Home > Work > The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith QUOTES

The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith QUOTES

1 " In my early teens, [my grandfather] would sometimes stomp around his living room, where he used to shave towards mid-day with bowl, brush and open razor, deriding my ignorance and mocking the made-up discipline of sociology, which I at one stage claimed to be studying. 'What is sociology?' he roared derisively, twisting and rolling the silly word on his Hampshire tongue. I knew, alas, that he was quite right. "

― Peter Hitchens , The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

2 " Most of the people who would have apologised for Stalin in his day have now found other causes - the cultural and sexual revolution, campaigns to tax the Western poor to provide money for Africa's rich, and above all, the intolerant and puritan secular fundamentalism that gathers around the belief in madmade global warming. "

― Peter Hitchens , The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

3 " It did not then cross my mind that they, like religious apologists, might have any personal reasons for holding to this disbelief. It certainly did not cross my mind that I had any low motives for it. Unlike Christians, atheists have a high opinion of their own virtue. "

― Peter Hitchens , The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

4 " Only one reliable force stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. Only one reliable force forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law. Only one reliable force restrains the hand of the man of power. And, in an age of power-worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power. "

― Peter Hitchens , The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

5 " This society, promoted by its leaders as an egalitarian utopia, was in truth one of the most unequal societies on earth. "

― Peter Hitchens , The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

6 " The new brand of militant atheism...adopts a mocking and high-handed tone of certainty, sneers at its Christian opponents, and states, or implies, that they must be stupid. This style of attack conforms to the irreverent spirit of the age and so is not very carefully examined. It is not widely recognised that secularism is a fundamentally political movement, which seeks to remove the remaining traces of Christian moral law in the civil and criminal codes of the Western nations. "

― Peter Hitchens , The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

7 " hope to do in the pages that follow is to explain first of all how I, gently brought up in a loving home and diligently instructed by conscientious teachers, should have come to reject so completely what they said. I had some good reasons for refusing some of it. My mistake was to dispense with it all, indiscriminately. I hope to show that one of the things I was schooled in was not, in fact, religion, but a strange and vulnerable counterfeit of it—a counterfeit "

― Peter Hitchens , The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

8 " To “love thy neighbor as thyself” is a far greater and more complicated obligation, requiring a positive effort to seek the good of others, often in secret, sometimes at great cost, and always without reward. Its most powerful "

― Peter Hitchens , The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

9 " Those who write where many read, and speak where many listen, had best be careful what they say. Someone is bound to take them seriously, and it really is no good pretending that you didn’t know this. "

― Peter Hitchens , The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

10 " I likewise thought—when I was solemnly first introduced to it at the age of thirteen—that “science” had fully explained the motions of the planets, the law of gravity, and the mysteries of time. Anything that had not yet been explained would no doubt soon be discovered. There were no mysteries. Because we could observe gravity in action, we somehow knew what it was. Nobody then mentioned that its operation, especially in empty space, simply cannot be explained. All was settled. "

― Peter Hitchens , The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith