--- Santosh Helekar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hitchens' response doesn't cut it because it accepts > the false premise of his opponent that the only God > that counts as the real God is the particular one > that > he worships. ------------------------------
Santosh, I think you are mixing up Hitchens with Gilbert. Gilbert who has been consistently donating blood obviously has had the circulation to his brain cut off from this activity :-) Hitch, on the other hand, doesn't suffer from a "real God" syndrome. You've missed the point of both the question and the response. The Fijian man was postulating that the arrival of Christianity has had a civilising effect on his society (which it might well have had, at least through the prism of his own eye). He has assumed this to mean that ergo Christianity is the "real religion". Hitchen's response was that had Christianity been a "divine" religion, it's dissemination would have been earlier and, more evenly and simultaneously spread across the world. A more fitting response would have been Frazer's viewpoint that anthropologically speaking, evidence points to the fact that all societies evolve to arrive at the same moral values. Some just take a lot longer. The Fijians would ultimately stop using human flesh as canapes before dinner, even without the help of interventionist missionaries. This being a debate, perhaps it's hard to come up with good responses thinking on your feet as it were, whiskey glass in hand. selma __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com