Presidential Debate | Cambridge Union

[Music] [Music] hello perfect good evening everyone it's lovely to see a pack chamber or albeit with social distancing this is my final debate of term um and thank you so much to you the members of the society for propelling us through throughout town what's going to happen is we're going to do a little bit of a tradition where the officers from this term will switch places with the team that is replacing us in nikolas next time so without further ado if we could applaud each officer for their service as they leave the chamber and applaud the officer coming in and welcoming them so our wonderful equalities officer sharina is going to switch places with zara the ants officer for easter is switching places with letty our incoming ants [Applause] officer our speakers officer for easter tara is switching places with phoebe the speaker's officer for michaelmas [Applause] our debates officer for easter lara is switching places with sophie are debates officer mikamos [Applause] our incoming vice president patrick for the upcoming academic year is switching places with jungmin [Applause] [Music] [Applause] and finally i am switching places with keir the president for michaelmas well good evening everyone uh lovely to see 70 people here um if we may now get the speakers in we shall get going uh on our debates so um delighted to see such a bad crowd before we begin i just want to say very briefly um a word of thanks to everyone on the easter team um they have had one of the toughest innings i think is possible to imagine uh for a union term and it's not one that i envy in the slightest and they have dealt with every challenge they faced uh with aplomb they are fantastically talented people and they're deeply dedicated to this society so thank you again to everybody on the usa team for being fantastic all this time but we do have a debate tonight as well as celebrating the end of child's presidency um and we should like to get uh speakers in now if they're ready uh down the corridor moment of dramatic suspense here tell you what we're waiting what we will discuss is how the debate tonight is going to work um we have four speakers on opposition and four speakers on proposition and after the second and third rounds of speeches we will take a round of floor speeches where anyone here tonight in the audience who wishes to speak on the motion either in proposition opposition or abstention we'll have a couple of minutes uh max to speak so um get thinking now while you can of uh what you'd like to say um and so we shall shortly begin okay um the motion before the house tonight is uh this house believes uh religion is compatible with modernity um and our first speaker tonight is someone we've already met uh and that is joel rosen who is the outgoing president of the cambridge union and serves as vice president of the cambridge university law society he is a second year student at trinity uh hall and studies history joel the floor is yours [Applause] friends thank you so much for joining us tonight i must confess a little home advantage as i begin my speech you see the outgoing president of the union departs the chair and speaks from the law in their final debates and i'm immensely grateful to all those who have offered me support and kindness throughout this term the society has endowed me with many memories and friends together we've platformed the marginalized and forgotten and held the powerful to account now looking around the room tonight i must observe a slight irony in that the cambridge union is debating whether anything is compatible with modernity some may see a line up the decked in black tie and wonder whether any of us have ever encountered modernity i would submit that both terms in this motion abroad and should not be interpreted narrowly modernity in this context is not a specific historical time period but rather a series of attitudes and norms that define our world the motion asks us whether religion as a concept not a particular faith or doctrine is compatible with our contemporary world i and my friends on this side of the house demonstrate every day by our living example how modernity and religion can live in harmony together i am religious not because i believe my religion contains all there is of the human spirit i do not belong to a prostitizing face face i do not seek to convert others but do seek to take my place in the great conversation of humanity for me personally judaism provides answers to the three most important questions every self-reflecting individual in the modern world must at some point ask of themselves to borrow the words of rabbi sacks of blessed memory whose presence in this chamber is sword is sorely missed who am i why am i here how then shall i live the remainder of my speech will be organized around these three questions who am i why am i here how then shall i live who am i above all else i'm a jew when i wake up in the morning and when i go on my way when i lay my head at night i know that i'm a part of a story indescribably bigger than my own to be a jew is to acknowledge a part in a story that began for millennia ago to know that your history does not begin with your birth and end with your death i know that i am a bridge between the generations and the stories i inherited from my parents and they from theirs will live on in me and in the generations that follow a couple of years ago before i applied to this university i found myself in a library looking into a glass case friends if you were to leave this chamber stroll past john's and trinity head down garrett hostel lane and over the bridge you would arrive at the university library i distinctly remember as a slightly more fresh-based teenager exploring the city whose colleges streets and very fabric uh defined by christianity being directed by an attendant in the university library to what he described as your people's collection he was referring to the cairo ganesa some four hundred thousand manuscript fragments found in the ganesha or storeroom of the ben ezra synagogue in foster in old cairo two hundred thousand fragments of parchment venom and paper were brought to cambridge by solomon shatter in the late 19th century they tell the story of an uninterrupted thousand-year-old continuum of jewish life religion and science from around 870 to the 19th century i still i saw an alphabet i understood a civilization whose message was universal but command particular and felt at one with the world just beyond the glass physically out of reach was the handwritten signature of moses maimonides described by osler as the prince of physicians an outstanding philosopher scientist scientist religious leader who debated fiercely with the dogma of the times in order to advance scientific and medical thought yet he lives in harmony with his faith his photograph sits above my dad's desk in his london hospital and i always see a twinkle in his eye slightly different twinkle but whenever he's debating talmudic texts or researching the cardiovascular system there's still a twinkle he maimonity is not my dad has been the unforgotten inspiration of physicians for more than eight centuries now tonight the prophets of new atheism will tell you that the civilizations that from which they have reaped so much are irrational primitive and should be discarded i urge you to reject such fundamentalism having explained who i am i'll now move on to why i'm here i am here because my ancestors though scattered and scarred by 18 by 18 centuries of exile never lost their humor or their faith across immense expanses of space and time they continued to tell one of the oldest and mine and in my opinion one of the most beautiful stories ever imagined it's the story of slaves redeemed from servitude of homelessness and the journey home above all it's the story of a people whose name israel means he who struggles with man and with god and prevails each year in the oldest religious tradition of the west the passover seder my maternal grandfather would tell over the story of how he personally at the age of nine was exiled from his land and walked for several days across europe ultimately to make a home raise a family and pursue a career as a physicist thus i am here because my ancestors refused to relinquish who they were choosing faith over fate yet in each generation engaging with the prevailing modernity having explained who i am why i'm here i'll use my remaining minutes not in life in this in this speech to attempt to convey how religious teachings are not only compatible with modernity but sometimes essential for navigating our atomized and noisy worlds and there's a book by the norwegian explorer erling karger who wrote a book about silence in the age of noise in it he tells the story of how he spent 50 days walking alone in antarctica he'd purposefully broken his radio at the start of the expedition because he was searching for something something that's often missing in the hustle and bustle of everyday life and that thing is silence now for 25 hours each week i go offline and experience something known as shabbat it's a period of calm in which people come together in dignity and equality to anticipate an age of universal peace and i can't adequately convey how precious that island in each week has been during this most hectic of terms science teaches us how our world works not why it tells us of the world that is not of the world should be science cannot tell us to love the stranger or help the poor the great modern democratic institutions from democratic government to the market economy do not answer the questions i've posed tonight i like countless