To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation – is that good for the world?
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSI’m 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.
More Christopher Hitchens Quotes
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The violence in the Bible is appalling.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
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.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.
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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.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
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 -
If the Qur’an was the word of God, it had been dictated on a very bad day.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
There is no such thing as closure, and it wouldn’t be worth having if it were available, because all it would mean is that something that was quite an important part of you had gone numb.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
We have lived in a world where the discoveries of physics and genetics are far more awe-inspiring, as well as infinitely more liberating, than the claims of any religion.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, ‘Well, good on you. See you there.’
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
There’s been some research in cognitive science, I’m told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it’s white noise.
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The discovery there is no god is a great relief, because if there were, it would be like living in a celestial North Korea if there was one. You would never be able to escape.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human pre-history where nobody – not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms – had the smallest idea what was going on.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
I’m not afraid of being dead, that’s to say there’s nothing to be afraid of. I won’t know I’m dead, would be my strong conviction. And if I find that I’m alive in any way at all, that’ll be a pleasant surprise. I quite like surprises.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS






