The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever
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Authors: Christopher Hitchens
Tags: #Agnosticism & atheism, #Anthologies (non-poetry), #Religion: general, #Social Science, #Philosophy, #Religion: Comparative; General & Reference, #General, #Atheism, #Religion, #Sociology, #Religion - World Religions, #Literary essays
Portable Atheist
Books
Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger
Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies
Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles
Why Orwell Matters
No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton
Letters to a Young Contrarian
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Thomas Jefferson: Author of America
Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man”: A Biography
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Pamphlets
Karl Marx and the Paris Commune
The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s, Favorite Fetish
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq
Collected Essays
Prepared for the Worst: Essays and Minority Reports
For the Sake of Argument
Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays
Collaborations
James Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten
(with Peter Kellner)
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)
Portable Atheist
ESSENTIAL READINGS FOR THE NONBELIEVER
selected and with introductions by
DA CAPO PRESS
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
List of credits/permissions can be found on back matter.
Every effort has been made to contact or trace all copyright holders. The publisher will be glad to make good any errors or omissions brought to our attention in future additions.
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.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.
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 (1919–1987) who had the moral fortitude to refuse false consolation even while enduring the “selection” process in Auschwitz:
“Silence slowly prevails and then, from my bunk on the top row, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen.
Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas-chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking anymore? Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again?
If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.”
—F
ROM
P
RIMO
L
EVI
:
I
F
T
HIS
I
S
A M
AN
(1959)
“I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day. Actually, the experience of the Lager with its frightful iniquity confirmed me in my nonbelief. It has prevented me, and still prevents me, from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice…I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in October 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death…naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the ‘commission’ that with one glance would decide whether I should go immediately into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instance I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: one does not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a nonbeliever is capable. I rejected the temptation: I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it.”
—F
ROM
P
RIMO
L
EVI
:
T
HE
D
ROWNED AND THE
S
AVED
(1986)