generations of my ancestors learned how to argue around the friday night table and then stepped out into the world on sunday morning maimonides teaches that if you want to come to the love of god you should study science tonight you will hear the opposition describe two opposing irreconcilable forces they will ask you to choose one over the other they will attempt to prosecute all believers for the sins of some they will paint an unsettling picture with broad brushstrokes i know from the history of my people you can choose both from the songs of leonard cohen to the cinematography of steven spielberg there is something immensely rewarding both spiritually and intellectually in bringing religion and modernity together a duet is always more beautiful than a solo and for that reason i urge you all in the words of robert frost to take the path less traveled and vote for the motion tonight [Applause] thank you very much for that joel um with that we will move on to the opening speech of the opposition deborah francis white is a stand-up comedian podcaster screenwriter and speaker she is known for her podcast the guilty feminist and her frequent appearances on how i got news for you and the film say my name which he recently wrote thank you okay jehovah's witnesses at the age of 14 and was baptized at 16. i was living in a beach town in australia in the latter half of the 20th century a place and time that hadn't been troubled much by feminism itself if you've seen neighbors it was like that just with a bit of added god when i became a jehovah's witness i can tell you that entering a religion that's got its wits about it and is doing what organized religions do well in the main control their congregations it was like stepping into a time machine and getting out of the delorean in a dystopian margaret atwood novel the missionary school we aspired to go to run by the watchtower society was called gilead that's where we were at gang all our thoughts were thought through for us by six old men in new york running the show and policed by a local body of elders we were encouraged to report each other for infractions and confess to these men because jehovah would see whatever we did anyway and he would find a way of revealing it if we didn't turn ourselves in a woman has never made a decision in the history of the jehovah's witnesses even when and how the kingdom hall is cleaned is decided by a man and now you might be thinking well debris you experienced an extreme fundamental cult hashtag not all religions and to that i would say several things one is freedom of religion means freedom of religious cults you have to look at your weakest link or your strongest cult when you say religion umbrella term not just leonard cohen songs but religion is compatible with modernity i was a church i was i was part of the church of england before that as i told you and that was mostly as far as i could make out a cake-based faith and i would say listen if your religion is two-part cake one part fate and one part faith you're probably going to be all right but it's the cake not the faith that's bringing most of the loveliness home yes some religions have been diluted by modernity but the parts of organized religion that are kind and empathetic and compassionate and inclusive are concessions to the modern world which are self-preservation measures not because the religion is compatible with modernity but because if it does not change or at least disguise the worst parts of itself like an aging racist husband the modern world will divorce it and it will become extinct because it cannot cook for itself let me be clear when i say that faith and religion are different things if you have a personal faith and that faith gives you hope and connection with something outside of yourself that delivers you strength and comfort whether that be the idea of an omnipotent being in the sky the on that connects all humanity any number of stephen spielberg films in your case any number of divine beings you can call out to in distress or for peace breaking your radio when you go for a walk whatever then this personal devotion to something unknown and archaic is not to be disputed it's not modern who wants the help of a higher power that was born yesterday no one wants a faith that's still in the beta testing phase but it is personal and any atheist work worth their salt in my opinion is really an agnostic because we just don't know what's out there somewhere we can't prove a negative maybe there's a rabbit made of antimatter who invented us all maybe there's a celestial minibus who dropped us all off at the door we don't know faith is its own ball game but any practice that relies on ancient texts and power structures that we would codify as a religion is obliged to do pretzel-like workarounds to even approach our modern values religion never leads the way in inclusion and celebration of difference precisely because it is a device designed to make human beings conform to a code of conduct wear this eat this come into this building because we have a monopoly on getting god on the line we will tell you what happens after you die if you will leave your money to us when it happens religion has always resisted modernity because modernity is change and change is a threat to control it is quite a recent phenomenon that religion has chased modernity in fear of becoming extinct the more ancient misogynistic xenophobic and homophobic the scriptures the more contortions modern liberal religious people have to do to keep a foot in a scriptural camp and a modern camp god is non-binary if we are created in their image if that's the case why hasn't god made life easier for genderfluid people in your church god was talking to a simpler less enlightened people on their terms where did those simpler less enlightened people get their simple unenlightened ideas from surely the people who actually schlepped up a mountain to talk to god would be more inclusive and compassionate than we are not less surely they'd have been instructed to celebrate all of god's wondrous creative uh creation creative creations equally and not rank some and vilify others and stone a few more the other reason that religion is not compatible with modernity is that it's been a very long time since god made contact with any of these ancient religions this second coming is taking an implausibly long time isn't it i know as a former jehovah's witness they've been any number of soft launchers for armageddon the the appearance of the divine has been absent for a very long time if the rolling stones can do nine farewell tours in the last 20 years why hasn't the omnipotent made an appearance in that time or in fact for hundreds or even thousands of years except for the odd crying statue or mystical piece of toast which doesn't seem to be of much help if religion were to be compatible with modernity the alpha and the amiga would do something to get with the kids and pay generation zed a visit perhaps on judgment day i will be proved wrong although i suspect the only judgment day i will face is today and the only judge i will answer to is the magnificent judge rinder a god among men if i am in front of our creator on judgement day i am sure she will commend me for getting out of the escape room of a cult she set for me and welcome me at her table while commending the good judge for defending faithfully his religion and its place in the modern world but i doubt the ancient of ancients mother nature the big bang incarnate i doubt she'll claim modernity she won't have her pronouns in her bio she doesn't have a snapchat she doesn't know how to work i don't know how to work it how could she there's a massive age difference between us and certainly she doesn't seem to be contributing much to climate change she's leaving that to the divine greta thunder like i am she's retired she's of the ancient she's of the classical she's of the prehistoric she wants to be left alone she is no thoroughly modern maker and she will conclude as i have and you must hear tonight that religion is not compatible with modernity whatever else it is thank you thank you very much for that uh impassioned speech deborah uh may i take this opportunity to politely remind our speakers uh to stick to patrick's uh lovely time limits there just for everyone here who's on a full bladder um with that i'd like to introduce the second speaker in uh uh support of the proposition tonight sophia shah is a first-year law student at downing college and he won this lot through open audition so phillip the floor is yours [Applause] i must confess that the opportunity to speak before this house tonight was one that i regarded with some hesitancy as my friend and fellow speaker joel can attest to it is always difficult to conduct a speech with the same level of rigor and precision when the motion is one that lies close to your heart when your emotions once a notion of calm are tumultuous tempest within my religion islam for those of you who do not know not only lies close to my heart but defines it it lays the foundation of who i am what i do why i do it through religion i belong to something much bigger than myself but ironically the essence of that is something beautifully personal and this is ultimately why i'm speaking before you tonight because to determine whether religion is compatible with modernity we need to define religion and since religion in its entirety is as indefinable as the universe it occupies we cannot best view it through the personal lens i describe now i've come to my the realization that my investment in this in this motion is not a source of weakness but one of strength one cannot truly know religion unless they live it breathe it experience it with every beat of their heart that is why in contrast to much of what you may have heard from me at this union my speech tonight will be deeply personal i will not delve into the specifics of islamic jurisprudence as i am not a jurist and i will avoid a contracted battle on the grounds of theology or philosophy tonight i speak to you from the heart tonight i speak to you not only as a man of ration but as a man of faith tonight at the very core of my speech i speak to you not as an orator or a lawyer but as a muslim and nothing more what is religion perhaps more importantly what is religion to me from my own experience religion can be distilled into three cardinal virtues that form both its foundations and outward manifestation three virtues that i strive to live by three virtues i aim to illustrate to this house the virtue of religion that underpins all others is that of loyalty regardless of one's faith loyalty is exhibited to a higher power or ideal as a manifest my loyalty above all else is to my god to his word to the set of moral commands it gives rise to the opposition may deride this loyalty as blind dogmatic faith to a foreign and archaic set of ideals hardly applicable to society at large hardly compatible with modernity but i fundamentally disagree with such sentiment for one a commitment to islamic law and convention has instilled in me a firm respect for the rule of law and the legal system by which we abide on a more personal and arguably more important level my religion inspires my indomitable loyalty to my family and to my friends i would do for them what i wouldn't do for myself i'm happier for their success than i am for their my own and would go through heaven and hell to be the son the brother the friend i can only hope to be my religion inspires my loyalty as religion is loyalty i ask this house is loyalty incompatible with modernity a related yet more elusive virtue is that of honor alongside loyalty sweat to a set of ideals or principles must lie an immutable integrity loyalty to one's word at the foundation of my own religion lies the islamic testimony of faith to bear witness there is no god but allah and that muhammad peace be upon him is his messenger now upon deeper reflection this is not only a statement of belief but an oath when one utters these words to express or affirm their faith they make a promise to abide by their by their religions moral and legal principles when i fast for up to 20 hours a day in one of the hottest months of the year when i stay up until 3am to perform the morning prayer i am motivated by an innate sense of duty stemming from a promise i gave i am motivated by honor and because of its importance in my religion i apply it in every aspect of my life i never betray my principles regardless of how alluring the alternative may be and when i give my word i will move heaven and earth to keep it my religion inspires my honor as religion is honor i ask this house is honor incompatible with modernity the final virtue i aim to illustrate is compassion a virtue that is self-evident but no thank you but one that is beautiful in its simplicity the principles of loyalty and honor i have mentioned thus far would be meaningless without the feeling of love that gives them context love of god and love for others charity underpins one of the five pillars of islam that i strive to live by and inspires more general acts of kindness the prophet muhammad peace be upon him mentioned that even smiling can be an act of charity the prophetic example all muslims aspire to being the paragon of compassion my religion and religion more generally instills within its followers that golden rule to love for others what you love for yourself to be a better muslim i strive to be more charitable to be more kind to smile more and through my compassion enable others to do the same the personal maxim which most informs my interactions with my friends is that i re repay even the slightest act of kindness tenfold a maxim very much derived from islam my religion inspires my compassion as religion is compassion i ask this house is compassion incompatible with modernity no thank you tonight you may you have heard me speak to you of loyalty honor and compassion words that admittedly seem to be fading into obscurity but nonetheless remain as important today as they have been for millennia my own religion is perfectly encapsulated in its testimony of faith that i believe that there is one god and that the prophet muhammad peace be upon him is his messenger but like the majesty of an iceberg there are layers upon layers of meaning beneath its initial surface interpretation for this testament of faith not only describes what i believe but who i am it demands loyalty loyalty to my lord but also loyalty to my family and to my friends it demands honor something that is difficult to describe but even more difficult to practice it demands compassion something i hope my friends watching tonight can say they have witnessed firsthand the fellow muslims these qualities make me a better muslim to those of a different faith or none at the very least a better person i must ask this house have we reached a point as a society where striving to be a better person is a thing of the past i think not i hope not [Applause] uh thank you very much uh so for we now come to our second speaker uh for the um opposition um aretha is that are you thinking you want to come now instead yes okay in which case uh we will move to uh dr arif ahmed uh he is a philosopher at goblin keys college uh who read mathematics oxford university and went on to study philosophy at sussex and cambridge he is a senior lecturer in the faculty of philosophy an atheist and libertarian i'm told his philosophical outlook stems from the work of hume and hayek arif the floor is yours thank you so much thank you for the invitation of course it's a pleasure to be here as always now the proposition tonight is where their religion is compatible with modernity and of course the question that we're asking is not whether religion is nice um or whether there are bits that people like but whether it's compatible with modernity and by this we don't mean what religion ought to be or what it could be or what religion would be if the people running it were the obviously very humane and thoughtful people on the opposition we're asking about we're asking about what religion actually is and to answer and ask the question therefore we must consider religion as it is experienced and practiced by most religious people when we do that well to do that we must look beyond the cambridge bubble we must indeed look beyond the bubble of a highly secular and rainy island off the northwest coast of europe and look at the experiences of the vast majority of people who live under religion now and in the past when we do so we will find i think that religion is as the philosopher dc stove wants to put a disaster area um and not a disaster area of the passive kind like a flood or an earthquake but a disaster area of the active kind like a nuclear leak or an outbreak of foot and mouth in cattle it is actively spreading intellectual and moral devastation around the world i'm going to give three arguments for why religion i believe is incompatible with modernity the first is connected with an intellectual point the second is connected with a moral point and the third is connected with a political point on the intellectual point um i didn't say much i guess i mean it's one of the achievements of modernity by which i mean what's happened since the scientific revolution and the enlightenment one of its many great and permanent achievements to have removed all intellectual credibility whatever from any of the distinctive claims of religion now of course in a bubble like cambridge when you say things like that you often hear this sort of neo-augustinian blather about oh it's all really a metaphor it doesn't actually mean the things that they say so the story about abraham taking his son for for a long and possibly one-way trip up a mountain all the zombies that appeared in 29 a.d in judea is actually a metaphor for something um but if you actually look at what religious people believe in in the rest of the world you'll find that things are very different to take two examples indonesia is the country with the largest muslim population in the world 55 of indonesians um uh believe that human beings have always existed in the form that they now do america is the country with the largest christian population in the world seventy percent of american christians uh believe that natural select evolution by natural selection these are things that most religious people believe so again i'm talking about religion as it actually is not as it would be in the hands of the of the humane and enlightened people who have spoken for the proposition so far now as i say i don't particularly want to want to go into the the arguments here i think i think it's as clear as anything could be there's more evidence you know that these things are false than that the second world war took place or that napoleon existed so i'm not going to go into these arguments in great detail that i'd be happy to to discuss them if anyone wants to raise it i'll move on therefore to the second respect in which religion is incompatible with modernity and that as i suggested was the moral one and in this connection i have to say my argument is in fact going to be slightly more friendly to religion because the fact is whether we like it or not we atheists we we people who believe in the enlightenment and believe in truth science and evidence and so on we have to admit that there is a gap at the heart of modernity there is a black hole where moral certainty used to be so that our position is that of someone who when you face a moral question imagine you're you all face moral problems in your life just take the exact sacrifice example of the person who had to decide whether to go off and fight for the resistance or go and stay and look after an aging relative an ill relative and you ask what should i do and there are philosophical theories there's consequentialist theories deontological theories and so on so there are attempts to answer this question but ultimately i believe there is no answer and you have to face the fact that whatever you do you might ask did i do the right thing but the fact is you have to face it you're not going to die and god will tell you that you've got the right answer there is no right answer we ultimately are all faced with a kind of radical choice and that sort of if you like alienation or perhaps a better word perhaps perhaps a better word for it is disenchantment that we find at the heart of modern life is in stark contrast to the moral certainty that we get from religion and here i don't have to make any claims about whether it's better or worse okay i needn't be dissing religion to say this indeed i can very much see the comfort that we provided to religious people um by that sort of certainty and only a fool or someone who hasn't faced a genuine moral dilemma would scoff at that but it doesn't change the fact that these two things are incompatible and at the heart of of the modern world is something which excludes the very thing that is for many people the essence of religious belief the third point that i want to make the third argument so i said i would mention three so one of them was intellectual one of them was moral and the third was political um this again i'm afraid is perhaps a bit more hostile to to religion um it is a fact that we have in the modern world a conception of rights and of individual rights which is simply incompatible with the practices that we actually find in religions around the world and this is as i say religions as they are as they are practiced i'll give you a couple of examples of that so one of them which which indeed did occur in the western world is the example of the maglin laundries so these were institutions run by the church largely as they grew up by the catholic church though not initially in ireland which were for the incarceration of prostitutes and fallen women as they were called um 30 000 maybe more women were incarcerated in these places over the 20th century um nobody knows the precise number of people who are subjected to starvation torture physical and mental abuse as a result of these they're still finding mass graves of babies who are starved to death and there's you know this there's still testimony from people for their treatment from the nuns in these stories these who who are basically acting in accordance with the catholic church's obsession with controlling people's sexual behavior that's what religion means that's incompatible with modernity second story i want to tell you concerns islam and it concerns the the episode of a fire in a school for girls in mecca in 2002 i believe um so this is as you may know about this is well-known story at the time fire started early in the morning um there are about 800 students there they all tried to get out the religious police in saudi arabia stopped some of the girls from escaping the burning building because they weren't conservatively enough dressed they beat them so they had to go back in the building 15 of those girls died as a result of that now i dare you to tell me listen to these stories and tell me that religion is possibly compatible with anything that deserves the name of modernity i urge you to oppose the motion thank you very much for that moving speech with that we will come to a break and we will take floor speeches my favorite part of the evening uh would anyone here uh like to speak for one to two minutes uh in proposition of the motion raise your hand if you do ah there's one up there okay could we get a microphone up there is that okay and could you state your name in college for the record as well please test hello hello my name is nathan i'm from celeb so i am a gay muslim which is a combination which would have gotten me stoned and i already have a special place in hell i suppose but despite all that i am still practitioning muslim and i would like to argue that acceptance religion does not equate to a complete abandonment of values uh modern modern values and to the closure of one's mind by adopting a blind uh policy of blind faith so it's unfortunate that some of the arguments uh on the opposition today presented positives that much of the world's problems stem from religion and i believe that in its purest form organized religions such as islam christianity buddhism and other major religions are not bad models to live one's life if we exclude the adversarial relations between between religions and even within religious groups and the extremism as you have mentioned in some cases that can stem from this religious aberration of said beliefs in essence i still argue that religion provide two key benefits for modern day humans and the first is the sense of belonging to a community and a purpose for co-existing i'm muslim and i'm just going to provide two examples that i know closely but i'm sure other religions would have similar doctrines in islam the prophet muhammad was known to state that there are only two types of people your brothers in religion or your equals in creation and the quran states that do not abuse those whom they worship besides allah and in christianity some of you might know this better but the bible states to let everyone be convinced in his own mind indicating freedom of religion and to love your neighbor as yourself are these not beliefs that are compatible with humanity the second is to provide the benefits of being spiritual the spirituality required to alleviate the hardships of modern life there has been over 400 studies that have quantitatively examined the relationship between one's religious and spiritual involvement with the onset of depressive symptoms or disorders and the collective results of these studies suggest that religious beliefs and practices may help people to cope better with stressful life circumstances give meaning to life and provide hope in terms of hopelessness and surround depressed people with a supportive community again are these not assets that would complement modern modernity so i guess to conclude i'd like to ask the floor to consider that the detrimental effects of religion discussed are but aberrations that can arise in any community religious or not and that fundamentally religions do carry values that are compatible with the human way of life modern or not till the end of time thank you thank you very much now would anyone like to raise a hand to speak in opposition ah we'll go over there thank you okay i'm in college please oh yes uh so i'm som bhagti and i'm from trinity college so i'd like to thank everyone for their excellent speeches so far and i'd just like to point out that while all the people on the proposition side of the motion are wonderful people many of them i know individually they practice their religion in a very unique context they practice it following what 200 or 300 years of intellectual development of the protestantization of the anglosphere where you have religion not as it would be let's say in saudi arabia or india or so many places across the world where it is inseparable from politics but rather in a sort of condition where religion is something different like if you went back to jesus and there are sort of uh moments in the bible where jesus enters the sort of uh the temples and like throws out uh coins because he wants to rebel against the sort of roman empire if you asked jesus and we managed to resurrect him today miraculously for the second time whether or not he believed that oh um whether he was doing a religious act or a political act he would not know what you were talking about because there is no difference between politics and religion and in the vast majority of the world and indeed in well history to be honest and what we have to sort of bear in mind what we have to take into account that all of us here today are in like a very very very very safe context and that's not the case for the vast majority of the world coming back to the sort of person who just raised the point of uh who raised the floor speech it is true that religion is a somewhat important part in placing ourselves culturally and then perhaps providing meaning to our lives it is true that religion gives us honor and so on and so forth and i'm willing to concede those points it's just that alternative forms can also give us honor like we heard mentions of family i mean i am slightly religious but i don't pretend that i can make falsifiable predictions about it from the world i just think that it's a nice coping mechanism but apart from that like i mean i don't i mean no no no i mean honestly like god has helped me get through so many exams um i mean made up though he is she is they is i'm not sure they are sorry um but i mean ultimately i can have a family without being religious i can have so many things without being religious because i live in a very privileged condition but if i wanted to live let's say in saudi arabia or india and i wanted to be a woman or a muslim or gay then i would be stoned to death then i wouldn't