Atheists state that it may not be said that there is no god, but that it may be said that there is no reason to think there is one. It is an extraordinary claim which would, under reasonable circumstances, require extraordinary evidence, according to author and noted atheist Christopher Hitchens.
He says deists Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Payne and Albert Einstein may wish not to abandon the idea that there must be some cause for the universe. Even if you can get yourself to that position, which unbelievers maintain is always subject to better and more elegant explanations, all your work is still ahead of you.
If you advance from deist to theist, you must believe god cares about you, knows who you are, minds what you do, answers your prayers, cares which bits of your penis or clitoris you saw away or have sawn away for you, minds who you go to bed with and in what way, minds what holy days you observe, minds what you eat, minds what positions you use for pleasure, all your work is still ahead of you – and lots of luck.
There's no one who can move from the first position to the second.
This is a totalitarian belief; a wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority that can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who must subject you to total surveillance, around the clock, every waking and sleeping minute of your life, before you're born, and even worse – and this is where the real fun begins – after your death.
It’s a celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate? North Korea has a dead man as its president. It's a
necrosity. It's the most heartless tyranny the human species has thought of, but at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea.
It attacks us at our deepest intellect and integrity. It means that we could not arrive at a right action without celestial, divine permission. We would not know right from wrong if we did not have heaven’s permission to do so. Our acute awareness of what is fair and unfair comes to us as a gift from the great unassailable dictator.
Religion is our first attempt as a species to explain the universe. It’s what we tried when we didn't know anything. We didn't know we lived on a spherical planet that revolved around the sun. We didn't know there were micro-organisms that would explain disease. We thought diseases came from curses or witches or ill-wishing devils. It's also our first attempt at philosophy and morality; our first attempt at health care.
But because it is our first, it is our worst. We now have better explanations for all these dreads. And we have cleared up all these mysteries. Yet we still dwell. And in some countries live in a totalitarian regime that forbids us from thinking about the progress that has been made and denies us the knowledge that these advances have in fact occurred.
Where once it probably was an aid to our survival, it is a great peril to our continued civilized species.
It relies on the supernatural more than the much more miraculous, much more beautiful, much more elegant, much more harmonious universe. You cannot compare Darwin and Einstein to the burning bush or to the idea that there can be no redemption without the mutilation of genitalia.
This is what you have to believe if you're a monotheist, and do so in the face of all we know now that we didn't before.
The human race is estimated to be between 100,000 and 200,000 years old. Let's say 100,000 for argument’s sake. For much of 100,000 years the life expectancy was maybe 25 years. Infant mortality was rife; micro-organism disease was terrifying. Earthquakes and volcanoes would have been seen as extraordinary forces. There would have been great fights over land, territory, women, food, water and tribalism.
For 95-96,000 years heaven watches this with folded arms, with indifference, with coldness. And then around 3-4,000 years ago, but only in really barbaric, literate parts of the Middle East – not in China or where people can read or think or do science, no, no, no – in barbaric, illiterate, backwoods parts of the Middle East, it decided we can't let this go on. We better intervene. And what better way than by human sacrifices and plagues and mass murder. And if that doesn't make them behave morally, we just don't know what does.
If there are any people that can still bring themselves to believe anything remotely like that, they convict themselves first of being very stupid, and second, immoral.
At last the case for divine intervention of the supernatural has fallen, Hitchens concludes, and we should be glad that it has fallen.
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