A full-throated 'New Atheist'

Giving credit where credit is due...

Two days ago I wrote a post that centered on Portland Monthly's smart Q&A between Christopher Hitchens, a prolific writer and one of the world's best-known atheists, and the Rev. Marilyn Sewell, recently retired minister the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Portland.

A day later, I read another Q&A between Hitchens and Willamette Week's Aaron Mesh that offered some other dimensions of the writer's strongly held beliefs and opinions. That, too, was worth reading.

Tonight, I offer a report by Jeff Baker, The Oregonian's book critic, on Hitchens' lecture in Portland. Read it here.

According to Baker, Hitchens spent more than an hour attacking organized religion to the apparent delight of the audience -- no surprise that we live in one of the least "unchurched" states in the nation. But then he riled people up when he voiced his strong support for U.S. policy in Iraq -- again, no surprise given Portland's left-leaning sentiments.

The sharp right turn into foreign policy was a reminder to the Portland Arts & Lectures series crowd that Hitchens, a full-throated atheist who had no problem calling evangelical minister Rick Warren a "palpable fraud and dolt," is not a conventional liberal. If any doubt remained, Hitchens wiped it away a moment later with his answer to a question about whether the Catholic Church should refuse communion to politicians who favor abortion rights.

The Catholic Church, which Hitchens had excoriated earlier in the evening for the way it tolerated and protected priests who abused children, is well within its rights to refuse communion to those who disagree with its position against abortion. Not only that, he said, its stand on abortion is "the only moral point it has left."

The dude doesn't hold back, does he?