Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would think-though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one-that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.
Interpretation
Knowledge and understanding of the natural world can lead to greater compassion and less dogmatism in beliefs about the afterlife.
In this quote, Christopher Hitchens suggests that modern knowledge, particularly in natural sciences, has advanced to a level where even the least educated among us possesses a deeper understanding of the world than the founders of religious ideologies. This understanding fosters a sense of empathy and a lack of interest in condemning others to hell, reflecting a shift towards more compassionate worldviews that are less focused on punishment and more on understanding human existence.
In practice
Use this quote in a discussion about the importance of education in shaping moral and ethical views.
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.
We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.
Relations of production are first reproduced by the materiality of the processes of production and circulation. But it should not be forgotten that ideological relations are immediately present in these same processes.
A person is an individual substance of a rational nature.
It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.
History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.
Nirvana is something within you. It is not an external reality. No god thunders down from the mountaintop. Just as the great mystics in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths all discovered, God is within the self. God is virtually inseparable from ourselves.
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