Religieuze nood is tegelijk de expressie van de werkelijke ellende
en het protest tegen de werkelijke ellende.

Religie is de zucht van het onderdrukte schepsel, het hart

van een harteloze wereld, net zoals het is de geest van een geestloze situatie.

Het is de opium van het volk.

De afschaffing van religie als het illusoire geluk van het volk

is nodig voor hun echte geluk.

De vraag de illusies op te geven over zijn toestand is de vraag

een aandoening op te geven die illusies nodig heeft.

De kritiek op de godsdienst is daarom in de kiem de kritiek

van het dal van ellende, de halo van de religie.

Kritiek heeft de denkbeeldige bloemen uit de ketenen geplukt,
niet zo dat de mens de ketenen zal dragen zonder enige fantasie of troost,

maar zo dat hij de ketenen zal afschudden en de levende bloemen ruimen.

Blz 13 Hoofdstuk 1 Putting it mildly

As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction,

and the destruction of all the hardwon human attainments that I have touched upon.

Religion poisons everything.

GOD IS NOT GREAT Religion poisons everything

by Cristopher Hitchens uittreksel j.k. blz 2

Blz 18 Hoofdstuk 2 Religion kills

In Belfast, I have seen whole streets burned out by sectarian warfare between different sects of Christianity, and interviewed people whose relatives and friends have been kidnapped and killed or tortured by rival religious death squads, often for no other reason than membership of another confession.

Blz 22 hfdst 2

Immaculately conceived virgin, De onbevlekte ontvangenis

"Now the birth of Jesus Christ was in this wise.

When his mother,Mary, was espoused to Joseph, before they came together she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.

" Yes, and the Greek demigod Perseus was born when the god Jupiter visited the virgin Danaë as a shower of gold and got her with child.

The god Buddha was born through an opening in his mother's flank.

Catlicus the serpent-skirted caught a little ball of feathers from the sky and hid it in her bosom, and the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli was thus conceived.

The virgin Nana took a pomegranate from the tree watered by the blood of the

slain Agdestris, and laid it in her bosom, and gave birth to the god Attis.

The virgin daughter of a Mongol king awoke one night and found herself bathed in a great light, which caused her to give birth to Genghis Khan.

Krishna was born of the virgin Devaka.

Horus was born of the virgin Isis.

Mercury was born of the virgin Maia.

Romulus was born of the virgin Rhea Sylvia.

Blz 28 Hoofdstuk 2 Religion kills

On February 14, 1989, my friend Salman Rushdie was hit by a simultaneous death sentence and life sentence, for the crime of writing a work of fiction.

GOD IS NOT GREAT Religion poisons everything

by Cristopher Hitchens uittreksel j.k. blz 3

To be more precise, the theocratic head of a foreign state—the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran—publicly offered money, in his own name, to suborn the murder

of a novelist who was a citizen of another country.

Those who were encouraged to carry out this bribed assassination scheme, which extended were offered not just the cold cash but also a free ticket to paradise.

Blz 29

Moreover, Rushdie had been brought up as a Muslim and had an understanding of the Koran, which meant in effect that he was an apostate.

And "apostasy," according to the hadith, is punishable only by death.

There is no right to change religion, and all religious states have always insisted on harsh penalties for those who try it.

Blz 30

In considered statements, the Vatican, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the chief sephardic rabbi of Israel all took a stand in sympathy with—the ayatollah.

So did the cardinal archbishop of New York and many other lesser religious figures. While they usually managed a few words in which to deplore the resort to

violence, all these men stated that the main problem raised by the publication of The Satanic Verses was not murder by mercenaries, but blasphemy.

Hfdstk 4 A Note on Health, to Which Religion Can Be Hazardous

Blz 50 religion continues to pose an urgent threat to public health.

I am a mohel: an appointed circumciser and foreskin remover. My authority comes from an ancient text, which commands me to take a baby boy's penis in my hand, cut around the prepuce, and complete the action by taking his penis in my mouth, sucking off the foreskin, and spitting out the amputated flap along with a

mouthful of blood and saliva.

This practice has been abandoned by most Jews, either because of its unhygienic nature or its disturbing associations, but it still persists among the sort of Hasidic fundamentalists who hope for the Second Temple to be rebuilt in Jerusalem.

To them, the primitive rite of the peri´ ah metsitsah is part of the original

and unbreakable covenant with god. In New York City in the year 2005, the ritual, as performed by a fifty-seven-year-old mohel, was found to have given genital herpes to several small boys, and to have caused the deaths of at least two of them.

GOD IS NOT GREAT Religion poisons everything

by Cristopher Hitchens uittreksel j.k. blz 4

Blz 50

Mayor Bloomberg overrode the reports by distinguished Jewish physicians who had warned of the danger of the custom, and told his health care bureaucracy to postpone any verdict.

The crucial thing, he said, was to be sure that the free exercise of religion

was not being infringed.

It happened to be election year in New York for the mayor,

which often explains a lot.

But this pattern recurs in other denominations and other states and cities, as well as in other countries.

Across a wide swath of animist and Muslim Africa, young girls are subjected to the hell of circumcision and infibulation, which involves the slicing off of the labia and the clitoris, often with a sharp stone, and then the stitching up of the vaginal opening with strong twine, not to be removed until it is broken by male force on the bridal night.

Blz 51

The Shia fundamentalists in Iran lowered the age of "consent" to nine, perhaps in admiring emulation of the age of the youngest "wife" of the "Prophet" Muhammad.

