The day has finally arrived! My time at my Christian college is finally coming to a close. I’ve finished my tests and papers, and in a week, I’ll be graduating. To take a break from writing, this week I am sharing with you my favorite quotes from Hitchens’ God is Not Great. Enjoy!
1. “Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we must mistrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason.” p. 5
“We shall resolve [disagreements] by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication.” p. 5
2. “How much effort it takes to offer the incredible! . . . How much vanity must be concealed in order to pretend that one is a personal object of a divine plan? How much self-respect must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness of one’s own sin? . . . How much contortion is required to receive every new insight of science and manipulate it so as to ‘fit’ with the revealed words of ancient man-made deities?” p. 7
3. “Those who have believed what the priests and rabbis and imams tell them about what the unbelievers think and about how they think, will find further such surprises as we go along.” p. 10
4. “Today, ancient stupidity is upon us again.” p. 41
5. “A modern believer can say and even believe that his faith is quite compatible with science and medicine, but the awkward fact will always be that both things have a tendency to break religion’s monopoly, and have often been fiercely resisted for that reason.” p. 47
6. “Can it be a coincidence, then, that all religions claim the right to legislate in matters of sex? The principal way in which believers inflict on themselves, on each other, and on nonbelievers, has always been their claim to monopoly in this sphere.” p. 53
7. “A special subgenre of modern literature is the memoir of a man or woman who once underwent a religious education.” p. 55
8. “The three monotheistic religions teach people to think abjectly of themselves, as miserable and guilty sinners prostrate before an angry and jealous god. . .” p. 73
9. “The real ‘miracle’ is that we, who share genes with the original bacteria that began life on the planet, have evolved as much as we have.” p. 84
10. “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.” p. 96
11. “Then there is the very salient question of what the commandments do not say. Is it too modern to notice that there is nothing about the protection of children from cruelty, nothing about rape, nothing about slavery, and nothing about genocide? Or is it too exceedingly ‘in context’ to notice that some of these very offenses are about to be positively recommended?” p. 100
12. “Rightly are the simple so called.” p. 110
13. “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).” p. 125
14. “Provisionally, then, one is entitled to conclude that the apparent unity and confidence of the faith is a mask for a very deep and probably unjustifiable insecurity.” p. 125-126
15. “Everything is already explained. I fail to see why the religious are so reluctant to admit this: it would free them from all the futile questions about why god permits so much suffering. But apparently this annoyance is a small price to pay in order to keep alive the myth of divine intervention.” p. 149
16. “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” p. 150
17. “The cobbled-together ancient Jewish books had an ill-tempered and implacable and bloody and provincial god, who was probably more frightening when he was in a good mood.” p. 175
18. “I am not the only one who has been an atheist in a foxhole.” p. 188
19. “There you have it again: a baseless assumption that some undefined external ‘force’ has a mind of its own, and the faint but menacing suggestion that anyone who disagrees is in some fashion opposed to the holy or paternal will.” p. 201
20. “All the creation myths of all people have long been known to be false.” p. 205
21. “. . . What will you say if you die and are confronted with your Maker? . . . My own reply: Imponderable Sir, I presume from some of not all of your many reputations that you might prefer honest and convinced unbelief to the hypocritical and self-interested affectation of faith or the smoking tributes of bloody altars.” p. 212
22. “If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had reached the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.” p. 220
23. “The slightest infringement—of a holy day, or a holy object, or an ordinance about sex or food or caste—could bring calamity.” p. 231
24. “What is a totalitarian system if not one where the abject glorification of the perfect leader is matched by the surrender of all privacy and individuality, especially in matters sexual, and in denunciation and punishment—’for their own good’—of those who transgress?” p. 232
25. “There is nothing in modern secular government that even hints at any ban on religious observance.” p. 247
26. “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.” p. 250
27. “I do not know for certain about death and the gods—but I am as certain as I can be that you do not know, either.” p. 257
28. “There is no requirement for any enforcing or supernatural authority. And why should there be? Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.” p. 266
29. “No grand and noble deity should have such atrocities and stupidities laid to its charge.” p. 268
30. “We do not have the option of ‘choosing’ absolute truth, or faith. We only have the right to say, of those who do claim to know the truth of revelation, that they are deceiving themselves and attempting to deceive—or to intimidate—others. Of course, it is better and healthier for the mind to ‘choose’ the path of skepticism and inquiry in any case, because only by continual exercise of these faculties can we hope to achieve anything.” p. 278
There you have it! These have been my favorite quotes from God is Not Great. In other words, God may not be great, but these quotes sure are! I’m sorry about that. I know it wasn’t funny. Anyways, what were your favorite God is Not Great quotes or quotes in general? Let me know in a comment! 🙂
Work cited:
Hitchens, Christopher. god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Twelve Books, 2006.