jefferson and lincoln were atheists.
  
• buddha, horus (and many other gods) were supposedly born of virgins

look, just because you've denounced religion doesn't mean you're rational. i guess this is just another case of a fundamentalist who has simply changed denomination. because you cannot claim to be basing your abscence of faith (or perhaps anti-faith) in an invisible sky-daddy on rationality when clearly every other belief you hold is just as idiotic, irrational, and out of touch with reality and fact. and especially not when two of those four points are precisely the same lies i hear from the fundamentalist christians, and another is the same kind of inaccurate appeal to authority, just with your camps traded. jefferson was not an atheist. he was not a christian -- he was a deist. let's all try to remember that. and who the hell even cares.

and... and for someone who writes books on religion to get the basic facts of historical religions wrong, and straight from that paranoid claptrap zeitgeist movie? you could have at least googled horus and buddha, or read the wikipedia article, which in two seconds would get you the correct information. i'm sorry he didn't mention krishna specifically, so the hindu sitting next to him could hand him his ass on a silver platter.

christopher hitchens, you are nothing but a crank, and i am disappointed in you. atheists should be disappointed in you, for claiming the rational high ground while holding so many irrational and counter-factual positions.