Christopher Hitchens vs Peter Hitchens - Brothers Debate God & War

you you well good evening I'm Gleaves Whitney the moderator of this evening's debate and I'm the director of the Helen Stein Center for presidential studies at Grand Valley State University and I want to welcome you a warm welcome to you and also to viewers of our webcast live tonight's event has caused a stir because it brings together two eminent writers who happen to be brothers some people would have you think the only thing Peter and christopher hitchens share is DNA but anybody who has read their work knows they share much more than that both are independent thinkers both are fierce debaters and both are superb writers who show a profound respect for the English language Christopher Hitchens the older of the two is one of the most controversial voices in anglo-american journalism based in Washington DC he has written 20 books including biographies of Thomas Paine George Orwell and Thomas Jefferson with whom he shares an April 13th birthday so early happy birthday as well as scathing critiques of Henry Kissinger Bill Clinton and Mother Teresa most recently he wrote the book on atheism God is not great and edited the portable atheist a contributing editor to Vanity Fair he also writes regularly for a number of high-toned publications Peter Hitchens the younger of the two by two and a half years has crossed the pond to be with us he is one of Britain's most independent journalists who blogs and writes a regular column for The Mail on Sunday formerly a longtime writer for The Daily Express Peter was once asked by former Prime Minister Tony Blair to quote sit down and stop being bad this after aggressive questioning at a press conference Peter's the author of the abolition of Britain and the abolition of Liberty he is also written for The Spectator The Guardian and New Statesman and it's worth noting the Peter is no stranger to our shores he lived in Bethesda Maryland for two years well this event is unique Christopher and Peter have never before debated one-on-one in the United States I guess it's also unique because Christopher is in a church both brothers agreed to the topics and the format beforehand they will debate Iraq and God principally but this evenings format also allows considerable time at the end for you to jump in and put questions to both of our distinguished guests the coin toss earlier this evening determined that Peter will speak first on the topic of Iraq the brothers will debate the proposition the invasion of Iraq was wrong Peter you have ten minutes well thank you can you hear me try them and good evening or as Salaamu alaikum as they say in Detroit now in Britain as you know we take the adversarial principle rather further than you do we don't just have adversarial courtrooms we have an adversarial parliament and an adversarial press and we have adversarial families and I know I've got to be asked all kinds of foolish questions about whether we got on and what our childhood was like I would say that it had its ups and downs my father at one point forced us in a scenario similar to that at Dayton Ohio to sign a peace treaty which I later repudiated by breaking the frame open and tearing it to shreds and we would spend long summers drenching each other with what was available to hand in those days before the Super Soaker which was used washing up liquid bottles and since then we've really kept our hands off each other more or less tonight those of you who are hoping for a session of mud wrestling will I hope be disappointed but I can offer you one small thrill which is that it seems to me and it seemed to me the closer I've got to this evening that I don't ever want to do this again so there is a very strong chance that this would be the last time we shall ever do this turning to the subject under discussion the war in Iraq I don't know it was too easy for myself because it seems to me that it is actually a fantastically easy position to take first of all our confessor a beginning for some time my mind was not made up I considered supporting it and almost everything in my past made me want to do so one of the reasons that I didn't was the ranked stupidity of much of the propaganda in its favor and I was particularly struck by article by Michael Kinsley in which he said that the people who want this war are treating their own arguments with contempt but one of the reasons that I would have I would have expected myself to support it is that and this is bandha gulping the first half as well as the second half the religion that I grew up with in England was not what you might think the Christianity of England by that time was a pallid anemic thing the thing that we were all brought up to believe in was in something called we won the war it's saints where the pilots in the battle britain it's God was Winston Churchill and it's effused everything we did we lived you must remember in this wonderful peaceful country largely untouched by foreign attack in a land honorably battered by war I was surrounded the cities that we lived in or near my father was a naval officer our Father I should say in this evening we lived in cities battered by war or near cities battered by war and everything even as small children that we talked about was overshadowed by that war and we thought that it had been good in fact we were convinced it had been good and we grew up entirely believing that you could by launching war do good things as time has passed and as I have traveled to the nastier places of the world they've become less sure of this and I've seen more and more the consequences of those pictures which we so often see on our television screens of the missile being launched from the ship of what happens at the other end and I've seen also on a particular and terrifying occasion in Somalia the arrival of the US Marines intent on rescuing a country in desperate desperate straits and the subsequent failure despite the enormous cook intentions everybody involved but there was something else about the Iraq war that I didn't like and that was this and it was particularly just as it began and as I was beginning to feel most strongly that I didn't like it a Rear Admiral of the United States Navy and of course I feel rather strongly like neighbors because of my parentage was portrayed on the television addressing his ships company this was not a stirring or poetic oration it concluded with the words it's hammer time and this was succeeded by a playing of a song called we will rock you well yes it is quite funny except that what they then did was to launch missiles which headed towards the country where they would land inevitably in some cases on places where entirely innocent people were living I didn't think this was a serious attitude towards war I was reminded continuously and I have to say I have a largely conservative audience in Britain and I've said repeatedly that I I didn't like this war and I would get angry emails phone calls and letters saying I was unpatriotic and wrong and I would send back one thing to most of these people which was Kipling's recession and Admiral Keating's outburst made me think most strongly of that that particular passage we loose while I should have written this down remembered it I remembered it earlier on drunk with sight of power we loose wild tongues that have not the in or and of the reeking tube an iron shard upon which the heathen rely and I thought there was an arrogance about this war and a belief flowing from self-righteousness and misdirected idealism which was bound to end in disaster and I thought at my own country at the end of the 19th century embarking on the Boer War and ending essentially its imperial power by its overweening folly and I thought not merely wrong but a mistake and nothing absolutely nothing which has happened since and I have been to Iraq twice since that war took place has convinced me in any way I was wrong this was an idealist war it was an idealist war supported by idealists for the best of reasons and fulfilled my belief that there is nothing in this world more terrifying than somebody who thinks he is right thank you Peter Christopher you have ten minutes and I'll take all nine and a half of them it goes by the way if drunk with sight of power we loose LW OSE wild hogs that have not dia nor such boastings as the Gentiles use and lesser breeds without the law it's the whole magnificence of Kipling that is exactly what makes people nervous about quoting him correctly because when you get it right it's unsettling and lots of things about this or unsettling and so they should be and it's my duty as well as my pleasure to congratulate Peter on on keeping things edgy for this evening you didn't come here we hope for a banal debate ladies and gentlemen now listen you can't see underneath my shirt the garlic necklace and you have no idea that I'm fighting my way by Northwest Airlines back from here tomorrow morning to be in New York for the memorial service to William F Buckley at st. Patrick's Cathedral in other words you've got no idea what I've been going through lately and there's no real reason why you should but when they said to me this evening when you come out do you want to be at the throne or at the pulpit I did feel slightly discombobulated and when I said well where's the men's room and they said it's down there and there's men's room and then there's women's room I understand that but in between sexton's room I began to feel more discovered still and today is the anniversary of the day in 1945 when my mother and my father got married after both of them having been through a very long war very long brutal cruel war after that succeeded the long austerity poverty struggle with which they'd had to beguile their youth in the 1920s and 30s of interwar Britain if you can even assume that people in Europe in those days lived between two wars rather than endure long armistice between two terrifying resumption of hostilities every time you read fragile truths in the New York Times think of that as applying to the 1920s and 1930s in Europe and you'll get a better idea of what this resumption of hostilities were and yes I think if I look at my brother and think well our parents got married in this day 1945 that is a little unsettling it's also I think hope you don't mind my saying so rather reassuring we are both here after all and determined to testify now on this question about the Mesopotamian war everybody knows why they oppose it don't they everyone's clear on what the reasons are we were told wrong things given inaccurate information by dubious governments we were sort of cheated into a feeling that we delegations of the UN had overstated the matter of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism in fact when you think about it you'll find that it's probably even wrong to mention saddam hussein in the same breath as weapons of mass destruction or terrorism i have a couple of tests from of my own for whether people know what they're talking about when they're talking about iraq anyone who says that saddam hussein was okay a bad guy doesn't know that you'll hear about you hear that said quite a lot they don't know they know what fascism feels like you know what it's like to see families forced at gunpoint to applaud the torture an execution in public of their family members they don't know what it's like to see 180,000 members of the Kurdish people at a minimum killed by poison gas in the northern provinces of Iraq in the worst light to see at least that number of shear Arabs killed in southern Iraq they don't know what it took Anglo American British American policy to put a no-fly zone from 1991 onwards over those two zones to make sure that those two genocides could not be