God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

by Christopher Hitchens

How much vanity must be concealed—not too effectively at that—in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?

those who offer false consolation are false friends.

Thus the mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.

The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on.

You can believe in a divine mover if you choose, but it makes no difference at all, and belief among astronomers and physicists has become private and fairly rare.

Thus the postulate of a designer or creator only raises the unanswerable question of who designed the designer or created the creator.

religion teaches people to be extremely self-centered and conceited. It assures them that god cares for them individually, and it claims that the cosmos was created with them specifically in mind.

There doesn’t seem to be a word to describe the absence of divine intervention in this case. But the human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

When the bones of prehistoric animals began to be discovered and scrutinized in the nineteenth century, there were those who said that the fossils had been placed in the rock by god, in order to test our faith.

a theory that is unfalsifiable is to that extent a weak one.

For optimal vision, why would an intelligent designer have built an eye upside down and backwards?

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.

There is an intriguing paradox here: evolution does not have eyes but it can create them.

A “theory” is something evolved—if you forgive the expression—to fit the known facts. It is a successful theory if it survives the introduction of hitherto unknown facts.

This is what makes piffle out of the ignorant creationist sneer, which compares evolution to a whirlwind blowing through a junkyard of parts and coming up with a jumbo jet.

We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.

we no longer have any need of a god to explain what is no longer mysterious.

Since all of these revelations, many of them hopelessly inconsistent, cannot by definition be simultaneously true, it must follow that some of them are false and illusory.

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.

religion suffered from one incurable deficiency: it was too clearly derived from our own desire to escape from or survive death.

Thus, and as usual, religion arouses suspicion by trying to prove too much.

Well, it can be stated with certainty, and on their own evidence, that the Gospels are most certainly not literal truth.

If the New Testament is supposed to vindicate Moses, why are the gruesome laws of the Pentateuch to be undermined? An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and the killing of witches may seem brutish and stupid, but if only non-sinners have the right to punish, then how could an imperfect society ever determine how to prosecute offenders?

There is a further objection. 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).

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 justifiable insecurity.

Has the art of resurrection died out? Or are we relying on dubious sources?

And exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.

Those who desire to certify miracles may wish to say that such recoveries have no “natural” explanation. But this does not at all mean that there is therefore a “supernatural” one.

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

Still, this story raises some very absorbing questions, concerning what happens when a plain racket turns into a serious religion before our eyes.

virtuous behavior by a believer is no proof at all of—indeed is not even an argument for—the truth of his belief.

A faith that despises the mind and the free individual, that preaches submission and resignation, and that regards life as a poor and transient thing, is ill-equipped for self-criticism.

All the creation myths of all peoples have long been known to be false, and have fairly recently been replaced by infinitely superior and more magnificent explanations.

An offering of a virgin or an infant or a prisoner was assumed to appease the gods: once again, not a very good advertisement for the moral properties of religion.

Once again we have a father demonstrating love by subjecting a son to death by torture, but this time the father is not trying to impress god. He is god, and he is trying to impress humans.

I am told of a human sacrifice that took place two thousand years ago, without my wishing it and in circumstances so ghastly that, had I been present and in possession of any influence, I would have been duty-bound to try and stop it. In consequence of this murder, my own manifold sins are forgiven me, and I may hope to enjoy everlasting life.

The order to “love thy neighbor” is mild and yet stern: a reminder of one’s duty to others. The order to “love thy neighbor as thyself” is too extreme and too strenuous to be obeyed, as is the hard-to-interpret instruction to love others “as I have loved you.”

Nothing proves the man-made character of religion as obviously as the sick mind that designed hell,

The urge to ban and censor books, silence dissenters, condemn outsiders, invade the private sphere, and invoke an exclusive salvation is the very essence of the totalitarian.

Religion even at its meekest has to admit that what it is proposing is a “total” solution, in which faith must be to some extent blind, and in which all aspects of the private and public life must be submitted to a permanent higher supervision.

Totalitarian systems, whatever outward form they may take, are fundamentalist and, as we would now say, “faith-based.”

some humans have always noticed the improbability of god, the evil done in his name, the likelihood that he is man-made, and the availability of less harmful alternative beliefs and explanations.

Galileo might have been unmolested in his telescopic work if he had not been so unwise as to admit that it had cosmological implications.

Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astonomy takes the place of astrology.

Faith-based fanatics could not design anything as useful or beautiful as a skyscraper or a passenger aircraft. But, continuing their long history of plagiarism, they could borrow and steal these things and use them as a negation.