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Christopher Hitchens:
Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more
happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.
That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without
evidence.
Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
Faith...
Gullibility and credulity are considered undesirable qualities in every
department of human life -- except religion.
The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It
is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise
and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty
and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we
are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is
nothing more; but I want nothing more.
The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for
ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate
massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by
crude, uncultured human mammals.
Faith is the surrender of the mind; it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the
surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It’s
our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our
yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or
something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues,
faith must be the most overrated. |
Here is page from this book:
