Christopher Hitchens: Collision: Is Religion Absurd or Good for the World?

Description

Christopher Hitchens and Pastor Douglas Wilson

Collision: Is Religion Absurd or Good for the World?

What's Your Reaction?

Last fall, we went on tour debating the topic "Is Religion Good For The World?" Our arguments were captured on film for a new documentary, Collison . Are our morals dictated to us by a supreme entity or do discoveries made by science and reason, make Atheism a natural conclusion? You decide.

Religion Is Absurd

by Christopher Hitchens

Religion will always retain a certain tattered prestige because it was our first attempt as a species to make sense of the cosmos and of our own nature, and because it continues to ask "why". Its incurable disability, however, lies in its insistence that the answer to that question can be determined with certainty on the basis of revelation and faith.

We do not know, though we may assume, that our pre-homo sapiens ancestors (the erectus, the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals, with whom we have a traceable kinship as we do with other surviving primates) had deities that they sought to propitiate. Alas, no religion of which we are now aware has ever taken their existence into account, or indeed made any allowance for the tens and probably hundreds of thousands of years of the human story. Instead, we are asked to believe that the essential problem was solved about two-to-three thousand years ago, by various serial appearances of divine intervention and guidance in remote and primitive parts of what is now (at least to Westerners) the Middle East.

This absurd belief would not even deserve to be called quixotic if it had not inspired masterpieces of art and music and architecture as well as the most appalling atrocities and depredations. The great cultural question before us is therefore this: can we manage to ...

Original URL

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-hitchens/collision-is-religion-abs_b_326673.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-hitchens/collision-is-religion-abs_b_326673.html