Christopher Hitchens - The portable atheist : essential readings for the nonbeliever

ESSENTIAL READINGS FOR THE NONBELIEVER

selected and with introductions by

DA CAPO PRESS

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

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Introductions copyright 2007 by Christopher Hitchens

Published in the United States by Da Capo Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group, http://www.dacapopress.com.

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Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN: 978-0-306-81608-6

Dedicated to the memory of Primo Levi (19191987) who had the moral fortitude to refuse false consolation even while enduring the selection process in Auschwitz:

My warmest thanks are due to my agent, Steve Wasserman, and my publisher and editor, Ben Schafer, for the collaboration which initiated this volume. I s safe to say that without the devoted skill of Lori Hobkirk as copy editor and project editor and Cliff Corcoran as copyright and permissions editor, the scope and range of the collection would have been considerably less than it is.

When accusedprobably correctlyof scientific plagiarism, Sir Isaac Newton was careful to say (again plagiarizing from an ancient acknowledgement) that he had stood on the shoulders of giants. I am, in this effort as in all my other ones, immensely indebted to a small but growing group of devoted rationalists, who reject the absurd and wicked claims of the religious and who look for answers in the marvels and complexities of science, as well as in the higher and deeper reaches of literature. I am more proud than I can say that Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali contributed some hitherto unpublished work to this anthology. In the realm of the natural and physical sciences, the labors of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Michael Shermer, Steven Weinberg, Anthony Grayling, and Sam Harris have been at once courageous, witty, and original, and it is my dearest hope that anybody picking up this book of excerpts will be impelled to read all these distinguished authors at their full length and full strength.

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens

At the close of his imperishable novel La Peste (The Plague), Albert Camus gives us a picture of the thoughts of the good Dr. Rieux, as the town of Oran celebrates its recovery fromits survival ofa terrible visitation of disease. Rieux determines to remain lucid and to complete this chronicle, in order that:

He should not be one of those who held their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.

This is part of the work, both of conscience and of memory. The pre-history of our species is hag-ridden with episodes of nightmarish ignorance and calamity, for which religion used to identify, not just the wrong explanation but the wrong culprit. Human sacrifices were made preeminently in times of epidemics, useless prayers were uttered, bogus miracles attested to, and scapegoatssuch as Jews or heretics or witcheshunted down and burned. The few men of science and reason and medicine had all they could do to keep their libraries and laboratories intact, or their very lives safe from harm. Of course, when the evil had passed over, there were equally idiotic ceremonies of hysterical thanksgiving, propitiating whatever local deities there might be