To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.
Interpretation
Emphasizing the value of skepticism and experience over blind belief.
In this quote, Christopher Hitchens critiques the tendency to favor dogma and unquestioned faith, suggesting that this approach neglects the richness of life’s experiences and the wisdom gained from doubt. He uses the metaphor of discarding a fine vintage for a less valuable, superficial alternative to illustrate the folly of rejecting critical thinking in matters of belief and understanding.
In practice
During a philosophical discussion, one might use this quote to argue for the importance of questioning beliefs.
In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar.
[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.
The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head - chemo-brain they call it. It's awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned.
Let me tell you something: for hundreds of thousands of years, this kind of discussion would have been impossible to have, or those like us would have been having it at the risk of our lives. Religion now comes to us in this smiley-face, ingratiating way — because it’s had to give so much more ground and because we know so much more. But you’ve got no right to forget the way it behaved when it was strong, and when it really did believe that it had God on its side.
Life is teleology par excellence; it is the intrinsic striving towards a goal, and the living organism is a system of directed aims which seek to fulfill themselves.
I tell people, and it's the truth, I could sit in my garage for a week and it won't make me a car. And you can sit in church till your bottom is flat and that won't make you a servant of Christ.
I believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all the political men of our time.
Interference by the three classes with each other s jobs, and interchange of jobs between them, therefore, does the greatest harm to our state, and we are entirely justified in calling it the worst of evils.
Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.
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