which has provided blogs by all manner of commentators on the subject of religion, Columbia professor Randall Balmer takes Hitchens' own fundamentalism to task:
But
one of the characteristics of fundamentalism everywhere, including the
secular fundamentalism that Mr. Hitchens articulates, is an
unrelentingly dualistic view of the world – good versus bad, black
versus white – a refusal to see nuances and ambiguities. Have people
who claim to be religious engaged in unseemly behavior? Of course they
have. But people of faith have also been responsible for much good in
the world: poverty relief, feeding the hungry, marching for civil
rights or against war. How many hospitals in America, to take only one
example, were founded by religious groups? Mercy Hospital or
Presbyterian Hospital or Methodist or Jewish or Baptist.
Mr. Hitchens shares with other fundamentalists a blindness to shades
of gray. He prefers to deal in dualistic categories – religion = bad;
secularism = good – rather than expend the effort and take the trouble
to move beyond such facile generalizations.
It would be like asserting, on the basis of Mr. Hitchens himself,
that all secular fundamentalists are rude, bombastic, and
intellectually lazy. That generalization is patently absurd.
So are Mr. Hitchens’s statements about religion.