Debate Teacher Reacts | The Secret Behind Christopher Hitchens' Greatness!

And now, for something different.

The question then is, what was so great about Hitchens?

I think the answer will help you as someone who wants to understand debate.

There was a word for this a long time ago, because we used to put a spotlight on this and talk about its importance, and now not so

much.

This right here, if you have this skill, and it's developed well, at key moments in debate,

this right here is, in my opinion, one of the greatest rhetorical tools that you could possibly use.

And yet, somehow, I do think that Hitchens knows that this particular move is

powerful.

For an audience member to be called out like this, what he's doing right now, it creates an emotional moment.

What I'm trying to get you to see is that you should appreciate those strategies, those tactics

in debate, because they will serve you well.

And now, for something different.

Welcome to Wise Disciple, my name is Nate, and I'm the face of this here organization.

Here at Wise Disciple, we're helping you become the effective Christian that you were meant to be.

So before I jumped into ministry, I taught debate, and so here I am.

I'm making videos related to debate.

Well, today I thought, you know what?

It would be cool if we highlighted things that people do that work.

Things that cause folks to shine when it comes to the debate stage.

So this is a bit of a different approach.

I mean, if you consider what I've been doing at the Debate Teacher React series, like a jewel.

I'm trying to turn the jewel around and look at it from a different angle, so to speak, right?

So we're going to look at things that cause folks to shine on the debate stage.

And Christopher Hitchens, for many people, shined.

There were a couple of key ways where he did.

He was a great orator.

I actually think he was one of the best, okay?

I was an atheist until I was 30 years old.

And so I have to say that Hitchens was one of those guys that I read that I was just generally a fan of.

The question then is, what was so great about Hitchens?

I think the answer will help you as someone who wants to understand debate.

Maybe you're here because you're thinking about getting into more formal debates, or maybe you're just here because you want to understand

Hitchens a little bit better.

Maybe you just want to raise the level of your own discourse when you're reaching across the aisle, so to speak.

You're disagreeing with others, but you want to be effective.

You want to be persuasive, all right?

So what I'm going to do is look at Hitchens' opening statement for the most popular debate that

he participated in.

This is the most popular on YouTube.

This is the God Debate between Hitchens and Dinesh D'Souza.

Almost 7 million views as of this recording.

So let's see what makes Hitchens so interesting, so compelling.

Such a great speaker.

If we wanted to bake a Christopher Hitchens cake in the oven, what ingredients go into that cake?

Let's find out.

Super quick, I have to say this, and I haven't said this in many, many videos, but we have a store.

So if you like what's going on with Wise Disciple, you want to rep Wise Disciple, because that is pretty much the

coolest way you could possibly tell others about this channel, check out the store.

Where you can get cool things like the shirt I'm wearing.

It says, I cross -examine for the Lord.

And there's other cool things that you can take a look at, and you can wear and walk around, and people will say, hey, what's that all about?

And then you can explain.

Wise Disciple is on YouTube, and you definitely have to check out the videos.

Okay, thank you so much.

The structure of tonight's debate will be as follows.

Hitchens will start, taking 15 minutes for his opening remarks, defending the motion that religion is the problem.

Followed by D'Souza, with a 15 -minute opposition to the motion.

Okay, so the moderator has kind of sort of identified the resolution, the

proposition for this debate, and that is religion is the problem.

Okay, that's literally what he just said.

Now, the question is, problem with regard to what?

Society in general?

Or is it the problem with religious violence that we see expressed all over the world?

Well, it seems like maybe that's the answer, right?

Hitchens seemed to be focused on that in his own writings.

It appears the moderator touched on the problem of religious violence just a minute earlier.

But it's unclear because it's not clearly stated in the resolution itself what the specific context

is of this problem.

But okay, we do have something to work with, and that is, now we see Christopher Hitchens has to make a

prima facie case that religion itself is the problem.

Now, a good debater should define these key terms, okay?

So Hitchens needs to define religion.

He needs to define the problem in order for us to move forward in this debate.

So will he do that?

Let's find out.

Thank you, Professor.

Very generous introduction.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

My first duty, which is also a pleasure, is to thank the University of Notre Dame for inviting me

onto its terrain.

And Mr. O'Duffy in particular, in an institution that's also identified, I believe, with the great history and people of

Ireland, for taking the revenge of arranging for English weather to

greet me.

Now, I could, I've been given 15 minutes.

So this is always a good move by a debater.

