The easiest way to establish a dictatorship is to claim you are God’s representative on earth.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSThe easiest way to establish a dictatorship is to claim you are God’s representative on earth.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSMy own opinion is enough for me. And I claim the right to defend it against any consensus, any majority anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSArguments that explain everything explain nothing.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSI’m an atheist. I’m not neutral about religion, I’m hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSNo one has the right to tell me what to do because he has a divine warrant.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSThe 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 HITCHENSIf the Qur’an was the word of God, it had been dictated on a very bad day.
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.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSSome 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.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSWell, 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 HITCHENSThe faithful believe that certain truths have been ‘revealed.’ The skeptics and secularists believe that truth is only to be sought by free inquiry and trial and error. Only one of those positions is dogmatic.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSThere 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 HITCHENSThe governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that ‘if English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for me.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSIslamophobia: a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSEven if I accepted that Jesus – like almost every other prophet on record – was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSThe Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS