Hitch 3 Flashcards
All arguments about the existence of a God appear to come from an argument from design.
Bishop Paley said if you find a watch there must be a watchmaker. The problem with this argument is that it leads to an infinite regression. We are surrendering to our own solipsism if we continue on this track.
Those who have faith often present themselves with modesty and humility. Excuse me, I’m just on a errand for God or the creator.
Faith is the surrender of our scepticism, our curiosity, our willingness to doubt ourselves, our willingness to accept propositions that are unwelcome to us.
The most we know about the cosmos is that we don’t know very much about it. Everything is arranged against the way we feel. What is going to give way? The thought or the feeling? The reason or the emotion?
There are no microorganisms, dinosaurs or marsupials in Genesis. They can kill you.
What are the odds that God created man when stacked against the odds that man created God.
Are they all equal versions of the same untruth?
There is an outside chance that one of these monotheisms is true i.e. this is something to kill for.
We are studying at a time when a page of Stephen Hawking is much more awe-inspiring that anything you can read in Genesis.
If somebody wants to take credit for the Creation, He must accept responsibility for everything.
Of course we don’t live without awe. We don’t live without a sense of majesty. We don’t live with contempt for ourselves.
There are things we cannot know. I am happy in this conclusion. I don’t mind submitting to this curiosity and scepticism. But what can we say of people who say they know?
Christians mire themselves in a swamp of guilt. Wretched. Condemned. Grovelling. Thank God someone was tortured to death 2000 years ago, so that I can live forever. Abject. Servile.
Wouldn’t it make you happy that someone died for you? Could it be like feeling in love? Does it make them happy? They cannot be happy until you believe it too. Is this a sign of moral security or insecurity? If everyone believes it I might be right.
When they don’t the argument from design, it’s Pascal’s wager. “You didn’t provide any persuasive evidence.”
The self-evident immorality of the wager - it’s just abject or naked self-interest.
What if the proposition was true, that you lived under a permanent cradle to grave supervision. This is the definition of unfreedom and the origin of totalitarianism.
People often behave better because of it. It’s a way of inculcating ethics. Not everyone is going to do philosophy or physics.
We have to begin using our brains more. Human emancipation begins where religion ends.
Religion infects us in our most basic integrity. It says we could not know right from wrong without divine guidance.
The physical existence of Jesus is necessary. It’s not for Socrates.
I think that our morality and ethics is innate, as in other mammalian species.
How long can a healthy mind be satisfied with superstition?
Religion is the origin of the idea of the totalitarian. This is where tyranny begins. The beginning of emancipation is to repudiate this antique serfdom.
Why did the Christian message take so long to reach the people of China? The Chinese civilisation dwarfed that of anything in Western Europe or the Americas.
It is only with the arrival of religion and the holy books that some people are said to be the masters and others to be dispensable or slaughtered. From the original Jewish books to the Christian testaments, through to the Koran and the Book of Mormon, slavery is mandated every step of the way.
Pseudo-ethnological garbage.
Would you rather a baby born in Pakistan today be a secular humanist or a Wahhabi Muslim?
Are all of these Gods and prophets equally false or equally valid?
My proposition by saying that they are all false, is at least intelligible.
Divine right of kings, political doctrine in defense of monarchical absolutism, which asserted that kings derived their authority from God and could not therefore be held accountable for their actions by any earthly authority such as a parliament. Originating in Europe, the divine-right theory can be traced to the medieval conception of God’s award of temporal power to the political ruler, paralleling the award of spiritual power to the church. By the 16th and 17th centuries, however, the new national monarchs were asserting their authority in matters of both church and state. King James I of England (reigned 1603–25) was the foremost exponent of the divine right of kings, but the doctrine virtually disappeared from English politics after the Glorious Revolution (1688–89). In the late 17th and the 18th centuries, kings such as Louis XIV (1643–1715) of France continued to profit from the divine-right theory, even though many of them no longer had any truly religious belief in it. The American Revolution (1775–83), the French Revolution (1789), and the Napoleonic wars deprived the doctrine of most of its remaining credibility.
The divine right of kings is a political and religious doctrine of royal and political legitimacy. It asserts that a monarch is subject to no earthly authority, deriving the right to rule directly from the will of God. The king is thus not subject to the will of his people, the aristocracy, or any other estate of the realm. It implies that only God can judge an unjust king and that any attempt to depose, dethrone or restrict his powers runs contrary to the will of God and may constitute a sacrilegious act. It is often expressed in the phrase “by the Grace of God”, attached to the titles of a reigning monarch.
We might do well to stop forging manacles with our own minds.
As one can intuit from Thomas Paine, in order to safeguard the rights of man, we will require a new age of reason.
The holy books cannot be rewritten. Slavery and genocide are not denounced in the first 5 Jewish books but recommended.
Human rights are mandated by evolution and not predicated on anything supernatural.
