Christopher Hitchens - The Portable Atheist - Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

Blaming the Victims (edited with Edward Said)

When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds (photographs by Ed Kashi)

International Territory: The United Nations (photographs by Adam Bartos)

Vanity Fair’s Hollywood (with Graydon Carter and David Friend)

List of credits/permissions can be found on back matter.

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Introductions copyright © 2007 by Christopher Hitchens

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ISBN: 978-0-306-81608-6

1. Necyomantia , 3. Lucian of Samosata (120?–180?), Syrian-born Greek satirist. The work referred to by Hume is more commonly known as Menippus or The Descent into Hades .

2. “The gods have their own laws.” Ovid, Metamorphoses 9.499.

3. Sadder refers to the Seder Eliyyahu , a Jewish book of homilies written between the third and thenth centuries C.E. The Pentateuch is the first five books of the Old Testament.

4. Zaleucus (fl. 550 B.C.E.), lawgiver of the Locrians and disciple of Pythagoras.

5. Brahmans or Brahmins are the priestly caste among the Hindus. Talapoins are Buddhist monks.

6. The ninth month of the lunar calendar, during which Muslims are to abstain from eating and drinking between sunrise and sunset.

7. Bomilcar or Bormilcar was a Carthaginian general (fl. 310 B.C.E.) who unsuccess fully sought to become tyrant in Carthage.

8. L. Sergius Catilina (108–62 B.C.E.), Roman patrician who attempted to lead a revolt against the government. Cicero delivered four celebrated orations condemning him.

1. Boswell never filled the blank.

1. In 1998, two international teams of astronomers independently reported unexpected evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. These findings suggest that the universe is not oscillating but will continue to expand forever.

2. Earth-based telescopes provided the answer in 1998. See previous note.

1. H. Küng, Does God Exist? (Collins, London, 1980; first published in German as Existiert Gott? by Piper-Verlag, Munich, 1978).

2. See the Appendix to The Cement of the Universe (see n. 2 to Chapter 1, Chapter 3, above) and “A Defence of Induction” (see n. 9 to Chapter 8, Chapter 21, above).

3. See n. 7 to Chapter 6, Chapter 13, above.

4. Cf. Chapter 6 of Hume’s Moral Theory (see no. 2 to Chapter 6, Chapter 12, above), and my “Cooperation, Competition, and Moral Philosophy,” in Cooperation and Competition in Animals and Man , edited by A. Colman (Van Nostrand, London, forthcoming).

5. N. Machiavelli, The Prince (many editions), Chapter 11.

6. R. Robinson, An Atheist’s Values (Oxford University Press, 1964; paperback Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1975), Chapter 8. The story is no doubt apocryphal. This book as a whole gives a very full answer to the question of the moral consequences of atheism. References in the text to Robinson are to pages in this work.

7. See the works referred to in nn. 3 and 4 (pp. 246 and 250) above.

8. Enquiry concerning Human Understanding , Section 10; cf. Chapter 1 above.

9. Plato, Euthyphro . The exact force of “the Euthyphro dilemma” is considered in Chapter 10 of my Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.

10. Matthew 9:13. The passage from Luther is quoted by James on pp. 244–245 of The Varieties of Religious Experience (see n. 1 to Chapter 10, Chapter 25, above) and the story about Dr. Channing in no. 1 on Chapter 45 of the same work.

11. E.g., On the Jews and their Lies , in Vol. 47 of Luther’s Works , edited by H. T. Lehman (Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1971), pp. 121–306, recommends the burning of synagogues and of the Jews’ houses, confiscation of their books, forbidding of worship and teaching, or alternatively expulsion of the Jews from the country.

12. E.g. Joshua 8, 10, and 11; Samuel 15.

13. De Rerum Natura , Book I, line 101.

14. See pp. 193–195 of Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong , and the article mentioned in no. 4 above.

15. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion , Part XII.

16. The Prince , Chapter 25.

1. Intelligent design has been unkindly described as creationism in a cheap tuxedo.

2. Classical Latin and Greek were better equipped. Latin Homo (Greek anthropo- ) means human, as opposed to vir ( andro- ) which means man, and femina ( gyne- ) which means woman. Thus anthropology pertains to all humanity, where andrology and gyne cology are sexually exclusive branches of medicine.

3. There is an example in fiction. The children’s writer Philip Pullman, in His Dark Materials , imagines a species of animals, the “mulefa,” that co-exist with trees that produce perfectly round seedpods with a hole in the centre. These pods the mulefa adopt as wheels. The wheels, not being part of the body, have no nerves or blood vessels to get twisted around the “axle” (a strong claw of horn or bone). Pullman perceptively notes an additional point: the system works only because the planet is paved with natural basalt ribbons, which serve as “roads.” Wheels are no good over rough country.

4. Fascinatingly, the muscle principle is deployed in yet a third mode in some insects such as flies, bees, and bugs, in which the flight muscle is intrinsically oscillatory, like a reciprocating engine. Whereas other insects such as locusts send nervous instructions for each wing stroke (as a bird does), bees send an instruction to switch on (or switch off) the oscillatory motor. Bacteria have a mechanism which is neither a simple contractor (like a bird’s flight muscle) nor a reciprocator (like a bee’s flight muscle), but a true rotator: in that respect it is like an electric motor or a Wankel engine.