Christopher Eric Hitchens 1949–2011

When someone on the bus says God's been talking to them do you move closer to them or do you move away?

So called “Divine Revelation” is provincial:
Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says maybe 100,000. Richard Dawkins thinks maybe a quarter-of-a-million. I'll take 100,000. In order to be a Christian, you have to believe that for 98,000 years, our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25 years, dying of their teeth, famine, struggle, bitterness, war, suffering, misery, all of that for 98,000 years. Heaven watches this with complete indifference. And then 2000 years ago thinks, that's enough of that. It's time to intervene. And the best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East. Don't appear to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization. Let's go to the desert and have another Revelation there. This is nonsense. It can't be believed by a thinking person.
[ In addition, to be a Christian or a Muslim, you must also believe the insulting absurdity that the Almighty Creator of the Universe tried to communicate but somehow failed to connect with the majority of Humanity. As Ethan Allen first pointed out, this is a selfish and inferior notion of a God void of justice, goodness, and truth, ...which, if admitted to be true, overturns all religion, ...resolving the whole into the sovereign disposal of a tyrannical and unjust being, which is offensive to reason and common sense, and subversive of moral rectitude in general. ]

From the debate with British Prime Minister Tony Blair:
    “Thank you ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much to the Monk family great philanthropists for making this possible. Seven minutes, ladies and gentlemen, for the foundational argument between religion and philosophy leaves me hardly time to praise my distinguished opponent. In fact, I might have to seize a later chance of doing that. I think three and a half minutes for metaphysics and three and a half for the material world won't be excessive. And I have a text, and it is from (because I won't take a religious text from a known extremist or fanatic) it's from Cardinal Newman, who was recently, at Prime Minister Blair's urging, beatified on his way to canonization. A man whose Apologia made many Anglicans reconsider their fieldalty; and made many people join the Roman Catholic Church. And is considered, I think rightly, a great Christian thinker. My text from the apologia: “The Catholic Church,” said Newman, “holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die in extremist agony than that one soul, I will not say, will be lost, but should commit one venial sin, should tell one willful untruth, or should steal one farthing without excuse.”
    “You'll have to say it's beautifully phrased, ladies and gentlemen. But to me, and here's my proposition, what we have here, and picked from no mean source, is a distillation of precisely what is twisted and immoral in the faith mentality, its essential fanaticism. Its consideration of the human being as raw material. And its fantasy of purity. Once you assume a creature, and a plan, it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well. I'll repeat that. Created sick and then ordered to be well. And over us to supervise this is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea. Greedy, exigent, I would say more than exigent, greedy for uncritical praise from dawn till dusk and swift to punish the original sins with which it so tenderly gifted us in the very first place. However, let no one say there's no cure. Salvation is offered. Redemption, indeed, is promised at the low price of the surrender of your critical faculties. Religion, it might be said, must be said, would have to admit that it makes extraordinary claims. But though I would maintain that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, rather daringly provides not even ordinary evidence for its extraordinary supernatural claims. Therefore, we might begin by asking (and I'm asking my opponent as well as you, when you consider your voting) is it good for the world to appeal to our credulity and not to our skepticism? Is it good for the world to worship a deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs? To appeal to our fear and to our guilt. Is it good for the world to appeal to our terror, our terror of death? Is it good to preach guilt and shame about the sexual act and the sexual relationship? Is this good for the world? And asking yourself are these really religious responsibilities, as I maintain they are. To terrify children with the image of hell and eternal punishment, not just of themselves, but of their parents and those they love. Perhaps worst of all, to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world? And can you name me a religion that has not done that? To insist that we are created and not evolved in the face of all the evidence. To say that certain books of legend and myth, man-made and primitive, are revealed, not man-made code.
    “Religion forces nice people to do unkind things. And also makes intelligent people say stupid things. Handed a small baby for the first time, is it your first reaction to think beautiful, almost perfect. Now, please hand me the sharp stone for its genitalia that I may do the work of the Lord. No, it is as the great physicist Steven Weinberger has very aptly put it, “In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can. The worst will do the worst they can. But if you want to make good people do wicked things, you'll need religion.”
    “Now, I've got now one minute and 57 seconds to say why I think is very self-evident in our material world. Let me ask Tony again because he's here, and because the place where he is seeking peace is the birthplace of monotheism. So, you might think was unusually filled with refulgence and love and peace. Everyone in the civilized world has roughly agreed including the majority of Arabs and Jews and the international community that there should be enough room for two states, for two peoples, in the same land. I think we have a rough agreement on that. Why can't we get it? The UN can't get it. The US can't get it. The Quartet can't get it. The PLO can't get it. The Israeli Parliament can't get it. Why can't they get it? Because the parties of God have a veto on it. And everybody knows that this is true. Because of the divine promises made about this territory, there will never be peace. There will never be compromise. There will instead be misery, shame, and tyranny. And people will kill each other's children for ancient books and caves and relics. And who is going to say that this is good for the world? And that's just the argument, the example nearest to hand. Have you looked lately at the possibility that we used to discuss as children in fear? What will happen when messianic fanatics get hold of an apocalyptic weapon? Well, we're about to find that out as we watch the Islamic Republic of Iran and its party of God allies make a dress rehearsal for precisely this. Have you looked lately at the revival of Tsarism in Putin's Russia where the black cowled, blackcoated leadership of Russian orthodoxy is draped over an increasingly xenophobic, tyrannical, expansionist and aggressive regime? Have you looked lately at the teaching in Africa and the consequences of it of a church that says AIDS may be wicked but not as wicked as condoms? That's exactly no seconds left, ladies and gentlemen. I've done my best. Believe me, I have more.”

