What IS good, and how do we determine it?

[Randy Carson]

That's not what Christopher Hitchens said. But whatever.

It may have escaped your notice but I am not Christopher Hitchens. Maybe it's something of an alien concept for you but I don't necessarily have to agree lock-step with everything said by other people, even if they are or were atheists. It's not as though we revere our 'leaders', such as they are, merely because they happen to be prominent. They're not our popes or anything so silly.

However, feel free to give the actual quote of what the Hitch said.

Quote 1

"Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick, and commanded to be well. I’ll repeat that. Created sick, and then ordered to be well. And over us, to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea. Greedy, exigent, greedy for uncritical phrase from dawn until dusk and swift to punish the original since with which it so tenderly gifted us in the very first place."

From the debate transcript: Christopher Hitchens v. Tony Blair.

Fawning agreement here.

Quote 2

And another quote here which says:

For Hitchens, if there existed a God who answered prayers and intervened in human affairs, “we would be living under an unalterable celestial dictatorship that could read our thoughts while we were asleep and convict us of thought crime and pursue us after we after are dead, and in the name of which priesthoods and other oligarchies and hierarchies would be set up to enforce God’s law.” Essentially, we’d be living in a supernatural Orwellian world.

Hope that helps.