“Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, i...”
Work
Despite the mistaken use of the label "New Atheists," there is a lot of continuity over the past couple of centuries among atheist authors in their critiques of religion, theism, and superstition. Not every argument is identical, and even when the same basic argument is being offered there can be variety in how it is presented. This evolution of atheist critiques of supernatural religion is one of the virtues of Christopher Hitchens' book The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever. Well known for his own atheist book God Is Not Great, Hitchens treads some very heavily-traveled ground here in editing a compendium of atheist writings. Do we really need yet another book of essays, isolated chapters, and other selections from atheists, agnostics, freethinkers and skeptics of the past? What could we get out of this latest offering that we didn't get from the past half dozen that we bought - or the others that we simply skipped? Those are good questions, and reasons why I was skeptical of Hitchens' book, but in the end I think he succeeds in making his book more than "just one more" collection of atheist essays.
Quotes
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Christopher Hitchens
Canonical work source
“Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, i...”
“[R]eligion was the race's first (and worst) attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best the species could do at a time when we had no concept of physics, chemistry, biology or medicine...”
“I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must cla...”