Hitchens v. Hitchens: Faith, Politics, and War

this program is brought to you by grand valley state university well good evening i'm gleaves whitney the moderator of this evening's debate and i'm the director of the halenstein 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 imminent 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 payne 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 is 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 that 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 evening's 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 10 minutes well thank you can you hear me that's right then and good evening or assalamu 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'm going 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 uh 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 i can offer you one small thrill which is that it seems to me uh and it seems 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 will be the last time we shall ever do this turning to the subject under discussion uh the war in iraq i don't want to make this too easy for myself because it seems to me that it is actually a fantastically easy position to take first of all i'll confess that at the 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 an 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 and would have expected myself to support it is that and this is bandicam in 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 its saints were the pilots of the battle of britain its god was winston churchill and it suffused 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 on 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 i'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 u.s marines intent on rescuing a country in desperate desperate straits and the subsequent failure despite the enormous good intentions of 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 uh a rear admiral of the united states navy and of course i feel rather strongly about navy's because of my parentage was portrayed on the television addressing his ship's 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 a 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 said repeatedly that i i didn't like this war and i would get angry emails phone calls and letters saying that i was unpatriotic and wrong and i would send back one thing to most of these people which was kipling's recessional and admiral keating's outburst made me think most strongly of that that particular passage we lose while i should have written this down remembered it i remembered it earlier on drunk with sight of power we lose wild tongues that have not the in or and of the wreaking 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 of my own country at the end of the 19th century embarking on the boer war and ending essentially its imperial power by its over-winning 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 that i was wrong this was an idealist war it was an idealist war supported by idealists for the best of reasons and it 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 10 minutes and i'll take all the nine and a half of them um it goes by the way if drunk with sight of power we loose l double osc wild tongues that have not the in or 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 are 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 um now listen uh 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 uh memorial service for william f buckley at saint 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 uh 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 discombobulated still um 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 aft 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 endured a long armistice between two terrifying resumptions 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 those resumptive 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 saying so rather reassuring we are both here after all and determined to testify now on this question about the mesopotamian war um everybody knows why they oppose it don't they everyone's clear on what their reasons are um we were told wrong things were given inaccurate information by dubious governments we were sort of cheated into a feeling that we our delegations of the un uh had overstated the matter of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism in fact when you think about it um 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 what they're talking about you hear that said quite a lot they don't know they don't know what fascism feels like they don't know what it's like to see families forced at gunpoint to applaud the torture and 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 they don't know what it's like to see at least that number of shia 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 uh muslim excuse me the islamic conference and of the united nations abolishing it annexing it making it part of iraq they don't they didn't hear the speech from saddam hussein 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 around first get the nuclear weapon that at the two the uh reactor which we found as a result of the kuwait war when we weren't 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 uh as complacent as we were in the meantime fighters in northern and southern iraq were fighting against a charity 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 statecraft as one of the things that american soldiers male and female and politicians who voted for it those who've defended it will be proudest of in the future of 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 state 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 that cannot be left to 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 that 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 shia iran and wahhabi saudi arabia does anyone think this is a matter of indifference is anyone willing to get up and say you sir very good for you i admire your nerve i wouldn't mind if you were the only one as you seem to be you're indifferent to it um the rest of us here voters and consumers or believers in uh freedom might possibly want to take the view that it can't be for us a nothing question what happens to iraq we'll add one in the remaining time that we have brought one of the great uh war criminals of the world to justice and put him and his crime family and his main uh 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 cell phone or a satellite dish that we have undone what unesco calls the greatest crime against the human ecology ever committed the destruction of the marshes of uh 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 uh proclaimed the autonomy of the kurdish people the oldest uh largest uh nation in the world not to have a state of their own and that where they live in their federalized uh democratized provinces in northern iraq which were released from saddam hussein's control uh a full 12 years before the liberation of the rest of the country business flourishes press flourishes democracy flourishes civil society flourishes 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 in time i'm willing 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 all have all your work still ahead of you and you thought it was going to be easy didn't you bye now thank you christopher peter the next five minutes are yours thank you the lesser 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 could 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 parliaments 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 misgoverned where there are despots whether it's torture where there 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 do not nor if we're terribly tender about the massacres of uh of arabs by arabs or the citizens of arab states by other united states why is it that we accept it as our allies in the first gulf war the state of syria whose 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 none of 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 kabbalah 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 i was 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 uh seems a waste of hitchensism in a way to just reduce things to the balance sheet but we do balance sheet we'll do balance sheet properly um let me uh suggest some things to you first um everybody knows there isn't a single clever person here who doesn't know is there watching this on a webcast who doesn't know that you can't mention weapons of mass destruction and and saddam in the same breath even though he used them against uh against uh 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 govern this question in the case of iran 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 anna or jack shirak where did where did colonel gaddafi come a 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 have been he didn't come to kofi anna hold your applause comrades i know i'm never going to get any from um but thanks for thanks for trying um i sort of appreciate it um he didn't come to kofi anna no jacques shirak or or the prostituted uh equally prostituted gerhard schroeder the real blood for oil pimps and prostitutes uh who constituted the leadership of the anti-war movement in european politics no he came to tony blair and he came to george bush i give up okay let's have a look at this big stock pal that colonel gaddafi's got all this time um 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 with 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 cat as it's called in washington we discover from this capitulation the aq car network we shut it down or at least we put its leader under house arrest at least 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 u.s 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 avoided arrest when he was caught had to be released because he was traveling on a a diplomatic passport a what passport a what passport a diplomatic passport what diplomatic possible an iraqi diplomatic passport just like abu nidal had been traveling on justice like 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 offenses too because just as china has backed saddam hussein and just as it backs robert mugabe and just as it's backed the worst elements in burma so it has been behind many of our woes in um 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 nonproliferation treaty iraq has used weapons of mass destruction on its own territory on the church of others third you may uh lose your sovereignty if you give aid comfort and harbor to international terrorist groups iraq is multiply convicted of this and fourth for occupying and invading the territory of other nations which iraq had done several times continued 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 can if you're gonna 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 some of which i know more about than you could dare to know i know things about what went wrong that would 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 80 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 okay you mean you're ready for another burst from okay that's there's something wrong with this coin toss business um okay let me see i don't think that's going to take 10 minutes to disprove the existence of god um the the atheist proposition is the following most of the time it may not be said 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 lucretius and democritus and the original anti-theistic uh 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 uh 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 more elegant explanations even if you can get yourself laptop 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 away or have sworn away 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 for 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 um 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 gravaman 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 it's an excellent thing that there's no reason to believe in the absurd propositions i just uh admittedly rather briefly rehearse to you um 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 convict you of thought crime 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 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 necrocracy athanatocracy is one short of a trinity i might add the sun 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 upon a right action or right thing without celestial divine permission we would not know right from wrong if we did not have heaven's uh 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 uh the great unassailable dictator and throne what what what could abolish our integrity what could abolish our honesty our decency our dignity more than that the second third uh is a little more pragmatic um 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 revolved around the sun uh we didn't know that there were microorganisms that explained disease we thought diseases came from curses or witches or uh ill-wishing or uh devils or dust devils we know anything from the childish terrified ignorant uh origins of our animal primate species becomes religion it's also our first attempt at philosophy our first attempt at morality our first attempt at healthcare actually but because it was our first it is 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 uh where once it probably was an aid to our survival um a really great peril to our continued ability to live as a civilized species thus it seems to me that in point of its uh proposing of a totalitarian solution to what is after all a real problem to its ghastly uh 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 or the i or the or the demand that without circumcision there can be no redemption just just picture it and then i'll i'll give you one final thought experiment this is what you have to believe now if you're a monotheist because we now know things we didn't used to know we know that the human species could be as not just 200 000 years ago from the cro-magnons and the um uh the rival premiums could be as little as a hundred richard dawkins thinks two hundred thousand francis collins who did the human genome project he's by the way cs lewis kind of christian thinks a hundred thousand 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 two hundred thousand years first few tens of thousands infant mortality rife microorganism disease terrifying earthquakes uh volcanoes extraordinary but and fights over land over territory over food over women over tribalism frightening to you for 95 96 000 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 of the middle east it's 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 it does if there is a single person in this room who can bring themselves to believe anything remotely like that they convict themselves of being first very stupid and second very immoral and thus it seems to me that the case for divine intervention for the supernatural falls and that we should be glad that it's fallen and thank you peter 10 minutes ten minutes uh yeah um well i i i can tell you're all enjoying the post saddam era which uh which we were told was so good i i wonder whether an invasion of uh the uh celestial regions might now uh 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 calling 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 incurious 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 the picking out of that which is bad what i do not i do not think that this sorry did you wish to intervene no sir please tell him i'm not sure you're sure i mean i need to know absolutely of course in a more generous tone it would have been less fun to do and who knows there might have been other consequences in the bookshops i don't know but since it wasn't catched 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 surprised you 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 uh no um could no believer take which is unbelievable 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 of the universe apart from a series of accidents then you may behave exactly as you wish now in the case of christopher 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 of very pleasant cities and they are able 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's home in oxford to find a large number of highly practical atheists in my country it is 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 from 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 180 000 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 to that 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 god 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 eat of this fruit and ye shall be as god 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 will know 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 i'm telling that human solidarity is a way of 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 uh 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 manners 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 begun to happen to me in britain i i'm i'm i'm walking down the the 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 very long if the public morality is declining and i say there are three stages of this as the whole is solipsistic i will do what i want when there's nothing but left and 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 there's port and starboard and there's four and off but they change when the ship moves and then there's the universal one which flows from the universe where there is 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 is it why seek to bring it down why mock it why make silly jokes about circumcision this is far more important than that i really do wish he treated seriously for once well i i know it's easy to sneer but still someone has to do it and if you like i will stop with the uh circumcision which you think is a trivial thing i mean have you ever talked to anyone or interviewed anyone who's been subjected to female genital mutilation because of god's will you wouldn't think you wouldn't say it was trivial or tease if you had let alone to the number of boy children who die every year because of the covenant the hideous covenant that's imposed upon them by mosaic law which also i might add celebrates every year in all three monotheisms the decision of a 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 any one of you who's prepared to show how much you love god and appreciate true north by holding a knife to your firstborn's 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 does have a few gears of religion because after all you know in the in this veil of tears let's do that but it's been reviewed very seriously by many bishops many rabbis by the pope's uh 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 comedies and friends in the idea of vicarious redemption or you do not and you either 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 responsibility away or you don't think so i think vicarious 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 allowed it say oh i don't think you can do it probably i can i'll serve your term i'll do that for you but to say i'll take your sins away you never committed them they're you're washed white as snow and 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 agree to be called sheep anyone here want to stand up and say i'm a sheep i'm a lamb good for you anyone else good for the rest of you fine sheep you are um it's not usually that easy uh 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 red shift of edwin hubble is not a an expanding rate that is slowing down as newton would have had us believe there's 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 reid lawrence crowe says peace in the current scientific america wouldn't 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 it's tomorrow 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 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 futiling and chaotic planning and or and probably both extreme cruelty callousness and indifference towards those who he summoned into existence and made to suffer these points cannot be overthrown by any kind of casualty and certainly we're not even challenged by the kazooistical efforts you just heard thank you peter five minutes uh less i hope um the knife at the throat was not used and that is the point of the story why else is it told the those one of the fascinating things about those who who seek to sweep christianity out of this society and one of the things in crystal's book which is actively repellent and the only thing in 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 a man sticking a knife towards 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 this failure of 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 cause no they didn't do it because they were christians because they were something else and if if societies do anything bad then it the the 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 christians 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 i think it's very well exemplified in this in this misrepresentation of one of the central stories in in the bible well uh my fellow uh sheep like americans um is it not the case that uh in the matter of the aid the muslim sacrifice or in the matter of the abrahamic sacrifice of isaac that the first test the father must pass is to show his god that he's at least willing to do it uh 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 sado-masochistic 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 toying of with by the dictator of uh 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 my brother has