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

Divine Software?

"We live in an age in which most people believe that mere words - "Jesus," "Allah," "Ram" - can mean the difference between eternal torment and bliss everlasting. Considering the stakes here, it is not surprising that many of us occasionally find it necesary to murder other human beings for using the wrong magic words, or the right ones for the wrong reasons. How can any person presume to know that this is the way the universe works? Because it says so in our holy books. How do we know thay our holy books are free from error? Because the books themselves say so. Epistemological black holes of this sort are fast draining the light from our world.

There is, of course, much that is wise and consoling and beautiful in our religious books. But words of wisdom and consolation and beauty abound in the pages of Shakespeare, Virgil, and Homer as well, and no one ever murdered strangers by the thousands because of the insipiration he found there. The belief that certain books were written by God (who, for reasons difficult to fathom, made Shakespear a far better writer than himself) leaves us powerless to address the most potent source of human conflict, past and present. How is it that the absurdity of this idea does not bring us, hourly, to our knees? It is safe to say that few of us would have thought so many people could believe such a thing, if they did not actually believe it. Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything - anything - be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in."

Sam Harris - The End of Faith

The End of Faith

"These events should strike us like psychological experiments run amok, for that is what they are. Give people divergent, irreconcilable, and untestable notions about what happens after death, and then oblige them to live together with limited resources. The result is just what we see: an unending cycle of murder and cease-fire. If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidences regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have found a recipe for the fall of civilization."

Sam Harris - The End of Faith

Frozen Wine

"They brought me rubies from the mine, and held them to the sun, I said they are drops of frozen wine from Eden's vats that run."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Drink Deep

“A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.”

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) – An Essay on Criticism, 1709