Ecto1

thischarmingman1981:

Be­liev­ing then that hu­man life is ac­tu­al­ly worth liv­ing, one can com­bat one’s nat­ural pes­simism by sto­icism and the re­fusal of il­lu­sion, while em­bel­lish­ing the scene with any one of the fol­low­ing. There are the beau­ties of sci­ence and the ex­traor­di­nary mar­vels of na­ture. There is the con­so­la­tion and irony of phi­los­ophy. There are the in­fi­nite splen­dors of lit­er­ature and po­et­ry, not ex­clud­ing the litur­gi­cal and de­vo­tion­al as­pects of these, such as those found in John Donne or George Her­bert. There is the grand re­source of art and mu­sic and ar­chi­tec­ture, again not ex­clud­ing those el­ements that as­pire to the sub­lime. In all of these pur­suits, any one of them enough to ab­sorb a life­time, there may be found a sense of awe and mag­nif­icence that does not de­pend at all on any in­vo­ca­tion of the su­per­nat­ural. In­deed, no­body armed by art and cul­ture and lit­er­ature and phi­los­ophy is like­ly to be any­thing but bored and sick­ened by ghost sto­ries, UFO tales, spir­itu­al­ist ex­pe­ri­ences, or bab­blings from the be­yond. 

Christopher Hitchens (1949 - 2011)

RIP Hitch. You were a wonderfully intelligent man. Thanks for helping us show the world that God is not great.