Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was an Anglo-American journalist, intellectual, author, polemicist, social critic, philosopher, and one of the members of the famous Four Horsemen of New Atheism (together with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett). He is also a contributor to many newspapers like New Statesman, The Atlantic, Free Inquiry, Vanity Fair, and many more. Hitchens was known for his antitheistic opinions and brutal criticism of religion, as shown in his book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007). His anti-religious views and his effective and witty debating skills left a great mark to the atheist and skeptic community, even if he died 9 years ago. Here are some of his remarkable quotes from his books and speeches:
"For a lot of people, their first love is what they'll always remember. For me it's always been the first hate, and I think that hatred, though it provides often rather junky energy, is a terrific way of getting you out of bed in the morning and keeping you going. If you don't let it get out of hand, it can be canalized into writing. In this country where people love to be nonjudgmental when they can be, which translates as, on the whole, lenient, there are an awful lot of bubble reputations floating around that one wouldn't be doing one's job if one didn't itch to prick." - For the Sake of Argument (1993)
"Religious ideas, supposedly private matters between man and god, are in practice always political ideas." - The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish (1990)
"The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks." - Letters to a Young Contrarian (2000)
"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." - Letters to a Young Contrarian (2000)
"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."
"A double problem arises: There is first the difficulty of, if not the impossibility of demonstrating the existence of any creator or designer at all. I think I say something uncontroversial when I say that no theologian has ever conclusively demonstrated that such a designer can or does or ever has existed. The most you can do, by way of the argument from design, is to infer him or her or it from an apparent harmony in the arrangements - and this was at a time when that was the very best that, so to speak, could be done. But religion goes a little further than this already rather impossible task, and expects us to believe as follows: that the speaker not only can prove the existence of a said entity, but can claim to know this entity's mind - in fact, can claim to know it quite intimately; can claim to know his or her personal wishes; can, in turn, tell you what you may do, in his name - a quite large arrogation of power, you will suddenly notice, is being granted to the speaker here. The speaker can tell you that he knows - he cannot tell you how - but he can tell you that he knows, for example, that heaven hates ham, that god doesn't want you to eat pork products; he can tell you that god has a very very strong view about with whom you may have sexual relations, indeed, how you may have sexual relations with others; he can indicate, perhaps a little less convincingly but no less firmly, that there are certain books or courses of study that you might want to avoid or treat with great suspicion." - Christopher Hitchens vs. Marvin Olasky
"On our integrity, our basic integrity, knowing right from wrong and being able to choose a right action over a wrong one, I think one must repudiate the claim that one doesn't have this moral discrimination innately, that, no, it must come only from the agency of a celestial dictatorship which one must love and simultaneously fear. What is it like to lie to children and tell them that they have an authority, that they must love and be terrified of it 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, children don't have an innate sense of fairness and decency, which of course they do. What is it like?” - Christopher Hitchens vs. Alister McGrath
"Some people say that without God, people would give themselves permission to do anything. [Yet] only with God, only with the view that God’s on your side, can people give themselves permission to do things that otherwise would be called satanic." - Speech at Freedom from Religion Foundation (2007)
"Is there anything that is forbidden to anybody who says they have God on their side? Who says they have God with them? Is there any evil that they forbid themselves to do?" - Christopher Hitchens vs. Dinesh D'Souza
"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." - The Portable Atheist: Essential Reading for the Nonbeliever (2007)
"I'm not afraid of death myself, because I'm not gonna know I'm dead. I'm awed a bit by the idea, but I'm perfectly reconciled to it. Certainly I am, as everyone is, reconciled to everyone else's death but their own. They think an exception can be made in their own case."