be educated then there will be so many things that would have happened to me which i just don't have and in fact the version of modernity which we have has sort of removed the religion from religion what we're debating today well what the proposition is debating isn't whether religion is compatible with the religion but rather where the the version of religion that we have today where where you remove the religion from it is compatible with modernity whether nothing is compatible with modernity as most uh sort of set theorists or mathematicians will tell you the empty set intersected with any set is just the same set over again i'm sorry i may have sort of revealed that i'm a matmo at this point however however this is my point we don't live with the full burdens of religion placed upon us and therefore we are in some way sort of incapacitated when we come to this decision and we have to bear religionism in mind as you know the entirety of the rest of the world bears it in mind but it has real life consequences on whether people can survive whether people go about their lives whether they are educated whether they are stoned to death whether they can even like raise families and all of the benefits of religion we can sort of remove from religion and we have removed from religion that's this incredibly successful project that we've been maintaining called modernity which might have something to do with what we're debating today so please please please religion is not necessary it is not compatible it is not like religion minus religion is compatible of course but religion is not necessary and it is not compatible with modernity for the sakes of all of those people who live like outside of the uk outside of the us outside of australia and canada and all those wonderful anglicized places which have sort of suffered this or rather benefited from this protestantization of religion please please please vote against the motion today because i can tell you that there are billions of people around the world billions who will appreciate you for doing so if they watch youtube in the cambridge union thank you son for that one to two minute speech could we do we have anyone else who's willing to speak in a relatively cursed manner in abstention someone please raise your hand otherwise ah there we go hello name in college please thank you very much andrew ossipaw of hamerton college i think something important to consider in this debate is what religion actually is and we've tried to define that and in different ways we've defined the pure type the ideal type the real type what actually happens but what religion ultimately is is an idea just like anything else and ideas are bulletproof and you can't quite remove them it's very hard to do that and the important thing to understand is really what religion is is it's a belief in something greater than ourselves accompanied by some sort of aesthetic common gathering hierarchy and a belief something that we think will come from that i mean let's take the cambridge union for example we gather here because we believe that through debate we will somehow reach truth or in democracy we vote because we think that it brings about greater equality helps us to find the common good and all those beautiful things but does that actually happen in reality i mean sure religion can help you be more loyal it can help us be more kind to one another but at the same time it can also make us harm one another and hate one another and those things are both problematic and irresolvable and there's not really much we can do about that because you can't just destroy an idea it's very very difficult so i think that is something to consider tonight ideas are bulletproof and i mean religion was definitely stronger back in the days of the catholic church before um that fell apart because back then it was very much tied to how the state enforced behavioral practices and ever since then we've been wondering about when religion will actually end and it's been centuries since then and is still here so you can argue that morality is dead you can argue that it's no longer there you can argue that you live a better life but you can have all those things with it or without it in the end there's only really being in and then being out thank you okay we will now move on to our third speaker for the proposition tonight who is joining us through the magic of zoom uh reverend katie harford is the university chaplain at oxford brooks she speaks regularly on queer and feminist theologies and mental health especially the way that experiences of oppression and societal pressure affect the mental health of queer people and has been featured on the guilty feminist podcast kate the floor is yours good evening members of the union it's a privilege to be amongst you all if i take long pauses be aware that i may be able to hear myself in an echo this house believes that religion is compatible with modernity because religion at its heart is about a search for meaning as joel began by saying we are believers not because it's easy but because life is hard scriptures cry out for understanding and individuals through prayer and reflection are constantly asking questions and seeking meaning and as it happens a lot of the truth of religion is contained in a phrase offered by the opposition there is no answer one only has to look at writings like the book of book of job forgive me and the way in which one of the greatest minds of modernity carl jung spent a lifetime wrestling with it and you've heard beautiful accounts of personal faith from my esteemed colleagues they are talking as i am from the truth of religion as it is lived and practiced and i would thank the opposition not to write us off as a fringe albeit a friendly and attractive one there is nothing time-bound about these ideas and experiences in fact they speak to the heart of so many debates that characterize the early 21st century what we currently call modernity although there have been many modernities before us and i will also be arguing that a lot of the so-called ills of religion that the opposition have mentioned are rooted in broader societal issues i'd like to start by repeating an observation from the floor that far from being contrasted with religion modernity as we understand it here and now is rooted in christian social change that began in europe the protestant reformation in its rejection of the hold that catholicism had on the governments of europe is the first example in the european history of a move a widespread influential and um long-standing move towards what we would now call secularism even humanism originated around this time as a school of evangelical christian thought a number of non-conformist movements that were religious in nature have been wrongly labeled as atheists rather than secularist to take for example the foundation of ucl where i took my undergraduate degree which in fact owes a great deal to the jewish community and indeed this university like ancient universities across europe and north america owes its very existence to the study of theology and traditionally muslim countries in the middle east have developed ideas philosophies and sciences that we could not have the modern world without and you have heard that religious organizations are capable of great harm i would attest to that and witness to it i experienced harm at the hands of religious organizations myself the church of england it turns out was not worth the cake for me despite that religion is not entirely composed of harm far from never leading the way to change as a member of the metropolitan community churches i have seen a queer centric church be the first lgbtq plus organization in the usa to hold property and would note that not all the opposition we've faced as a church is religious bigotry is not the sole preserve of religion my church mcc was also at the forefront of many of our rights we were arguing for marriage when stonewall was still talking about civil partnership separate but not equal is not equal and we weren't alone we stood shoulder to shoulder with other queer liberation movements and with our friends in liberal judaism quakerism and other movements because a lot of what we think is down to religion is based on tradition including its harm and this isn't contortion or distortion it's because scholars of religions have for so many centuries been rooted in patriarchy and in the power structures that surround them they've been seeking to uphold power and abusing religion to maintain that in europe in european christianity a lot of what we believe to be the truth of scripture is based on the interpretation of white middle and upper class men the spares of wealthy families who were allowed to go to the church the wonderful stories that exist in our tradition and that we share with our jewish cousins have been corrupted the bisexuality of king david in juan samuel 18 has been whitewashed with a no homo footnote when he professes his love to jonathan questions about gender in genesis in the story of joseph have failed to be accounted for in most understandings until the last century when women and queer people finally were able to have a true voice in religion and the role of women furthermore has been ignored again speaking from a position of as a christian minister phoebe the deacon possible author of hebrews and certainly the person to whom i owe my vocation has been roundly ignored you've heard from my colleagues that loyalty honor and compassion are compatible with modernity that is undeniable it is also undeniable we have demonstrated with grateful help from the opposition that