10 Christopher Hitchens Quotes on Religion

Christopher Hitchens quotes on religion

12. The (Catholic) church, as far as I know, has not endorsed any war as just since it supported General Franco's invasion of Spain to destroy the Spanish republic with a Muslim mercenary army in the thirties, on the side of Hitler.

20. If you think that the intifada in France is about housing, go and try covering the story wearing a yarmulka.

43. The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.

47. I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator - that's beyond my conceit. I therefore have no choice but to find something suspect even in the humblest believer. Even the most humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicit in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke Greville's unforgettable line, 'Created sick - Commanded to be well.' And there are totalitarian insinuations to back this up if its appeal should fail. Christians, for example, declare me redeemed by a human sacrifice that occurred thousands of years before I was born. I didn't ask for it, and would willingly have foregone it, but there it is: I'm claimed and saved whether I wish it or not. And if I refuse the unsolicited gift? Well, there are still some vague mutterings about an eternity of torment for my ingratitude. That is somewhat worse than a Big Brother state, because there could be no hope of its eventually passing away. In any case, I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves. You can see the same immorality or amorality in the Christian view of guilt and punishment. There are only two texts, both of them extreme and mutually contradictory. The Old Testament injunction is the one to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (it occurs in a passage of perfectly demented detail about the exact rules governing mutual ox-goring; you should look it up in its context [Exodus 21]). The second is from the Gospels and says that only those without sin should cast the first stone. The first is a moral basis for capital punishment and other barbarities; the second is so relativistic and 'nonjudgmental' that it would not allow the prosecution of Charles Manson. Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultra vindictiveness and ultracompassion. Judaism has some advantages over Christianity in that, for example, it does not proselytise - except among Jews - and it does not make the cretinous mistake of saying that the Messiah has already made his appearance. However, along with Islam and Christianity, it does insist that some turgid and contradictory and sometimes evil and mad texts, obviously written by fairly unexceptional humans, are in fact the word of god. I think that the indispensable condition of any intellectual liberty is the realisation that there is no such thing.

70. Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins and astrology ends, and astronomy begins.

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

72. On Jerry Falwell: I think it's a pity there isn't a hell for him to go to. The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you'll just get yourself called Reverend. Who would, even at your network, have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the attacks of September 11th were the result of our sinfulness and were God's punishment if they hadn't got some kind of clerical qualification. People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup. The whole consideration of this horrible little person is offensive to very, very many of us who have some regard for truth and for morality and who think that ethics do not require that lies be told to children by evil old men, that we're not told that people who believe like Falwell will be snatched up into heaven - I'm glad to see he skipped the rapture and was found on the floor of his office - while the rest of us go to hell. How dare they talk to children like this, how dare they raise money from credulous people on their huckster-like Elmer Gantry radio stations and fly around in private jets as he did, giggling and snickering all the time at what he was getting away with?:How dare he say, for example, that the Antichrist is already present amongst us and is an adult male Jew, while all the time fawning on the worst elements in Israel, with his other hand pumping anti-Semitic innuendos into American politics along with his friends Robertson and Graham, encouraging the most extreme theocratic fanatics and maniacs on the West Bank and in Gaza not to give an inch of what he thought of as holy land to the people who already lived there, undercutting and ruining every democrat and secularist in the Jewish state in the name of God? He's done us an enormous, enormous disservice by this sort of demagoguery:the fact is that the country suffers to a considerable extent from paying too much by way of compliment to anyone who can describe themselves as a person of faith - Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard: Chaucerian frauds, people who are simply pickpockets and frauds who prey on the gullible:He woke up every morning, as I say, pinching his chubby little flanks and thinking 'I've got away with it again!':I think he was a conscious charlatan and bully and fraud and I think if he read the Bible at all - and I would doubt whether he could actually read any long book at all - that he did so only in the most hucksterish, as we say, Bible-pounding way. I'm gonna repeat what I said before about the Israeli question. It's very important. Jerry Falwell kept saying to his own crowd 'Yeah you gotta like the Jews cos they can make more money in ten minutes than you can make in a lifetime.' He was also full, as his friends Robertson and Graham are and were, of anti-Semitic innuendo, yet, in the most base and hypocritical way, he encouraged the worst elements among Jewry. He got Menachim Begin to give him the Jabotinsky Medal, celebrating an alliance between Christian fundamentalism and Jewish fanaticism that has ruined the chances for peace in the Middle East. Lots of people are going to die and are already leading miserable lives because of the nonsense preached by this man.

74. When I am at home, I never go near the synagogue unless, say, there is a bar or bat mitzvah involving the children of friends. But when I am traveling, in a country where Jewish life is scarce or endangered, I often make a visit to the shul. [5]

75. Religious exhortation and telling people, telling children, that if they don't do the right thing, they'll go to terrifying punishments or unbelievable rewards, that's making a living out of lying to children. That's what the priesthood do. And if all they did was lie to the children, it would be bad enough. But they rape them and torture them and then hope we'll call it 'abuse'. [6]

100. If you are a religious apologist invited to debate Christopher Hitchens, decline.

102. Many stupid people refuse to believe in a supreme power. I felt like that once but then I had a moment of revelation when I realised that everyone was talking nonsense and that there was an all-powerful benign intelligence that controlled our destinies. The ignorant and uneducated blamed Him for allowing wars in which thousands died or floods in which people's homes were swept away while He merely looked on. 'Why does He allow evil to happen?' they asked, as if this was a sensible question. But it isn't. The fact remains that George Bush does exist. Although He moves in mysterious ways and His sayings are sometimes difficult to comprehend, if we have faith in George Bush all will be revealed and our lives will be transformed. We could not wish for more.