And that is, the first few things that are said in a debate are meant to develop a debater's

ethos, okay?

It focuses on a debater's credibility.

You have to remember, the first question that many in the audience, and those who are judging if the debate is more

formal, but let's face it, in debates like this, the audience is the judge, right?

The question that they're thinking about is, who is this person standing in front of me?

Right?

That's true in basically any encounter, especially if someone comes up to you cold and starts telling you a bunch of stuff as

if you just listen to them, right?

The first question anyone asks is, who the heck is this person, right?

And so it is always wise to take the first few seconds and answer that question in some form or fashion.

A lot of debaters will be very gracious.

They'll thank their hosts for inviting them.

They'll pay compliments to the university, if it's at a university, or the venue, whoever puts it on, right?

They may even pay a compliment to their opponent, their interlocutor, and say that they have a lot of respect

for them, and they've read their works, whatever.

But also, they may tell jokes.

Jokes are just about always a useful tool during this time.

If you're funny, okay?

If you're not funny, maybe consider something else.

So this move by Hitchens is great.

Hitchens was the master of stuff like this.

And just so you know where I'm going with this, every debater must walk the balance of presenting their

logical case and also being rhetorically persuasive.

You have to do both.

Hitchens was a master rhetorician.

Everyone knew it.

Most of the people that debated him loved him.

And that's due in large part to his ability as a rhetorician.

So if you're a debater, you're thinking about getting to debate, right?

You have to walk that balance well.

And I would argue that Hitchens worked over time in the area of persuasion.

Was very good at it.

And in the area of persuasion, what I mean by that is Aristotle's categories of rhetoric.

Pathos, ethos, and logos.

And not necessarily in that order.

Which isn't that much, but I could do it in a way in two.

Like this, as a proposition.

When Gertrude Stein was dying, some of you will know this story, she asked, as her last

hour approached, well, what is the answer?

And when no one around her bed spoke, she rephrased and said, well, in that case,

what is the question?

And I'm speaking tonight, we are speaking tonight, we're met tonight at an institution of higher learning.

And the greatest obligation that you have is to keep an open mind.

And to realize that in our present state, human society, we're more and more

overborn by how little we know.

And how little we know about more and more.

Or if you like, how much more we know, but how much less we know as we find out how much more and more

there is to know.

In these circumstances, which I believe to be undeniable, the only respectable intellectual position is

one of doubt, skepticism, reservation, and free, and I'd stress

free and unfettered inquiry, in that lies, as it has always lain, our only hope.

Okay, so notice he's laying a framework for the discussion.

He's laying a framework for the debate.

Again, this is his opening statement.

And I have always said, so I'll probably circle back around to this in a little bit, that laying a

framework is one of the key things that you can do as a debater in order to be

persuasive and to win.

Okay?

Laying a framework just basically means that you are talking about the debate in a manner that allows the audience

slash judge, again, in this kind of a setting, the audience is the judge, to help them to think

through the debate, think about what matters, think about how they should be judging the debate,

think about what's important, what's not important, all of those things.

And so your opening statement must include, and right at the beginning, in my opinion,

some form of laying a framework.

Christopher Hitchens is doing that now.

You need to think about this.

This is what matters.

I would argue that we need to start out as skeptics, essentially what he's saying here.

That's him doing what he's supposed to be doing, okay?

So let's keep going.

So you should beware always of those who say that these questions have already been decided.

In particular, to those who tell you that they've been decided by reservation, excuse me, by revelation,

that there are handed down commandments and precepts that predate, in a sense,

ourselves, and that the answers are already available if only we could see them, and that the

obligation upon ourselves to debate ethical and moral and historical and other questions is thereby

dissolved.

It seems to me that that is the one position, it's what I call the faith position, that has to be discarded

first.

So thank you for your attention, and I'm done.

Except that it seems that I have a reputation for

demagogy to live up to.

When I come to a place.

So notice tone, notice articulation, again, that little joke

right there, all of this goes to build his credibility with the audience.

If you're tracking this so far, your first role as a debater is to develop your ethos with your audience, right?

And the thing with Hitchens is he realizes if he can make you laugh

as a debater on the stage, then he's done some work to get you to trust him.

If you originally put up a wall of distrust as an audience member, you know, I'm walking in as a

Christian, I know that this Hitchens guy is not a Christian, so I'm just going to put up a wall and I'm going to secure

myself within that wall, right?

