So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.
Christopher HitchensMots clés shakespeare einstein religion atheism security salvation marilyn-monroe antisemitism islam iraq germany jews rabbis debate poland india spinoza temples ancestors middle-east normality martin-amis damascus prague eastern-europe desecration synagogues jewish-question david-rieff jewishness annie-navasky arthur-miller bar-and-bat-mitzvah best-man budapest eritrea istanbul kurdish-people morocco religious-conversion robert-goldburg steve-wasserman tunisia victor-saul-navasky
It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity.
Abraham LincolnMots clés history atheism lincoln
In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah's flood to the Holocaust.
Christopher HitchensMots clés god religion atheism ontology holocaust theodicy pathetic-fallacy noah 2004-indian-ocean-earthquake acts-of-god deluge-myth problem-of-evil
John Hodgson can describe Richard Dawkins's atheism as vacuous only because 'atheist' is a term which non-believers use purely as a polemical convenience when we have to define concisely what we don't believe [...]. No atheist is principally that. What we'd want to call ourselves is humanist or materialist, or biologist or linguist, or for that matter socialist, because one or more of these, or something else again, is what we do and think and are. We have 'purely and simply finished with God', to adapt a phrase of Engels's.
David CraigMots clés god religion atheism richard-dawkins atheists self-concept lrb biologists friedrich-engels humanists john-hodgson linguists materialists socialists
En ningún momento de la historia, en ningún lugar del planeta, las religiones han servido para que los seres humanos se acerquen unos a los otros. Por el contrario, sólo han servido para separar, para quemar, para torturar. No creo en dios, no lo necesito y además soy buena persona.
José SaramagoIt is hard to see how a great man can be an atheist. Without the sustaining influence of faith in a divine power we could have little faith in ourselves. We need to feel that behind us is intelligence and love. Doubters do not achieve; skeptics do not contribute; cynics do not create. Faith is the great motive power, and no man realizes his full possibilities unless he has the deep conviction that life is eternally important, and that his work, well done, is a part of an unending plan.
Calvin CoolidgeMots clés god faith atheism creativity
Anything beyond the limits and grasp of the human mind is either illusion or futility; and because your god having to be one or the other of the two, in the first instance I should be mad to believe in him, and in the second a fool.
Marquis de SadeMots clés god religion atheism
Nobody that has seen a baby born can believe in god for a second. When you see your child born, and the panic, and the amount of technology that is saving the life of the two people you love most in the world, when you see how much stainless steel and money it takes to fight off the fact that god wants both those people dead, no one, no one can look into the eyes of a newborn baby and say there's a god, because I'll tell ya, if we were squatting in the woods, the two people I love most would be dead. There's just no way around that. If I were in charge, no way. We need technology to fight against nature; nature so wants us dead. Nature is trying to kill us.
Penn JilletteMots clés love nature atheism technology childbirth
Indeed, it's futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like.
Christopher HitchensMots clés politics religion atheism theocracy islamic-republic islamic-holy-books religious-text
By Hays' reasoning, penetrating a rectum with a penis is a violation of how God meant humans to function. However, penetrating a human body with a sword, a common way to kill people in biblical times, is acceptable. Apparently human bodies were designed to be penetrated by metal implements, but not by flesh.
Hector AvalosMots clés murder nature christianity god religion atheism bible reasoning humans homosexuality homophobia sodomy swords christianity-and-homosexuality religion-and-homosexuality
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