replicated they don't know what it would be like to be a citizen of Kuwait or Iran seeing Saddam Hussein's army coming over the horizon attacking your civilians in that way abolishing in one case the whole existence of a member state of the Arab League and of the Muslim excuse me the Islamic Conference and of the United Nations abolishing it and Xing it making it part of Iraq they don't they didn't hear the speech from said I'm saying saying the only mistake he ever made was that he invaded Kuwait before he'd finished the nuclear weapon he should have done it the other way round first to get the nuclear weapon but at the chewy thir reactor which we found of as a result of the Kuwait war when we went looking for it get the bomb first then invade Kuwait then ask them what they're going to do now now that I've invaded it don't do it don't get it the wrong way around we lived at this man's permission for a long time we lived by his warrant only his stupidity allowed us to be as complacent as we were in the meantime fighters in northern and southern Iraq were fighting against a challenger we should have been fighting ourselves the liberation of Iraq in other words the decision that we had to move the Iraqi people and the region into a post Saddam era will stand I'm convinced as one of the greatest decisions of American state craft as one of the things that American soldiers male and female and politicians do version for it those have defended it would be proudest of in the future any decision we've ever made despite the ridicule despite the incompetence despite the failures despite the disappointments let us review what we've done first we have removed a keystone stage of the Middle East from the control and sole ownership of a psychopathic crime family who owned all of Iraq and treated its people as if they were disposable citizens I remind you that this Keystone State occupies a choke point on the Gulf and an arterial carotid point in the world economy it cannot be left the control of a fascistic mafia I remind you further that it exists between the exorbitant Sunni Wahhabi theocracy of Saudi Arabia and the no less exorbitant Shia theocracy of Iran but it is it is the keystone that allows us yes us we have the right to do this we have the right to insist on oil we who don't have to be ashamed of mentioning oil in the same breath as democracy to say if we can recuperate Iraq if we can recuperate its oil industry if we can stop it being the private property of a psychopathic crime family we can not only help the Iraqis but we can undercut the monopoly or the duopoly of shear Iran and Wahhabi Saudi Arabia does anyone think this is a matter of indifference was anyone willing to get up and say you sir very good for you I my or nerve I wouldn't mind if you were the only one as you seem to be you're indifferent to it the rest of us here voters and consumers all believers in freedom might possibly want to take the view that it can't be for us a nothing question what happens to Rob will add what in the remaining time that we have brought one of the great war criminals of the world to justice and put him and his crime family and his main complicit associates on trial in public in a country where until recently very recently it was death slow death very slow death to possess a cellphone or satellite dish that we have undone what UNESCO calls the greatest crime against the human ecology ever committed the destruction of the marshes of southern Iraq the oldest wetlands in the Middle East the smoke and destruction of which could be seen from the Space Shuttle so terrible was the environmental decay that we have proclaimed the autonomy of the Kurdish people the oldest largest nation in the world not to have a state of their own and that where they live in their federalized democratized provinces in northern Iraq which were released from Saddam Hussein's control the full 12 years before the liberation of the rest of the country business flourishes press flourishes democracy flourishes civil society flushes the sooner the earlier the intervention by the British and American forces in Iraq in other words the happier the sooner the greater the deeper the more enduring and the more useful in the future is the outcome I'm willing to defend because I've just seen time I will need to defend and underline and repeat and restate and emphasize everything I have said so far so all of you who've come here under the pathetic illusions peddled by Hillary Clinton Harry Reid and moveon.org have all your work still ahead of you and you thought it was going to be easy didn't you by now Thank You Christopher Peter the next five minutes or yours thank you the ER Vasa breeds without the law were the Germans it was the law that they were outside that made them lesser I just thought I had to add that right consequences of the Iraq war six trillion dollars which the United States does not have expended Iraq under the control largely of the ayatollahs of Iran the resorts to torture by the United States often by proxy but not always disgraces in themselves and disasters an untold number of innocent people killed the certainty that the United States is unable for the foreseeable future to mount a justified military operation abroad the diminution of the moral authority of the Western democracies again for the foreseeable future fantastic what more can you ask resulting from deliberate ignorance of the past deliberate willful ignorance of the past of Britain's own attempts to control and exploit and govern Iraq through fake Parliament's and fake elections at least more successful for a while in gaining the cooperation of at least one of the Iraqi factions without necessarily having to pay them to fight by the day with ak-47s against our enemies instead of against us again triumph I really do not see what justification that could be of the operation on its own merits but if it is a principle that the United States has to intervene in every country which is miss governed where there are despots whether it's torture whether is no freedom then where else can anybody in this room think of that we might be intervening for instance the site of the Summer Olympics might occur to some but we dunno nor if we're terribly tender about the massacres of Arabs by Arabs or the citizens of Arab states by other out states why is it that we accept it as our allies in the first Gulf War the state of Syria who's then President Hafez al-assad ordered his troops with artillery to surround the town of Hama and shell it until everyone living in it was dead if our principle is that we only associate with nice foreign regimes and we always attack and devastate nasty ones where was that principle then neither it makes sense none of the objectives turned out to be true when I was in Iraq for the first time only a few weeks after the invasion people crowded around me in Najaf and Karbala saying and many of them spoke English they said thanks very much indeed for coming now will you please get out and that was the nicest thing that anybody said to me all the time is there how can anyone stand here and say that this is a success all I can say is that it must take the most enormous courage and resolution to continue to stick to an obviously losing argument well it's obviously come to the actuarial seems a waste of Hitchens ISM in a way to just reduce things to the balance sheet but we do balance sheet will do bounce ship properly let me suggest some things to you first everybody knows that there isn't a single clever person here who doesn't know is they're watching this on webcast who doesn't know that you can't mention weapons of mass destruction and Saddam insane breath even though he used them against against Iran and against the the Kurds wrongly described as his own people within the borders of his own country and was continuing to incubate and maintain the capacity to recover them however for actuarial purposes let me just say that having enforced the resolutions that governed this question in the case of Iraq we forced the capitulation of Colonel Gaddafi whose stock of WMD we had underestimated when he came in and he didn't surrender I might add to Kofi Annan or jac Chirac where did where did Colonel Gaddafi come the few weeks after the fall of Baghdad to say okay you can take all my stockpile now and put it in Oak Ridge Tennessee where it now is which is where it should it be you didn't come to Kofi Annan hold your claws comrades I know I'm never going to get any from a but thanks for thanks for trying I sort of appreciate you can come to kofi annan or Jacques Chirac or the prostituted equally prostituted Gerhard schröder the real blood for oil pimps and prostitutes who constituted the leadership of the anti-war movement in European politics no he came to tony blair and you came to george would I give up okay let's have a look at this big stockpile that Colonel Gaddafi's got all this time it's bigger than we thought much bigger than we thought we accused him of a lot it was much worse than we thought as it had been when Saddam Hussein at the time of Kuwait much worse than we thought well let's have another look where's he got it from where's it come from it's come from North Korea and it's come from Pakistan Pakistan our ally so by walking back the couch as it's called in Washington we discover from this capitulation the AQ Khan Network we shut it down or at least we put its leader under house arrest miss for now at least we put the North Koreans in the frame and they know we've got them this is the biggest non-proliferation victory there has ever been for any US administration ever in history that's the first thing the second is we catch the guy who rolled Leon Klinghoffer off the deck of a cruise ship in the Mediterranean who were avoided arrest when he was caught had to be released as he was travelling on a diplomatic passport a what passport a what passport that you're chromatic passport what jit right possible an Iraqi diplomatic passport just like Abu Nidal had been traveling on just as my every other terrorist gang you've ever heard of in the Middle East have been headquartered in Baghdad we shut that down too you think this is nothing you think it's nothing you want to sneer at it and say Bush says mission accomplished sneer go on sneer these achievements are real there are four four reasons for which a state previously sovereign may lose its sovereignty may be deemed to be outside the law they are for I'll recite them quickly one violations of the Genocide Convention which we have signed and by the way by all means let's impose this on Sudan and by all means let's impose it on them for Darfur and on China for many other offences too because just as China has backed Saddam Hussein and just as it backs Robert Mugabe and justice backed the worst elements in Burma so it has been behind many of our words in the Middle East so that's the first thing the Genocide Convention may not be violated we've signed it it mandates that you must move to punish or prevent genocide second a regime loses its sovereignty if it violates the non-proliferation treaty Iraq has used weapons of mass destruction on its own church in on the Church of others third you may lose your sovereignty if you give aid comfort and harbour to international terrorist groups Iraq is multiple he convicted of this and fourth for occupying and invading the charity of other nations which Iraq had done several times continue to do was intending to do again this is not unfortunately the case with all the despots we'd like to get rid of the cheap point that Peter ends with saying if you if you get a do Saddam Hussein don't you have to do anybody must reach the critical standard I've just mentioned the four great offenses repeated flagrant