Then Hitchens knows that when he gets you to laugh at a couple of his jokes, then he's probably taken a

few bricks off of your wall.

You tracking that?

It's a great move.

If you're already super funny, it's easy to do, right?

You're just leaning into the talents you already have naturally.

Hitchens always came across as being funny, as having the spirit of like

contrarian playfulness.

He often would speak at times as if he wanted you to be in on the joke with him.

You know, that all helps to develop his ethos.

And as a debater, it's vital that you develop that.

Like this, I read the local paper, the campus observer in this case.

I was sorry to see that Dinesh and I are not considered up to the standards of Father Richard McBrien,

whose exacting standards I dare say are out of our reach.

And I was also sorry to see myself and others represented in other papers,

and in particular by a distinguished cleric in St. Peter's on Good Friday,

who made a speech through which His Holiness the Pope sat in silence, Father Canto La Mesa,

saying that people like myself are part of a pogrom, a persecution comparable only to that

of the Jews, with the church in mind.

This is the first time I've ever been accused of being part of a pogrom or a persecution.

But as long as it's going on, I'll also add that it's the only pogrom I've ever heard of that's led by

small deaf and dumb children whose cries for justice have been ignored.

And while that is the definition of the pogrom, I'll continue to support it because I think it demonstrates very

clearly the moral superiority of the secular concept of justice and law

over canon law and religious law, with its sickly emphasis on self -exculpation

in the guise of forgiveness and redemption.

Ooh.

So his point here is just to say that the Catholic Church,

well, and I take it all Christians by extension, are included in this.

They do not have the trustworthiness to call out injustice when they use terms

incorrectly, when they focus on things that are not accurate, right?

Terms like pogrom, which is a word used to describe violent mob -style attacks

against religious communities, right?

Although the original usage of the word describes the attacks against the Jewish community, which I believe Hitchens was Jewish.

So in other words, how can the Church, capital C, be believed when they misuse

terms and therefore mischaracterize injustice in that sense?

Seems like the secular view of injustice is superior.

That's what he's saying.

The only reason why religion is a problem, it's a problem principally because it is man -made.

Because to an extent it is true, as the Church used to preach when it had more confidence, that we are, in

some sense, originally sinful and guilty.

If you want to prove that, you only have to look at the many religions that people have constructed to see that they are indeed

the product of an imperfectly evolved primate species, about half a chromosome away

from a chimpanzee, with a prefrontal lobe that's too small, an adrenaline gland that's too big, and various

other evolutionary deformities about which we're finding out evermore.

A species that is predatory.

A man is a wolf to man, homo homini lupus, as has well been said.

A species that's very fearful of itself and others and of the natural order.

And above all, very, very willing, despite its protestations of religious modesty, to be convinced that the

operations of the cosmos and the universe are all operating with us in mind.

Make up your mind whether you want to be modest or not.

But don't say that you were made out of dust, or if you're a woman, out of a bit of rib, or if you're a Muslim, out of a clot of

blood, and you're an abject sinner, born into guilt.

But add, nonetheless, let's cheer up.

The whole universe is still designed with you in mind.

This is not modesty or humility.

It's a man -made false consolation, in my judgment.

And it does great moral damage.

It warps.

It begins by warping what we might call our moral sense of proportion.

Watch the forcefulness of tone here.

His point is that one of the reasons why religion is the problem is because it's man -made, right?

And not only that, see, here's where things start to, hmm, get a

little murky for me.

Because what I'm looking for is the Tolman model of argumentation, right?

Of making a kind of an argument when you lay out your case as a good debater.

And what I mean by the Tolman model is a claim, a data, and a warrant.

We call it CDW.

What Hitchens just did was he spent the majority of his time making the claim.

I don't even know if I heard exactly data in there.

But when it came time to sort of support himself, which is the category of warrant, right?

The warrant aspect of an argument is how your data supports your claim.

What he did was he just explained his claim.

So in terms of what the relationship of the data is to the claim, all he did was he reiterated his

claim and explained it further.

He unpacked his claim.

And that's where things start to fall apart.

Clearly, he's speaking.

Clearly, it's confidently.

But what is the argument exactly?

That's the question that you should be asking.

What are the arguments specifically?

What exactly is he saying?

Because that's where things start to fall apart.

Now, at the very end, he says, well, religion makes people take a low view of

themselves.

It warps morality.

That's what he's saying, especially with regard to the notion of original sin, right?

But then he just leaves it.

And so what he has not explained yet is why that is a problem with religion,

okay?

Some of the pieces are there, but the whole thing is not there, which then I suppose he suggests that the opposite is

true or something close to the opposite, which is, well, tell people they're great and wonderful on the inside, and perhaps that should

eliminate all the deleterious effects of religious folks that we have witnessed in the past.

But again, rhetoric is key.

You see how his voice gets louder at certain places here.

This is for emphasis.

And you see how his nonverbals support this shift in speech.

So the glasses come off, right?

Now he's talking to you.

Well, it appears like it's more important because now the glasses are off on this particular occasion, right?

For emphasis.

And by the way, don't hear what I'm not saying.

It's not that all of this is carefully scripted out ahead of time by Hitchens so that it's kind of this

manipulative thing.

I don't think it is.

I think a lot of this is just naturally part of his style that he's developed over time.

I'm just talking about the effects of these kinds of things on the debate itself.

They help to persuade an audience.

They travel a distance that you, the debater, need to travel.

And Hitchens was just very good at that.

I wish that was all that could be said, though I think that's the most important thing.

I ought to say why I think it ought to be credited.

And I want to add that my colleagues, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, have been very generous in this respect.

This debate would be uninteresting if religion was one -dimensional.

Religion was our first attempt to make sense of our surroundings.

It was our first attempt at cosmology, for example, to make sense of what goes on in the heavens.

It was our first attempt at what I care about the most, the study of literature and literary criticism.

It gave us texts to deliberate and even to debate about, even if some of those texts were held to be the word of God

and beyond review and beyond criticism.

Nonetheless, the idea is introduced and it had never been introduced before.

It's our first attempt at healthcare in one way.

If you go to the shaman or the witch doctor and you make the right propitiations, the right

sacrifices, and you really believe in it, you do have a better chance of recovery.

Everybody knows it's a medical fact.

Morale is an ingredient in health.

And it was our first attempt at that too.

It was our first very bad attempt at human solidarity because it was tribe -based, but nonetheless it taught that

there were virtues in sticking together.

And it was our first attempt, I would say also, this is not an exhaustive list, at psychiatric care,

at dealing with the terrible loneliness of the human condition.

At what happens when the individual spirit looks out shivering into the

enormous void of the cosmos and contemplates its own extinction

and deals with the awful fear of death.

This was the first attempt to apply any balm to that awful question.

But as Charles Darwin says of our own evident kinship with lower

mammals and lower forms of life, we bear, as he puts it in The Origin of Species,

we bear always the ineffaceable stamp of our lowly origin.

I'll repeat it.

The ineffaceable stamp of our lowly origin.

Religion does the same thing.

It quite clearly shows that it's the first, the most primitive, the most crude, and the most deluded attempt

to make sense.

It is the worst attempt, but partly because it was the first.

So the credit can be divided in that way.

And the worst thing it did was to offer us certainty, to say these are truths that are unalterable.

They're handed down from on high.

We only have to learn God's will and how to obey it in order to free ourselves from these dilemmas.

That's probably the worst advice of all.

Heinrich Heine says,.

Again, this is where, this is always where Hitchens falls off.

And this video is really about the things that Hitchens does well.

But I suppose what he does well only goes to contrast what he does not do well either.

And what he does not do in just about any debate he's in is make good arguments.

Notice so far, he said the problem with religion is that some Catholics, or maybe one, I'm not sure,

misuse the term pogrom, and therefore they should not be trusted when it comes to the issue of justice.

Okay, but notice that last part there, I had to say that out loud because Hitchens did not.

And that's what I'm trying to say.

In a debate, a good debater must lay out their case, which entails clear contentions that are themselves

arguments with a claim, data, and warrant according to the Tolman model.

And these must be clear so we can track them.

Hitchens, if he was trying to make an argument connected to injustice and trustworthiness,

didn't do that.

He also says one of the reasons religion is the problem is it gives people a low view of themselves.

Okay, that's the claim.

Now, where's the data?

Where's the warrant to fill out that argument?

Nowhere.

That's what I mean.

If Hitchens had been just as good a logician as he was a rhetorician, he would have been

unstoppable, ladies and gentlemen.

But as it stands, he was just an excellent rhetorician.

But if you're in a dark wood on a dark night and you don't know where you are and you've never been through this territory

before, you may be well advised to hire as a guide the local mad, blind old man who can

feel his way through the forest because he can do something you can't.

But when the dawn breaks and the light comes, you would be silly if you continued to operate with this

guide, this blind, mad old man who was doing his best with the first

attempt to give you just two very contemporary examples.

To have a germ theory of disease relieves you of the idea that plagues are punishments,

that's the church used to preach, that plagues come because the Jews have poisoned the wells, as the church very often

preached, or that the Jews even exist and are themselves a plague, as the church used to preach when it felt strong enough

and also was morally weak enough and had such little evidence.

Uh, you can free yourself from the idea that diseases are punishments or visitations.

If you study plate tectonics, you won't do what the Archbishop of Haiti did

the other day, speaking to his sorrowing people after his predecessor had been buried in the ruins of the cathedral at Port -au

-Prince, along with a quarter of a million other unfortunate Haitians whose lives were

miserable enough as it was, and to say with the Cardinal Archbishop of New York standing next to him

that God had something to say to Haiti and this is the way he chose to say it.

If you study plate tectonics and a few other things, you will free yourself

of this appalling burden from our superstitious, fearful, primate past.

And I suggest, again, to an institution of higher learning, that's a responsibility we all have to take on.

This might be a good place to say this.

What is so powerful about Hitchens?

And I would say that all debaters would benefit from doing what Hitchens does here.

What's so powerful about him is that he is a great storyteller.

There was a word for this a long time ago because we used to put a spotlight on this and talk about its importance, and now

not so much.

But the word is raconteur.

Christopher Hitchens is a brilliant raconteur.

A raconteur is someone who can just use stories in very compelling ways to relate what they are communicating to their audience.

This right here, if you have this skill and it's developed well at key moments in debate,

this right here is, in my opinion, one of the greatest rhetorical tools that you could possibly use.

Why do I say that?

Well, because all of us interpret information through story.

That's how we're wired.

And so what that means is, information, if it's wrapped up inside a good story, a good

illustration, will grow deep roots in the people that you're talking to.

It'll stick longer.

Information, if wrapped up inside story, will help people to better understand it.

Why?

Because in a story, things become much more concrete.

They become alive.

They take on aspects that we can latch onto and understand because we understand things and we

interpret information through narrative.

And so that's key.

Hitchens is the master of this.

How many stories has he already told in his opening statement?

Have you noticed?

The whole thing has been filled with stories and illustrations.

And by the way, to his own detriment, because again, so far, there are no clear arguments at all.

But there are a lot of stories and illustrations.

So again, going back to that balance, you need to walk the balance.

It's not just that you are a good rhetorician, but also you need to back it up with good reasons, good evidence, good

arguments, all that stuff.

But then the reverse is true as well.

If you are really well -skilled in the area of information, you know everything, you've got it all memorized here,

you need to be able to relay it in a way that's easily received.

And that's where rhetoric comes in.

I mean, just think about the last sort of rhetorical tool that Hitchens employed.

He's trying to make the claim that religion is man's first attempt at making sense of the world.

And so this very old and first way of doing something, and

which is very ignorant, right?

Of trying to explain things and give us a way to live that we know now is outdated and harmful.

This is Hitchens' sort of talking points.

He relays all of that by talking about a crazy old blind man who tries to lead people through a dark

forest, right?

The crazy old blind man is religion.

It's powerful.

It's powerful because you can see this in your mind.

It's memorable.

It helps you to connect to what he's saying.

And that goes a long way to help you as a debater.

Be a raconteur.

Develop your usage of stories and illustrations when appropriate.

If we reflect, some people say the great Stephen Jay Gould, who I admired very much, whom we all learned a great

deal about evolutionary biology, used to say rather leniently, I think, that, well, these

are non -overlapping magisteria, the material world, the scientific world, and the faith world.

I think non -overlapping is too soft.

I think it's more a question really increasingly of it being a matter of incompatibility or

perhaps better to say irreconcilability.

Just if you reflect on a few things, I'll have time, I hope, to mention.

My timer, by the way, isn't running, so I'm under your discipline, Professor.

You'll give me...

Four and a half minutes.

Very good.

When we reflect that the rate of expansion of our universe is increasing, it was thought until Hubble that we knew it

was expanding, but that surely Newton would teach us that the rate would diminish.

No, the rate is increasing.

The Big Bang is speeding up.

We can see the end of it coming increasingly clearly, and while we wait for that, we can see the

galaxy of Andromeda moving nearer towards the collision that's coming with us.

You can see it now in the night sky.

