Vietnam? Seriously?
Endless CIA operations? You mean like 9/11/73?
Now there was a real success for freedom and democracy.
And Reagan’s idea of financing the mujahadeen in Afghanistan has worked out sooooo well, hasn’t it?

As for the mujahadeen, don’t change the subject.Socialist economies are Ponzi scams. They can only work by progressively growing, devouring the wealth built up by freer systems. The mujahadeen stopped the expansion of the USSR allowing it to implode. And the so-called pacifists you listed benefitted from that. Deal with it.

The Vietnam War, badly mishandled as it was by the Johnson Administration, still stopped the expansion of Communism throughout SE Asia. Ditto for the CIA operations overseas. In Chile, we traded a Communist dictatorship for a conventional one — one that would not seek to expand its brand of tyranny across state lines. Sometimes, you have to choose between bad and worse. God bless the CIA.

What do you think you’re “taking” when you read a book, not the authors communication? What else then?

Huh? What does this have to do with anything?

What Hitchens does not appreciate is that his sense of morality is merely piggy-backing on a Christian rationale and on Christian presumptions bequeathed to him.

And the christians were piggy backing on the the greeks and the zoroastrians, and the israelites, who piggy-backed on the babylonians and the sumerians, etc, etc. In fact, when it comes to moral norms and ethical systems, it’s a matter of “plagiarize, plagiarize, let no one else’s work evade your eyes!” (Though independent origination is probably also needed to explain the ubiquity of the basic ethic of reciprocity.)

It’s safe to assume that Hitchens has in mind a larger set of circumstances where it’s obvious that violent action would prevent further violence.

I think it’s far safer to assume that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or is deliberately distorting the Berrigan’s legacy, by saying they advocated not resisting evil.

What Hitchens does not appreciate is that his sense of morality is merely piggy-backing on a Christian rationale and on Christian presumptions bequeathed to him. Christians are commanded (not persuaded) to love the unlovely, to deny themselves for the weaker, and to forgive this who persecute them.

Hitchens might be able to construct (after the fact) rational reasons for why doing any of those things is ultimately beneficial anyway, but he would not have considered them at all except for the original, entirely irrational, imperative from God. Only collectivist societies have come up with utterly secular reasons for performing similar altruistic actions by merely creating a religion out of civic life.

I’m sorry, but this is simply a mistake. Our sense of morality predates religion; it was not given to amoral humans by the Christian god. Our species evolved to be socially interdependent, and morality was adaptive for us and therefore preserved and enhanced by natural selection. Likewise, as we’d expect, there is evidence of moral sense (less developed than ours) in various other species.

Every society, religion, or other social institution from the beginning has built on this moral sense. The differences have been in the interference of dogma (supposed divine commands that sometimes take precedence over moral action) and in what each society defines as its circle of moral concern, the “in-group” who are supposed to have moral rights. For example, every society throughout history, regardless of religion, has had sanctions against killing people, but not everyone necessarily has qualified as fully a person: when they’ve had reasons to kill certain people (neighboring tribes or nations, criminals, rebellious lower-class citizens, slaves, etc.), they’ve simply defined those people as beneath moral concern. But no society has ever said its people could kill just anyone.

And in modern times, we’ve evolved pluralistic societies with a higher appreciation for human life and dignity (i.e., the values of humanism), so we’ve widened our circle of moral concern to the point where we don’t think anyone ought to be killed without very good reason. But the in-group/outsider distinction was also adaptive in earlier eras.

There are many places you can read about the natural origins of our moral sense; one that I enjoyed is a book by Michael Shermer, called “The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule.”

The notion that morality comes from a supernatural being is persistent in religions, since it’s a necessary fiction to support retention of adherents. But it’s a pernicious notion, because it causes so many religious people to think nonreligious people (or people of other religions) are amoral or immoral, and has led to much persecution over the centuries. And of course, it hampers our evolution from our original tribal, in-group/outsider mentality to our modern, pluralistic, advanced morality, and is dangerously maladaptive in a world of WMD’s, mass communication, and cheap transportation.

As far as my personal convictions go, which aren’t really under discussion here, I think that in the relatively small set of circumstances where it is obvious that a violent action would prevent further violence, violence can be justified.

Anyway, what you’re trying to defend here is that Hitchens was not mistaken or deliberately lying when he said that the Berrigans believed in “non-resistance to evil”. You haven’t even addressed this.

Lets put it this way. It’s safe to assume that Hitchens has in mind a larger set of circumstances where it’s obvious that violent action would prevent further violence. That’s what he’s getting at when he talks about the Berrigans, they as pacifists would be on the wrong side of that moral argument, and would not resist evil if it meant using violence. He’s talked about pacifism before in audio interviews, so it’s not possible for me to find quickly, but that’s the gist.

Endless CIA operations? You mean like 9/11/73?
Now there was a real success for freedom and democracy.

And Reagan’s idea of financing the mujahadeen in Afghanistan has worked out sooooo well, hasn’t it?

Korean War
Vietnam War
Endless CIA operations
Strategic Defense Initiatives
Mujahadeen

They had a lot of really violent help.

Andrei Sakharov
Vaclav Havel
Lech Walesa

Not complete washouts.

So you’re actually arguing that in no circumstance that violence would be the more moral option?

No, I’m not Aj, so stop making things up. Go back and read what I wrote. I did not say that movements that made a commitment to non-violence always achieved success in resisting evil.

As far as my personal convictions go, which aren’t really under discussion here, I think that in the relatively small set of circumstances where it is obvious that a violent action would prevent further violence, violence can be justified.

Anyway, what you’re trying to defend here is that Hitchens was not mistaken or deliberately lying when he said that the Berrigans believed in “non-resistance to evil”. You haven’t even addressed this.

(Hitchens also seems to have no effing clue who Oscar Romero was, he seems to think he’s still alive, instead of having been assassinated in 1980 for calling on the Salvadoran soldiers to resist orders to shoot their fellow peasants.)