Critique of "God is Not Great" by Christoper Hitchens

[phil-lndn]

I appreciate you trying, but you're using the word "true" in a way that doesn't seem to mean anything.

It's true that I wrote the story, for whatever reason I wrote it. That's just a tautology. It's not necessarily true that my story undermines your story, it may have failed utterly. If it's only true that I intended to undermine you (and that was an assumption on your part, it wasn't part of the story) then that's not saying much useful.

I agree that you need to view things in context, and to see what you can really learn from it, regardless of whether the events happened as written. Is this what you're trying to say? If not, I have no clue and I'll have to give up. I'm all for philosophy, but when it gets to the point where you're assigning labels and meanings that apply equally to everything, they no longer have any significance.

I likewise appreciate you are trying to understand me, what I'm trying to communicate is unfortunately slightly mind-twisting if you haven't encountered it before. 


Perhaps a way to help explain it is to say that "true" is always a perspective. There is no "true" in an absolute sense. Example - this picture you might have seen before is a great practical demonstration of perspectives. It's possible to see 2 different pictures in there, one is of an old women looking down and the other is of a young women looking away. 




Which one is "true"?

Both. And, neither.

"The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth" -  Niels Bohr