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IMG_0768His aversion to religion, in the sense usually attached to the term, was of the same kind with that of Lucretius: he regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up factitious excellencies – belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human kind – and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtue: but above all , by radically vitiating the standard of morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful

– John Stuart Mill, on his father, in the Autobiography

From time to time I feel the need to refresh my memory with  the books of Dawkins’ and Hitch.  Unfathomable to me today, but I was in my late 30’s before I picked up a book written on Atheism and Theology. Of course I had read several religious texts, but not of others opinions and analysis of said mythologies. I didn’t feel the necessity,  however, now I wonder why the hell I took so long and how many good books I had missed! I’m catching up!

Well, I decided today was the day for a Hitch refresher, I mean, what else was there to do on a rainy summers day…

Firstly, I wonder if all bookworms are like me, all my favorites are at my fingertips in audio, book and ebook form, well you never know  when you to read them right? Take this morning, I found myself listening to the rain against the windows (a comforting sound, I always find) and my iPhone within arms reach as I had a cat fast asleep and couldn’t move, so what better way to start my day than a bit of “God Is Not Great”.

As a great orator and rhetorician Hitchens is second to none and his debating skills are legendary, as another famous biologist/atheist has said:-

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

-Richard Dawkins

Sadly Hitchens is with us no more but he has left many books, essays, interviews and lectures for us to pour over, including his four objections to religious faith.

  1. It wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos.
  2. It manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism.
  3. It is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression.
  4. It is ultimately grounded in wishful thinking.

What we can say is the following:

We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes racheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness

excerpt from ‘God Is Not Great’

 

Past and present atrocities have occurred 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 pre frontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands too big and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee

excerpt from ‘God Is Not Great”

If your belief is based on a fear of death, and you see religion as a great consolation, then I agree with Hitch when he says “Those who offer false consolation are false friends”

RELIGION IS MAN MADE

The person who is certain and claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be protracted.

excerpt from ‘God Is Not Great’

The God Delusion and God Is Not Great should be required reading in our Religious Education classes, we owe it to our children to encourage inquiring minds and a philosophy based on science and reason.

Just as Goldilocks and the three bears and other fairy stories are enjoyable escapism as children, so should the texts of Christianity, Judaism and Islam be the stuff taught as horror stories and treated as the fiction it is.

To conceive of an all powerful creator, who supervises and loves you even when you sleep, who you must obey and observe his commandments so you will qualify to an eternity in a so called heaven?  Doesn’t that sound a little icky huh? If you are a theist you probably find that a comforting thought, to me it is the stuff of nightmares. What a sick dictatorship you live in, I’m amazed you dare breath. What a relief to know it is all in your head, and that this is not happiness, you are in a cult based on mind control.

As Heinrich Heine said in , Gedanken Und Einfalle

” In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind old men as guides”

To move forward we need to break the chains of religious servitude, it can only cause pain and sorrow in the long term. As Hitch said:

The true believer cannot rest until the whole world bends the knee. Is it not obvious to all, say the pious, that religious authority is paramount, and that  those who decline to recognise it have forfeited their right to exist

excerpt from ‘God Is Not Great’

To live in a world where religion has the foothold, is to live in a truly Dystopian society, likened only to North Korea.

My answer is , God is man-made, we are an island in the cosmos. If you don’t bring gods here, you wont find any  here….

 

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