Christopher Eric Hitchens 1949–2011
“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…”
“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 lets appeal 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 Hitchens' excellent list of absurdities, 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.”]
“[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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“[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?”