Christopher Hitchens - God Is Not Great (2007)

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Though it is true we are the highest and smartest animals, ospreys have eyes we have calculated to be sixty times more powerful and sophisticated than our own and that blindness, often caused by microscopic parasites that are themselves miracles of ingenuity, is one of the oldest and most tragic disorders known to man. And why award the superior eye (or in the case of cat or bat, also the ear) to the inferior species.

Christopher Hitchens
Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.

Christopher Hitchens
Islam in its origins is just as shady and approximate as those from which it took its borrowings. It makes immense claims for itself, invokes prostrate submission or "surrender" as a maxim to its adherents, and demands deference and respect from nonbelievers into the bargain. There is nothing-absolutely nothing-in its teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance and presumption.

Christopher Hitchens
If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.

Christopher Hitchens
The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.

Christopher Hitchens
Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.

Christopher Hitchens
Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.

Christopher Hitchens
It is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists

Christopher Hitchens
Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.

Christopher Hitchens
One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human pre-history where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea what was going on.

Christopher Hitchens
Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.

Christopher Hitchens
Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.

Christopher Hitchens