Are You There, God? It’s Me, Hitchens.

April 30, 2007 on 5:54 pm | Friedrich Braun | Atheism/Agnosticism, Books | | Email This Post | Print this Post

Some amusing quotes from a recent interview:

What’s your favorite Bible story?
“Casting the first stone” is a lovely story, even though we’ve found out how much it wasn’t in the Bible to begin with. And the first of the miracles. Jesus changes water into wine. You can’t object to that.

Well, you’ve said plenty about the pleasures of drink before.
But it also shows the persistence of the Hellenic influence in those regions. If the Jews had not made the crucial mistake of rejecting Hellenism and philosophy and submitting themselves, or being reconquered, by the Maccabean ultra-Orthodox, everything would have been better and we’d never have had to endure Christianity and Islam.
Will you write about Virginia Tech?

Has anyone in the Bush administration confided in you about being an atheist?
Well, I don’t talk that much to them—maybe people think I do. I know something which is known to few but is not a secret. Karl Rove is not a believer, and he doesn’t shout it from the rooftops, but when asked, he answers quite honestly. I think the way he puts it is, “I’m not fortunate enough to be a person of faith.”

Will you write about Virginia Tech?
I have no interest in it, but if it goes on for a couple of days I will. My heart sinks when yellow-ribbon events occur, if that doesn’t sound too cynical. What one needs in this society is less sentimentality and more stoicism. [He did write a Slate column last week, headlined SUCK IT UP.]

Full interview here.

No Comments yet »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

XHTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>

Powered by WordPress.
Entries and comments feeds. Valid XHTML and CSS. ^Top^

Donate towards my web hosting bill!