Read:
- The New Atheists, Ronald Aronson, The Nation
- The God Debate, Newsweek, Apr 2007
- Richard Dawkins Won't Repent, Terrence McNally interviews Richard Dawkins, Tyee Books
- A Dissent: The Case Against Faith, Sam Harris, Newsweek
- The Church of the Non-Believers, Gary Wolf, Wired Magazine
- Arguments for Atheism, Infidels.org
- Investigating Atheism, University of Cambridge
- Positive Atheism: Great Historical Writings, Historical writing sorted by authors.
Watch:
In Their Own Words: Christopher Hitchens
“The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism.”
“Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.”
“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”
“Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar…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.”
“If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.”
“Is it too modern to notice that there is nothing about rape, nothing about the protection of children from cruelty, and nothing about genocide? Or is it exactingly "in context" to notice that some of these very offenses are about to be positively recommended?”
“The person who is certain, and who 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.”
“A modern believer can say and even believe that his faith is quite compatible with science and medicine, but the awkward fact will always be that both things have a tendency to break religion's monopoly, and have often been fiercely resisted for that reason.”
“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.”
“Exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.”
“Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of 'the flock’.”
“I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.”
“I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infected us. Perhaps partly for this reason, I have never been able to see Zionism as a cure for it.”
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