For one-hundred thousand years our species has been around on this speck, usually dying, a great number of them, in childbirth. For the first eighty or ninety or so thousand years, nearly one-hundred [thousand years], not living more than 25 or 30 years at the most, then probably dying of their teeth, if they were lucky. All of the other needless mammalian things that show us that we bear the stamp, as Darwin put it, of our lowly origin, the appendix we don't need anymore, innumerable other shortcomings of our design - we're designed to live on the Savannah that we've escaped from - terrible disease, suffering, misery, malnutrition, and fear, where do the earthquakes come from? why is there an eclipse? what are the shooting stars doing? and awful cults of sacrifice to try and ward off what are in fact natural events; and war, and rape, and the kidnap of other peoples and the enslavement of them; all of this goes on, gradually, gradually inching up to the point where you can brew beer - a break-through in my view - domesticate animals, separate one kind of corn from an other; very rudimentary progress, but terrible struggle, sacrifice, pain, misery, and above all fear and ignorance, and - you have to believe this if you believe in monotheism - for the first 97, 98 thousand of this heaven watches with indifference, "oh, there they go again, that whole civilization's just died out", "well, what are you gonna do?", "they're raping each other again, they think that the other tribe has poisoned the well so they're going to kill all their children, just watch all that..", 3000 years ago at the most its decided "no, we've got to intervene now" - you have to believe it, you have to believe it - and the revelations must be personal, must appear, so we'll pick the most backward, the most barbaric, the most illiterate, the most superstitious, and the most savage people we can find, in the most stony area of the world; we won't appear to the Chinese, who can already read, we won't appear in the Indus valley, where they know a thing or two and they're already very far ahead of us, no, we'll appear to this brutal, enslaved, hopeless, superstitious crowd and we'll force them to cut their way through all of their neighbors with slaughter, genocide and racism and settle on the only part of the middle east where there's no oil; and all subsequent revelations occur in the same district! and without this we wouldn't know right from wrong.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends, brothers and sisters, I know I'm capable of parody, and at my lowest of sarcasm, and I've proved it to you, and sometimes I've got paid for it, but in seriousness now, do I really, do I seriously misrepresent the situation? you must believe something like that happened, or did not, in order to address the whole question of where monotheism comes from. I would say it can't be proved that that isn't how we came to understand morality, and the need for it, but I would regard it, in the light of the other evidence I've touched upon, as being in the very highest degree improbable that that is the way we discovered how to think, how to decide how to live with one another, what our duties are to each other and so forth... and again if this was the plan, was it made by someone who "likes" us? well, that's another question.

Christopher Hitches - Interview with Tony Jones