god is not Great
by Christopher Hitchens
(Twelve, 2007)
Why, if god was the creator of all things, were we supposed to “praise” him so incessantly for doing what came to him naturally? This seemed servile, apart form anything else.
Page 3.
There will remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism,, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately bounded on wish-thinking.
Page 4.
We distrust anything that contradicts science of outrages reason.
Page 5.
Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.
Page 5.
How much vanity must be concealed - not too effectively at that - in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?
Page 7.
God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was 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.
Page 8.
Past and present religious atrocities have occurred not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational.
Page 8.
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.
Page 9.
The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made.
Page 10.
My particular atheism is a Protestant atheism. It is with the splendid liturgy of the King James Bible and the Cranmer prayer book - liturgy that the fatuous Church of England has cheaply discarded - that I first disagreed.
Pages 11-12.
Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other. for this reason, I would not prohibit it even if I thought I could.
Page 12.
Many services, in all denominations and almost all pagans, are exactly designed to evoke celebration and communal fiesta, which is precisely why I suspect them.
Page 16.
It can be stated as a truth that religion does not, and in the long run cannot, be content with its own marvelous claims and subline assurances. It must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers, or heretics, or adherents of other faiths.
Page 17.
Sectarianism is conveniently self-generating and can always be counted upon to evoke a reciprocal sectarianism.
Page 19.
Religion poisons everything, including our own faculties of discernment.
Page 22.
The literal mind does not understand the ironic mind, and sees it always as a source of danger.
Page 29.
The true believer cannot rest until the whole world bows the knee.
Page 31.
Religion is not unlike racism. One version of it inspires and provokes the other.
Page 35.
Religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred, with members of each group talking of the other in precisely the tones of the bigot.
Page 36.
In theory and in practice, religion uses the innocent and the defenseless or the purposes of experiment.
Page 51.
Clearly, the human species is designed to experiment with sex.
Page 54.
The findings of science are far more awe-inspiring than the rantings of the godly.
Page 57.
Augustine was a self-centered fantasist and an earth-centered ignoramus.
Page 64.
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).
Page 64.
The end of god-worship discloses itself at the moment, which is somewhat more gradually revealed, when it becomes optional, or only one among many possible beliefs.
Page 67.
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.
Page 67.
The scholastic obsessives of the Middle Ages were doing the best they could on the basis of hopelessly limited information, ever-present fear of death and judgment, very low life expectancy, and an audience of illiterates.
Page 68.
We have nothing much to learn from what they thought, but a great deal to learn from how they thought.
Page 68.
If one must have faith in order to believe something, or believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished.
Page 71.
Religion traches people to be extremely self-centered and conceited. It assures them that god cares for them individually, and it claims that the cosmos was crated with them specifically in mind.
Page 74.
Since human beings are naturally solipsistic, all forms of superstition enjoy what might be called a natural advantage.
Page 74.
The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad tings to another account is apparently universal.
Page 76.
I was educated by Sir Karl Popper to believe that a theory that is unfalsifiable is to that extent a weak one.
Page 81.
Why do people keep saying, “god is in the details”? He isn’t in ours, unless his yokel creationist fans wish to take credit for his clumsiness, failure, and incompetence.
Page 85.
A “theory” is something evolved - if you forgive the expression - to fit the known facts. It is a successful theory if it survives the introduction of hitherto unknown facts. And it becomes an accepted theory if it can make accurate predictions about things or events that have not yet been discovered, or have not yet occurred.
Page 85.
Investigation of the fossil record and the record of molecular biology shows us that approximately 98 percent of all the species that have ever appeared on earth have lapsed into extinction.
Page 88.
In Genesis man is not awarded dominion over germs and bacteria because the existence of these necessary yet dangerous fellow creatures was not known or understood.
Page 90.
Progress does not negate the idea of randomness.
Page 92.
One must never forget how recent most of our knowledge really is.
Page 93.
We no longer have any need of a god to explain what is no longer mysterious. What believers will do, now that their faith is optional and private and irrelevant, is a matter for them. We should not care, as long as they make no further attempt to inculcate religion by any form of coercion.
Page 96.
The syncretic tendencies of monotheism, and the common ancestry of the tales, mean in effect that a rebuttal to one is a rebuttal to all.
Page 98.
It is hardly a surprise if religions choose to address themselves first to the majority who are poor and bewildered and uneducated.
Page 115.
Religion arouses suspicion by trying to prove too much.
Page 115.
To say that something is “man-made” is not always to say that it is stupid.
Page 117.
