# Quote — Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great

> Of the other bodies in our solar system alone, the rest are all either far too cold to support anything recognizable as life, or far too hot. The same, as it happens, is true of our own blue and rounded planetary home, where heat contends with cold to make large tracts of it into useless wasteland, and where we have come to learn that we live, and have always lived, on a climatic knife edge. Meanwhile, the sun is getting ready to explode and devour its dependent planets like some jealous chief or tribal deity. Some design!

- Author: [Christopher Hitchens](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens.md)
- Book: [God Is Not Great](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/god-is-not-great.md)
- Page: 80
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/God_Is_Not_Great#Chapter_Six:_Arguments_From_Design) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/god-is-not-great/of-the-other

## More from this book

> The connection between religion, racism, and totalitarianism is also to be found in the other most hateful dictatorship of the twentieth century: the vile system of apartheid in South Africa. ... Racism is totalitarian by definition: it marks the victim in perpetuity and denies him, or her, the right to even a rag of dignity or privacy, even the elemental; right to make love or marry or produce children with a loved one of the "wrong" tribe, without having love nullified by law.

p. 251 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/god-is-not-great/the-connection-between.md)

> I shall again defer to a finer writer than myself and quote what H. L. Mencken irrefutably says in his Treatise on the Gods: "The simple fact is that the New Testament as we know it is a helter-skelter accumulation of more or less discordant documents, some of them probably of respectable origin but others palpably apocryphal, and that most of them, the good along with the bad, show unmistakable signs of being tampered with."

p. 110 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/god-is-not-great/i-shall-again.md)

> The Gospel according to Luke states that the miraculous birth occurred in a year when the Emperor Caesar Augustus ordered a census for the purposes of taxation, and that this happened at a time when Herod reigned in Judaea and Quirinius was governor of Syria. That is the closest to a triangulation of historical dating that any writer even attempts. But Herod died four years "BC" and during his rulership the governor of Syria was not Quirinius. There is no mention of any Augustan census by any Roman historian, but the Jewish chronicler Josephus mentions one that did occur — without the onerous requirement for people to return to their places of birth, and six years after the birth of Jesus is supposed to have taken place.

p. 112 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/god-is-not-great/the-gospel-according.md)