Christopher Hitchens On Religion And Terrorism

The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan

Politics, News, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 836 Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2022

⏱️ 127 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As you’ll tell from my brief new intro to this 2006 conversation, my voice right now is so eviscerated I can’t speak at all. Silenced at last! So here is a very early experiment I did with kinda-podcasting, when I took a microphone to Hitch’s place and let the tape roll. A blast from the grave in some ways.

We mainly debated the nature of religion and the global war on terrorism. For two clips — on the divinity of Jesus, and whether the Golden Rule is actually “cruel and stupid,” as Hitch put it — pop over to our YouTube page. The audio quality is a little rough, but a transcript of the two-hour conversation is available here.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The Hi, this is me.
0:32.0	With a voice that I really don't recognize, I'm told by the doctors I just have to stop talking if I am to
0:41.6	recover my voice. So, however hard that is for me, that's what I'm doing. I couldn't record a podcast
0:50.2	this week for reasons that are now pretty obvious, but we didn't want to leave you
0:58.3	with nothing.
0:59.9	So what we did was he found a really old sort of podcast thing that I pioneered and did a few years ago.
1:12.8	So we're going to talk with a voice from the grave.
1:17.7	Namely, this is me one night with a single microphone in Christopher Hitchens' dining room after dinner, you can hear us occasionally drinking.
1:32.3	You can hear him smoking, but it was constant, talking about a whole range of things,
1:39.3	including religion, which of course was one of Hitch's main obsessions. With any luck, I will be able to speak
1:50.2	enough next week to have a podcast. We're planning to talk to Richard Reeves. He's written a fascinating
1:59.7	new book about men and boys.
2:02.6	But until then, here is my intro to the discussion that I had with Hitchens.
2:10.6	And if you have some time, it's kind of interesting, though not.
2:14.6	I confess the highest quality, but definitely a higher quality
2:19.7	than my voice right now. Thank you all for listening. Thanks for your well wishes. I just
2:27.6	have to be patient and shut the fuck up for a while. I'll see you all next week. Thanks.
2:33.2	A while back, which I think means 2006 in this case, I thought it would be a cool idea
2:41.0	to do online what no one had really been able to do on television, which is have extended,
2:47.0	casual, spontaneous conversations, over drinks, after dinner dinner in a relaxed setting where we might
2:53.7	be able to talk about things more honestly and candidly than you get to do in a segment on
	...

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