All religions have staunchly resisted any attempt to translate their sacred texts into languages “understanded of the people,” as the Cranmer prayer book phrases it. There would have been no Protestant Reformation if it were not for the long struggle to have the Bible rendered into “the Vulgate” and the priestly monopoly therefore broken.
Page 125.
All religions take care to silence or to execute those who question them (and I choose to regard this recurrent tendency as a sign of their weakness rather than their strength).
Page 125.
If one comprehends the fallacies of any “revealed” religion, one comprehends them all.
Page 126.
Islam when examined is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require.
Page 129.
We know … that the portentous Christian term “Jehovah” is a mistranslation of the unuttered spaces between the letters of the Hebrew “Yahweh.”
Page 136.
Faith … discredits itself by proving to be insufficient to satisfy the faithful.
Page 140.
It is surprising how petty some of the “supernatural” miracles now seem.
Page 140.
Miracles … do not vindicate the truth of the religion that practices them: Aaron supposedly vanquished Pharoah’s magicians in an open competition but did not deny that they could perform wonders as well.
Page 142.
Exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.
Page 143.
Natural disasters are actually not violations of the laws of nature but rather are part of the inevitable fluctuations within them, but they have always been used to overawe the gullible with the mightiness of god’s disapproval.
Page 148.
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. This is even more true when the “evidence” eventually offered is so shoddy and self-interested.
Page 150.
Between them, the sciences of textual criticism, archaeology, physics, and molecular biology have shown religious myths to be false and man-made and have also succeeded in evolving better and more enlightened explanations. The loss of faith can be compensated by the newer and finer wonders that we have before us, as well as by immersion in the near-miraculous work of Homer and Shakespeare and \Milton and Tolstoy and Proust, all of which was also “man-made.”
Page 151.
If we watch the process of a religion in its formation, we can make some assumptions about the origins of those religions that were put together before most people could read.
Page 155.
This is an ancient problem. Credulity may be a form of innocence, and even innocuous in itself, but it provides a standing invitation for the wicked and the clever to exploit their brothers and sisters, and is thus one of humanity’s great vulnerabilities.
Page 161.
People can be better off believing in something than in nothing, however untrue that something may be.
Page 165.
High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.
Page 176.
The argument that religious belief improves people, or that it helps to civilize society, is one that people tend to bring up when they have exhausted the rest of their case.
Page 184.
The first thing to be said is that virtuous behavior by a believer is no proof at all of - indeed is not even an argument for - the truth of his belief.
Pages 184-185.
To believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing.
Page 185.
The worse the offender, the more devout he turns out to be.
Page 192.
An extraordinary number of people appear to believe that the mind, and the reasoning faculty - the only thing that divides us form our animal relatives - is something to be distrusted and even, as far as possible, dulled.
Page 198.
Scientists have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless even for learning from mistakes. They refer to them as being “not even wrong.” Most so-called spiritual discourse is of this type.
Page 202.
Japanese Buddhists of the time regarded their country’s membership of the Nazi/Fascist Axis as a manifestation of liberation theology.
Page 203.
By the end of the dreadful conflict that Japan had started, it was Buddhist and Shinto priests who were recruiting and training the suicide bombers, of Kamiikaze (“Divine Wind”), fanatics, assuring them that the emperor was a “Golden Wheel-Turning Sacred King,” one indeed of the four manifestations of the ideal Buddhist monarch and a Tathagata, or “fully enlightened being,” of the material world.
Page 203.
Contempt for the intellect has a strange way of not being passive. One of two things may happen: those who are innocently credulous may become easy prey for those who are less scrupulous and who seek to “lead” and “inspire” them. Or those whose credulity has led their own society into stagnation may seek a solution, not in true self-examination, but in blaming others for their backwardness. Both these things happened in the most consecratedly “spiritual” society of them all.
Page 204.
A faith that despises the mind and the free individual, that preaches submission and resignation, and that regards life as a poor and transient thing, is ill-equipped for self-criticism.
Page 204.
The collectivization of guilt, in short, is immoral in itself, as religion has been occasionally compelled to admit.
Page 210.
Religion is scapegoating writ large.
Page 211.
Half of the splendid buildings in Rome would never have been raised if the sale of indulgences had not been so profitable.
Page 212.
The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey.
Page 212.
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.
Page 213.
By a nice chance, cupidity and avarice are the spur to economic development.
Page 214.
Nothing proves the man-made character of religion as obviously as the sick mind that designed hell, unless it is the sorely limited mind that has failed to describe heaven - except as a place of either worldly comfort, eternal tedium, of (as Tertullian thought) continual relish in the torture of others.
Page 219.