gross and intentional and going to be repeated all of them again it was essential that we move Iraq and the region into a post Saddam Hussein era and the the woes that have fallen upon us the second thoughts we're bound to have the worries about the the blunders that we made while doing it none of which I would deny and so which I know more about than you could dare to know I know things about what went wrong they will curl your hair still none of these can impeach the idea that we did it not too soon but much too late and that only therein lies our shame thank you thank you for spirited debate on our first topic by prior agreement the second topic concerns God the proposition is God does not exist and he is not great a historical note exactly eighty years ago back in 1928 Clarence Darrow debated a similar proposition within these walls well since Peter went first on the previous question Christopher will go first on this one Christopher 10 minutes you mean you're okay you mean you're ready for another burst from okay oh yeah that's there's something wrong with this coin toss business okay let me see I don't think it's going to take ten minutes to disprove visas of God the Atheist proposition is the following most of the time it may not be surd that there is no God it may be said that there is no reason to think that there is one that was the situation after Lucretia and Democritus and the original anti theistic thinkers began their critique of religion and I would just ask you all ladies and gentlemen to bear in mind a mild distinction while we go on you may wish to be a deist as my heroes Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine were and you may not wish to abandon the idea that there must be some sort of first or proximate cause or prime mover of the known and observable world and universe but even if you can get yourself to that position which we unbelievers maintain is always subject to better and more perfect and what elegant explanations even if you can't get yourself leptin all your work is still ahead of you to go from being a deist to a theist in other words from someone who says God cares about you knows who you are Minds what you do answers your prayers cares which bits of your penis or clitoris you saw a way or have sorna way for you minds who you go to bed with and in what way minds what Holy Days you observe minds what you eat Minds what positions you use to pleasure all your work is still ahead of you and lots of luck because there's nobody there's nobody even Aquinas had to give it up there's no one who can move from the first position to the second so I could and I'm actually strongly tempted to I can leave it right there but then it's not in my nature to let off a captive audience so easily so I'll add a couple of things the reasons why I am glad this is not true would I suppose be the gravamen of my case some people I know who are atheists will say they wish they could believe it some people I know who are former believers say they wish they could have their old faith back they miss it I don't understand this at all I think it's a it's an excellent thing there's no reason to believe in the absurd propositions I just admission dear I'll briefly rehearse to you the main reason for this I think is that it is a totalitarian belief it is the wish to be a slave it is the desire that there be an unalterable unchallengeable tyrannical authority who can prove it you of thoughtcrime while you are asleep who can can subject you who must indeed subject you to a total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life I say of your life before you're born and even worse than where the real fun begins after you're dead a celestial North Korea who wants this to be true who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate I've been to North Korea it has a dead man as its president Kim jong-il is only head of the party and head of the army he's not head of the government of the state that office belongs to his deceased father Kim il-sung it's a necro cracy a fan autocracy is one short of a trinity I might add the son is the reincarnation of the father it is the most revolting and utter and absolute and heartless tyranny the human species has ever evolved but at least you can die and leave North Korea does the Quran does the Quran or the Bible offer you that Liberty no no the tyranny the misery the utter ownership of your entire personality the Smashing of your individuality only begins at the point of death this is evil this is a wicked preachment so that's the first thing second it attacks us in our deepest in our deepest most essential integrity it's an insult to us in other ways it says that we you and I could not individually or collectively decide or upon a right action or right thing without celestial divine permission we would not know right from wrong if we did not have heavens permission to do so where else how else could we know our human solidarity our innate knowledge of right and wrong our acute awareness of what is fair and what is unfair what is just not worthless to us these come to us also as gifts from the great unassailable dictator and throne what what what could abolish our integrity what could abolish our honesty our G sincere our dignity more than that the second third is a little more pragmatic religion is our first that's why I'm so fascinated with it it's our first version of the truth it's our first attempt as a species it's what we tried when we didn't know anything we didn't know we lived on a spherical planet we didn't know that our planet revolve around the Sun we didn't know that there were microorganisms that explain disease we thought diseases came from curses or witches or ill wishing or Devils or dust devils we know anything from the childish terrified ignorant origins of our animal primate species we comes religion it's also a first attempt of philosophy our first attempt at morality our first attempt at health care actually but because it was our first our worst we now have better explanations for all these dreads and we have cleared up all of these mysteries yet we still dwell and in some countries in some societies not just dwell but live under under a totalitarian regime that forbids us to think about the progress that has been made or denies us the knowledge that these advances have in fact occurred so it has become where once it probably was an aid to our survival a really great peril to our continued ability to live as a civilized species thus it seems to me that in point of its proposing of a totalitarian solution to what is after a real problem to its ghastly reliance upon the supernatural rather than the much more miraculous much more beautiful much more elegant much more numinous much more harmonious natural explanations think how much lovelier Einstein and Darwin are think how how much more elegant and persuasive they are than the idea of the burning bush or the for the eye or the or the demand that without circumcision there can be no redemption just just picture it and then I'll give you one final thought experiment this is what you have to believe now if you're monotheistic we because we now know things we didn't used to know we know that the human species could be is not just 200,000 years ago it did it become separate from the cro-magnons and the rival creams which could be as little as 100 Richard Dawkins thinks 200,000 Francis Collins who did the Human Genome Project who's by the way CS Lewis kind of Christian things 100,000 all right I'll take a hundred I'll take a hundred here's what you have to believe for a hundred thousand years humans are born as a primate species expectation of life what 25 years for the first 200,000 first few tens of thousand infant mortality writhe microorganism disease terrifying earthquakes volcanoes extraordinary but and fights over land of a territory over food over women over tribalism frightening two four ninety five ninety six thousand years heaven watches this with folded arms with indifference with coldness and then around three to four thousand years ago but only in really barbaric illiterate parts for the Middle East not in China not in China or where people can read or think or do science no no no in barbaric illiterate backward parts the Middle East is decided we can't let this go on we better intervene and what better way than by human sacrifices and plagues and mass murder and if that doesn't make them behave morally we just don't know what does if there is a single person in this room who can bring themselves to believe anything remotely like that they convict themselves a being first very stupid and second very immoral and thus it seems to me that the case for divine intervention for the supernatural false and that we should be glad that it's fallen and thank you Peter 10 minutes ten minutes uh yeah well III can tell you're all enjoying the post-saddam era which which we were told was so good I wonder whether an invasion of the celestial reason regions might now be in order and we could then have a post god era which would be of similar delightful quality I am amazed when confronted with this argument how little my brother seems to know of that which he attacks how he prefers to mock and belittle how he prefers to select from it all those things which I think most educated believers themselves are troubled by how he imagines that people other than himself do not seem ever to have been troubled by the things which trouble him and nonetheless have come to the conclusion despite all that belief in a God in my case God willing by his first name that belief in God is nonetheless wise beneficial and good not just for ourselves but for the universe if only the how shall I say the flippant during tone could be abandoned for a moment and we could discuss this more seriously it seems to me to be in curious to the point of tedium to examine the universe and not to ask yourself certain very powerful questions the first of which is why is there something rather than nothing the second of which is since we do not know anything at all about our origins and must work out what we think we know from extremely scanty evidence that it would be unwise to form absolute certainties on this now the character of the book God is not great which my brother wrote is one entirely of the jeering the mocking the caricature picking out of that which is bad what I do not have that I do not think that this so did you wish to interview her please tell me I'm not really sure I mean here I need to know did this sell absolute okay well right and that's that's the end of the Christian charity a link for the moment um had it been catch of course in a more generous turn it would have been less fun to do and who knows there might have been other consequences in the book shops I don't know but since it wasn't couched in that turn that is what we have to argue with and I would simply say this first of all for a while I'm surprising haven't asked it tonight my brother would go around saying that there was a question which no believer could answer about what action could no could no believer take which an unbeliever could or something of that character to which I would reply the question of morality is utterly irrelevant to you if you genuinely believe that which you say you believe if you think that there is no authority if you think that we are the products of random chaos if there is no reason for the existence to the universe apart from a series of accidents then you may behave exactly as you wish now in the case of Krishna and his ally and colleague professor Dawkins I refer to this as luxury atheism I know where they live they live in very pleasant parts the very pleasant cities and they are able to to advance the theory of atheism