written very well in in england and in indeed elsewhere about the awful nihilism and uh relativism that uh has poisoned so much of our social and national uh collective life i have more agreement with him on this then perhaps he understands but to say that this is to be equated with uh atheism is simply to misunderstand what nihilism and relativism mean and that's very i think i can make this point relatively simply um someone who says uh 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 satanists are not atheists by definition their satanic majesties are not non-entities um uh is saying uh 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 abuse any nightmare of violence and shame to be yours and to be proud of it too now i have two challenges that peter's despised in the past but i'm 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 to this question which i've now asked in print many times in public many times radio tv any any number of times you don't yet have an answer to name me moral action performed or moral action recommended or moral statement made by a believer name me one by a true believer in 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'll have thought of two or three more the connection between religion and morality proposed by the believers in supernatural dictatorship is thoroughly utterly morally null 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 oh yeah i was just going to say i mean i can think of 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 get i didn't i didn't get that this would you want do you mind saying that i don't mind at all you may remember i didn't i just didn't hear it i'm sorry i'm not trying to be funny no no i i i resigned if you recall from the daily express uh about seven years ago when it was taken over by a man whose main business was pornography i was slightly surprised a few weeks ago to find that uh a column written by you appeared in one of his newspapers but that isn't a response to either challenges i mean i submit myself to 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 two one is an exorcism to throw out a devil couldn't be performed by a non-believer a better try than the one peter's just come out with but a bit of a tortology and the second that i got only yesterday from a very thoughtful writer uh of a letter from i think georgia atlanta georgia is um could john dunn one of my favorite poets along with george herbert registered have written the songs and sermons if he had not been a believer the answer to 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 the fact that i don't know the answer to the second question means that the answer hasn't been proposed by the proposed answer to the first one let alone by peter's lame attempt to complain about the fact that my column is more widely syndicated than his peter did you want to respond more widely and promiscuously syndicated however widely i was syndicated i wouldn't want it there well thank you that concludes part one of our debate and is advertised i think it was provocative as we anticipated part two 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 cue over here let's go ahead and start with you yes ma'am hello hello okay we can hear you professor higgins um can you i heard you correct someone in a previous talk and tell can you speak on what you see is the relationship between self-interest enlightened self-interest and morality and morality the lady in case it wasn't audible to all the lady asks if i will comment on the relationship between light and self-interest and morality my line is not uh that taken by um for example iron rand um that the selfishness is a virtue um on its own uh i don't believe in the abnegation of the personality i don't believe in the horrible christian idea of of of masochism um modesty self-sacrifice self-hatred the endless confessions of of sin and worthlessness any more than i believe in the equally vile quranic idea that were made not out of dust but out of clots of blood by a by a celestial dictator but i think that probably we are innately selfish enough to begin with um because of the process of evolution by natural selection that we don't need additionally to cultivate our own selfishness and the the the trick the clue and the odd thing and the thing that comes to people strangely naturally is this um they understand about human solidarity i'll just take i'll just give you two examples one from each testament the uh 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 archaeological evidence none of that ever occurred but the idea that um 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 shackle drop is of course an insult to our decency and our integrity they couldn't have got that far or been a people of any kind if they had been under any other impression so this is innate in us and it comes to our solidarity our humanity our brother and sisterhood the second is from the new so-called new testament the the samaritan so-called the man from samaria who wouldn't see someone just lie bleeding and 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 you're surf 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 um oscar wilde in the soul of man under socialism puts it very beautifully he says socialism would free us from the awful necessity of living for others uh 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 and the conservatives why give them baths the poor are so ignorant and stupid they won't even know how to use them uh they'll keep coal in 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 bath for my sake that's the right mix of self-interest and morality and it works too 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 rape them and torture them and then hope we'll call it abuse no the priesthood must get out of the way for this argument to become grown up that's 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 what what's what reason do you have to suppose that any action is right apart from that which suits you there is none and and and you and you can have mine you may borrow with pleasure uh the morality of the religious if you wish to do so but to pretend that by doing so you're not borrowing it is an untruth and i 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 you're going to clap that you clap that stand up who clapped that okay we have other people who want to ask questions let's move on to our next questionnaire uh dr hitchens uh what question is truth real and if so how do you determine it excuse me it's my fault i stepped on your line would you mind repeating your question it was brief i think is truth real does it exist if so how do you determine it once more is truth real and if so how do you determine okay we're having attack relativism on purpose i should maybe uh specify precisely what i meant to say it's a famous line as you know what is truth asked suggesting pontius pilate and did not stay for an answer well it's a long stay if you do stay for it what what i believe to be the case is that the there is a difference between fair-mindedness um impartiality even-handedness and objectivity which is the search for the truth and the willingness to say that upon coming upon an uncomfortable truth if it was that one's own expense