Hitch 2 Flashcards
Diarmaid MacCullogh - a history of Christianity: the first 3000 years
Christendom ends in 1914 when countries go to war with its leaders as Gods. It’s also the curtain raiser to fascism.
We now estimate a total of 400 billion galaxies. A star the size of our Sun goes out every second. That’s quite a lot whilst I’m talking.
It can be argued that all this was set in motion - collapsed stars, failed galaxies, pitiless extermination - so that one primate species (capable of language and reason) could have dominion over one tiny speck of a planet in the suburb of a very minor galaxy.
Arrogate - to take or claim something without justification
Arrogation of power - to take power presumptuously and unwarrantably (using divine warrant in the religious case)
A design of this kind doesn’t just imply a designer. It implicates a designer. If there is such a designer he is fantastically destructive and wasteful.
99.8% of all species have already become extinct. This is a pitiless, capricious, wasteful designer. There is an indictment to which this deity must be subjected to.
Socrates - you must educate yourself by striving constantly as hard as you can to get the point of understanding your own ignorance.
It doesn’t matter if Socrates existed or not because we have his method.
Is there not something fanatical about placing such large claims on such slender evidence?
Religion’s metaphysical claims are untrue. It belongs to the infancy of our species
We didn’t know the germ theory of disease
We didn’t know that earthquakes were the result of living on the cooling crust of a planet
No theologian has ever conclusively demonstrated that a designer has ever existed.
Religion goes further than deism and the speaker says that he knows the entity’s mind. The speaker can tell you that he know that Heaven hates ham. The speaker can also indicate certain areas of study which you should avoid - a quite sinister arrogation of power.
It gives to ministers, rabbis, shamans power in the here and now, the only place where it really counts.
The inescapable conclusion is that temporal power is what is being sought, of a dictatorial and absolutist kind.
Tyranny over the mind is exerted through theocracy
This is what happens when people think they have God on their side.
The arrogance of power when it’s backed by the divine
You can be a deist but not believe in religion
You can be an atheist but want to believe in a God
Theism is the most complete form of totalitarianism ever conceived. The abolition of privacy.
There is genocide, racism and slavery in the Old Testament but no Hell. Only until gentle Jesus arrives in the New Testament do we get punishment of the dead.
If God made man it’s very difficult to understand why there are so many religions warring with each other. If man made God it’s very easy to see why.
Christianity says you’re born unfree with a duty to a stern parent. And a stern parent who will never quit.
You’re taught that you must love someone who you must also fear. I have always though the idea of compulsory love to be quite sinister.
If the idea of the eternal father does not worry you it should.
Imagine if you had a father who said to you, “I’m never going to die”. This is tyranny and it infantilises you because it says that can never grow up.
My favourite example of religion being the origin of totalitarianism is Big Brother. We can never be truly free until we break this chain.
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