Jerry Bowyer Gets Some Feedback

Remember this blog post from a few days ago?

That's the one where local Pittsburgh conservative pundit Jerry Bowyer stumbles (embarrassingly) as he takes on Christopher Hitchens (who's dead and can't defend himself) regarding Christ's virgin birth.

Well, some readers at Forbes.com have given Jerry some feedback.  Not all of it good.

As of the writing of this blog post, there was a smattering of comments supporting Jerry, like this one:

I see the Secular Nazis are coming out of the woodworks to attack Jerry Bowyer. I think Hitchens was an interesting guy who had legitimate complaints against Mother Theresa and others but he was also one of the most arrogant Marxists around. He was far from the “genius” he and other Left-wing Nazis claimed him to be. I wonder which is harder to conceive: The virgin birth or that inanimate matter spontaneously formed living beings, something which scientists have never been able to replicate or prove and never will replicate or prove.

But for the most part the comments ran this one:

What did I just read here??? I mean, and guy who believes in the Unicorn proclaimed himself to be smarter than Hichens??? Ok mate, keep on dreaming..

Or this one:

Vapid!

Seriously Jerry? Don’t try to write anything like this in the future. It makes you look silly.

Given the current state of right wing victimology, I would assume some on the right would see this comment as an attempt to limit Jerry's 1st Amendment rights.

Since he's no longer with us, I'll let Christopher Hitchens (by way of this comment on Jerry's Forbes piece) defend him his position on Mary:

I’ll grant you that it would possible to track the pregnancy of the woman Mary who’s mentioned about three times in the Bible and to show there was no male intervention in her life at all but yet she delivered herself of a healthy baby boy. I can say—I don’t say that’s impossible. Parthenogenesis is not completely unthinkable. It does not prove that his paternity is divine and it wouldn’t prove that any of his moral teachings were thereby correct. Nor, if I was to see him executed one day and see him walking the streets the next, would that show that his father was God or his mother was a virgin or that his teachings were true, especially given the commonplace nature of resurrection at that time and place. After all, Lazarus was raised, never said a word about it. The daughter of Jairus was raised, didn’t say a thing about what she’d been through. And the Gospels tell us that at the time of the crucifixion all the graves in Jerusalem opened and their occupants wandered around the streets to greet people. So it seems resurrection was something of a banality at the time. Not all of those people clearly were divinely conceived. So I’ll give you all the miracles and you’ll still be left exactly where you are now, holding an empty sack.

(In case you missed it, Jerry's just been hitchslapped)

You can read the full debate transcript here.