Hitch 1 Flashcards
The person who is certain and who claims divine warrant for his certainty belongs now to the infancy of our species.
In the tradition of Thomas Paine, his books were incisive, ironic, chock full of information, contemptuous of what the pundits might think, redolent with indignation and choice adjectives. He had an unfailing wit and grace and a sort of penetrating lyricism, provoking us until we paid attention.
He expanded the Universe because he made the connections.
For most of human history, religion and bigotry have been two sides of the same coin.
Ineffable - too great to be expressed in words. An unknowable and ineffable creator
Stupefying - astonishing and shocking
Repellent - repulsive, repugnant, nauseating, loathsome, obnoxious
Extirpate - weed out, stamp out, destroy, eradicate, crush, suppress
Febrile - characterised by a great deal of excitement or nervous energy
Eviscerate - deprive something of its essential content (eviscerate his impunity)
Discreditable - dishonourable, reprehensible
Myopic - lacking foresight or intellectual insight, narrow-minded
Emancipating consequences
We make allowances for the orgies of stupidity that were indulged in before humanity had a clear concept of the germ theory of disease.
I simply laugh when I read the Koran with its endless prohibitions on sex and its corrupt promise of infinite debauchery in the life to come.
Religion claims the right to officiate at the end of life, just as it hopes to monopolise children at life’s beginning. It offers a redemption which is not theirs to bestow.
We have nothing to learn from what they think, but a great deal to learn from how they think.
Our place in the cosmos is so unimaginably small that we cannot, with our miserly endowment of cranial matter, contemplate it for long at all.
In the Future of an Illusion, Freud made the obvious point that religion suffered from one incurable deficiency: it was too clearly derived from our own desire to escape from or survive death.
All religions take care to silence or execute those who question them. I choose to regard this recurrent tendency as a sign of weakness rather than strength.
Islam uses the prohecies of the Old Testament and the Gospels of the New like a perpetual fund. In return for this derivative modesty, all it asks is to be accepted as the absolute and final revelation.
We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.
We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion.
How much vanity must be concealed in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?
The collectivisation of guilt is immoral in itself.
I cannot absolve you of your responsibilites. It would be immoral of me to offer, and immoral of you to accept.
The definition of an educated person - to truly know the extent of your own ignorance.
Lucretious anticipated David Hume in saying that the prospect of future annihilation was no worse than the contemplation of the nothingness from which one came.
So many people are prone to that solipism that either makes or breaks faith, and imagines that the universe is preoccupied with one’s own fate.
The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected.
Credulity may be a form of innocence, and even innocuous in itself, but it provides a standing invitation for the wicked and the clever to exploit their brothers and sisters, and is thus one of humanity’s greatest vulnerabilities.
No honest account of the growth and persistence of religion, or the reception of miracles and revelations, is possible without reference to this stubborn fact.
An open mind is not an empty mind
A supernatural dictator is the template for totaliarianism
Religion is implicitly totalitarian because it can convict you of thought-crime.
Why don’t you accept this wonderful offer? Why wouldn’t you like to meet Shakespeare, for example?
I don’t know if you really think that when you die you can be corporeally reassembled, and have conversations with authors from previous epochs. It’s not necessary that you believe that in Christian theology, and I have to say that it sounds like a complete fairy tale to me. The only reason I’d want to meet Shakespeare, or might even want to, is because I can meet him, any time, because he is immortal in the works he’s left behind. If you’ve read those, meeting the author would almost certainly be a disappointment.
But when Socrates was sentenced to death for his philosophical investigations, and for blasphemy for challenging the gods of the city — and he accepted his death — he did say, well, if we are lucky, perhaps I’ll be able to hold conversation with other great thinkers and philosophers and doubters too. In other words the discussion about what is good, what is beautiful, what is noble, what is pure, and what is true could always go on.
Why is that important, why would I like to do that? Because that’s the only conversation worth having. And whether it goes on or not after I die, I don’t know. But I do know that that’s the conversation I want to have while I’m still alive. Which means that to me, the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet; that I haven’t understood enough; that I can’t know enough; that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
And I’d urge you to look at… those people who tell you, at your age, that you’re dead till you believe as they do — what a terrible thing to be telling to children! And that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority — don’t think of that as a gift. Think of it as a poisoned chalice. Push it aside however tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.