purely as a theory well I live in England and I don't need to travel very far from my home which is not far from professor Dawkins his home in Oxford to find a large number of highly practical atheists in my country at his common no more than three or four times a week to read accounts of people being kicked to death by youths aged between about 13 and 17 it invariably ends with the phrase and then they started kicking his head as if it were a football these accounts grow more and more common if you venture into the areas where these people live you will find a complete absence of any kind of moral feeling whatsoever a complete absence of self-government among the strong among the healthy among those who are able to control and take advantage of their neighbours Christianity and everything that went with it have vanished or among them they are practical atheists and they really mean it in fact in some ways they're not atheists if you examine my country carefully you'll find that the worship of mark the slaughter of children at the rate of one hundred and eighty thousand a year in the womb continues that the worship of Mammon is out of control that the worship of Ashtaroth is pretty well advanced as well and a number of the other pagan gods they're way out in front of the dear old Anglican Jehovah in whom I attempt to believe all this seems to me to point to an important factor in religion which is why it seems to me that it is reasonable given that we are ignorant of the answers to whether there is or is not a God and cannot know why we might reasonably think that it was worth believing in such a being if the universe does have an order if it does have an origin if there is running through it an eternal law then wouldn't it be a good idea to try to find out what it was and to seek to govern ourselves by it now I too have been to North Korea and I will tell you that I have the opposite impressions which my brother had this is a country entirely run by people who hate and despise the idea of God and who have made themselves into gods and that indeed is what so very often happens when people ignore the very very earliest part of the Bible in which the serpent says to Adam and Eve either this fruit and ye shall be as gods this is what we do when we decide for ourselves that there is nothing above us we destroy Authority we destroy all the things which turn the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just they go they're going very rapidly in my country I suspect that if things proceed as they are in our educational system and our trash culture they will happen pretty rapidly in this one too and then you want it then you will know what happens when God is truly absent not because he isn't there but because the only place he can occupy lies within our heart and either he is there because we invite him and we seek his assistance in the governing of ourselves or he is not and we cease to be able to govern ourselves because we no longer know how to do so there are many forms of morality until that human solidarity is a wave of running the world well up to a point it is but the problem with human solidarity is that it operates at different levels and when I lived for some years in Moscow it was folly to expect anyone to hold open a door in the Moscow Metro big heavy steel and glass doors they were too because nobody there knew anything about matters they let the things swing back in your face and if I ever held the door open for somebody else as I did in my naive early weeks in that city they'd look at me as if I were mad now something similar has began to happened to me in Britain I'm walking down the aisle of a crowded train and I see somebody coming the other way struggling with luggage and I think well I'll step out of the way and let them pass increasing the people behind me think I'm having a heart attack so they barge past me the breakdown of general assumptions about what is good affects the way that everybody behaves you cannot have a private morality and it very long if the public morality is declining and I say there are three stages this is the holy solipsism right and left is that way this way and it's the other way if I turn around and then there's what you might call the shipboard morality where this port and starboard and there's four enough but they change when the ship moves and then there's the universal one which flows from the universe whether it's true north and where there is no difference ever about which is right and which is wrong and which is the root of all authority the authority of the state which places power under the law the authority of the family where the parents rule the children the authority of the country where the people govern themselves under a law which will accept all these things derive from that understanding without it we're lost why sneer at it wife seek to bring it down why mock it my baked silly jokes about circumcision this is far more important than that I really do wish he'd treated seriously for once well well I I knew it's easy to sneer but still someone has to do it and if you like I will stop with the circumcision which you think is a trivial thing I mean if you ever talk to anyone or interviewed anyone who's been subjected to female genital mutilation because of God's will you wouldn't think of what you would say was trivial or tease if you had let alone to the number of boy children who die every year because of the Covenant the the hideous covenant that's imposed upon them by Mosaic law which also I might add celebrates every year in all three more theorems the decision of the father to put his knife to his son's throat because that's how much he loves the dictator now I find this wicked and I won't have my belief called frivolous and anyone of you who's prepared to show how much you love God and appreciate you north by holding a knife to your firstborns throat to prove your devotion can stand up now or be regarded by my brother as someone who's not morally serious and now you see the depth to which now you see the depth now you see the depth into which religion wants to throw you now my book it does have a few jeers at religion because after all you know in the in this very of Cheers let's do that but it's been reviewed very seriously by many bishops many rabbis by the Pope's chaplain in Rome all of whom have said as they've said about previous polemics of mine that I make some points that they haven't yet come up with an answer to the answer the reason for that is because they can't it's not in the nature of them to be able to do so you either believe ladies and gentlemen brothers and sisters comrades and Friends in the idea of vicarious redemption or you do not and you all think it's morally serious or you don't in other words you can either say yes I may have sinned badly but I can throw my sins on another and he can take them from me and die for me and suffer for me and take my responsibilities away we don't think so I think that Karis Redemption is the most immoral idea in current circulation I could if I wanted to if I knew you or even if I didn't know you I could offer to take your debt and pay it it's been done people will do that for friends for lovers even for strangers I could offer to serve your term in prison if if the law loud it say oh I don't think you can do it probably I can I'll serve your turn I'll do that for you but to say I'll take your sins away you never committed them there you're washed white as snow clean as new and and you can watch me being tortured and put to death as a lamb as a sheep and I'll call you a sheep and my congregation will be called a flock from then on is a double humiliation first it's a hideous outrage on the scapegoat second it's a terrible insult on those who agreed to be called sheep anyone here want to stand up and say I'm a sheep I'm allow good for you anyone else good for the rest of you fine sheep you are it's got usually that easy now okay why is there something not nothing good question why is the universe expanding so fast now that it's just been discovered that the redshift of Edwin Hubble is not an expanding rate that is slowing down as Newton would have had us believe was an expanding rate that is speeding up people thought the physicists thought the universe would slow down no the rate of expansion is so great now that very soon it won't be possible read Lawrence Krauss his piece in the current Santa Vera would even be possible to work out how we ever worked out what the Big Bang was such nothingness is coming to us we won't even know where we were in the meantime the Andromeda galaxy is heading towards us directly you can see it in the night sky now with the naked eye and in five billion years which is in physics time nothing some moral visitor it's here so the something we have now is about to meet with a great deal of nothing some design huh who designed that the question always is the same even with without science we knew what the philosophers knew anyone who claims this is a design must either convict the designer of one thing extreme incompetence and noodling and footling and chaotic planning and all and probably both extreme cruelty callousness and indifference towards those whom he summoned into existence and made to suffer these points cannot be overthrown by any kind of casuistry and certainly we're not even challenged by the casuist achill efforts you just heard thank you Peter five minutes unless I hope the knife at the throat was not used and that is the point of the story why else is it Those one of the fascinating things about those who seek to sweep Christianity out of this society and one of the things in Kristin's book which is actively repellant and the only thing the book which I found actively repellent was a suggestion that Christianity should be treated as a form of child abuse and therefore driven out of education one of the things these people do not seem to realize is that if you were to abolish it it would not be replaced by a blank space it is important to realize what it replaced that the argument about that sacrifice was argument about getting rid of human sacrifice and child sacrifice then-common but what we are dealing with here is an immensely powerful force in human emotion which existed before Christianity and which christianity sought and seeks to divert elsewhere you have to give people hope when they have done things whose remembrance is grievous and whose burden is intolerable it has to be done and what other hope can be offered than some kind of sacrifice the arguments the very complex arguments about that atonement are all to do with the discovery as I said earlier the attempt that we make in our feeble way to discover what it is that we are intended to do but to mock them as if they they were a matter of a man sticking a knife so was his son's throat with the idea that this was a recommended action in the manual of life is not really a misunderstanding it's falsehood and really shouldn't be acceptable in in civilized debate to speak as if something is being advocated when it is actually being preached against and it is again this this failure of understanding of the purpose of the thing the failure to understand that it has any good or benevolent characteristics whatsoever when it does produce good characteristics in the book you will find that those who are Christians who do good things are recruited to the Atheist Court no they do because they were Christians there because they were something else and if if societies do anything bad then it the Stalinist state of the Soviet Union is said to have done those things because Stalinist communism was in fact a form of religion you can't win it's completely circular there is nothing that anybody can do which is religious and which is based on a belief in God which Christopher will think is right and if anybody does anything which is wrong then it will be God's fault and there is no escape from this circle and I think it's very well exemplified in this in this misrepresentation of one of the central stories in the Bible well my fellow sheep like Americans is it not the case that in the matter of the I eat the Muslim sacrifice or in the matter of the Abrahamic centralized divisor that the first test the father must passed is to show his God that he's at least willing to do it that his submission can be taken for granted even to this extent is there anyone here who does not think that that is the grandeur of the story as well as what I would describe as the horrible sadomasochistic submission only then only when he's shown yes I will do it that's how much I love Big Brother only then is he released from the obligation this is the torturing this is even worse than the book of Job it's even worse than the twing or with by the dictator of the fate and emotions of one of his effortlessly made creatures anyone who loves this loves to be a slave now on the moral on the point of morality my brother's written very well in in England and indeed elsewhere about the awful nihilism and relativism that has poisoned so much of our social and national and collective life have more agreement with him on this then perhaps he understands but to say that this is to be equated with atheism is simply to misunderstand what nihilism and relative isn't mean and that's very I think I can make this point relatively simply someone who says that do what you will must be the whole of the law that's supposed that's supposedly what Satanists say at their ceremonies by the way station is to not atheists by definition the satanic Majesties are not known entities is saying is giving themselves permission to act entirely as they might wish their own pleasure how does the person who says God is on my side act I don't demand an answer from you I simply demand you think about my question how do those act who say God is on my side do they not act as if do they not do they not behave in Iran in Iraq in Bombay in Beirut in Belfast as if they have the right to do anything at all because God has given them permission yes they do you don't get rid of nihilism you don't get rid of relativism by claiming you have God in your corner rather you make you make it you make it possible for any torture any cruelty any child it is any nightmare of violence and shame to be yours and to be proud of it too now I have two challenges the PTO's despise in the past but going to repeat them to you and you decide what you think if you think that morality must be supernaturally referred that without heavenly dictatorship we would not have a moral guide you must have an answer this question which I've now asked in print many times in public many times radio TV any any number of times not yet had an answer to name me moral action performed or moral action recommended or moral statement made by a believer namely one by a true believer religion that could not could not have been made by an unbeliever namely one think about it I'm not demanding an answer now you have all evening however you won't need all evening for my corollary question name me a wicked statement or a stupid or evil statement made or stupid or evil action performed by someone claiming God's permission to do so you've already thought of one before this evening is over you were thought of two or three more the connection between religion and morality proposed by the believers in Supernatural dictatorship is thoroughly utterly morally no and void in fact it's worse than that it is an excuse for and has always been continues to be and will be an excuse for worse evil than any secularist or atheist could ever have permitted themselves or others glad you got that point Peter I was just going to say I mean I can't think about actually an instance of something which a believer did and an unbeliever didn't do which is that a few years ago I resigned from my newspaper when it was taken over by a man whose main business was pornography and I was surprised the other week to see a copy of another sister newspaper owned by that same man being adorned by a column written by my brother I didn't I didn't I didn't get that bit would you want you might say then I died at all I didn't I just didn't hear it I'm so I'm not trying to be funny I I resigned if you recall from The Daily Express about seven years ago when it was taken over by a man whose main business as pornography I was slightly surprised a few weeks ago to find that a column written by you appeared in one of his newspapers but that isn't a response to either my challenges is it I mean you asked I submit myself the arbitration of the audience that doesn't answer either of my questions I by the way I'll tell you two answers I have had the best - one is an exorcism - throw out a devil couldn't be performed by a non-believer but better try than the one Peters asking out with but a bit of a tautology in the second that I got hurting yesterday from a very thoughtful writer of a letter from I think Georgia Atlanta Georgia is um could John Donne one of my favorite poets along with George Herbert bridges but have written the songs and sermons if he had not been a believer the answers of that which has kept me awake longer than any of the other ones is that I don't know because I don't know how Verdi wrote the Requiem while being an atheist either but I think that the fact that I don't know the answer the second question means that the answer hasn't been proposed by the proposed answer to the first one let alone by Peters lame attempt to complain about the fact that my column is more widely syndicated than his Peter did you want to resign more widely and promiscuously syndicated them however widely I was syndicated I wouldn't want it there well thank you that concludes part 1 of our debate and is advertised I think it was provocative as we anticipated part 2 gives you the audience the chance to put questions to the brothers I think they're doing a good job putting questions to each other but why don't we mix it up a little bit and if you'll come to the microphones at the end of each aisle there's also I believe a microphone upstairs although I do not okay it's back in this corner over here if you would please take your place at the microphone and let's go ahead and start since we have a queue over here let's go ahead and start with you yes ma'am hello oh hello okay we can hear you professor Hitchens um can you do it I heard you correct someone in a previous talk and it'll thank you Mel yeah how can you speak on what you see is the relationship between self-interest enlightened self-interest and morality and morality the the lady in case it wasn't audible to all the lady asks if I will comment on the relationship between enlightened self-interest in morality my line is not that taken by for example I rant that that selfishness is a virtue on its own I don't believe in the abnegation of the personality I don't believe in the horrible Christian idea of masochism modesty self-sacrifice self-hatred the endless confessions of sin and worthlessness any more than I believe in the equally vile Quranic idea that were made not out of dust without of clots of blood by a by a celestial dictator but I think that probably we are innately selfish enough to begin with because of the process of evolution by natural selection that we don't need additionally to cultivate our own selfishness and that the the trick the clue and the odd thing and the thing that comes to people strangely naturally is this they understand about human solidarity I'll just take I just give you two examples one from each Testament um the ancient Jewish people of course never went to Sinai and never were in Egypt and never wandered in the desert and all of that is completely as everyone now knows from the archaeological evidence none of that ever occurred but the idea that our Jewish ancestors got as far as Mount Sinai under the impression that rape murder theft and perjury were okay and only when told by tablets that they weren't all right felt the penny drop or the shekel drop is of course an insult to our decency and our integrity they couldn't have got that far being a people of any kind if they had been under any other impression so this is in Asian Oz and it comes to my solidarity our humanity our brother and sisterhood the second is in the nude so-called New Testament that the Samaritan so called them the man from Samaria who wouldn't see someone just lie bleeding and suffering by the side of the road without helping him whatever motive he had and we don't know what it was he can't have been a Christian because it's the alleged Jesus of Nazareth telling the story about someone who existed before he did and the only people in the story who were told about who didn't do anything for the victim are the priests and the Levites so what the story tells us this parable is you don't need religion to behave with ordinary decency and morality and anyone who says you do says that you need dictatorial permission to do the right thing and then us earth it's in my interest that people don't suffer I don't want I don't want someone bleeding to death from AIDS on my doorstep for not just for their sake for mine I don't want that Oscar Wilde in the soul of man under socialism puts it very beautifully so socialism would free us from the awful necessity of living for others George Bernard Shaw when he ran for office in London said there should be no more houses built for the working classes without baths and and it was objected to him by the Tories the concern is it why give them baths the poor are so ignorant and stupid they won't even know how to use them they'll keep : them they don't deserve baths you're wasting your compassion on they said I don't want them to have a bath for their sake I want them to have baths for my sake that's the right mix of self-interest in morality and it works - it works it works whereas religious exhortation and telling people telling children that if they don't do the right thing they'll go to terrifying punishments or unbelievable rewards that's making a living out of lying to children that's what the priesthood do and if all they did was lie to the children it would be bad enough but they raped them and torture them and then hope will call it abuse know the priesthood must get out of the way for this argument have become grown-up so two brief points the fact that you know something is wrong does not necessarily mean that you don't then do it as I think most of us are aware and secondly it's all very well saying the people who are unbelievers know what is right but how do they know it's right and what what what reason do you have to suppose that any action is right apart from that which suits you there is no and and you can you can happen on you may borrow with pleasure the morality of the religious if you wish to do so but to pretend that by doing so you're not growing it is an untruth and I really it's it's amazing how difficult it is to get atheists to understand this very simple point and one other point about threatening people with terrible punishments it seems to me to be fairly evident looking again at my own country that in societies which do not believe in hell hell pretty quickly comes into existence but you're gonna clap that look at that stand-up about that okay we have other people want to ask questions let's move on to our next question dr. Hitchens of quick questions truth reel and if so how do you determine it exists me it's my fault I stepped on your line would you mind repeating your question it was brief light splatter is truth real does it exist is so how do you determine it once more is truth real and if so how do you determine okay we're having a chat relativism on purpose I should maybe specify precisely what I meant to say it's a famous lines you know what is truth ask to Jess ting Pontius Pilate and did not stay for an answer well it's a long stay if you do stay for it what would I believe to be the case is that the there is a difference between fair-mindedness impartiality even-handedness and objectivity which is the search for the truth and the willingness to say that upon coming a-calling uncomfortable truth if it was at one's own expense and then one had to change one's own opinion or analysis what one would be obliged to do so that's what objectivity means and I think that while the the grail of truth may not be entirely attainable without the idea of it without the obligation to seek it very intensely and very seriously one would be in a rudderless the world a world without true north if you like but the as rabbi Hillel says they the you the task may be unattainable but that does not mean you can give it up rather hello by the way who is the author of the golden rule which the Christians often claim to be their wrongly falsely lying Li and doubly falsely actually because the obligation to love others as yourself is an unattainable one and its sinister for that reason because you're demanded it's the mounted of you that you that you do the impossible thus you'll always be falling short that you'll always be in sin thou shall always be guilty thus you'll always have to confess thus you'll always be in the claws of the priests that's the trick as as it said by folk greville you're created sick and commanded to be well this is a sadomasochistic relationship with the dictator you can't be right you'll always be wrong the law is such as you can't keep it whereas the relatively sane injunction of the Babylonian rabbi this is what is repulsive to another sorry what is repulsive to you you should not do to another that's a decent rule but no one no one a better stand up and tell me that I needed God to tell me that Peter did you want to respond well okay we have a question up in the balcony yes this is a question for professor Hitchens again go to doctor doctor fair enough on your your website and in your books build up that wall you mentioned eliminating taxation freedom of taxation for churches and I was wondering what your thoughts were as to how that might if we were to someday do something like that how that might affect the separation of church and state that we enjoy right now well it sees me a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment that any religious institution can receive any payment from the United States government I would regard being tax-exempt or tax free as a disguised form of subsidy as I regard that so-called faith-based initiative to be a surreptitious violation of the same I should say for sincere believers that there is a there's an excellent reason why the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment was first proposed it wasn't proposed just by people like myself who wouldn't go any further than deism in their attitude to religion it was proposed by many people who were quite devout and who thought not just that the government must not be corrupted by religion but that the churches mustn't be corrupted by this association with the state either and I think that's an equally morally valid point James Madison the co-author of the Virginia statute on religious freedom and of the First Amendment and the other things that bodyguard are our wonderful Republican secular Constitution didn't think there should be chaplains to open Congress didn't even think there should be chaplains in the Armed Forces if you want to pray in the army they can no one can stop them but we're not going to pay for someone to pray oh these are very tough questions but they must be understood that these were part of the very urgent views of the framers and the founding fathers and it's our responsibility to be discussing this very seriously now at a time when Hillary Clinton's joined some reactionary evangelical organization John McCain to try and book bills to her faith-based connections John McCain a lifelong Episcopalian as this year I wonder why said he's a Baptist and Barack Obama senator Obama has been caught in some bigmouth sinister windbag rock and roll horror show Church on the south side religion religion is poisoning religion is poisoning our election and our democratic republic and it's time that we set it up if you want to be if you want to be a fraud and a fundraiser and a shakedown artist and a bigmouth and an ethnos in this country try your best but it's in it's long past time that we said putting Reverend in front of your name is not enough of an achievement we sort of agreed 200 or so years ago that we in Britain would not intervene in the United States politics and I feel I should uphold this tradition but there is one small point here there's a tremendous air of challenge and bravery and and hurling himself into a storm of rage and oppression in all this stuff and I have to say I do not find the Christian churches either in this country and especially my own particularly terrifying force to combat or one which is capable of crushing at the center however I would challenge him for instance to wage any kind of campaign of dissent against the dreadful tyranny of for instance the theory of manmade global warming against which it is almost death to speak if you wish to be in any kind of public life in either this country or mine but I don't think he will because that requires a little bit more in the way of I should I say no I won't say well it's not gonna do it euros if I mean since I I've warned you before about this clapping business since that's a challenge I hope you won't mind if I speak again it's not really my turn but I have just written a piece for for free inquiry secretary of atheist magazine Oh contributor regular column she was saying that it disturbs me to see how much the green movement is taking on the lineaments of a religion that the human species has an original sin in other words existing making smoke other things that upset the air that it will be punished for this that an Armageddon or an apocalypse is on its way that if all don't understand this that there could be terrible punishments and there's only one true way out of it now I've already written that I don't like the tone of this at all just in case business you don't have to read it you don't have to read everything I write you don't but you got you do and next time we talk I will expect you to have read everything okay our next question before I attempt to challenge mr. Christopher Hitchens with a question sir no professor Christopher hit - thank you I should say that I've taught a number of your books here at Grand Valley State University my students revere them and and so do I thank you you've been a very eloquent critic of empire throughout your career and as a young man I admired you a great deal for it are you prepared to admit now that the United States adventure in Iraq is also an adventure in imperial activity well and and you you asked this audience what a person who acts as if God is on their side acts like and I would suggest to you that that person acts much like the candidate you supported in 2004 george w bush in particular as regards the adventure in iraq yes now i quite see a quite understand your point - my my response will be the following um and i hope you're ready for it and those are you my best those who did that clapping thing that they still haven't is this everything the united states has done in iraq is Imperial society 6jh at least when the Central Intelligence Agency claims that it helped install the Saddam Hussein wing of the bath body follow me here not just the bath party about enough a fascist party with some Stalinist inflections but the Saddam Hussein wing in power in Baghdad that saw the CIA claimed of action 68 the United States was still an empire in 1974 when Henry Kissinger promised the Iraqi Kurds American support in their fight against Saddam Hussein with the backing of the Shah of Iran and Israel and didn't tell them that he was about to sell them out when Saddam Hussein and the Shah of Iran were going to make handshake over their dead bodies that was justice Imperial it was the United States was an empire when Jimmy Carter gave a green light to Saddam Hussein to invade Iran in 1980 and told them that would through with American intelligence supplied by satellite through Saudi Arabia that they would achieve as a swift victory over the Iranians and probably recover the arabic-speaking territories of who's the star of Persia for Iraqi control that war we reckon I've been to the cemeteries in Iran and in Baghdad that were probably not less than a million and a half casualties I'm just I haven't factored in all the casualty though all of these were Imperial in other words if the United States is either Imperial or it isn't if it is it's just as Imperial not to intervene in Iraq and to leave the status quo the way it is as it is to intervene in 2003 for the first time I know about the United States intervened in Iraq on the right side and I'm proud of having advocated that pause okay I knew I wouldn't get any applause but I just want you to know that's what I think it's the distinction kiddo hold me that's the distinct now the was just not to intervene would have been just as imperialist and that was the attitude that Kissinger Scowcroft bush senior Pat Buchanan the other elements of the conservative an imperialist right did advocate because these are the Saudi Lobby who are the core of impure ISM in my hometown of Washington they said no leaves that I was saying as the buffer state we like things the way they are don't you tell me that's a non-interventionist policy okay and don't tell yourself that because you're letting yourself and your moveon.org friends off much too lightly okay it seems to me to be very simple that's to launch an aggressive war is different from not launching an aggressive war and if if they can tell the dangers the aggressor if you can't tell the difference then it's difficult to know where to begin but I think I was accused of casuistry a few minutes ago and I think I can now return the accusation well alright next question hi I was gonna ask Christopher a question but it's Christopher now mr. Christopher but I getting very informal take a last Ally I'll ask Peter question and your answer I think says a lot about honesty and your honesty when you walk into a Natural History Museum and you look up at a Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil how does that relate to your religious belief what how do you place that in your religious belief in your answer I think it'll speak volumes about I'm not sure how it's supposed to I - spiders - something I should if you think that's right if you hold a fossil in your hand or if you look at a fossil in a new Natural History Museum oh you're you're a you're a believer obviously that has to those two things have to come together in some way in your mind how do they I'm sorry I really don't know what you're driving it well I just don't Peter okay I'll check ups you know you have some but professor Hitchens I'm sure I'm sure Christopher Cornell well if you don't mind me ventriloquist the last time we discussed this and I've don't hold you to it I got the impression that you had some sympathy for the argument that is called intelligent design I think the questioner wants to know if you think there's merit in that argument or not yes and I think you won't possibly they all saw at that point well I