these words are not mine – oh how I wish I could write like this….
“Religion is self generating, and it comes not just from unhappiness or loneliness – or what was sometimes called alienation – but from a need that we would have – no matter what the material circumstances were – for the… numinous would be one word… the transcendent would be another – the things that we know about without being able to quantify them; music, love, landscape (for a lot of people, I think, at different times of day) – some combinations of all those things, the nocturne. I wouldn’t trust anyone who was tone deaf on these things. But I think the great intellectual and in some ways cultural task is to satisfy hungers of this kind artistically and aesthetically without them becoming pretexts for superstition.”
Christopher Hitchens in full and eloquent flow during an interview in Australia on 2009.
Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog 
Hitchens is a heroic atheist and a great thinker. Still, his views regarding superstition sound somewhat anachronistic (even if I`m fascinated by his wit and style).
…All we live after the age of ideology and struggle again to grow up – and this is what exactly enlightenment means (man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity as Kant says). And so we try to shape our values and individual world-views from overhanded cultural patterns and fragments of beliefs of others. Yet, it`s dead difficult to be genuine. And here I mean not intelligence but being honest to ourselves that we`re not just copy-pasting others` beliefs but truly working on our identity. Easy to see the same attitude on all sides: you stick to an idea, a system of belief because you want to belong to a group of people (let it be the political, the intellectual elite or the religious community) or simply, it is more convenient or just consoling to do it.
How I see it: atheists or believers, we have the same field of experiences. It is more about what we exclude from or include in it. And perhaps the latter part is not totally up to us. Or perhaps it is all about interpretation. Yet, I always thought that Sartre`s views about God and religion were just so infantile. As if fighting with an idea inherited from childhood.
Look at the assumption behind his opening four words. – his faith defined.
Notwithstanding, let’s reword:
“Let us assume religion is self generating, and comes not just from unhappiness or loneliness but from a need (that we would have no matter what the material circumstances were) for the things that we know about without being able to quantify them; music, love, landscape.
Under this assumption I think the great intellectual and in some ways cultural task is to satisfy hungers of this kind artistically and aesthetically without them becoming pretexts for superstition.”
Surely the tough question is not “how do we satisfy our hunger?” but is instead “whence comes this need?”?
But of course the former can be made an “intellectual task” whereas the latter cannot.
Perhaps that’s why an intellectual might eschew it.
Thanks for the comments here. At the risk of trying to say what someone else was thinking (and there is enough of Hitchens filmed in various debates online for anyone to get a sense of the breadth and depth of his position), I would argue that “from whence it came” is precisely the intellectual task for the scientist, too. However, this task is not necessarily just a rational one. If one eschews the supernatural – i.e. transcendent to the reality of the universe (and the advocate of this position may simply move the goal-posts at any time of their choosing to fit their hypothesis) – then one is left searching instead for an explanation of knowledge, information, change etc. that incorporates the aesthetic, metaphor and the sacred just as much as the mechanical and the empirical.
I don’t think Hitchens avoided the questions that the religious believe is their province. He was well versed in most of the world’s scriptural texts and tenets but he saw through them to the questions that lay behind, and he applied a discipline and precision of thinking that was very inclusive.
Well, that’s how I see it.