Christopher Hitchens - God Is Not Great (2007)

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Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

Christopher Hitchens
Nothing optional — from homosexuality to adultery — is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishment) have a repressed desire to participate.

Christopher Hitchens
The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.

Christopher Hitchens
Religion looks forward to the destruction of the world.... Perhaps half aware that its unsupported arguments are not entirely persuasive, and perhaps uneasy about its own greedy accumulation of temporal power and wealth, religion has never ceased to proclaim the Apocalypse and the day of judgment.

Christopher Hitchens
Evolution is, as well as smarter than we are, infinitely more callous and cruel, and also capricious.

Christopher Hitchens
Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.

Christopher Hitchens
Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea of what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge. Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion.

Christopher Hitchens
The museums of medieval Europe, from Holland to Tuscany, are crammed with instruments and devices upon which the holy men labored devoutly, in order to see how long they could keep someone alive while being roasted. It is not needful to go into further details, but there were also religious books of instruction in this art, and guides for the detection of heresy by pain.

Christopher Hitchens
What happens to the faith healer and the shaman when any poor citizen can see the full effect of drugs or surgeries, administered without ceremonies or mystifications? Roughly the same thing as happens to the rainmaker when the climatologist turns up, or to the diviner from the heavens when schoolteachers get hold of elementary telescopes.

Christopher Hitchens
Benito Mussolini had barely seized power in Italy before the Vatican made an official treaty with him.... Catholicism became the only recognized religion in Italy... and in return urged its followers to vote for Mussolini's party. Pope Pius XI described [Mussolini] as 'a man sent by providence.'... Across southern Europe, the church was a reliable ally in the instatement of fascist regimes....

Christopher Hitchens
Religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred.

Christopher Hitchens
Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to be able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard — or try to turn back — the measurable advances that we have made.

Christopher Hitchens
There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.

Christopher Hitchens
Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.

Christopher Hitchens
I leave it to the faithful to burn each other's churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can be always relied upon to do

Christopher Hitchens
God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.

Christopher Hitchens
Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.

Christopher Hitchens
Jesus, it is true, shows no personal interest in gain, but he does speak of treasure in heaven and even of mansions as an inducement to follow him. Is it not further true that all religions down the ages have shown a keen interest in the amassment of material goods in the real world?

Christopher Hitchens
Jesus makes large claims for his heavenly father but never mentions that his mother is or was a virgin, and is repeatedly very rude and coarse to her when she makes an appearance.

Christopher Hitchens
Islam is at once the most and the least interesting of the world's monotheisms. It builds upon its primitive Jewish and Christian predecessors, selecting a chunk here and a shard there, and thus if these fall, it partly falls also.

Christopher Hitchens
The brilliant Schiller was wrong in his Joan of Arc when he said against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. It is actually by means of the gods that we make our stupidity and gullibility into something ineffable.

Christopher Hitchens
In particular, it is absurd to hope to banish envy of other people's possessions or fortunes, if only because the spirit of envy can lead to emulation and ambition and have positive consequences.

Christopher Hitchens
Is it too modern to notice that there is nothing [in the ten commandments] about the protection of children from cruelty, nothing about rape, nothing about slavery, and nothing about genocide? Or is it too exactingly "in context" to notice that some of these very offenses are about to be positively recommended?

Christopher Hitchens
Urging humans to be superhumans, on pain of death and torture, is the urging of terrible self-abasement at their repeated and inevitable failure to keep the rules.

Christopher Hitchens
If god really wanted people to be free of [wicked thoughts], he should have taken more care to invent a different species.

Christopher Hitchens
The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

Christopher Hitchens
The most educated person in the world now has to admit— I shall not say confess— that he or she knows less and less but at least knows less and less about more and more.

Christopher Hitchens
High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

Christopher Hitchens
My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.

Christopher Hitchens
Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and unwieldy advantage of having come first.

Christopher Hitchens