The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

by Christopher Hitchens

(Cats may sometimes share the cold entrails of a kill with you, but this is just what a god might do if he was in a good mood.)

Cats do this because they don't think we can hunt & feed ourselves.

Men talk of heaven,—there is no heaven but here; Men talk of hell,—there is no hell but here; Men of hereafters talk, and future lives,— O love, there is no other life—but here.

The Koran! well, come put me to the test— Lovely old book in hideous error drest— Believe me, I can quote the Koran too, The unbeliever knows his Koran best.

I <3 this so hard. All of us atheists out here reading Bibles & *memorizing* it.

so that man, which looks too far before him, in the care of future time, hath his heart all the day long, gnawed on by fear of death, poverty, or other calamity; and has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep.

We're Prometheus' liver & the buzzards are life itself. Nice.

in which sense perhaps it was, that some of the old poets said, that the gods were at first created by human fear: which spoken of the gods, that is to say, of the many gods of the Gentiles, is very true. But the acknowledging of one God, eternal, infinite, and omnipotent, may more easily be derived,

It just dawned on me that monotheism is far easier than polytheism. You've only got one deity's rules to follow.

Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favoured by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune’s greedily coveted favours, they are consequently, for the most part, very prone to credulity. The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt, especially when hope and fear are struggling for the mastery, though usually it is boastful, over-confident, and vain.

This element of inconsistency has been the cause of many terrible wars and revolutions; for, as Curtius well says (lib. iv. chap. 10): “The mob has no ruler more potent than superstition,” and is easily led, on the plea of religion, at one moment to adore its kings as gods, and anon to execrate and abjure them as humanity’s common bane.