The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

by Christopher Hitchens

what kind of designer or creator only chooses to “reveal” himself to semi-stupefied peasants in desert regions?

Richard Dawkins may have phrased it most pungently when he argued that everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god—from Ra to Shiva—in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in.

“The mob has no ruler more potent than superstition,”

faith has become a mere compound of credulity and prejudices—aye, prejudices too, which degrade man from rational being to beast, which completely stifle the power of judgment between true and false, which seem, in fact, carefully fostered for the purpose of extinguishing the last spark of reason!

It is strange, a judicious reader is apt to say, upon the perusal of these wonderful historians, that such prodigious events never happen in our days. But it is nothing strange, I hope, that men should lie in all ages.

And if God is indeed omnipotent, why could He not have produced the glorious result without such a long and tedious prologue?

The commonest objection to birth control is that it is against “nature.” (For some reason we are not allowed to say that celibacy is against nature;

So, I’m saying, “This I believe: I believe there is no God.” Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I’m not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows, and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it’s everything in the world, and everything in the world is plenty for me.

Revelation most likely survived because its author was confused with John, the Beloved Disciple. It is interesting to speculate how different medieval European history, and indeed the history of religion in Europe and the United States would have been if the Book of Revelation had also failed, as it nearly did, to be retained in the Bible we now know.

Martin Luther (1483-1546), writing in the sixteenth century, conceded that “We Christians seem fools to the world for believing that Mary was the true mother of this child, and nevertheless a pure virgin. For this is not only against all reason, but also against the creation of God, who said to Adam and Eve, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’”

The letters of Paul were written before Mark’s Gospel, and yet rather surprisingly they do not mention many of the details of Jesus’s life that we find in the Gospels: no allusions to Jesus’s parents, or to the Virgin Birth, or to Jesus’s place of birth; there is no mention of John the Baptist, Judas, nor of Peter’s denial of his master.

G. A. Wells points out, “they give no indication of the time or place of Jesus’s earthly existence. They never refer to his trial before a Roman official nor to Jerusalem as the place of his execution. They mention none of the miracles he is supposed to have worked.” Even when certain doctrines attributed to Jesus in the Gospels would have been of obvious use to Paul in his doctrinal disputes, there is no mention of them.