Hitchens: Religion is about power.

question for our dr. jerk alright I won't take a minute to ask in the I don't just support and try and help out the those who dissent from the ridiculous belief Christianity the horrible idea of vicarious redemption in other words of the idea that by watching another person suffer an innocent person suffer that you could be free not just from your deaths or your sins but your responsibilities you could cast your sins on escape I don't just oppose that disgusting belief I chose the Judaism from which it's plagiarized and the Islam that plagiarizes from it and I give a publicity and exposure whenever I can to this who were brave enough in old times to oppose this this nightmarish belief and one of the great opponents of the Islamic totalitarianism in ancient Persia was the great Omar Khayyam perhaps the greatest poet of Persia whose Rubaiyat I'm sure is known at least to some of you and my favorite verse of this comes from the Robert legaly own translation and it takes the form of a question that the quatrain is in the form of question it says and do you think that onto such as you a maggot minded starved fanatic crew God gave a secret and denied it me well well what matters it believe that to to this magnificent astronomer and scientists and physician and humanists of Persia who opposed the cruel sadistic verminous ignorant mullahs of his day I borrow the question what is your authority for saying that you know something that I don't Chris Wragge probability argument as you said before you can't disprove the existence of God and you can't prove beyond any doubt that there's a God I'm giving probability I'm giving cosmological teleological moral consciousness reason Mattox all of those things I listed before it's open the evidence is open to everybody and this is related to your 70,000 years a point that you've just made there from a Christian perspective God has always had a revelation even before Christ it talks about the fact that God has always had a witness there's three witnesses there's creation everyone has creation there's conscience everyone has conscience and there's Christ now Christ's true only came 2,000 years ago but his sacrifice how some published on again excuse me his sacrifice of atonement his retroactive to everybody lived before him so he's always had a witness it is quite convenient and that is the very nature of God you're absolutely correct well I got him to say it you see if we were if we were only discussing ontological questions that would be all very well and it could be quite amusing I could say that you require a high degree of standard of proof for your proposition than I perhaps do for mine and you probably accept that and so forth and we could go back and forth we'd be pull Turing again with the essence of the matter which is this the difference between the theist and the deus is as follows the deer says may not make sense without some kind of designer the theist says when I tell you what to do Christopher I have God on my side you're the deer says he can tell what God wants of me what lengths I should shave off the end of my penis if I'm a boy or have a male child or of the clitoris if it's a female child he knows through the exactitude what the proportions of that should be what the diet should be what the dietary laws ought to be who I should sleep with and in what position and various other you can and since God doesn't ever directly appear and say do it this way it's done for him this is really convenient by human representatives who claim to act in his name so that's why I think your standard of proof should be a great deal higher because if you you you know the reason this point is important to you is because it would mean real power in the only world that actually exists which is the material world of you over me and you wonder why I'm not keen okay the the material world is all that exists that thought that you just mentioned Christopher the material world that all that exists is that thought material and if it is why is it true that sounds like as mystery to me but I mean I I certainly think that that everything that I am a capable of thinking saying feeling and so forth does depend on my continued existence as a what should we say mass of molecules or you know I should shoot me in the head and Ike I can't go on like this and I won't be coming back to bother you either question sure nor am i going anywhere after that Sam Chris I don't wish it otherwise by the way I don't worship God gives you what you desire

Channel: Melvin Olontha

Views: 1,102,358

Keywords: Christopher, Hitchens, Turek, god, VCU, debate, atheism, deism, theism, wishful, thinking, christianity, Dawkins, Humanism, argument, church, power, christian, fundamentalism, evangelical

Id: 3pJ-rWaEyw0

Length: 5min 31sec (331 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 22 2008