patriarchy and not religion is what is incompatible with modernity in that spirit please vote with the motion before the house thank you thank you very much uh cage for that just on a procedural note is anyone else in here boiling or is that just me because we could open the rear doors it is a bit hot isn't it would some of the events managers mind opening the and also possibly windows it is rather bored um with that we come to the third uh speaker for the opposition um willie moore uh peter which one of you is going to come up now peter okay in which case uh we will [Music] uh which case we would love to welcome up uh peter tatchell who is an extraordinary individual uh most obviously he is a human rights campaigner and a member of the gay rights group outrage and of course green party but he's also director of the peter tatchell foundation a human rights organization and a documentary about his life hating pediatrical is now available on netflix peter you have the year of the house thank you very much the motion before us tonight is religion is compatible with modernity not religion can be or could be compatible with modernity but that it is compatible with modernity and this is not about your religion your kind loving religion this is about religion per se religion in general the history of religion and what religion is doing around the world today the proposition so far has not given us a single example of religion being at the forefront of modernity not even one single example in fact our side has repeatedly offered examples of where religion has stood against modernity and still to this day stands against modernity now i am the first to admit that there are good people of faith some of my inspirations have been good people of faith i think of dr martin luther king who led the struggle for black civil rights in america i think of archbishop desmond tutu who was a leading figure in the struggle against apartheid in south africa i think of the catholic fathers daniel and philip berrigan who in the united states in the 1960s did non-violent direct action against the american involvement in the vietnam war to me they are heroes but they are the exception not the rule they are the odd ones out i think we need to understand that overall religion has been an historic obstacle to progress it has been against science it was against the enlightenment galileo galilei was punished by the catholic church and excommunicated for over 400 years because he told the truth about the solar system giordano bruno in the 1500s spoke against the church's ignorant view about the solar system and he paid with his life he was burned alive at the stake in 1600 by the catholic church those are two examples of thousands of tens of thousands of victims of religion that i could explain and illuminate if we look at all the great social movements throughout history the church has been on the wrong side take slavery the churches and indeed islam endorsed slavery it promoted slavery it defended the slavers in the name of religion and led to millions and millions of people suffering the inhumanity of slavery they quoted the bible the quran the prophet to justify this hideous vile dehumanizing practice in our own country the church has throughout history defended tyranny we look at the royal family today as being some nice cozy family let's not remember what past kings and queens of england did to their own people they ruled as dictators and tyrants who crushed the poor who executed critics and dissenters and every act they did or almost every act they did was defended by the church the church buttressed royal tyranny here in england wales scotland and ireland look at colonialism when britain other countries from europe went out and colonized subjugated and enslaved peoples across the world the colonisers went there with a bible in one hand and the bayonet in the other tens of thousands hundreds of thousands millions of people were subjected to enslavement by colonialism justified by religion defended by religion exonerated by religion priests prayed for the success of the conquistadors who decimated latin american culture and the conquistadors went there and murdered and destroyed whole cultures that had existed for centuries take the battle of the suffragettes the church was against them the church said no women should not have the vote women are inferior the suffragettes were denounced from the pulpits from the lands and to john o'groats the viciousness of the attacks on the suffragettes by the churches of this country has been forgotten by many but women suffered and delayed their right to vote because the church worked hand in hand with politicians to make sure it was delayed as long as possible there were some but very much a minority and as i said there are some people and some sects who have done good things and been on the right side of history but overall not look at the state of lgbt plus rights in this country and around the world every single gay law reform in this country since 1999 when we secured the first big reform every single one was opposed by organized religion in this country every single one said lgbti plus people must suffer discrimination it still continues today opposition to modernity is part and parcel of organized religion the churches the mosques the temples the synagogues they are still predominantly male dominated patriarchy is not something separate is intrinsic to organize religion opposition to abortion a woman's right to choose opposition to stem cell and embryo research which can open doors to curing deadly diseases is opposed by most religions opposition to same-sex marriage still in many countries is opposed by the church child sex abuse has infected whole swathes of organized religion today in poland hungary and russia it is christian churches that are leading the fight against women's rights lgbti rights the rights of muslims and immigrants if we look at uganda nigeria pakistan bangladesh there we see religion oppressing not only women and lgbt plus people but even muslims who don't conform to their particular interpretation of islam in iran we have a shia dominated state that persecutes sunni muslims in saudi arabia it's the opposite a sunni-dominated state that persecutes shia muslims ahmadi muslims sufi muslims and of course people of no faith so all across the world we see to this day religion playing a role against modernity supporting wars and conflicts yo from the crusades to the war in the north of ireland to the persecution of rohingya muslims in myanmar today to the massacre of muslims in srebrenica in the 1990s to the persecution of christians by muslims in northern nigeria to the conflict in israel and palestine religion religion religion is the core not the only solution not the only problem but religion is the core of the essence of those conflicts so i ask you to support this motion leave aside the good deeds sorry to pose this motion sorry i ask you to oppose this motion leave aside all the good things you've heard they are good things by some people of faith but they are not representative they do not equate with religion as it truly is in the past and it is still today thank you [Applause] thank you very much now um we would like to do one more round of floor speeches so if anyone um has anything they'd like to say for the shortest possible time i can't emphasize that enough a short period of time uh in proposition uh then please raise your hand now very quiet audience today um oh there's one over there okay could we pass the microphone that way please um david speech we heard was essentially just a list of horrible things that religious people have done but i think um organized religions um sorry um i think they don't have a monopoly on doing horrible things to each other and i could have as long as speech on horrible things that organizations such as the uh revolutionary committee republic such as the red khmer such as the national socialist workers party such as the albanian communist party and i could go on forever listing horrible things that anti-religious people have done to each other so i don't think that um the enumeration of um such things really weak weakens the statement of this house as an aside the anti-slavery the abolitionist movement started in churches so um that was just very brief i just wanted to say that thank you and any speeches in opposition we get a microphone over there david thank you name in realize college i think the debate tonight was about whether or not and we had the stickers of the proposition try to define our universe i tried to define my own way how i see modernity i see modernity as the way to go my way and when you have a set of rules that find your age and the way you go to heaven i see that that's not according in whichever way religion goes against the rules of the valleys of modernity which is your way would anyone else like to chance the microphones for a speech in abstention ah we'll go over there please thanks uh daniel at the heart of the question of the debate today is how to define in terms of oppressive power structures um such such and and have listed all sorts of horrible things done by oppressive power structures the proposition has characterized religion as a as as a striving for good values such as empathy kindness honor and and so on but fundamentally that hasn't answered the question this house believes that religion is compatible with modality because two sides have simply defined religion in a different way and argued that that type of religion is or isn't compatible with modernity and so in considering this i'd urge you to vote in abstention thank you very much let's now come to the final round of uh main speeches tonight uh beginning with uh robert rinder speaking for the proposition uh robert is a british criminal barrister and television personality he was called to the bar in 2001 and his practice at two hair court focuses on crime and international law he writes columns in the sun and in the london evening standard and he is known for his documentary series for the bbc on modern history the last one of which was on the holocaust and was watched by an audience of 8 million people robert the floor is yours good evening everybody mr president ladies and gentlemen this is perhaps the most serious and profound topic in all of human history it's threads have weaved itself into a tapestry that's cloaked itself in all of the colleges and troubled mankind humankind for as long as we can remember and we're certainly not going to solve that problem that issue tonight um given how dry the debate has become i'm confident none of you know me uh not least because you're paying for education and won't have watched daytime television but i can tell you that i've dealt with the full planner plea of law the other day i woman came into my courtroom she was suing her dentist i wanted to know precisely where in the country this case had taken place but said madam can you tell me where you got your teeth done answer in my mouth but prior to that i spent the better part of two decades dealing with international human rights law and i say this sitting opposite a hero of mine a man who has placed his body his life his courage his every facet of humanity between me and those who would seek to do violence against me and i know as a lawyer that i begin with a fundamental thing that must be done to you lawyers out there about to go into practice many of you will be here tonight it's the critical starting point to frame precisely what the other side needs to prove but firstly to narrow the debate and determine first of all what must be conceded i concede the incalculable violence that has been done to you peter that has been done to you in the name of religion the violence against the lgbt community i concede deborah francis white the unimaginable emotional cost of being brought up and into a cult must have caused you and perhaps the incurable reality that will never leave you i concede all of the horrible things that have been done in the name by in the name of religion that's not the point of the debate tonight the question is what the other side must prove they must prove two things firstly that those groups of people who have faith that come together in a collection known as religion do violence to modernity and i'll give you the examples that have to be answered that they do violence to the pursuit of science that perhaps above all as we sit here that this should be manifest in a collection of the brightest young people of our generation that they interfere with social justice that they finally interfere with the furtherance of peace on every level religion is perfectly if not entirely compatible with the advancement of all of those things and secondly they need to prove that removing religion is possible in the first place that not just throwing off its yoke is conceivable against the backdrop of human fallibility that faith doesn't sit within each and every one of us intuitively in some capacity even if you don't think you're religious go on to twitter as i'll come on to but that also perhaps critically that human advance would be more moral always more moral in the absence of religion that's what they need to prove tonight to persuade you i start with this idea of it being inescapable um a very quick story it's it's important we've been asked to throat clear about what our faith is i'm a jewish person but certainly a secular person there is i believe within us whatever your mindset whatever your view a spiritual complexion much as i feel uneasy using that language but it's true a sense of the abstract that reaches out and perhaps connects you to another human being most writ large to me about a year and a half ago as i made a documentary and stood on the ground of treblinka where my family were murdered and stood alongside the last survivor who'd agreed to be on that earth a man of letters a man of profound emotional range depth and courage and a man of science as we went to make the memorial prayer motivated he was to remember the lives to breathe the memory into his loved ones who had been murdered there to say their names for history rather than beginning the kaddish he reached out and over to me and said remember this is for all of the living people of the earth i can't describe what that felt like it's where the abstract is it's where prose ends and poetry begin it's the very articulation of the divine for me that's religion it is a compulsion an urge a spiritual complexion that i believe and i would put to each and every one of you that connection of humanity that may be inescapable but that's not what i have to prove the other side has to prove firstly that this would do violence to social justice and we've been asked and called upon to give specific examples i don't have time to go into the innumerable ways that the synagogues that the mosques and the churches persisted let's just do a few you i hope are mindful each and every one of you of the privileged position that you find yourself in wherever you've come from in some instances it would have taken greater elbow and greater hard work but the most critical thing that you will have is your access to network that capacity to feel that you can speak to deserve to be in the room the churches have provided as of the synagogues have as have the mosques that network that capacity to gift platforms to speakers to educate young people they continue to do that today one of the consequences of modernity ladies and gentlemen is widespread as i hope you're aware endemic poverty disparities that are getting worse and more extreme across the world i see people rolling their eyes at that and i invite them to come and see the food banks provided by the churches in my community the mosques in my community the synagogues in my community and i ask you given what's being suggested here given that modernity itself is part of the cause of that disparity and given that those institutions religious institutions have listened to those cries and have all all responded whether it's supportable to suggest that it's incompatible with modernity then we ask a question is it incompatible with science and i listen to the first speaker describing his own father as a man of science and it's glib and we're aware of course of the 55 plus percent of physicians and physicists who look up at the sky in bewildered or and feel entirely sure and certain that their faith is consistent with their exploration of science in fact there is absolutely no difficulty whatsoever and many of them if not all of them including many who have worked on the vaccines today consider themselves people of religious persuasion and of cat and of course the difficulty we have when i ask the question how could religion possibly be compatible with peace in the modern world and i put to my hero peter tatchell that for every one bad egg for everyone you might argue ian paisley there are a thousand no 100 no 10 000 desmond tutus those that would seek to run to do good as opposed to seek to divide us that is religion in the modern world i have um little time so in my conclusion i'm afraid i'm going to very quickly deal with this idea that it would interfere with human advance and this is the biggest topic of all so you'll forgive me for overrunning very shortly let's leave aside the obvious and cheap points that i hope each and every one of you are mindful of articulated albeit in a way which wasn't entirely clear back there but let's remember the obvious points of societies today of atheists who are in the process as we sit here comfortably in this room of killing the weaker muslims atheist society that's prosecuting that as we speak let's ask ourselves a question are you not religious when you look at the way people interact with one another on twitter the language that's deployed i'm not religious but don't speak and use that language i'll de-platform you there are heretics there are communities built around the entire entirely similar psychological infrastructure as religion have a look you know perfectly well what community you're building even though you might overtly profess not to be religious it's just another form in those instances of tribalism now given its inescapable and given that we know that tyranny can exist it does exist has always existed with or without religion i put it to you that the other side haven't come close to proving their argument as they must as they must that religion is incompatible with modernity quite quite the opposite that in today's society not only is it inescapable and the lived experiences of millions of young people but above all else religion in the world today is and will continue to be in our disparate world a force for good [Applause] thank you very much for that robert uh we will now come to our last speaker of the evening uh william gilley uh william is a second year law student at moorland college and he won this slot through open audition william the floor is yours [Applause] it's a great honor to close the debate tonight but i find myself in the awkward position of having to disagree with everyone before me not only the people on the for the proposition but also those who i'm back opposing it with me um i'm not sure everyone who's faced this debate on both sides has