This is the object of a design, you think?

What kind of designer in that case?

To say that this must have an origin and now we know how it's going to end, why ask why

there's something rather than nothing when you can see the nothingness coming only replaces the question.

Faith is of no use in deciding it, and that's on the macro level.

From the macro to the micro, 99 .8 of all species ever created, if

you insist, on the face of this planet have already become extinct, leaving no

descendants.

I might add that of that number, three or four branches of our own family, Homo

sapiens, branches of it, the Cro -Magnons, the Neanderthals, who were living

with us until about 50 ,000 years ago, who had tools, who made art,

who decorated graves, who clearly had a religion, who must have had a god, who must have

abandoned them, who must have let them go.

They're no longer with us.

We don't know what their last cries were like.

And our own species was down to about 10 ,000 in Africa before we finally

got out of there.

Again, what are the clear contentions to support Hitchin's position that religion is the problem?

Don't really know.

Now, it seems Hitchin wants to talk about how religion and science are not compatible.

But you see, he doesn't really clearly say that, does he?

And now he wants to talk about Cro -Magnons and the branches of our own species, as he puts it, that's disappearing.

As if to suggest what?

That the religious characterizations of the telos of the world and the goal of mankind, that they are

incorrect?

But you see how that's not the topic.

But you see how he's not spelling that out clearly.

He has two minutes left in his speech, and he has not made a clear case.

I mean, this is from a debate standpoint.

This is not a great opening speech.

Why?

Because the contentions are missing.

The claims, the data, the warrants following the Tolman model, they're all missing.

But the rhetorical aspects of his speech are operating at peak performance.

And so this is why I think Hitchin is so well beloved and considered to have beaten

a lot of Christians and religious folks in debate, because that's how powerful rhetoric can be.

And so again, if you want to debate, and you are strong on the side of your argumentation,

you need to take a few lessons from Christopher Hitchin and develop your rhetoric.

Unforsaken this time or so far, to move from the macro, in other words, to the micro,

our own solar system is only halfway through its allotted span before it blows up.

And as Sir Martin Ryle, the great astronomer, Royal and Professor of Cosmology at

Cambridge, and incidentally a believing Anglican says, by the time there

are creatures on the Earth who look as the sun expires, they will not be human.

Will not be humans who see this happen if our planet lives that long.

The creatures that watch it happen will be as far different from us as we are from amoebae and bacteria.

Faced with these amazing, overarching, titanic, I would say awe -inspiring

facts, like the fact that ever since the Big Bang, every single second, a

star the size of ours has blown up.

While I've been talking, once every second, a star the size of our sun has gone out.

Faced with these amazing, indisputable facts, can you be brought to believe

that the main events in human history, the crucial ones, happened 3 ,000 to 2

,000 years ago in illiterate desert Arabia and Palestine?

And that it was at that moment only that the heavens decided it was time to intervene.

And that by those interventions, we can ask for salvation.

Can you be brought to believe this?

I stand before you as someone who quite simply cannot.

And who refuses, furthermore, to be told that if I don't believe it, I wouldn't have any source for ethics or morality.

Please don't pile the insulting onto the irrational.

And tell me that if I don't accept these sacrifices in the desert, I have no reason to tell right

from wrong.

One minute.

So now, Hitchens has lost the thread.

And so, instead of, again, making a clear case to support the proposition that religion is the problem,

now, Hitchens wants to use, I don't know what, incredulity?

To communicate that no one should believe that religion it

seems like he's really focused on Christianity, but he also includes other religions that those are true.

Why?

Because it does not comport with our current scientific understanding.

Uh, okay.

But that's not what the debate is about, though.

So, I don't want to say that this is a purposeful bait -and -switch here, because maybe Hitchens isn't

aware that he's veered away from his debate lane.

That instead of making a case, making a series of arguments to support the

position that he holds that religion is the problem, that instead now he's actually getting upset with the audience

and saying, don't you tell me to believe it?

What?

Like, what – is that your role, Christopher Hitchens, as a debater?

To all of a sudden get on a Christian's case in the audience and chastise them?

No, it's not.

But nevertheless, there is a power behind this kind of stuff, ladies and gentlemen.

It still has an effect because of the power of his ability to speak well, because

people can still feel the force of his arguments, right?

Are you really going to believe that in light of the bleak outlook of the universe that somehow God exists?

Again, whether or not you should believe in God is not what the debate is about.

And yet, somehow, I do think that Hitchens knows that this particular move is

powerful.

