The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution

by Christopher Hitchens

Ignorance, to a scientist, is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched. Ignorance, if you are a theologian, is something to be washed away by shamelessly making something up. If you are an authority figure like the Pope, you might do it by thinking privately to yourself and waiting for an answer to pop into your head – which you then proclaim as a ‘revelation’. Or you might do it by ‘interpreting’ a Bronze Age text whose author was even more ignorant than you are.

I think it’s condescending not to confront people, as it were, one by one or en masse. Public opinion is often wrong. Mob opinion is almost always wrong. Religious opinion is wrong by definition.