Hindu child brides in India are flogged, and sometimes burned alive, if the

pathetic dowry they bring is judged to be too small.

The Vatican, and its vast network of dioceses, has in the past decade alone been forced to admit complicity in a huge racket of child rape and child torture,

mainly but by no means exclusively homosexual,

in which known pederasts and sadists were shielded from the law and reassigned to parishes where the pickings of the innocent and defenseless were often richer.

In Ireland alone—once an unquestioning disciple of Holy Mother Church—it is now estimated that the un-molested children of religious schools

were very probably the minority.

hfst 5 blz 64

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of

human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus

who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest

idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful

infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable

demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and

other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows

much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion,

and one would like to think—though the connection is not a

fully demonstrable one—that this is why they seem so uninterested in

sending fellow humans to hell.

All attempts to reconcile faith with science and reason are consigned

to failure and ridicule for precisely these reasons

GOD IS NOT GREAT Religion poisons everything

by Cristopher Hitchens uittreksel j.k. blz 5

Hoofdstuk 6 Arguments from design blz 90

Here again one sees the gigantic manmade fallacy that informs our "Genesis" story. How can it be proven in one paragraph that this book was written by ignorant men and not by any god?

Because man is given "dominion" over all beasts, fowl and fish.

But no dinosaurs or plesiosaurs or pterodactyls are specified, because the authors did not know of their existence, let alone of their supposedly special and immediate creation.

Nor are any marsupials mentioned, because Australia—the next candidate after Mesoamerica for a new "Eden"—was not on any known map.

Most important, in Genesis man is not awarded dominion over germs and bacteria because the existence of these necessary yet dangerous fellow creatures was not known or understood.

And if it had been known or understood, it would at once have become apparent that these forms of life had "dominion" over us, and would continue to enjoy it uncontested until the priests had been elbowed aside and medical research at last

given an opportunity.

Even today, the balance between Homo sapiens and Louis Pasteur's "invisible army" of microbes is by no means decided, but DNA has at least enabled us to sequence the genome of our lethal rivals, like the avian flu virus, and to elucidate what we have in common.

Blz 96

The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.

Hoofdstuk 7 Revelation: The Nightmare of the "Old" Testament

Blz 101

The tale is told in the second book of Moses, known as the book of Exodus, in chapters 20-40. The Ten Commandments.

Seventy-four of the elders, including Moses and Aaron, then meet god face-to-face. Several whole chapters are given over to the minutest stipulations about the lavish, immense ceremonies of sacrifice and propitiation that the Lord expects of his newly adopted people, but this all ends in tears and with collapsing scenery to boot: Moses returns from his private session on the mountaintop to discover that the effect of a close encounter with god has worn off, at least on Aaron, and that the

children of Israel have made an idol out of their jewelry and trinkets.

GOD IS NOT GREAT Religion poisons everything

by Cristopher Hitchens uittreksel j.k. blz 6

At this, he impetuously smashes the two Sinai tablets (which appear therefore

to have been man-made and not god-made, and which have to be redone hastily in a later chapter) and orders the following:

"Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor."

And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses, and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.

A small number when compared to the Egyptian infants already

massacred by god in order for things to have proceeded even this far, blz 102

but it helps to make the case for "antitheism."

By this I mean the view that we ought to be glad that none of the religious myths has any truth to it, or in it.

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.

It goes without saying that none of the gruesome, disordered events described in Exodus ever took place.

Blz 107

One could go through the Old Testament book by book,……

Moreover, the context is oppressively confined and local.None of these provincials, or their deity, seems to have any idea of a world beyond the desert, the flocks and herds, and the imperativesof nomadic subsistence. This is forgivable on the part of the provincial yokels, obviously, but then what of their supreme guide and wrathful

tyrant? Perhaps he was made in their image, even if not graven?

Hfdstk 8 The "New" Testament Exceeds the Evil of the "Old" One blz113

Judas attends the final Passover meal, as usual, but departs from the customary script.

When Jesus appears to pity his other disciples for knowing so little about what is at stake, his rogue follower boldly says that he believes he knows what the difficulty is. "I know who you are and where you have come from," he tells the leader

GOD IS NOT GREAT Religion poisons everything

by Cristopher Hitchens uittreksel j.k. blz 7

"You are from the immortal realm of Barbelo." This "Barbelo" is not a god but a heavenly destination, a motherland beyond the stars.

Jesus comes from this celestial realm, but is not the son of any Mosaic god. Instead, he is an avatar of Seth, the third and little-known son of Adam.

He is the one who will show the Sethians the way home.

Recognizing that Judas is at least a minor adept of this cult, Jesus takes him to one side and awards him the special mission of helping him shed his fleshly form and thus return heavenward.

He also promises to show him the stars that will enable Judas to follow on.

Deranged science fiction though this is, it makes infinitely more sense than the everlasting curse placed on Judas for doing what somebody had to do, in this otherwise pedantically arranged chronicle of a death foretold.

It also makes infinitely more sense than blaming the Jews for all eternity.

some later Dante would have drawn us a hypnotically beautiful word-picture of the wonders of "Barbelo."

dr.C.E.Hitchens ere doctoraat van de website redactie

Dhr.Christopher Hitchens

by Cristopher Hitchens uittreksel j.k. blz 2

Blz 18 Hoofdstuk 2 Religion kills

Blz 22 hfdst 2

Blz 28 Hoofdstuk 2 Religion kills

Blz 51

Hoofdstuk 6 Arguments from design blz 90

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