For an audience member to be called out like this, what he's doing right now, it creates an emotional moment, and I think Hitchens

knows that to some degree.

And he probably didn't care that he's no longer debating the topic, that he's way off course.

He doesn't – that's part of his contrarian nature, I suppose.

Don't tell him what the rules of debate are.

I'm just going to go do what I want to do.

One minute.

Good.

Then I'll have to prune, and you'll be the losers.

But I'll have a – there's a rebuttal coming.

All right.

Look at the contemporary religious scene.

I return to religion as well as just faith and belief.

Israeli settlers are stealing other people's land in the hope of bringing on the Messiah and a terrible war.

On the alternative side, as it thinks of itself, the Islamic jihadists are preparing a war without end,

a faith -based war based on the repulsive tactic of suicide murder.

And all of these people believe that they have a divine warrant, a holy book, and the direct word of God on their side.

We used to worry when I was young, what will happen when a maniac gets hold of a nuclear weapon?

We're about to discover what happens when that happens.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is about to get a nuclear weapon, and by legal means that flout every possible international law

and treaty.

Meanwhile, in Russia, the authoritarian, chauvinistic, expansionist regime of Vladimir Putin

is increasingly decked in clerical garb by the Russian Orthodox Church, with its traditional allegiance to

czarism, serfdom, and the rest of it.

And Dinesh would have to argue – I'll close on this –.

Dinesh would have to argue that surely that's better than there'd be a mass outbreak of secularism

in Russia and Iran and Israel and Saudi Arabia.

And I would call that a reductio ad absurdum.

And I'll leave you with it, and I'll be back.

Thanks.

Yeah.

So, little bit of framing there at the end, right?

Laying a framework for the audience to adjudicate my opponent, Dinesh, must argue that the

worst behavior from the Middle East is better than secularism, right?

That's a great move by an opponent.

I mean, you know, it does set up a false dichotomy, but it's a great move as a debater.

That's why I keep saying that.

Laying a framework, if your audience adopts your framework, is the key

to winning.

And so, again, why is Hitchens so great?

Because he utilizes rhetoric very well.

He spends time developing his ethos, his credibility with the audience.

He – and I didn't say this earlier – he speaks as if he's talking to one person, not the whole crowd.

Did you notice that?

The level of his voice is not loud enough to address the whole room.

It's slightly lower.

It's slightly more hushed, right?

As opposed to somebody else who wants to extend the volume level of their

voice to the back of the room, right?

He doesn't do that.

And he always looks directly at the audience.

He almost never looks at his opponent, except to say something directly to them, or the

moderator, for example, right?

But he's always looking at the audience, which is what we teach debaters to do, right?

Don't look at your interlocutor.

Look at the judge.

He's gracious.

He tells jokes.

These are all very good things to develop your ethos as a debater.

He also is a great storyteller.

He's a raconteur of the first order, in my opinion.

If you think about it, too, it's like he's often poetic in the way that he communicates.

All of these things take the information that he wants to relay, even if they aren't exactly clear arguments,

and it plants them down deep in each audience member.

If you are somebody who does not agree with Hitchens, what I'm trying to get you to see is that

you should appreciate those strategies, those tactics in debate, because they will serve

you well.

Take the information you want to relay and plant it deeper with stories and illustration.

It's one of the greatest things that a debater can do with the appropriate set of stories and at the appropriate times.

Finally, he didn't do a lot of this, from what I can tell, but he did clearly, right at the beginning of the debate and right at the end of

the debate, he laid a framework for how the audience should understand the debate.

This is, again, very often the key to winning a debate.

Even if you don't make the better case, even if you lay a better framework, you win.

Very often, the audience believes you, they adopt your framework, and you win.

Well, I hope that helped you.

Even as Christians, we have things to learn from Christopher Hitchens.

What do you think Hitchens did well on the debate stage?

Let me know in the comments below.

If you like this video, let me know if there's somebody else, maybe, that you would like me to take a look at and break down in

this way.

More debate videos are coming, and videos in general, they're coming in the channel, so stay tuned.

Take a look if you haven't already seen the entire debate.

I think it's actually very helpful, very interesting debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D'Souza.

Maybe you can even watch the rest of the debate and practice identifying more moments of rhetoric from both sides of the debate

aisle, so to speak.

I'll leave the link in the notes below.

But in the meantime, thank you so much for joining me for this video, and I'll say bye for now.