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There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness.  We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine.  Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form of one of man’s most useful innovations: the bound book).  To us no spot on earth is or could be “holier” than another: to the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock, we can counter pose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or the gallery to another, or to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty.  Some of these excursions to the bookshelf or the lunch or the gallery will obviously, if they are serious, bring us into contact with belief and believers, from the great devotional painters and composers to the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Newman.  These mighty scholars may have written many evil things or many foolish things, and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow.  Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism, as did, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor hanged by the Nazis for his refusal to collude with them.  We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which in why the devotions of today are only the echoing repeatitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness.

—— Christopher Hitchens 《God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything》

我是无神论者这点并不是个秘密。对于神学之说我不介意听听，如果叫我膜拜的话我是打死不干的。这就像叫我膜拜《西游记》里的孙悟空一样(或许很多人不知道，孙悟空只是个捏造出来的小说人物)。回想过去那些叫我信教的人，他们说的理由很多都包括‘奇迹’。我真想告诉他们，‘奇迹’只是一中机率。他们能出生在这个世界上，也是种奇迹。他们能在千千万万个精子当中闯进卵子成功受孕，是一种奇迹。