what if you say no I said what what actually is the question doing settle that not answer it well that's a good question it's just a general question about if you walk into Natural History Museum in your CDs possible you know a bunch of the museum do you think there's any merit to intelligent design to me the two cannot they cannot it's either one of the other it's just an honest one one one water one leaf give it up give it up are we at an impasse or get it sorry well I don't believe in the young earths you don't then huh then how can you have a I thought it was a what if we what if the question was do you think intelligent design is an argument with merit some pretend that was the question so sorry it's these microphones what ecology I'd like to know so could the much you think that intelligent design is an argument the case that has merit uh yes I think it's an interesting skeptical current and I think that it's it deserves to be discussed fairly it's interesting in my country you can go into almost any book shop and the the shells are groaning with the works of Richard Dawkins denouncing the the terrible people who think that just maybe possibly the the theory of evolution may have some faults you cannot find try as you may a single book which can give you any idea of what it is that Professor Dawkins is attacking it's not allowed no publisher will publish it no bookshop will stock it it seems to me it's an interesting no idea how the realm of nature took its present shape nor see nor has you nor have you nobody has we don't know it's it's something which is which is which is open to discussion as a skeptical current it's interesting and I think it's one of the other things which is fascinating is the way in which the the watch what I might call the the Davos Lobby exalts currently over the recent court case in which it managed to suppress any teaching of the existence of the theory of intelligent design now the case which the darnest used to exalt over quite rightfully or was the Scopes case so ably misrepresented in the film inherit the wind in which it was the boneheaded literal Bible if realist creationists who were attempting to suppress the teaching of Darwinism and the evolutionists quite rightly defeated that in court and exhausted over it now they're exalting over the suppression of what somebody else wants to say that seems to me to be a strange transformation and a very telling one and it is the intolerance and rage of the Darwinists against any expression of skepticism however cautious scientifically based and well qualified which actually makes me wonder whether the ID people may not have a point well I mean there's the goat there's that there is that I think there is a ghost of a point there but it's only this ghost it's following that that evolution occurred is conclusively verified by the record of molecular biology and a fossil record there isn't there has never been an article in any peer-reviewed journal and there never will be to say to the contrary however that's only to say that that it did occur how it occurred is not something that's completely consensual and the Darwinian theory of natural selection is only so far the least contested of those explanations and Stephen Jay Gould for example of whom I was something a friend and a great admirer and Richard Dawkins is also credible had a tremendous disagreement still do posthumous in the case of now about punctuated evolution about the steps by which this occurred but that it occurred is not to be doubted and thus the the idea that that can be equal time for the opposite ear in a science class is as false as to say well children the chemistry period is over now after the break we'll be doing our my plans for your astronomy teachers off today but your astrology ultimate can check in nonsense of when and when President Bush says we should teach the argument I'm with him if he's sincere because everything I know about the the Darwin argument comes from two great set peace debates one in Oxford in the late Victorian Ypres between Bishop Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley the inventor of the term agnostic about Darwinism and the second in Tennessee in the 1920s even more famous but if the president wants that and he wants his faith based initiative then every church that gets a subsidy or a grant must also teach doe is equal time is that what the president wants I am sure I know the answer that thank you you're right you're a fine American Christopher I'm up here we need the microphone upstairs please try it again sir please do ah oh I'm sorry I did not hear that doing well was that was that was audible to everybody wasn't it you first III really couldn't hear it I'm sorry okay I'll surely be sitting what about subjective experience if someone says I had religious experience and I went on to do a noble action shouldn't we credit that to religion would that be a fair pressing of your question sir he says yes I have an answer but I'm sure you do too suppose I seen it will present any difficulties in my position so I think I'll hand it over to him well I mean the bet one of the best books for the unbeliever to read ISM is William James's varieties of religious experience where which is by the way is a trope and come up against a lot with CS Lewis many other religious writers they say you who believe in the material world don't believe in the supernatural you can't account for the experiences of Revelation and enlightenment and miracles or the other people experience and you you don't understand the numinous in other ones and I say that that's true for me I don't and I don't trust them though I do think they can be confused with experiences of nature landscape music sex and love the numinous in other ways but if these experiences the positive ones are going to be credited to the religion account then so must the person who says that God told him to go and get a gun and kill all the unveiled girls and there if they're going to be if all these things are going to be charged they've all got to be charged and that would leave us exactly where the argument of design leaves us and all the others view where we started Savva I don't if I could just respond very briefly to that I don't think that's true I think a lot of time is wasted in this argument by atheists blaming Christians for all the horrors and depressions that are taking place in history and Christians returning oh no it was only done by atheists it's quite plain that human beings are always capable of enormous wickedness and the misunderstanding and misapprehension of religion is is incredibly dangerous and I think that the the idea that either side is faultless in this is absurd and indefensible but I would very strongly that far more good has been done by religious belief than harm and that great harm is likely to be done to our civilization by an abandoned religious belief sir our next question hi I was just at a philosophical luncheon at the University of Chicago where they teach your brand of atheism with morality in their theology school but they were congratulating Chicago alderman on his life and one of the things that they cheered was that he had spent several months with Trotsky in Mexico in 1928 they thought this was really great and that a group of atheists would cheer men who killed between 40 and 60 million people and having spent I would now do it having and having spent months with him and this is something they look up to and this is the top of the people who do this the Chinese were atheist killed what a hundred to two hundred million people they did 90 million people in one locking up two provinces in the north and they preached atheism at Trotsky went preached atheism across Russia and then he hung priests from the back of the Train this to say that atheist atheism will kill without any limit if it gets if it gets into power anywhere this has been proved from one end of the world to another after Ethiopia where but this is this is this is your thing if he is my will kill there is no good sir we need a excuse me sir witness sir we need a question please noodles guru is going to be the perfect good question it's how can you defend it I mean you know I have been there but you say that it isn't working I mean if you bring atheism back in a government it will kill many people no is the question of by the way I thought it was a perfectly well first question to be an atheist doesn't guarantee you against being say this or nihilists or fascist or Stalinist or Maoist though it's slightly unlikely I think you'd be a fascist or National Socialist but it's I would say a necessary condition for enlightenment not a sufficient one and I'll take your question seriously in the following way the 20th century totalitarianism that are accused of being secular I'll say something about each of them it was a long question so I hope you'll allow me I'll try and condense it to start with the the original 20th century to attach Aryan our geology which originally called itself fascism if in any account you read of fascism historical account you read from its origins in Italy through Spain Portugal Croatia Hungary Slovakia so if you take out the word fascist and put Catholic right wing it's the same story there's no difference and if you add political parties in political alliance with the Vatican it's the same all of them fascism is another word for the Christian Catholic right-wing in in Slovakia the actual head of the fascist dictatorship was a priest Father T's though in almost every case the regime was in holy orders and or with the direct reliance with with the Pope himself that's a simple matter anyone can check it out I'm not going to assert it now I would say a fact checking and I would be as one on this point now that's not completely true with National Socialism it's true of the Nazi Party in Austria and Bavaria in its heartlands that it begins blessed by the Vatican by a Concorde out with the church by the Protestant churches also but it's not true to say it's a Christian movement in quite the same way it's a pagan movement to some extent my favorite example is this I suppose Joseph Goebbels was expelled from the Catholic Church he was he was any Nazi who was why was he expelled for marrying a divorced Protestant Magda Goebbels you see the church does have its standards however no is estimated by Paul Johnson Catholic historian that more than 40% of the evolve and SS were practicing confessing Catholics no one was ever excommunicated or threatened with excommunication for taking part in fantasy and that was because of the alliance between the Nazi Party and the church on two main things anti Bolshevism and anti-semitism again I'm condensing a bit now brings me to the Stalinists okay you're Joseph Stalin you've taken over Russia you've been educated in a Seminary in Georgia by the way to be up till 1917 for hundreds of years hundreds of millions of Russians have been told that the head of the state is a God that the Tsar is above our ordinary secular power that he's and he's the head of the Russian Orthodox Church as well as they you shouldn't be in the dictatorship business if you can't take advantage of a well a deep well of credulity and civility like that it's your golden opportunity what does he do heresy trials heresy trials witch hunts miraculous discoveries such as lie centers biology the worship of the leader from whom all blessings flow as I described North Korea the most religious state have ever seen neutralist mutinous this would apply also to Mao's China with the same background of superstition and civility now for there to be a fair test about this you'd have to do the following and no one I've ever debated with has even tried it so you be the first you find me a state