meant one had to change one's own opinion or analysis well 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 um and without the obligation to seek it uh very intensely and very seriously one would be in a rudderless world a world without true north if you like but the uh as rabbi hillel says the the you the task may be unattainable but that does not mean you can give it up rabbi hello by the way who is the author of the golden rule which the christians often claim to be their own uh wrongly falsely lyingly um and doubly falsely actually because the obligation to love others as yourself is an unattainable one and it's sinister for that reason because you're demanded it's demanded of you that you that you do the impossible thus you'll always be falling short thus you'll always be in sin thus you'll always be guilty thus you'll always have to confess thus you'll always be in the claws of the priests um that's the trick as uh as it's said by phil greville you're created sick and commanded to be well this is a sado masochistic 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 at least 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 had better stand up and tell me that i need a god to tell me that peter did you want to respond okay we have a question up in the balcony yes this is a question for professor hitchens again um doctor fair enough on your uh your website and in your books uh 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 um excuse 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 the so-called faith-based initiative to be a surreptitious violation of the same i should say for sincere believers that um 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 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 the churches mustn't be corrupted by this association with the state either and i think that's an equally morally valid point um james madison the co-author of the virginia statute on religious freedom and of the first amendment and the other things that bodyguard our 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 over them 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 has joined some reactionary evangelical organization john mccain to try and book bills to her faith-based connections john mccain a lifelong episcopalian has this year i wonder why said he's a baptist and uh barack obama senator obama has been caught in some big mouth sinister wind bag rock and roll horror show church on the south side religion religion is poisoning religion is poisoning our election and our democratic republic and its time that we've said enough if you want to be if you want to be a fraud and a fundraiser and a and a shakedown artist and a big mouth and an ethno racist 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 uh 200 or so years ago that um we in britain would not intervene in united states politics and i feel i should uh uphold this tradition but there is one small point here there's a tremendous air of challenge and bravery and uh and uh hurling uh 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 not in my own particularly terrifying force to combat or one which is capable of crushing a dissenter 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 man-made 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 how should i say no i won't say it well let's make it i've warned you before about this clapping business um since that's a challenge uh 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 uh secular atheist magazine i contribute to regular columns who's saying that it disturbs me to see how much the green movement is taking on the um linumens of a religion that the human species has an original sin in other words existing um uh making smoke um other things that upset the air um that it will be punished for this that uh an armageddon or an apocalypse is on its way uh that if all don't understand this that there could be terrible punishments and that there's only one true way out of it no i've already written that i don't like the tone of this at all just in case this you don't have to read you don't have to read everything i write you don't but you guys 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 uh with a question professor christopher hitchens 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 and and uh you you asked this audience uh 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 yes now i quite see i quite understand your point and my my uh will be the following um and i hope you're ready for it and there's i'll do my best and those who did that clapping thing that they still haven't uh is this everything the united states has done in iraq has been imperial since 1968 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 bad enough a fascist party with some stalinist inflections but the saddam was saying wing of it in power in baghdad that's how the cia claimed to have acted in 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 a handshake over their dead bodies that was just as 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 with through with american intelligence supplied by satellite through saudi arabia that they would uh achieve a swift victory over the iranians and probably recover the arabic-speaking territories of kuzastan of persia for iraqi control that war we reckon i've been to the cemeteries in iran and in baghdad of that war probably not less than a million and a half casualties i'm just i haven't factored in all the casualties 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 policy okay i knew i wouldn't get any applause but i just want you to know that's what i think is the distinction no no please that's the distinction now that 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 and imperialist right did advocate because these are the saudi lobby who are the core of imperialism in my hometown of washington they said no leave saddam hussein 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 fairly simple that to launch an aggressive war uh is different from not launching an aggressive war and if if you can't deal with it if you can't tell the difference then it's difficult to know where to begin uh but i think i was accused of casualty a few minutes ago and i think i can now return the accusation well all right next question hi i was gonna ask christopher a question but it's christopher alex mr christopher but i i it's getting very informative i think i'll ask i'll ask peter a 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 how do you place that in your religious belief and your answer i think is it'll it'll speak volumes about i'm not sure how how it's supposed to i you you'll have to explain this is there something i should if you hold the fossils if you hold a fossil in your hand or if you look at a fossil in a new natural history museum you're you're a you're a believer obviously that 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 at i just don't peter okay professor hitchens i'm sure i'm sure christopher can help you well if you don't the last time we discussed this and i don't hold you to it i got the impression that you had some sympathy for the argument that it's 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 can't possibly have