How many nonbelievers, in the face of personal annihilation, would remain as clear-eyed, as courageous, as confident of the hard-won view of reality that science and skepticism gives us? Religion, arguably, arose out of the need to answer the very question that Hitchens now confronts: how do we deal with the inevitable and implacable fact of death? Perhaps Hitchens’ experience shows us a way to face it without the easy consolation of myths.
Most people, most of the time have no desire to be free. They would rather put up with the oppression.
We are not a species programmed for liberty. Some of us prefer a quiet life and want to repose our trust in an authority. We want security.
The instinct to be free is as strong as the instinct for security.
Main arguments:
1/ God created the Universe/natural order but this can be suspended or rendered inoperative when miracles are required. Having it both ways in the most exorbitant and promiscuous manner.
2/ There is no evidence that any moral precepts derive from Christianity
3/ Many teachings of Christinaity are immoral, mythical and incredible e.g. vicarious redemption/atonement.
4/ Mutually exclusive claims between man being created as a miserable sinner but also that the whole universe was designed with just you in mind.
Western secular law says we can use reason to make legislation. Islam says it has already been preordained by Allah.
“I’m not just a vulgar materialist. I do know that humans are also so made even though we are an evolved
species whose closest cousins are chimpanzees. I know it’s not enough for us to to eat and so forth. We know how to think. We know how to laugh. We know we’re going to die, which gives us a lot to think about, and we have a need for, what I would call, “the transcendent” or “the numinous” or even “the ecstatic” that comes out in love and music, poetry, and landscape. I wouldn’t trust anyone who didn’t respond to things of that sort. But I think the cultural task is to separate those impulses and those needs and desires from the supernatural and, above all, from the superstitious.”
The argument between Christians over biblical literacy is incoherent. Either it’s true or it’s not.
Religion will never be acquitted of solipsism. It may claim to be modest and humble but it isn’t. Excuse me I know the will of God and I’m on an errand for him.
Imagine if I was told that Jesus did not exist…all of the eternal questions would remain exactly the same…how should we treat our fellow creatures? How do we build the just city?
Don’t take refuge in the false security of consensus.
The censorious instinct is that we know exactly what we already need to know.
Islam represents the trio of self-hatred, self-righteousness and self-pity. Islam makes quite large claims for itself:
It says that God spoke to one illiterate businessman on the Arabian peninsula 3 times through an archangel and that the resulting material, ineptly plagarised from the Jewish Old Testament and Christian New Testament, is to be accepted as the unalterable and final revelation.
We belong to an imperfectly evolved species. We bear every sign of the stamp of our lowly origin.
We live on a cooling planet whose crust has not yet settled.
Religion is philosophy frozen by dogma and cloaked in the shroud of righteousness.
The attempt to derive morality from religion is not only mistaken and irritating but has become very menacing.
Radical Islam is an unusually violent challenge to pluralist values.
You’re a barely evolved ape and a close cousin of the chimpanzee. But take heart, you’re capable of wonderful things.
The idea of consciousness surviving independent of the brain is very different to the idea of a mandated path to Heaven or Hell.
The natural world is wonderful enough without recourse to supernatural dimension/proposition/consideration.
I have no time to waste on this planet being told what to do by those who think that God has given them instructions.
The Neanderthals and the Cro-magnums only died out around 20,000 years ago. Why aren’t they mentioned in the holy books?
We’re made from stardust or from nuclear waste. It is as likely for us as any whale, dog or bacteria.
2 ideas I don’t like in Islam: 1/ the idea of a perfect book 2/ the idea of a perfect man. It means that any challenge is seen as profane. It can break but it cannot bend.
What we’re here to celebrate in this cultural desert of celebrity worship, counter-enlightenment malice and revealed scripture tyranny is that there is still someone in this world, especially amongst the intelligent and curious, with a furious appetite for ideas, for knowledge, for thought and for the questioning of authority