or society that threw off theocracy and threw off religion and said we adopt the teachings of Lucretius and Democritus and Galileo and Spinoza and Darwin and Russell and Jefferson and Thomas Paine and we make those what we teach our children we make that scientific and rational humanism our teaching and you find me that state that did that fell into tyranny and slavery and famine and torture and then will be on a level playing field as it is all you've done is show that the idea of worship and the idea of creativity and the idea of civility and slavery to religion is a bad idea in the first place but none of the desires and none of the Chinese case that it is by the way the Russian the Russian Orthodox Church always stayed when Stalin or we're sailin stomach but they never killed 30 percent of their population who didn't the Russians never killed 30 percent of the population before the Communists took over 20 or 30 percent knows our every did that nope no Christians are ever did any killing well no excuse me it's not at the First World War they started the pogroms they brought the protocols of the Elders of Zion - that was imported by sonorous secret policemen to National Socialists a Christian gangsters in Europe how much do you think the export of Russian Orthodox anti-semitism cost us in point of lives and war and have you ever counted up what happened to the wars in the wars and czar ISM started and carried on and the persecutions and the famines and the tortures and the starvation are the people who just died of neglect come on you want to do this accounting I'm here I'm really here for you or what the Serbian or what the Serbian Orthodox and the Russian Orthodox have just done in the Balkans from this is the most recent genocide we've seen in Europe entirely done by by a Russian and Serbian Orthodox fascist and Catholic Croatian ustasha grinding a whole part of civilized Europe into nothingness and bloodshed for their filthy stupid medieval quarrels how dare you say that any secularist we have opposed this kind of barbaric stuff or on all fours with these creeps don't you should take it back you owe me an apology you lose boy check you lose watching please hey civility civility civility is overrated not here it's not here right I think I just conceded the point that you could attribute evil acts to both religious and non-religious people and I continue to concede it but I think that the answer that you've just heard was shocking in its survey sickness first of all the most enlightened government that humanity had ever seen in terms of its own self conceit which of course is something that they theists are very fond of was that of the French revolutionary terror which ended by executing so many people that what is now the plaster la Concorde was ankle deep in blood and the executioner's were too tired and disgusted to continue their work as for the Soviet Union in which I lived for two and a half years of my life to portray the ideology and regime of that country as religious is an absurdity almost beyond belief requiring actually the most colossal nerve to make this was a state which tried to murder God it was a state of massacred priests of desecrated and demolished churches in which people were brought up with enormous energy not to believe in God oh there was no establishment of religion there and their tax breaks for no tax breaks for priests nothing of that kind a total totalitarian horror of persecution of something which people believed to their own comfort in times of the greatest trouble and which they had to keep in their hearts privately and it's specially if they were anything other than the humblest in society and keep secret if they wish to survive without being thrown out of their homes thrown out of their jobs or having their marriages deliberate destroyed through persecution that was the state of it this was not a religious phenomenon it is straightforwardly untrue to maintain that it was I have conceded I have conceded the evils done by my side why can't you just simply accept that the Soviet Union was an atheist regime which hated God why can't you do that because it would be because it would be forced because the Russian Orthodox Church stood then as it did with Stalin as it now increasingly does black cowled figures appear next to Vladimir Putin former KGB former current KGB third Turin Iser of the Ukraine Georgia and the Baltics from estrangement of sorry sponsoring the filthy synthesis in stone is necessity the same Russian orthodoxy is his official nationalist and statist ideology there was never a moment in Russian history where the powers-that-be didn't find that church convenient it may not have been convenient for you as a believer to notice it but I am obliged to the truth in the matter Russia was not an atheist state wasn't even a secular state it was a pseudo religious state borrowing from the practice of Orthodoxy and trading upon its teachings and its tradition and I repeat my challenge you for this question to be valid at all must propose and point out a government that adopts state or country or nation that adopts the teachings of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and pain and that fell into massacre and tyranny and you can't do it and so you have to look for tenth-rate substitutes it's an impossible choice right I can find your regime which you never supported which attempted to execute him as a as gratitude for his support and so can you the point is you will not accept the simple truth which is that the Bolshevik regime from its beginning persecuted religion with deep and determined violent murderous hatred and to maintain that West was in some way a religion phenomenon is no it's not as an absurdity I'm that the it to believe it is to Institute is to reveal a travel the credulity driven by an unreasoning faith in God every every every modern state has had to go through a period of declarative as a ssin of one kind of violence or another the Cromwellian revolution the Henry day it's just this a dissolution of the monasteries the wars in Spain the the wars in Italy the French Revolution which you mentioned they all have to go through it it's usually in proportion to how vile how filthy how cruel how tyrannical how greedy how ghastly was the pre-existing clerical regime on which much of this must be blamed but you can't say that the the test of humanistic secular atheist values has been conducted until you've had that conducted fairy Hitler's birthday was celebrated from the pulpit by order of the Vatican by every Church in Germany till the last day of his regime do I say that makes your National Socialist no I don't know I don't I would know how to if I was capable of a low blow but as you know I'm not here any of us response no is it's a toasty few talk our last one civil faith in in the last few years we've witnessed speak up in the last few years we've witnessed many atrocities perpetrated by fundamentalists and I'm concerned that we run the risk of letting our responses fall into a fundamentalist mode of thinking and I'd like to have each of you comment on that I'm not sure I got the grammar of your question so I must be honest well the the concern I have is that how can we sustain a modern secular response to medieval fundamentalist atrocities and and how can we convince our politicians to take a secular modern approach to thinking about these things in educating the populace about them the something safe ain't about the question I have to say I'm going to assume I know what you mean by fundamentalist so if we check the best known current political dispute in which this country is involved I suppose I'm the oldest one of the best understood it would probably be the question of Palestine okay where the bin has been for some time a conflict between two nationalisms approximately equivalent size of people's Jewish and Arab over a piece of land about the size of Wales with the great and quite just Plains emotionally just claims on both of their parts going back quite a long time for a long time now the solution to this very difficult matter seemed to many people to be something like a partition and an award of a roughly half e of the disputed territory not it's not perfect it's not great but it is the it is the accepted view of the PLO now most of the Israeli verging public of vast majority of American Jews of the UN of the European Union of the International Community Survey and it makes a rough kind of sense it's not brilliant isn't it it's thinkable it's not insane why can't we get whatever one seems to want because of religion that's why because there are enough people on the Jewish side to say what land split God gave all this land to us all of it to us and on the other side doesn't take much to say you're dead right about that God did it award all that talk to you to the Muslims only and there enough of them to make certain that cannot be a solution and just as if there wasn't enough the mad supporters of Judaism and the mad supporters of Islam the American Christians to the rescue with luck with luck if the Jews can be supported long enough as our rope supports the hanging man they can bring on the Battle of Armageddon the thing we all secretly yearn for as all religions do totalitarian first in their origin genocide learn their conclusions we want this to be over we want this world to pass away we are pointless without that demand we are not humanists we are eschatology and hey what could be more wonderful the Jews will bring it on and those who aren't converted in time to Christianity will be John to ash as well everybody else so what could be more heavenly than that so now you see why religion poisons everything these congregations these congregations and their religions and the filthy texts on which they base themselves earnestly desire that everything we call civilization and everyone in this room be destroyed they want it they relish it they work for it while you're asleep as well as while you're away coexistence with this kind of thing is as impossible as coexistence with fascism or Stalinism the sooner we wake up to it the better our chances of survival will be thank you Chris it's my unhappy task to have to call the question time to an end now thank you very much Peter and Christopher Hitchins for very lively in provocative debate told another cop thank you ma'am you know many helpful people and organizations come together to make an event like this so interesting and make it possible I'd like first to thank Tom Haas president of Grand Valley State University for his support also a wonderful partner that we've discovered Jeff Seaver in the Center for inquiry you thank him for the financial support and all the enthusiasm and hard work that that institution brought to this event to donors tonight Bob Goodrich and John hunting thank you very much and wow what a venue Heather beretta and the cop her colleagues at fountain Street Church for providing such great services here frank stella in the interfaith dialogue association Frank where are you thank you Doug kimchi and grand dialogue Thank You Grand Rapids Community College for your enthusiasm for this project and most of all the founding benefactor of our presidential study center Ralph Hauenstein who just celebrated his 96th birthday Thank You Ralph thank you all we are adjourned

Channel: Adam Bradway

Views: 359,422

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Keywords: htichens, gvsu, hauenstein center, adam bradway, brohters, debate, god, war, iraq, christopher hitchens, christopher hitchens debate, hitchens brothers debate, hitchens debate, chris hitchens, chris hitchens debate

Id: jsPovB3AQjo

Length: 122min 14sec (7334 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 15 2011