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God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything QUOTES

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything QUOTES

1 " The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth. "

― Christopher Hitchens , God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

2 " [E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence. "

― Christopher Hitchens , God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

3 " Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely soley upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. "

― Christopher Hitchens , God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

4 " 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. "

― Christopher Hitchens , God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

5 " Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation. "

― Christopher Hitchens , God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

6 " To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid. "

― Christopher Hitchens , God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

7 " And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. "

― Christopher Hitchens , God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

8 " Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it. "

― Christopher Hitchens , God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

9 " Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse. "

― Christopher Hitchens , God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

10 " it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists "

― Christopher Hitchens , God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

11 " God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization. "

― Christopher Hitchens , God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

12 " [T]o believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing. "

― Christopher Hitchens , God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

13 " There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking. "

― Christopher Hitchens , God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

14 " Past and present religious atrocities have occured not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational. Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder. "

― Christopher Hitchens , God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

15 " We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free
inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.
We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement between
Professor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins,
concerning “punctuated evolution” and the unfilled gaps in post-
Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shall
resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication. "

― Christopher Hitchens , God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

16 " Yet in our hands and within our view is a whole universe of discovery and clarification, which is a pleasure to study in itself, gives the average person access to insights that not even Darwin or Einstein possessed, and offers the promise of near-miraculous advances in healing, in energy, and in peaceful exchange between different cultures. Yet millions of people in all societies still prefer the myths of the cave and the tribe and the blood sacrifice. "

― Christopher Hitchens , God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

17 " We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. "

― Christopher Hitchens , God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

18 " Almost all religions from Buddhism to Islam feature either a humble prophet or a prince who comes to identify with the poor, but what is this if not populism? It is hardly a surprise if religions choose to address themselves first to the majority who are poor and bewildered and uneducated. "

― Christopher Hitchens , God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

19 " Actually, the “leap of faith”—to give it the memorable name that Soren Kierkegaard bestowed upon it—is an imposture. As he himself pointed out, it is not a “leap” that can be made once and for all. It is a leap that has to go on and on being performed, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary. This effort is actually too much for the human mind, and leads to delusions and manias. Religion understands perfectly well that the “leap” is subject to sharply diminishing returns, which is why it often doesn’t in fact rely on “faith” at all but instead corrupts faith and insults reason by offering evidence and pointing to confected “proofs.” This evidence and these proofs include arguments from design, revelations, punishments, and miracles. Now that religion’s monopoly has been broken, it is within the compass of any human being to see these evidences and proofs as the feeble-minded inventions that they are. "

― Christopher Hitchens , God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

20 " How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan? "

― Christopher Hitchens , God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything