Is God a Dictator? | Analysing Christopher Hitchens

it is a totalitarian belief it is the wish to be a Slave it is the desire that they're being unalterable unchallengeable tyrannical Authority who can convict you a 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 [Applause] has such a ghastly fate I've been to North Korea 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 foreign the most unique and characteristic argument that Christopher Hitchens ever made about religion is his famous depiction of God as a Celestial dictator God doesn't exist but even if he did this would be a terrible Injustice since it would amount to us living under a tyrannical dictatorship comparable to living in North Korea I remember being impressed by this argument when I first heard it not least because it was usually presented as if it was part of a stand-up comedy routine it's also terribly confronting why would we desire to be constantly surveilled why would anybody want there to be an unquestionable authority but in the spirit of good faith and in a continuing effort to distance myself from my wannabe Hitchens phase I wanted to explore this particular argument and look at some of the ways that it might be responded to I'm increasingly suspicious that it really works as an argument at all and I think it might demonstrate both a misunderstanding of the wrongness of dictatorship and also the nature of God but I'm not sure we'll see how we do to begin analyzing this we need to ask a question that might sound sounds strange but is very rarely asked in political conversation what's actually wrong with dictatorship but first a word from today's video sponsor morningbrew morning Brew is a free 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the QR code that's on your screen it's as simple as that and you'll have a more informed start to your morning back to the video okay so what's wrong with dictatorship that is if it is wrong what makes it wrong why is it a bad idea to give a single individual ultimate authority over the Affairs of citizens and the laws that govern them after all throughout history and in some places today people have been highly receptive to dictatorships they can have considerable public support there are more stable form of government than one that can completely change every few years they're also seen as more effective at getting things done compared to the long and drawn out process of debating legislation and elections and democracy order [Applause] I must ask the honorable gentleman order as has sometimes been said of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini he made the trains run on time in Plato's Republic a foundational philosophical text that imagines a hypothetical perfect city-state we're introduced to the concept of a philosopher king who Plato thought was the best possible leader of this perfect Republic this would not be someone who is elected by the people but rather someone trained from birth to have a genuine knowledge of Truth and goodness which makes them best placed to rule a nation they're not corrupt they're not trying to impress they're just actually the best people for the job this sounds a lot like dictatorship so what's the problem with this ideally we would have a dictator who knows what's best for his or her citizens cares for the interests of those citizens has a good understanding of Truth and goodness and takes decisive action in producing the best and most stable Society this would be far better and simpler to live under than Trump versus Biden and unending election campaigns you know voting for the legislature and the president and council elections mayoral elections ah of course it would of course this would be better but the problem is that this is a pipe dream few if any human beings are capable in practice of beings such a dictator indeed even Plato recognizes that whilst philosopher kings are hypothetically the ideal rulers it's not obvious that they could actually exist in practice the problem with dictatorship is the fallibility of the dictator sure a perfect dictator sounds fantastic but of course dictators are also humans and humans are simply never perfect because of this in practice dictatorships are prone to falling into disaster without sufficient means to hold one to account a dictator can exercise cruel and arbitrary power he can become tyrannical and oppressive he can be corrupt or malicious or both and even if we find a dictator with genuinely pure intentions you can still simply get things factually wrong make a mistake and accidentally lead his country into ruin because nobody could stop him these are the fears that compel people to reject dictatorship the Americans overthrew the British Monarchy because the Monarch was unjustly taxing them the Allies overthrew Nazism because Hitler was a murderous cruel expansionist the true evil of dictatorship always lies in the evil of the dictate hater but what if we could have a perfect dictator what if we could be governed by a being who was genuinely perfect hopefully you can see the point by now if the problem with dictatorship in the first place is the fallibility and corruptability and imperfection of the dictator than a necessarily infallible and Incorruptible and perfect dictator would seemingly not be something to worry about at least not in the same way and this seems to me the problem with Christopher Hitchens drawing an analogy between human beings and God remember you might think that the idea of God is silly or that God doesn't exist but Hitchens isn't arguing about the existence of God he's just saying that if it were the case that such a god existed it would be a bad thing but if the reason it would be a bad thing is because it would be analogous to a dictatorship then when we consider that what it is that seems to make human dictatorships evil and wrong is something about being human that is corruptability evil malice if these things don't apply to God then the analogy simply doesn't work indeed if there were a person who genuinely new with 100 certainty infallibly what was best for you better than you could ever hope to know yourself and genuinely wanted the best for you and gave you commands and guidance about how to live in the best possible way then provided this person is genuinely invaluable and genuinely benevolent it would be perfectly irrational not to do everything that person told you to and this of course is a description of God an all-knowing all-powerful and all-loving being who actually knows what's best for you and actually wants it of course you could respond that the gods of world religions are not perfectly moral they're not benevolent like the Christian God commanding genocide in the Old Testament or condemning homosexuals and the like but Hitchens isn't making a point about a particular God he's making the point that in principle the existence of an omniscient God in general is a terrible thing Hitchens is claiming that even the existence of the god that Christians claim to believe in that is one who is triumni meaning omnipotent omniscient and omnibenevolent would be a terrible tyranny that just seems to me to misunderstand what it is that makes dictatorship so unfavorable we can see this in how Hitchens casually conflates dictatorship with tyranny and treats them as if they mean the same thing when they don't a dictator is simply someone who has absolute power over a country a tyrant is someone who exercises that power in a cruel and oppressive or unreasonable or arbitrary manner if a perfect God existed then even if he could be described as a dictator it would be difficult to describe him as a tyrant since a loving God would certainly not be cruel and oppressive and it would be impossible for him to be unreasonable being a perfectly rational being once you're talking about God you're no longer talking about a being who is susceptible to the things that make dictatorships tyrannical and just before we move on here's something interesting for you just listen to the following exchange between Christopher Hitchens and a radio host so what if God actually exists sir would he not have been good to you no uh he wouldn't because if that were true it would mean that I had an eternal supervising parent who would never die and let me get on with my life never let me grow up keep me under surveillance but you have some supervision every every minute of my life and constantly asked me to be thanking and praising him yeah living in North Korea I I think it'd be a horrible outcome well not sure that that God is Kim Jong-il but what if what I said is true on Kim Jong-il he has a different opinion a classic and underrated pitch slap but it also seems to sum up the point that I'm trying to make here to risk killing the joke by dissecting the Frog Hitchens is of course mocking Kim Jong-il for thinking he's some kind of God in the way that he acts and behaves and that's precisely the problem with dictatorships human beings attempting to hold an office they could only be reasonably held by a god isn't that interesting but okay isn't there another problem to deal with here sure okay it would be in our interests to follow the dictates of a perfect God but what if freedom isn't that important too even if going against God's guidance would ultimately be bad for us shouldn't we be free to make that choice for ourselves isn't always doing what somebody else tells us incompatible with freedom Hitchens seems to think so um I'd say that the to me what matters most is the pursuit of happiness in the words of our greatest founding father and the pursuit of Liberty freedom and that these things are incompatible completely incompatible with the worship of an unalterable Celestial dictator that makes the concept of the pursuit of freedom of Happiness completely negative it negates it I'm not so sure that this would be the case just because theism is true after all the mere existence of a God who watches over everything and tells you that certain things are right and others are wrong does not remove your freedom to act as you please you can still freely choose to do whatever you like it's just that the existence of a God would mean that whatever you do is noticed and perhaps appropriately punished or rewarded now Hitchens would probably respond to this by saying that actually yes you are essentially forced to act in a particular way because God threatens you with Hellfire if you don't do so not imposed did you really say not imposed what if you reject this offer what are you told by what have you been told for Centuries by Christians if you reject this offer that took place by a means of a torture to death of a human being that you didn't want and should have prevented if you could what if you reject the office if you if you accept it you have eternal life under your sins are forgiven oh great what a horrible way to abolish your own responsibility and get your own Bliss I don't want it oh you don't well then you'd go to hell this is not imposed this is perhaps the most important consideration of this video and that the lot hinges on it in my view if hell does exist and it is a place of infinite torment as a punishment for rejecting God and I think Hitchens is quite right to say that this is enforcement and it does negate human Freedom you're not really acting freely if you've been threatened to act in a particular way it would be like a thief saying sure you can choose not to give me a wallet if you want but I will shoot you in the head if you don't your decision you're not really being offered a choice here but this simply isn't the only conception of what hell is and something which Hitchens needs to consider is that you can be a theist without having this conception of Hell or indeed without thinking hell exists at all for many theists hell is not primarily punitive it's not some kind of way for God to get back at you for the wrong things that you've done in your life indeed that doesn't make much sense given that God can't be harmed in any way by the behavior of humans instead hell is thought of as simply the natural result of sin hell just represents a separation from God it's not some literal place of flames and torture it's just wherever souls go that don't want Union with God and maybe you think that this view of hell is mistaken but there are a great deal of theists who believe in it and if you don't like it consider that there are a lot of theists who don't believe in hell at all or think that hell is merely a metaphor if I were religious I think I'd be inclined towards a position called annihilationism The View that if you don't go to heaven you simply cease to exist altogether one of the reasons that I think this is that religious philosophy often posits God as the ground of all being in the contingency argument he's put forward as the necessary Foundation of everything that exists without which nothing else could exist and so to reject Union with him or to go somewhere where he is not after you die would be to reject being itself and cease to exist because you wouldn't have a ground for your existence anymore but just imagine for a moment that hell is simply the natural result of sin something that God essentially can't help it's just somewhere people send themselves by not living a spiritually good life due to their Free Will as C.S Lewis famously said the gates of hell are locked from the inside or suppose hell doesn't exist or suppose hell is just a metaphor a representation of the disastrous Earthly sequences of wrong or misguided behavior and suppose that whatever this hell is it's a fate that God desperately wants you to avoid his provision of rules and laws would then not be so much a set of authoritarian dictates but rather an omniscient guide to getting the best possible outcome for yourself that he's giving you because he wants the best for yourself it would be like me going to my friend who's depressed and out of shape and sleeping terribly and their life is just a misery right now I might bang on their door and rather sternly tell them look you need to start waking up at 7am getting some exercise eating properly and sleeping better put your phone down delete tick tock and get outside if you don't you're going to end up in hell you're going to be anxious and sad you're going to be out of shape and addicted to social media and isolated and jobless and believe me you don't want that this isn't me being a dictator threatening my friends to act how I want him to this is me telling my friend how to actualize his potential and free himself from a self-inflicted hell that he doesn't even realize he's falling into and won't be able to fully understand until he tries following my advice indeed there's a strange Paradox in how by restricting the number of options available to himself by deleting Tech talk and not allowing himself to stay up late Etc he actually makes himself more free not less by placing these restrictions on himself and if these kinds of rules and this kind of advice could be provided not by me to my friend but by an omniscient Authority who knows better than you do how to achieve the best outcome for yourself then this might not best be depicted as a constraining tyrannical dictatorship but rather guidance on how to become truly free telling a sinner not to sin might be like telling a smoker not to smoke if somebody has a nicotine addiction and this addiction is constraining their life and preventing them from freely doing what it is that they want to do especially if the smoker doesn't know that smoking is unhealthy or doesn't realize it somebody telling them to stop smoking might seem tyrannical and unjust and a constraint on their freedom but it's at least possible that this order is being given not to constrain but in an attempt to liberate please follow my advice do as I say for your own sake and at least under one interpretation this is what's going on with religious law but because it's coming from an omniscient Authority you can always trust that this being knows what's best for you and has your best interests at heart this would mean that by committing yourself to following his commands about how to best live your life you're not making yourself less free but more free because you're allowing yourself in the sense of positive Liberty described by Isaiah Berlin to achieve self-actualization and self-mastery in the way that by preventing oneself from smoking a cigarette might make them become more free because the addiction was constraining them of course I don't think that sin exists in a religious sense and I think that the sins described by particular world religions are quite ridiculous but in principle the idea that there could be things that we're doing that are ultimately bad but we don't either realize that they're bad or we kind of have a compulsion to do them anyway and the idea that following someone's guidance or commands to stop doing them despite how much we might really want to would actually be better for us and actually give us more freedom rather than less I think is at least consistent for a better understanding of a religious perspective on this issue I recently spoke to Bishop Robert Barron and I'll play you an excerpt of our conversation in which we discussed this particular issue you might understand why Christopher Hitchens describes God as a tyrant because of course you know God is the is the great ground of all being but there's this idea that if you don't accept this or if you put a foot wrong or if you do the wrong thing you get punished and in such a way that even if you do it inside your own head you you have this this force that can punish you for it doesn't that seem tyrannical to you yeah that does but that's not the right way to look at it because see here's something very important philosophically that God doesn't need us God needs nothing God is God the world adds nothing to God's greatness is a very important theological idea God doesn't need my moral perfection God doesn't need anything from me God needs nothing from me so God's offended by what I no that's a psychologized sort of symbol of what we're talking about God the anger of God in the Bible I would translate as God's passion to set things right God hates the fact that I'm not alive and he hates what what I've done to myself and he wants that over he wants to burn that away and so the Divine anger the Divine punishment if we psychologize it as some you know Kim Jong-un punishing his his Rivals that's not it at all it's God Desiring in fact going all the way into our dysfunction all the way down so he might draw us out of it to me I think that the problem with tyranny is the Tyrant the the reason why tyranny is bad the reason why it's bad to have an authoritarian dictator is because of the corruptability of human beings it seems to me that if there were a person or being who genuinely knew you better than you knew yourself genuinely wanted the best for you and genuinely knew how to get the best for you then it would be perfectly irrational for you to not do what they say all the time and that this shouldn't be described as tyranny but rather something like genuine enlightened advice that you would be foolish not to take right that's why the psalmist can say you know Lord I love your law I meditate on a day and night the law is not some imposition on me I'd love your law it's like a when you're learning how to play golf and someone's giving you proper instruction and it's getting into your body and now you know how to hit that darn ball I I love the law give me more of it give me more of the law of golf and if I'm living just in my own space I'm going to golf any way I want to I'll be the worst golfer in the world right so that's a better metaphor for like religious law and that's why when the Lord says I will write the law in your heart that's like a golfer I finally got it in my body I finally had the laws in my body so that's what God wants to do he wants to write the moral law in my in my heart in a sense you actually become more free by restricting the amount of things that you can do yeah and see freedom is a great spiritual metaphor up and down this version because our attachments make us unfree and when I'm freed from my attachments I'm freed for that thing we first talked about this realm of objective value begins to open up to me in a fresh way as long as I'm in my little world and I'm hung up on how do people think about me and how am I doing and then I never the world of objective value doesn't open up to me it's like light pollution I never see the stars but when I get rid of all that clutter and distraction I can actually see the stars and this is what the the Tyrant of Christopher Hitchens description is actually doing it's not do this or else I'm going to punish you but do this because this is the right thing for you trust me do this and and things will clear away that will enable a whole world to open up to you that would be the right way to read it so let me know what you think is God a dictator and if so is that necessarily A Bad Thing are his laws threatening dictates or are they guidance and advice from someone who truly wants the best for you let me know what you think in the comments I've been Alex O'Connor I want to thank as always my top tier supporters on patreon for helping keep this channel alive thank you so much for watching don't forget to subscribe and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Alex O'Connor

Views: 174,658

Keywords: Alex O'Connor, cosmic, skeptic, cosmicskeptic, atheism

Id: t7LJBj6Jc-Q

Length: 24min 8sec (1448 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 01 2023