not solved that point by the way well if you say no so what what what actually is the question you said i'll answer it well that's a good question it's just a general question about if you walk into a natural history museum and you see these fossils well back to the museum do you think there's any merit to intelligent design to me the two cannot they cannot it's either one or the other it's just an honest one one word or one water one give it up give it up are we at an impasse we'll get it sorry well i don't believe in the young earth you don't then how then how can you um what if we what if the question was do you think intelligent design is an argument with merit so pretend that was the question so sorry it's these microphones actually i'd like to know what you think so like do you think that intelligent design is an argument a case that has merit uh yes i think it's an interesting skeptical current and i think that uh it's it deserves to be discussed fairly it's interesting in my country you can go into almost any bookshop and the the shelves are groaning with the works of richard dawkins denouncing the uh the the terrible people uh 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 thing to be discussed i have no idea how the realm of nature took its present shape nor has he 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 is interesting and i think it's one of the other things which is fascinating is the way in which the the uh what what i might call the uh the darwinist lobby exalts currently over the recent court case uh in which it managed to suppress uh any teaching of the existence of the theory of intelligent design now the case which the dominance used to exult over quite rightly was the scopes case so ably misrepresented in the film inherit the wind in which it was the bone-headed literal bible literalist 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 exhausting 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 there's there isn't i think there is a ghost to a point there but it's only this goes it's following that that evolution occurred uh is conclusively verified by the record of molecular biology and of fossil record um 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 uh something that's completely consensual and the darwinian theory of natural selection is only so far the uh least contested of those explanations and stephen j gould for example of whom i was something of a friend and a great admirer and richard dawkins who's also a friend of mine 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 there can be equal time for the opposite theory in a science class is as force as to say well children the chemistry period is over now after the break we'll be doing our alchemy class or um your astronomy teacher is off today but your astrology alternate uh can check in nonsense 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 piece debates one in oxford in the late victorian people between bishop wilberforce and thomas huxley the inventor of the term agnostic about darwinism and the second in tennessee um in the 1920s uh 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 darwinism equal time is that what the president wants i am sure i know the answer to that thank you you're a fine american christopher come up here we need a microphone upstairs please try it again sir please do um is oh i'm sorry i did not hear that well was that was that was audible to everybody wasn't it you first i i i really couldn't hear it i'm sorry okay i'll show you he said what about subjective experience if someone says i had a religious experience and i went on to do a noble action shouldn't we credit that to religion would that be a fair process of your question sir he says yes i have an answer but i'm sure you do too uh i suppose doesn't seem to present any difficulties to 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 is um is william james's varieties of religious experience where which is by the way is a trope you come up against a lot with c.s 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 um enlightenment and uh miracles that other people experience and you you don't understand the numiness in other words and i 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 in their instruments if they're going to be if they 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 from design leaves us and all the others where we started silva 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 uh atheists blaming christians for all the horrors and depressions that have taken 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 thoughtless in this is absurd and indefensible but i would very strongly argue that far more good has been done by religious belief than harm and that's great harm is likely to be done to our civilization by an abandoned religious belief sir our next question i was just at a philosophical luncheon at the university of chicago where they teach your brand of atheism and 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 a man who'd 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 100 to 200 million people they did 90 million people in one locking up two provinces in the north and they preached atheism and trotsky went and 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 this is this is this is your thing atheism will kill there is no difference sir we need to excuse me sir sir we need a question please he's gonna made a perfectly good question it's how can you defend anything i mean you know how can there be you say that atheism won't kill i mean if you bring atheism back in a government it will kill as many people no the question of by the way i thought it was a perfectly well phrased question to be an atheist doesn't guarantee you against being a sadist or nihilist or a fascist or a stalinist or a maoist though it's slightly unlikely i think you'd be a fascist or a national socialist but it's it's i would say a a necessary condition for enlightenment not a sufficient one um and i'll take your question seriously in the following way um 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 um to start with the the original 20th century totalitarian ideology which originally called itself fascism if in any account you read of fascism historical account you read from its origins in italy uh through spain portugal croatia hungary slovakia et cetera if you take out the word fascists and put catholic right wing it's the same story there's no difference and if you add politic 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 tezo in almost every case the regime was in holy orders and or with the direct alliance with um 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 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 concordat 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 uh joseph goebbels was expelled from the catholic church he was he was the only nazi he was why was he expelled for marrying a divorced protestant magda goebbels you see the church does have its standards however no it is estimated by paul johnson catholic historian that more than 40 percent of the vaf and ss were practicing confessing catholics no one was ever excommunicated or threatened with excommunication for