"I say I'm an anti-theist because I think it would be rather awful if it was true. If there was a permanent, total, around-the-clock, divine supervision...an invigilation of everything you did...you would never have a waking or sleeping moment where you weren't being watched and controlled and supervised by some celestial entity, from the moment of conception til...well not even to your death, because it's only after death that the real fun begins, isn't it? It would be like living in North Korea." - Interview at Hannity's America (2007)
"Beware of solipsism. Don't ever think you are the center of the world. Be very careful of assuming that you are the object of a divine design. That there's something special just about being you. That that's all you have to prove - that, why wouldn't a person such as yourself have God on their side; Why wouldn't it be - 'of course God would care who I slept with, what I ate, what holy day I observed, why would He not? Surely that's why the heavens are arranged in the starry beauty and array in the form they take.' -- You are forced to wonder, if maybe - even though it's a less beautiful thought - it could be that the galaxies are not arranged with you in mind." - Christopher Hitchens vs. Douglas Wilson
"There's no such word, though there should be, as "adeism" or as being an "adeist", but if there was one I would say that's what I was. I don't believe that we are here as the result of a design or that by following the appropriate rituals we can overcome death. If there was such a force, if there was an entity that was responsible for the beginning of the cosmos, and that also happened to be busily engineering the very laborious production of life on our little planet, it still wouldn't prove that this entity cared about us; answered prayers; cared what church we went to, or whether we went to one at all; cared who we had sex with or in what position or by what means; cared what we ate or on what day; cared whether we lived or died. There's no reason at all why this entity isn't completely indifferent to us. You cannot get from deism to theism - except by a series of extraordinarily generous (to yourself) assumptions. The deist has all his work still ahead of him to show that it leads to revelation; to redemption; to salvation; or to suspensions of the natural order." - Christopher Hitchens vs. William Lane Craig
"Religion is the outcome of unresolved contradictions in the material world. If you make the assumption that it's man-made then very few things are mysterious to you: It would be obvious to you why there are so many religions; You will understand why it is that religion has been such a disappointment to our species - that despite innumerable revivals, innumerable attempts again to preach the truth, innumerable attempts to convert the heathen, innumerable attempts to send missionaries all around the world - that the same problems remain with us. That nothing is resolved by this. If all religions died out, or were admitted to be false, all of our problems would be exactly what they are now: How do we live with one another? Where, indeed, do morals and ethics come from? What are our duties to one another? How shall we build the just city? How shall we practice love? All these questions would remain exactly the same. Emancipate yourself from the idea of a celestial dictatorship and you've taken the first step to becoming free." - Christopher Hitchens vs. William Lane Craig
"If this was the plan - was it made by someone who likes us?And if so, why have 99.9% of all the other species that have ever been created already died out? And part of what plan was that?;If it is a plan or a design, the planner must be either very capricious - really toying with his creation; and/or very clumsy, very tinkering and fantastically wasteful - throw away 99.9% of what you've made; or very cruel and very callous; or just perhaps very indifferent; or some combination of all the above. And so it's no good saying that He moves in mysterious ways, or that He has purposes that are opaque to us, because even that kind of evasion has to make itself predicate on the assumption that the person saying this knows more than I do about the supernatural, and I haven't yet met anyone who does have a private line to the creator, of the sort that would be required even to speculate about it. In other words, I haven't met anyone, in holy orders or out of it, who isn't also a primate. And neither have you." - Festival of Dangerous Ideas (2009)
"I ask myself why do these worshipers of this God want to convict him of being such a crummy designer - most of his creations die off, the rest suffer miserably; of being cruel and capricious and bungling and incompetent and callous as a father?" - Christopher Hitchens vs. John Lennox
"At the moment, it’s very clear to me the most toxic form that religion takes is the Islamic form… The whole idea of wanting to end up with Sharia with a religion-governed state — a state of religious law — and the best means of getting there is Jihad, Holy War, that Muslims have a special right to feel aggrieved enough to demand this is absolute obscene wickedness and I think their religion is nonsense, in its entirety."
"The idea that God speaks to some illiterate merchant warlord in Arabia, and he’s able to write this down perfectly and it contains the answers to all — don’t waste my time with that bulls**t. Also, the archangel Gabriel speaks only Arabic, it seems? Crap."
