The Four Horsemen: The Discussion that Sparked an Atheist Revolution

by Christopher Hitchens

While it is honourable and legitimate to speculate as to the truth of the tenets of religious faith, there is no call to mock or undermine the individually devout. Flaubert’s Coeur simple, the old servant Félicité on her knees, telling the rosary and looking up with reverent wonder at the stained-glass window above the altar, is not ripe for scorn; but the dogma relayed from the Vatican by the cardinal in his palace, dogma that keeps Félicité on her knees, the palace stocked with wine, and the populace plied with nonsensical edicts and eschatological threats … well, that is fair and necessary game.

Enquiries into the legitimacy of claims that spill out into the public arena and influence education, law-making and policy have no obligation to consider bruised feelings.

Because you cannot understand literature without knowing the Bible. You can’t understand art, you can’t understand music, there are all sorts of things you can’t understand, for historical reasons – but those historical reasons you can’t wipe out. They’re there. And so even if you don’t actually go to church and pray, you’ve got to understand what it meant to people to pray, and why they did it, and what these verses in the Bible mean, and what this—

Beautiful music, and its beauty is indeed enhanced by knowing what it means. But you don’t actually have to believe it; it’s like reading fiction.