Of atheism, Hitchens has said:

The conversations sparked by the death of polemicist extraordinaire Christopher Hitchens have touched on topics ranging from national politics to the Iraq invasion to atheism. While loathing ignorance in all its forms, Hitchens routinely stomached the company of its greatest purveyors to see it appropriately ridiculed.

Sometimes, however, it is from an unexpected angle that stupidity regarding the religious enterprise makes itself known. Appearing as a panelist to discuss (in part) the life and death of Christopher Hitchens, Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter professed with an unbecoming smugness that to "believe there is no god is just as much an article of faith as to believe there is one." (paraphrased) (1) When ignorance of John Q. Church takes this form it is boorish and unsurprising; when an Oxford Ph.D. working at Princeton utters such inanities it smacks of dishonesty.

"The atheist does not say and cannot prove there is no deity. He or she says that no persuasive evidence or argument has ever been adduced for the notion." (2)

"Atheist humanism has no resemblance to a faith, let alone a church. Any thinking person can accept its conclusions independently, without any catechism, and these reasoned conclusions do not require the incessant rituals of reinforcement that are necessitated by a belief in the incredible or the impossible." (3)

Of course, one would expect Professor Slaughter's education to have at least touched on the writings of Hume, Spinoza (incidentally, one of Hitchens favorites), as well as a healthy dose of informal logic while earning her J.D. from Harvard. The concept of the burden of proof and how one might actually "prove a case" should have stayed with her longer than the memory of a well-earned hangover at a sorority party. To the detriment of herself and her students, she seems to have taken the same tactic toward the concept of faith as Peter Kreeft has in his Handbook of Christian Apologetics. (4) I said it of him then and I will say it of Professor Slaughter now: When these are the teachers...what hope is there for the students?