Christopher Hitchens Quotes
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.
The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be protracted.
Religious exhortation and telling people, telling children, that if they don't do the right thing, they'll go to terrifying punishments or unbelievable rewards, that's making a living out of lying to children. That's what the priesthood do. And if all they did was lie to the children, it would be bad enough. But they rape them and torture them and then hope we'll call it "abuse".
The search for nirvana, like the search for utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.
The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. (It's the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall.
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.
Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. 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 supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.
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. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.
[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.
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.
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. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.
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.
It will happen to all of us, that at some point you get tapped on the shoulder and told, not just that "The party is over", but slightly worse: "The party is going on - but you have to leave - it's going on without you". That's the reflection that I think most upsets people about their demise. All right, then, because it might make us feel better, let's pretend the opposite. Instead, you'll get tapped on the shoulder and told, "Great news! This party is going on forever and you can't leave. You've got to stay; the boss says so. And he also insists that you have a good time."
The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.
One must state it plainly. 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 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 (as well as for comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think-though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one-that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.
I notice that Christians will often refer to the biblical miracles as a source of ‘evidence’ for the existence of god. The philosopher and historian David Hume wrote about “The problem of miracles” in “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” and I think his logic is irrefutable.
A miracle is defined as not part of the natural order but a suspension of the natural order. If you meet your grandmother in the street who you yesterday saw cremated, you can say either an extraordinary miracle has occured or you are under a very grave misaprehension or suffering from a delusion.
The likelihood of the second must be weighted against the likelihood of the first. If you only hear a report of the miracle from a second or third party, the odds must be adjusted accordingly before you can decide to credit a witness who claims to have seen something you did not see. And, if you are separated from the “sighting” by many generations, as in the biblical miracles, and have no independant corroboration, the odds must be adjusted more drastically.
So you must ask yourself: is it more more likely that the laws of nature have been suspended in your favour or that you have made a mistake or that you are relying on extremely dubious sources?
Exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.
Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely soley 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.
I am not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief is positively harmful. Reviewing the false claims of religion, I do not wish, as some sentimental materialists affect to wish, that they were true. I do not envy believers their faith. I am relieved to think that the whole story is a sinister fairy tale; life would be miserable if what the faithful affirmed was actually the case.
We don’t know exactly how long homo-sapiens have existed as a species. Richard Dawkins thinks it might be as much as 250,000 years; Francis Collins, the man responsible for the Human Genome Project thinks it may be as little as 100,000 years. Either way it’s a flash of a second in evolutionary time. I’ll take the lower estimate that our species has been around on the planet for 100,000 years. As a monotheist, or at least someone who believes in an Abrahamic religion, you have to believe something like this:… for about the first 96,000 years, homo-sapiens were born, a great number dying in child birth, often taking the mother with them, not living more than 25 or 30 years at the most and then probably dying of their teeth (if they were lucky) or the other needless mammalian things that show us that we bare the stamp, as Darwin put it, of our lowly origin, where we were designed to live on the Savanna where we escaped from: the appendix we don’t need any more and innumerable other short comings in our design; terrible disease, suffering, misery, malnutrition, and fear. Where do the earthquakes come from? Why is there an eclipse? What are the shooting stars doing? And awful cults of sacrifice to try and ward off what are, in fact, natural events. And war, and rape, and the kidnap or other peoples and the enslavement of them. All of this goes on and on, gradually inching up to the point where they can brew beer - a breakthrough in my view - domesticate animals, seperate one kind of corn from another so they can farm etc. Slow progress but terrible struggle, sacrifice, pain, misery, and above all fear and ignorance. So, for the first 96,000 or so years, heaven watches this with complete indifference. “Oh there they go again! That whole civilisation has just died out.” “They’re raping each other again.” “They think that the other tribe has poisoned their wells and so they’re going to kill all their children.” Then 4,000 years ago, at the most, heaven decides it’s time to intervene. And the revelation must be personal and so we’ll pick the most barbaric, illiterate, superstitious people we can find, in the most stoney area of bronze-age Palestine. We won’t appear to the Chinese where they can already read. We won’t appear in the Indus Valley where they are already well civilised and far advanced, no… we’ll appear to this brutal, enslaved, hopeless, superstitious crowd and we will force them to cut their way through all of their neighbours with slaughter and genocide and racism and settle in the only part of the middle east where there is no oil. Oh, and all subsquent revelations must appear in the same district.
Take the risk of thinking for yourself; much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.
