From a comment by Vox Day in the comments to this post:
You clearly don't know Hitchens's style very well, because Hitchens doesn't actually make coherent arguments. His notion of an argument is to bitch about circumcision, or Mother Theresa, or bans on pork, or to tell some random anecdote about two guys he met in Zambia once, and then act as if this somehow makes a point relevant to God's existence. That's why he gets his ass kicked every time he debates these days; everyone knows he's just a storyteller who can't actually construct an argument.
Dead on.
I'm listening to this second Christopher Hitchens v. Frank Turek debate. It is abundantly clear that Turek learned that Hitchens doesn't present arguments so much as offer up long, windy stories about something that purportedly offends him. In that regard, the description of reading "god is not Great" was by someone I know who is personally acquainted with Hitchens and described the book as akin to hanging out with someone who had a couple of Martinis and was going to tell the world what he really felt - i.e., like a monologue offered by an entertaining drunk riding his hobby horse. This certainly can be fun on occasion, but it's hardly a basis for living the examined life.
Nonetheless, in the second debate, like clockwork, around 13 minutes into his intitial twenty minute presentation in defense of the atheist worldview, Hitchens descends into a three minute monologue about "that evil, evil woman, the so-called 'Mother Theresa'" but who really has an Albanian name and took money from oppressive dictators and used that money to open up convents. Turek's reply - properly - was to say "So What?"
The difference between their first debate and this one is interesting. In the first debate, Turek was effusive in his admiration for Hitchens; that is missing in the second debate.
Turek presumably got an accurate reading of Hitchens' measure from the first debate when Hitchens showed himself unable and unwilling to actually address any of the points made by Turek. Instead, Hitchens spent his opening attacking what he called an "ontological argument" of the sort pioneered by Thomas Aquinas. The two problems with that approach were (a) the ontological argument presented by Hitchens was a strawman and (b) Aquinas rejected the ontological argument.
The only thing missing so far from these debates is Doug Wilson's question to Hitchens: "You gonna do something or just stand there and bleed?"
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