religious belief

Description

Hitchens stated that "[an] unborn child seems to me to be a real concept. It's not a growth or an appendix. You can't say the rights question doesn't come up. I don't think a woman should be forced to choose, or even can be." Although holding a personal anti-abortion position, Hitchens opposed the overturning of Roe v. Wade, stating, "that will make abortion more like a contraceptive procedure than a surgical one. That's the Hitchens plank, and I think it's a defensible one." Hitchens believed that a fetus should be regarded as an "unborn child", supporting the development of medical abortion techniques, and fundamentally believing in access to contraceptives and reproductive rights in order to prevent surgical abortion altogether. He strongly criticized the encouragement of sexual abstinence within the pro-life movement of the Christian Right. At the New York Public Library in May 2007, Hitchens debated the Reverend Al Sharpton on the issue of theism and anti-theism, giving rise to a memorable exchange about Mormonism in particular.[37] In God is not Great, Hitchens contended that, above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man and woman [referencing Alexander Pope]. This Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person. The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by electronic means, will revolutionize our concepts of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first time in our history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone.[38] Hitchens was accused of "anti-Catholic bigotry" by others, including Brent Bozell and UCLA Law Professor Stephen Bainbridge.[39] When Joe Scarborough on 12 March 2004 asked Hitchens whether he was "consumed with hatred for conservative Catholics", Hitchens responded that he was not and that he just thinks that "all religious belief is sinister and infantile".[40] In 2005, Hitchens praised Lenin's creation of "secular Russia" and his destruction of the Russian Orthodox Church, describing it as "an absolute warren of backwardness and evil and superstition."[41] In an interview with Radar in 2007, Hitchens said that if the Christian right's agenda were implemented in the United States "It wouldn't last very long and would, I hope, lead to civil war, which they will lose, but for which it would be a great pleasure to take part."[42] On 4 April 2009, Hitchens debated Christian philosopher William Lane Craig at Biola University on the topic "Does God Exist?" before both a live and closed circuit audience of over 15,000. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens%27_political_views