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Christopher Hitchens Christopher Eric Hitchens (born April 13, 1949) is a British-American author, journalist and literary critic. Currently living in Washington, D.C., he has been a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, The Nation, Slate, Free Inquiry, and a variety of other media outlets. Hitchens is also a political activist, whose best-selling books, flamboyance and erudition have made him a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. Hitchens is noted for his acerbic wit and his noisy departure from the Anglo-American political left. Formerly a Trotskyist and a fixture in the left wing publications of both the United Kingdom and United States, Hitchens departed from the consensus of the political left in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the European left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwa against Salman Rushdie. The September 11, 2001 attacks strengthened his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he calls "fascism with an Islamic face." He is known for his ardent admiration of George Orwell and Thomas Jefferson, and for his excoriating critiques of Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger, and Bill Clinton. Always a polemicist, Hitchens has long been the object of both lavish praise and vehement denunciation. An outspoken atheist and antitheist, Hitchens describes himself as a believer in the Enlightenment values of secularism, humanism and reason. His 2007 book God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything suggests that organized religion is "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children."
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Christopher Hitchens Quotes The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did. The Aztecs had to tear open a human chest cavity every day just to make sure that the sun would rise. Monotheists are supposed to pester their deity more times than that, perhaps, lest he be deaf. Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint. Why do all religions hate the birth canal? What is a penis without a birth canal? What god can you name that was not born of a virgin? If it [the Bible] was written by God, it wouldn't be so full of loopholes. It wouldn't be so full of contradictions. I am not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief is positively harmful. Reviewing the false claims of religion, I do not wish, as some sentimental materialists affect to wish, that they were true. I do not envy believers their faith. I am relieved to think that the whole story is a sinister fairy tale; life would be miserable if what the faithful affirmed was actually the case. “...I am more than ever sure that it’s enough to be born once, and to take one’s chance, and to grow old disgracefully.” Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed in the Bible. What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. 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. 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 indispensible condition of any intellectual liberty is the realisation that there is no such thing. Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise! Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins and astrology ends, and astronomy begins.
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