The person believing in an invisible man in the sky has no business calling anyone delusional. We as human beings forgive other human beings all the time, so I'm pretty sure we do have that power.
I know they're in the minority, but me holding atheists to a higher standard doesn't mean I actually expect most of them (even those that write about it philosophically) to reach it. Hell, I know I still have a lot to work on when it comes to myself. What I'm talking about, though, is along the lines of this and this (I think Luke from the latter site gets it right in his tagline: "Atheism is just the beginning; now it's time to solve the harder questions.").
I meant "rejecting the God hypothesis," the same way one would "reject Intelligent Design" or "flat-Earth theory."
Ok, but what does a definition have to do with standards? We may call Hitler inhuman because of his actions, but we don't mean that he literally wasn't from the species known as homo sapiens, we merely mean he did a lot of terrible things that are way below the standard that we hold other humans to. Similarly, I have no problem saying Mr. Idiot is an atheist if he doesn't believe in God but has a billion delusions the same as any theist does, but that doesn't mean I have to respect/care about his thoughts on the matter.
And I think he qualifies in every way. How was Hitch NOT "addressing and responding to the problems of his society... and (engaging) with the global issues of truth, judgment, and taste of the time?" When he's making a living writing and debating about how religion is evil, he's making a living out of addressing and responding to the problems of society and engaging in issues of truth and judgment.
You actually can have it both ways because there are multiple meanings of the word. One can be in the role of a public intellectual, ie, publishing works/debating on intellectual issues like religion, philosophy, politics, etc. without being all that intellectually formidable. Hitchens was undeniably an "intellectual" in the former sense, and arguably not an intellectual in the latter sense.
Fair enough. I guess I still think of Dawkins as being primarily an evolutionary biologist whom only got into the "intellectual" life after being faced with so much ignorance by the religious concerning evolution. I think that if there wasn't so much opposition to evolution amongst the religious, Dawkins never would've taken on that role to begin with (I could be wrong, but that's my sense).