HITCHENS: Well, that’s why I think the moment where everything went wrong is the moment when the Jewish Hellenists were defeated by the Jewish Messianists – the celebration now benignly known as Hanukkah. That’s where the human race took its worst turn. A few people re-established the animal sacrifices, the circumcision and the cult of Yahweh over Hellenism and philosophy. And Christianity’s a plagiarism of that. Christianity would never have happened if that hadn’t happened and nor would Islam. I have no doubt there would have been other crazed cults and so forth, but there might have been a
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