It's 2012, And People Are Still Being Killed Over Make Believe (Religion) Being Treated As Fact

[onager]

90. I wish you could have said that to Hitchens' face.

A few on-topic Hitchens quotes for you:

Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect...

Heroism breaks its heart, and ide­al­ism its back, on the intran­si­gence of the cred­u­lous and the mediocre, manip­u­lated by the cyn­i­cal and the corrupt.

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

And since you frequently claim to be an author, Hitch left some good advice for you:

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.