"All this could be part of a plan. But it’s some plan, isn’t it?; With mass destruction, pitiless extermination and annihilation going on all the time." - Christopher Hitchens vs. David Wolpe
"The metaphor of the watch was very much used by the deists. And of course, watches run down, and break down, and it was believed by many of them that if an intelligence had begun the universe, begun the process, he'd took no further interest in it - didn't intervene in human affairs, didn't mind who won the war, didn't mind which country was the leading one, watched with relative—well, or didn't watch—with indifference, plague, famine, war and so forth. That's a very hard position to oppose, by the way. It's impossible, actually, to disprove - one can only the evidence for it isn't quite strong enough to be persuasive. To be a theist, to be a member of a monotheistic religion, that believes that truth has been revealed, that god has intervened in human affairs, that he has a plan for us - each of as individually and as a species, and that it shows - is a very much more difficult undertaking. I'm gonna show why I think it's more or less impossible." - Christopher Hitchens vs. William Dembski
"I don't think it's healthy for people to want there to be a permanent, unalterable, irremovable authority over them. I don't like the idea of a father who never goes away, the idea of a king who cannot be deposed, the idea of a judge who doesn't allow a lawyer or a jury or an appeal. This is an appeal to absolutism. It's the part of ourselves that's not so nice; that wants security, that wants certainty, that wants to be taken care of. For hundreds and hundreds of years, the human struggle for freedom was against the worst kind of dictatorship of all: the theocracy, the one that claims it has God on its side. I believe that totalitarian temptation has to be resisted. What I'm inviting you to do is to consider emancipating yourselves from the idea that you, selfishly, are the sole object of all the wonders of the cosmos and of nature - because that's not a humble idea at all, it's a very arrogant one and there's no evidence for it. And then, again, the second emancipation - to think of yourselves as free citizens who are not enthralled to any supernatural-eternal authority; which you will always find is interpreted for you by other mammals who claim to have access to this authority - that gives them special power over you. Don't allow yourselves to have your lives run like that." - Christopher Hitchens vs. William Dembski
"When Socrates was sentenced to death, for his philosophical investigations and his blasphemy for challenging the Gods of the city and he accepted his death. He did say "well, if we're lucky perhaps I'll be able to hold a conversation with other great thinkers and philosophers and doubters too", in other words that the discussion about what is good, what is beautiful, what is noble and what is pure and what is true can always go on. Why is that important, why would I like to do that? Because that is the only conversation worth having. And whether it goes on or not after I die, I don't know, but I do know that it is the conversation I want to have while I am still alive. Which means that for me, the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can't give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don't know anything like enough yet. That I haven't understood enough, that I can't know enough, that I'm always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn't have it any other way. And I urge you to look at those of you that tell you (at your age) that that you are dead until you believe as they do. (What a terrible thing to be telling to children.) And that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority. Don't think of that as a gift, think of it as a poison chalice. Push it aside no matter how tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way." - Christopher Hitchens vs.. William Dembski
"The cure for poverty has a name, in fact: it's called the empowerment of women. If you give women some control over the rate at which they reproduce, if you give them some say, take them off the animal cycle of reproduction to which nature and some doctrine—religious doctrine condemns them, and then if you'll throw in a handful of seeds perhaps and some credit, the floor of everything in that village, not just poverty, but education, health, and optimism will increase. It doesn't matter; try it in Bangladesh, try it in Bolivia, it works—works all the time. Name me one religion that stands for that, or ever has. Wherever you look in the world and you try to remove the shackles of ignorance and disease stupidity from women, it is invariably the clericy that stands in the way, or in the case of—now, furthermore, if you are going to grant this to Catholic charities, say, which I would hope are doing a lot of work in Africa, if I was a member of a church that had preached that AIDS was not as bad as condoms, I'd be putting some conscience money into Africa too, I must say."
"Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things... one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority."
"I'll grant you that it would possible to track the pregnancy of the woman Mary who's mentioned about three times in the Bible and to show there was no male intervention in her life at all but yet she delivered herself of a healthy baby boy. I can say— I don't say that's impossible. Parthenogenesis is not completely unthinkable. It does not prove that his paternity is divine and it wouldn't prove that any of his moral teachings were thereby correct. Nor, if I was to see him executed one day and see him walking the streets the next, would that show that his father was God or his mother was a virgin or that his teachings were true, especially given the commonplace nature of resurrection at that time and place. After all, Lazarus was raised, never said a word about it. The daughter of Jairus was raised, didn't say a thing about what she'd been through. And the Gospels tell us that at the time of the crucifixion all the graves in Jerusalem opened and their occupants wandered around the streets to greet people. So it seems resurrection was something of a banality at the time. Not all of those people clearly were divinely conceived. So I'll give you all the miracles and you'll still be left exactly where you are now, holding an empty sack." - Christopher Hitchens vs. Frank Turek
"The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee." - Christopher Hitchens vs. Barry Brummett
"To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?" - Mortality (2012)
"If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does." - Mortality (2012)
"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." – God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007)
"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." - God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007)
"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." – The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer (2007)
“The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.” - Mortality (2012)
“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.” - Hitch-22: A Memoir (2010)
“Time spent arguing is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.” - Letters to a Young Contrarian (2000)
“I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world.” - The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (2007)
“We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.”
“God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite 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.” - God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007)
“I am not even an atheist so much as 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 true.... There may be people who wish to live their lives under cradle-to-grave divine supervision, a permanent surveillance and monitoring. But I cannot imagine anything more horrible or grotesque.”
“Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan—'a land without a people for a people without a land'—disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?” - Hitch-22: A Memoir (2010)
“Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of 'the flock.” - Hitch-22: A Memoir (2010)
“Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.” - God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007)
“Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.” - God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007)
"[Mother Theresa] was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions." - Mommie Dearest (2003)
"Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer."
"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."
"What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition."
"Suppose there were groups of secularists at hospitals who went round the terminally ill and urged them to adopt atheism: “Don’t be a mug all your life. Make your last days the best ones.” People might suppose this was in poor taste."
"That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." - God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007)
“What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence.”
“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.”
“Atheism by itself is, of course, not a moral position or a political one of any kind; it simply is the refusal to believe in a supernatural dimension.”
“There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.”
“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.”
"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 when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse."
"If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world. - God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007)
"Religion is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who can subject you to total surveillance around the clock every walking and sleeping minute of your life, before you're born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you're dead."
"God is the creator of the nature and laws of the universe, he could create humans in a way in which they don't disobey and still have freedom. That is what's so stupid and illogical about god. We are created sick, and commanded to be well."
"One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and revolving that issue."
"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." - God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007)
"There still 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 grounded on wishful thinking."
"I suppose one reason that I've always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate that the universe is designed to 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 to me."
"If someone tells me that I've hurt their feelings, I say, "I'm still waiting to hear what your point is." In this country, I've told, "That's offensive," as if those two words constitute an argument or a comment. Not to me they don't. And I'm not running for anything, so I don't have to pretend to like people when I don't."
"It is a horrible idea that there is somebody who owns us, who makes us, who supervises us - waking and sleeping; who knows our thoughts, who can convict us of thought crime - thought crime - just for what we think; who can judge us while we sleep for things that might occur to us in our dreams; who can create us sick, as apparently we are, and then order us - on pain of eternal torture - to be well again. To wish this to be true is to wish to live as an abject slave."
