Another Cocky Christian Fundamentalist Misunderstands Hitchens

I had to go look it up. I read the entire account where he talks about Miss Watts. At first, it did seem very out of place. He flattered her, and then insulted her, and then went back to flattering her again. But the only reason that seemed so random is because I listened to this video first; before I went to read it. By the time I finished reading that entire account, and then looked up the meaning of "old trout", his actual meaning became very obvious to me. This very gentle woman with very beautiful character became, for a moment, very un-beautiful. This happened a.) exactly when and b.) exactly because of ... allowing herself to become ugly for her religion. She suddenly fell from grace, in the eyes of 9-year-old Christopher. Middle-aged Christopher isn't calling her names. He is explaining the transformation 9-yr-old Christopher witnessed and how stark and startling it was for him at the time. In that moment, instead of her staying true to her natural beauty, she degraded herself when she slopped on a thick layer of clown makeup called religious dogma.

In that moment, she also switched from being an educator, to an anti-educator; and young Christopher immediately realized it. She'd been talking nonsense all along. And that did continue. But the point was that she went from saying pleasant nonsense that an uncritical 9year-old would just assume is reasonable, and then suddenly going too far; accidentally exposing the grift. Her religion is not why she was a pleasant person. On the same page, Hitchens notes this too. Instead, her religion had found a way to unfairly take credit for that beauty, and also to weaponize that beauty against defenseless child-minds. It was a very ugly business for her to sell herself to. Witnessing that happen in real time ... was the sort of disillusionment that helped catapult young Christopher into the man he would become. -- In other words, his mention of that ugliness was NOT an Ad hom. And Ad Hominem fallacy is when someone in a debate attacks the person instead of the other person's argument. That didn't happen here. He wasn't in a debate with Miss Watts. In this part of his book, Christopher Hitchens was merely sharing a part of his own journey, from the time he first realized something ugly about her faith, and (with that) realizing how that diminished her. He addresses her claims and related claims made by her religion ... separately from this issue. Nor was he "poisoning the well". The unflattering adjectives that he employs in those moments are fair, relevant, and even necessary. If someone (Hitchens, or anyone else) wants to write and share an essay on why something (anything) is "not good", then that person needs to clarify what they mean by "not good". They also need to cite examples of what makes it "not good", and then they need to share their reasoning for what makes those specific examples "not good". "Old trout" was a middle-aged Hitchens explaining a child-Hitchens feelings in the moment. When his teacher went out of her way to make herself more beautiful with the pageantry of her faith, she made herself much less so.