My attack is on faith. It's on the surrender of reason. I think it is always and everywhere a bad thing.

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals.

Even C.S. Lewis admits that everything that Jesus said is complete nonesense if it isn't uttered by somebody who believes that the world is about to come to an end. Only in that sense does it make sense to say, Take no thought for the morrow, Don't care about possession, Don't care about progress, or literacy, or improvement, or thrift, or any of the things that make culture possible, Theres no point. It's all going to be over real soon. Well, this is why culture and religion are eventually incompatible.

Religion as offered to you by its advocates, is immoral and irrational. And that the tyranny that it proposes you live under, fortunately has no evidence to support the idea of its existence. And by this discovery, and this alone, we are made aware of the truth. And that truth can make us free.

Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.

To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation -- is that good for the world?

That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved…

Probably the stupidest thing the human race does is to look for patterns in this way, and say when a baby falls out of a high-rise building and bounces on the grass below, that must be god. And when millions of children die every day for the lack of pure drinking water and just die in a banal manner, that's because god moves in a mysterious way, or isn't involved at all.

[W]e have such a thing as human solidarity. If we didn't have it we wouldn't have got this far. The usual statement of the moral (there nearest) statement we can make of the moral absolute, the best approximation we've come up with is what's called the golden rule. It's variously stated but it's usually rendered as something like: "Don't do to others what you do not wish them to do to you." ...It's a pretty good approximation. There's no society ever been discovered that doesn't have some such principal. If you tell me that my Grandmother's Jewish ancestors got as far as Sinai not knowing that murder and theft and perjury were bad, and only then found out, I will say to you: they wouldn't have got that far if they had been under another impression. There has been no revelation of this, it doesn't come from on high. It's innate.
[ No god ever said that He is going to teach us something new: What it means to be “good.” If people understand what “good” means without help from a god then morality dosen't depend on revelation or a Revealer. ]

If I could change one thing about the discourse in this country, just one, it would be: we would stop nodding approvingly when people say I am a person of faith. Because what are you nodding at? The guy, who you know is a glib asshole for saying it in the first place, would, even if he was a sincere asshole, would be saying, I hope you like the fact that I am willing to take an enormous amount of very important stuff completely on trust without any evidence of any kind. I say I'm not going to admire that. I think that stinks.

One of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority. It's an indispensable thing. People can call it blasphemy, if they like. But if they call it that, they have to assume that there is something to be blasphemed, some divine word. Well I don't accept the premise.

Is it moral to believe that your sins... can be forgiven by the punishment of another person? Is it ethical to believe that? I would submit that the doctrine of vicarious redemption by human sacrifice is utterly immoral...The name for that...was scape-goating...A positively immoral doctrine that abolishes the concept of personal responsibility on which all ethics and all morality must depend.
...
There is no problem that has so far been identified in the human species that demands a human sacrifice. For what problem, for what ill is this a cure?
...
I take my chances morally...I don't want torture, don't want human sacrifice, don't want authoritarian blood letting — don't want it. Can't think of a single thing it will make better.

I can tell you that of the suicide bombing population one hundred percent is faith-based. ... Of the genital mutilation community the same can be said.