It was left to Christians to find a hell from which there was no possible appeal.
Page 219.
If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.
Page 220.
The words “unborn child,” even when used in a politicized manner, describe a material reality.
Page 221.
The strenuous and dogmatic is the moral enemy of the good. It demands that we believe the impossible, and practice the unfeasible.
Pages 222-223.
The whole case for extending protection to the unborn, and to expressing a bias in favor of life, has been wrecked by those who use unborn children, as well as born ones, as mere manipulable objects of their doctrine.
Page 223.
It is useless to look for consistency in the covenants that people believe they have made with god.
Page 223.
If religion and its arrogance were not involved, no healthy society would permit this primitive amputation, or allow any surgery to be practiced on the genitalia without the full and informed consent of the person concerned.
Page 226.
Sexual innocence, which can be charming in the young if it is not needlessly protracted, is positively corrosive and repulsive in the mature adult.
Page 227.
The object of perfecting the species - which is the very root and source of the totalitarian impulse - is in essence a religious one.
Page 232.
Deep connection between repression and perversion.
Page 232.
Calvin’s Geneva was a prototypical totalitarian state, and Calvin himself a sadist and torturer and killer, who burned Servetus (one of the great thinkers and questioners of the day) while the man was still alive.
Page 233.
The urge to ban and censor books, silence dissenters, condemn outsiders, invade the private sphere, and invoke an exclusive salvation is the very essence of the totalitarian.
Page 234.
Arising out of the misery and humiliation of the First World War, fascist movements were in favor of the defense of traditional values against Bolshevism, and upheld nationalism and piety. It is probably not a coincidence that they arose first and most excitedly in Catholic countries, and it is certainly not a coincidence that the Catholic Church was generally sympathetic to fascism as an idea.
Page 235.
The church has made efforts to apologize for all this, but its complicity with racism is an ineffaceable mark on its history, and was not a short-term or a hasty commitment so much as a working alliance which did not break down until after the fascist period had itself passed into history.
Page 237.
The long association of religion with corrupt secular power has meant that most nations have to go through at least one anticlerical phase.
Page 244.
Sigmund Freud was quite correct to describe the religious impulse, in The Future of an Illusion, as essentially ineradicable until or unless the human species can conquer its fear of death and its tendency to wish-thinking.
Page 247.
The religious impulse - the need to worship - can take even more monstrous forms if it is repressed.
Page 247.
Religion even at its meekest has to admit that what it is proposing is a “total” solution, in which faith must be to some extent blind, and in which all aspects of the private and public life must be submitted to a permanent higher supervision.
Page 249.
Humanism has many crimes for which to apologize. But it can apologize for them, and also correct them, in its own terms and without having to shake or challenge the basis of any unalterable system of belief. Totalitarian systems, whatever outward form they may take, are fundamentalist and, as we would now say, “faith-based.”
Page 250.
For emphasizing tribe and dynasty and racial provenance in its holy books, religion must accept the responsibility for transmitting one of mankind’s most primitive illusions down through the generations.
Page 251.
Racism is totalitarian by definition: it marks the victim in perpetuity and denies him, or her, the right to even a rag of dignity or privacy.
Page 251.
Doubt, skepticism, and outright unbelief have always taken the same essential form as they do today there were always observations on the natural order which took notice of the absence or needlessness of a prime mover.
Page 255.
All he really “knew,” he said, was the extent of his own ignorance. (This to me is still the definition of an educated person.)
Page 256.
Those who believe that the existence of conscience is a proof of a godly design are advancing an argument that simply cannot be disproved because there is no evidence for or against it.
Page 256.
All major confrontations over the right to free thought, free speech, and free inquiry have taken the same form - of a religious attempt to assert the literal and limited mind over the ironic and inquiring one.
Page 258.
Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
Page 266.
Hume suggested that the profession of belief in a perfectly simple and omnipresent supreme being was in face a covert profession of atheism because such a being could possess nothing that we could reasonably call a mind, or a will.
Page 267.
It is absurd, even for a believer, to imagine that god should owe him an explanation. But a believer nonetheless takes on the impossible task of interpreting the will of a person unknown, and thus brings these essentially absurd questions upon himself.
Page 268.
Paine’s Age of Reason marks almost the first time that frank contempt for organized religion was openly expressed.
Page 268.
It is better and healthier for the mind to “choose” the path of skepticism and inquiry … because only by continual exercise of these faculties can we hope to achieve anything.
Page 278.
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 world-view, to prevent the emergence of rivals, tic n now only impede and retard - or try to turn back - the measurable advances that we have made.
Page 282.
The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected.
Page 283.