"My attitude towards someone who says, "I have a meek and mild savior for you, and if you don't like it, you can burn forever and be tortured indefinitely," is the same whether they keep it themselves or pass it on to someone else. A person who believes that is a wicked and delusional idiot. I shall simply have to say, as someone who is the beneficiary of a birthright of liberty in two countries, one of my birth and one of my adoption, that I decline to be spoken to in that tone of voice. I will not be told, "I have a supernatural offer to you, and if you don't like it, you can be tortured forever." I won't be talked to like that. That is the language of fascism and dictatorship. It's directly immoral, and it's a great relief to know that it's completely mythical."
"People always demand respect for their faith. You've noticed this happening. Why should I respect someone who makes enormous claims on no evidence, and when confronted with that fact, say, "Well, I don't need any evidence, I've got faith."? I think that extraordinary claims, such as that they know, not just that there is a god, but that they know his mind, they know his instructions, they've had revealed truth from him: a claim like that demands extraordinary evidence. Instead of which, they say, "No, how about no evidence at all, and just take me on faith?" Why am I suppose to respect that? I don't respect it. I suspect it."
"I challenge you to find one good or noble thing which cannot be accomplished without religion. It is impossible. You cannot do it."
"But if you've established deism, you've got all your work still ahead of you to be a theist. You have to show that this god, this person who went to all this trouble with physics, cares who you sleep with or how or whether you should eat a pig or not or what day you should observe as holy."
"A reasonably competent god, could have made absolutely clear-cut evidence of its existence."
"It is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity."
"Do I think I'm going to paradise? Of course not; I wouldn't go if I was asked. I don't want to live in some fucking celestial North Korea, for one thing, where all I get to do is praise the Dear Leader from dusk till dawn."
"Morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes."
"But you say not only that there is a god, but you know what he wants. Well, I know you can't know that. It's not a matter of how clever you are - you can't know it. But why do you claim to? Because you think it might give you the right to tell me what to do. Well, fuck that."
"To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation - is that good for the world?"
"We're not guilty. We're not all soaked in original sin. We're not all saved by ghastly human sacrifice. We're not all implicated in this filthy cult of death."
"God loves you so much that he created hell just in case you don't love him back."
"If belief in heaven was private, like the tooth fairy, I'd say fine. But tooth fairy supporters don't come around to your house and try to convert you. They don't try to teach your children stultifying pseudoscience in school. They don't try to prevent access to contraception. The religious won't leave us alone. These are not just private delusions, they're ones they want to inflict on other people."
"...not scorning the three delightful children who are everything to me and who are my only chance of even a glimpse of a second life, let alone an immortal one, and I'll tell you something: if I was told to sacrifice them to prove my devotion to god, if I was to do what all monotheists are told to do and admire the man who said, "Yes, I'll gut my kid to show my love of god." I'd say, "No, fuck you.""
"People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains."
"I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred, and contempt, and I claim that right."
"Nothing proves the man-made character of religion as obviously as the sick mind that designed hell, unless it is sorely limited mind that has failed to describe heaven - except as a place of either worldly comfort, eternal tedium, or (as Tertullian thought) continual relish in the torture of others."
"Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it."
"There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument."
"Religion is not the belief there is a god. Religion is the belief god tells you what to do."
"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."
"Just consider for a moment what their (the devout's) heaven looks like. Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea."
"Religion looks forward to the destruction of the world. Perhaps half aware that its unsupported arguments are not entirely persuasive, and perhaps uneasy about its own greedy accumulation of temporal power and wealth, religion has never ceased to proclaim the Apocalypse and the day of judgment."
"I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness."
"The teachings of Christianity - from vicarious redemption to the love of enemies, no thought for the morrow need be taken, that no thrift or care or family or society or solidarity is necessary - these are immoral teachings that have done and continue to inflict untold moral and physical harm on our species. And until we outgrow this nonsense, we have no chance of emancipating ourselves."
"Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens."
"Those who are determined to be 'offended' will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt."
"To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid." - God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007)
"If only religion were an opiate, no known narcotic rots the brain so fast."
Date Published: June 25, 2020
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