无聊小站

神的全知

Religion is manmade.  Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.  Still less can they hope to tell us the “meaning” of later discoveries and developments which were, when they began, either obstructed by their religions or denounced by them.  And yet —— the believers still claim to know!  Not just to know, but to know everything.  Not just to know that god exists, and that he created and supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know what “he” demands of us —— from our diet to our observances to our sexual morality.

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

记得小时候宗教课时，一位神父说如果有什么不明白的就问神，它会解答所有疑题。如果不明白任何东西，上了天堂后神就会让我们知道世上所有东西。我听了这段话后，写了张纸条传给这位神父。

神父，如果说我们死后上天堂上帝就会告诉我们所有事情，那我们又为何需要在这学校呆这么多年呢？为何不干脆在我们还未做任何坏事前就让我们失去生命呢？这样子我们不做任何坏事，也就是好事，而不让我们存活下来的人也算做了一件功德。这样大家都可以上天堂，不用在凡间受苦了。这样上帝应该会很高兴因为他的子民将在天堂上得到所有知识，不需要在凡间为了知道为何吃了食堂食物会拉肚子而多做揣摩。为何上帝还要我们在这凡间过着无知的生活呢？难道他很高兴看到我们愚蠢的样子，做着很笨的事？这是他的消遣吗？

神父读了我的纸条后久久不回答，转开话题谈其它东西。我又写了一张纸条给他。

亲爱的神父，我想刚才我问的问题你并不知道答案。我想你是不是应该依照你刚才对我们说的话，上天堂然后让上帝传授你一切知识呢？我想你会做神父一定也累积了不少功德，应该是能上天堂的。

记得我还问过这些传教的人很多刁蛮的问题。

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奇迹

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。

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