# Quote — Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great

> When the debris settled on Ground Zero, it was found that two pieces of mangled girder still stood in the shape of a cross, and much wondering comment resulted. Since all architecture has always involved crossbeams, it would be surprising only if such a feature did not emerge. I admit that I would have been impressed if the wreckage had formed itself into a Star of David or a star or crescent, but there is no record of this ever having occurred anywhere, even in places where local people might have been impressed by it.

- 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: 149
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/God_Is_Not_Great#Chapter_Ten:_The_Tawdriness_Of_The_Miraculous_And_The_Decline_Of_Hell) ([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/when-the-debris

## 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)