taking part in financially 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 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 power ordinary secular power that is and he's the head of the russian orthodox church as well as the you shouldn't be in the dictatorship business if you can't take advantage of a well a deep well of credulity and servility like that it's your golden opportunity what does he do heresy trials heresy trials witch hunts miraculous discoveries such as lysenko's biology the worship of the leader from whom all blessings flow as i describe north korea the most religious state i've ever seen um mutant is mutants 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 and fell into tyranny and slavery and famine and torture and then we'll be on a level playing field as it is all you've done is show that the idea of worship and the idea of credulity 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 kings by the way the russian the russian orthodox church always stayed with stalin always david's telling him 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 no zara ever did that no no christian czar ever did any killing well excuse me they started the first world war they started the pogroms they brought the protocols of the elders of zion to that was imported by tsarist secret policemen to national socialist 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 uh in the wars that czarism started and carried on and the persecutions and the famines and the tortures and the starvation and 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 the most recent genocide we've seen in europe entirely done by by a russian and serbian orthodox fascists and catholic uh croatian mustachio 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 who've opposed this kind of barbaric stuff are on all fours with these creeps don't you should take it back you owe me an apology you lose boy chick you lose poetry please hey civility civility civility is overrated not here it's not peter 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 evasiveness 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 atheists are very fond of was that of the french revolutionary terror which ended by executing so many people that what is now the plaster like concorde was ankle deep in blood and the executioners were too tired and disgusted to continue with their work as for the soviet union in which i lived for two and a half years in 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 are no 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 especially 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 deliberately 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 false 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 current kgb thug tyrannizer of the ukraine uh georgia and the baltics uh displacement of sovereignty sponsoring the filthy synthesis 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 it 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 or state or country or nation that adopts the teachings of of spinoza and einstein and jefferson and payne and that fell into massacre and tyranny and you can't do it and so you have to look for 10th rate substitutes well it's an impossible i i can find you a regime which is being supported which attempted to execute him as a as gratitude for his support and so can you the the point is you 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 this was in some way a religious phenomenon is no it's not it's an absurdity to to to to to believe it is to is to is to reveal a creature a credulity driven by an unreasoning faith in god every um every every uh modern state has had to go through a period of declericalization of one kind of violence or another um the cromwellian revolution the henry there's just this uh dissolution of the monasteries uh the wars in spain the uh the wars in italy uh the french revolution which you mentioned they all have to go through it it's usually in 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 uh the test of humanistic secular atheist values has been conducted until you've had that conducted fairly 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 you a national socialist no i don't no i don't i would know how to if i was capable of a low blow but as you know i'm not peter any last response no it's it's obviously futile our last invincible 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 sir i must be honest well the the the the concern i have is that how can we sustain uh a modern secular response to medieval fundamentalist atrocities and and how can we convince our politicians to take a secular modern approach to uh thinking about these things and educating the populace about them um there's something slightly faint about the question i have to say i'm going to assume i know what you mean by fundamentalists if we take the best known current political dispute in which this country is involved i suppose and the oldest one and the best understood it would probably be the question of palestine okay where they've been there has been for some time a conflict between two nationalisms approximately equivalent size of peoples jewish and arab um over a piece of land about the size of wales um with the great and quite just claims emotionally just claims on both of their parts going back quite a long time um for a long time now the solution to this very uh difficult matter seemed to many people to be something like a partition an award of roughly half each 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 of most of the israeli voting public of the vast majority of american jews of the un of the european union of the international community and stuff and it makes a rough kind of sense it's not brilliant but it's it's thinkable it's not insane why can't we get what everyone 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 didn't award all that but not to you to the muslims only and there are enough of them to make certain there cannot be a solution and just as if that 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 firsts in their origin genocidal in 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 eschatologists 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 turned to ash as will 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 christopher it's my unhappy task to have to call the question time to an end now uh thank you very much peter and christopher hitchens for very lively and provocative debate told him not 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 thank him for the financial support and all the enthusiasm and hard work that that institution brought to this event two 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 kinshi 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 howenstein who just celebrated his 96th birthday thank you ralph thank you all we are adjourned the preceding program is copyrighted by grand valley state university visit us at gvsu.edu

Channel: GVSU

Views: 502,377

Rating: 3.8972037 out of 5

Keywords: Iran, war, God, atheism, Iraq war, politics, Hitchens v. Hitchens: Faith, Politics, and War, gvsu

Id: sNlskhOlYBY

Length: 122min 23sec (7343 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2010