When asked if Stalin's purges were caused in part by atheism:
Here's the situation. Until 1917 the year of the Russian Revolution, millions and millions of Russians had for hundreds and hundreds of years been told that the head of the state, the Czar, was also the head of the church and was a little more than human, was a little farther over the people. He wasn't quite Divine, but he was more like a saint than a human, and he owned everything in the country and everything was due to him. That's how a gigantic layer of Russian Society was inculcated with the servile fatalistic ideas. If you were Joseph Stalin you shouldn't be in the dictatorship business in the first place if you can't realize this is a huge opportunity for you. You've inherited a population that's servile and credulous and superstitious. Well what does Stalin do? He sets up an inquisition. He has heresy hunts -- trials of heretics, the Moscow trials. He proclaims miracles, Lysenko's agriculture that was supposed to produce three harvests a year, or whatever it was. The pseudo biology that would feed everyone in a week. He says all thanks are due at all times to the leader. He must praise him at all times for his goodness and kindness. And incidentally he always kept the Russian Orthodox Church on his side. It split the church and some of them moved to New York and set up a rival. But the Russian Orthodox Church always remained part of the regime. He was not so stupid as not to know that he had to do that; just as Hitler and Mussolini made an even more aggressive deal with the Roman Catholic church and with some of the Protestants. And remember the other great axis of evil person of that time the Emperor of Japan was not just a religious person but actually a God. So fascism and communism and Stalinism and Nazism are actually nothing like as secular as some people think, and much more religious than most people know. But here's what a fair test would be. Find a society that's adopted the teachings of Spinoza and Voltaire, Galileo, Einstein, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and gone down the pits as a result of doing that into famine and War and dictatorship and torture and repression. That would be a fair test. That's the test I'd like to see; that's the experiment I'd like to run. I don't think that's going to end up with a gulag.

One of my objections to religion is that it makes intelligent people say stupid things. [And show little concern about sick war atrocities or other grave injustices which are not prohibited by their dogma.]

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.

Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.

[A]ll the great modern atheists, Darwin, Einstein and Freud were alike despised by the National Socialist regime.:::Now, just to take the most notorious of the 20th century totalitarianisms – the most finished example, the most perfected one, the most ruthless and refined one: that of National Socialism, the one that fortunately allowed the escape of all these great atheists, thinkers and many others, to the United States, a country of separation of church and state, that gave them welcome – if it’s an atheistic regime, then how come that in the first chapter of Mein Kampf, that Hitler says that he’s doing God’s work and executing God’s will in destroying the Jewish people? How come the fuhrer oath that every officer of the Party and the Army had to take, making Hitler into a minor god, begins, I swear in the name of almighty God, my loyalty to the Fuhrer? How come that on the belt buckle of every Nazi soldier it says Gott mit uns, God on our side? How come that the first treaty made by the Nationalist Socialist dictatorship, the very first is with the Vatican? It’s exchanging political control of Germany for Catholic control of German education. How come that the church has celebrated the birthday of the Fuhrer every year, on that day until democracy put an end to this filthy, quasi-religious, superstitious, barbarous, reactionary system?

We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.
...What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.

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.

What is it like? I've never tried it. I've never been a cleric. What is it like to lie to children for a living, and tell them that they have an authority that they must love, (Compulsory love what a grotesque idea.) and be terrified of at the same time. (What's that like? I want to know.) ...and, that we don't have an innate sense of right and wrong, that children don't have an innate sense of fairness and decency, which of course they do. What is it like? I can personalize it to this extent. My mother's Jewish ancestors are told that until they got to Sinai they've been dragging themselves around the desert under the impression that adultery, murder, theft and perjury were all fine. They get to Mount Sinai only to be told it's not Kosher after all. I'm sorry. Excuse me. We must have more self-respect than that for us, for ourselves, and for others. Of course the story is a fiction. It's a fabrication exposed conclusively by Israeli archaeology. Nothing of the sort ever took place. But suppose we take the metaphor. It's an insult. It's an insult to us. It's an insult to our deepest integrity. No. If we believed that perjury, murder and theft are all right we wouldn't have got as far as the foot of Mount Sinai or anywhere else.

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?

I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will provide plenty of time for silence.

My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and...!!!

A Tribute to Christopher Hitchens 11:08

Christopher Hitchens videos on youTube

God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything PDF

God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything Audio 8:47:59


The sleep of reason brings forth monsters. I may not know much but I think I know that much.