simply assumed that modernity is something that we should strive for and the question is does religion meet it or not but i'm not going to seek to challenge that or to uphold it because thankfully we've had a legal person come in and narrow the debate all we need to talk about is is religion compatible maternity so i'm not going to be bashing religion as you might imagine i'm i'm not going to i'm going to try not to bash modernity but i'm simply going to discuss to what extent are they compatible now of course as some of those opposing motions are pointed out already it's very easy to find compatibility once we go to high enough level of abstraction once we have fluff as we as one speaker wonderfully termed it once we had lots of cake or in the president's case lots of bagels and smoked salmon um but let's try to really get into it in where that where we need concrete answers concrete answers to concrete questions and again seeing as i see we have prestigious um lawyers all across the branch we have judge render we have the vice president the law side we have law students let let's think about it in terms of a legal question so the most most poignant example i can think of is a case from 2012 and this was called rigi and this was a marriage between two strictly orthodox parents who brought up their children in schools where they didn't have any secular education at all they were entirely given an entire entirely religious education now the mother left the community and the mother said that the children should be educated in accordance with normal like just in a secular school with secular and modern values now the judge said well of course we live in modernity we don't judge different religions we don't judge religions against each other all religions against no religion they're all equally valid but how do we decide the question in law when we want to know where the children should be educated we have to decide what is in the best interest of the child we have a choice we can't just talk about we can't just engage in some of the fluff that we've been hearing so the judge said well we have to consider the impact on the child and we have to allow the child to be in a position in life where the child will be able to reach the aspirations now you might say that's perfectly innocuous of course who wouldn't want a child to reach aspirations but again the problem is when we have to start fleshing that out we have to work out what are those aspirations and soon enough the court tell us the aspirations is that the child should be able to engage in the professions that should the child should be able to practice medicine or grown law again the child will have to be able to live a full secular life now of course these are contradictory you cannot say that modernity can view all ways of life all the conceptions of the good life equally but then ultimately come with the come to a conclusion that ultimately secular secularism and the modern life should be preferred but i don't blame the court for contradicting itself it's only exposing the inherent contradiction within the modern multiculturalism society itself we fool ourselves that our different lifestyles are not contradictory that there's always a way to harmonize them but again we asked we're faced with an actual question that there's only one answer and the judge said we judge that by the standards of the ordinary modern parent now the ordinary modern parent is not really agnostic about religious forms of upbringing by a wonderful piece of circular reasoning the ordinary modern parent believes that modernity is right and any conflicting religious police are wrong and the father and rigi believed that his conceptions of upbringing within the child's best interests and modernity were not and i submit that because these two views are ultimately irreconcilable now as again as peter pointed out this debate is not about whether religion can be made to be compatible with modernity religion is not compatible with eternity it can be made and there are liberal branches which have constantly been referred to in every organized religion which strive to do just that but they only achieve those by following the latest modern trends and then reading them into the text of tradition they take the lovely part the president mentioned the sabbath of course we can all talk about the digital detox and all those wonderful things which the bbc might cover from time to time but let's let's not forget what we find in certain texts about for example people who wouldn't fight in an army on the sabbath or people who couldn't partake in different um social encounters or people like me who might have an exam clash with with the sabbath sometimes there are hard questions where we have to take a pic we can choose to follow our religion or we can choose to follow aspirations of modernity but when we get down to those concrete questions sometimes we need one answer now in those liberal interpretations every commandment that offends the modern person it can be reinterpreted can be reconstructed so that they don't only conflict with modernity they confirm it but then i submit religion has no value as a source of moral behavior at all it only means what modernity allows it to mean this type of religion is necessarily compatible modernity because it's a creature and creation of modernity it's the values of a given decade dressed up in the tradition and culture of an ancient religion religion has always claimed to be more than this if we think about the first the beginning of the bible and what's originally called in hebrew it's the torah and that means the instruction it's a text and tradition which should understood an intellectually honest manner supplies guidance for posterity of course the way it applies changes in accordance with circumstances it it applies in the facts of the time and those facts of the time are as they are understood with the scientific knowledge of the time but ultimately it provides the ultimate form of guidance modernity provides a different form of guidance modernity uses the values of modern people as yardstick for determining moral questions if you watch all the speakers tonight from all benches they never stop to question their own modern values they simply put forward um a point of religion and said oh well that doesn't is that progressive is that not progressive and religion is good if it's progressive and it's bad if it's not progressive because modernity simply assesses questions by do they um are they consistent with the moral with the consensus of the generation as it happens to be today now if this is the position of atheists like those on my side of the bench it's perfectly coherent for an atheist morals may indeed be nothing more than the subjective consensus of each generation as to how to live best together society and that fulfills a valuable function but for those who profess faith but whose religion is nevertheless subservient to this outlook and they say that god is talking to us through his text but that somehow that always is compatible modernity in the 1800s that was compatible modernity in 96 is compatible and it's still compatible with modernity now we must conclude that god's views on the good life are as fickle as stephen tupe's relationship with freedom of speech now if if um i can just conclude i i want to conclude because dr ahmed mentioned something that uh mentioned this the story of abraham sending isaac to the slaughter and i i don't think he necessarily dealt with that fairly because what he didn't necessarily mention was that got this was a test and ultimately god was always going to tell abraham to bring isaac to the slaughter but ultimately send an angel so that abraham's hand should be stayed from the slaughter at the last minute now emmanuel kant who's a saint of modernity if there ever was one he couldn't understand this passage he thought abraham's actions were immoral and why because he thought that abram's actions should be god's god's word even god's word should be subjected to the standard of human reason now i think that the reason why the abrahamic story the story of bringing isaac is the foundational story of all that abrahamic religions is precisely because it makes the opposing claim abram is the father of religion because he subject he subjects subjugates his human reason to the divine will and of course god doesn't actually want that but ultimately the point has been made the point has been made that what a religious person does is what god wants and not by considering values of his own now for the point of this debate you don't need to decide who you'd agree with you you agree with you may think a divine prophecy should always be followed as long as it's absolutely verifiable and you may well agree with kant that human reason should always trump revelation but the one point i want to convince you of is that the choice presented by the debates premise is entirely misleading there is no coherent way of preventing a conflict between pure religion and performance from eternity because when the unmistakable divine voice rings loud in your ear instructing you to be a non-conformist and do something the court's ordinary modern parent would disapprove of you have to choose you can choose to listen to god you can choose to follow can't and dismiss it we can have a debate as to whether this house believes religion should be preferred to modernity which i suspect i will not be sitting on the same bench as my companions tonight and then you'll have a simple binary choice but considering the way the proposition is framed right now you have absolutely no choice whatsoever thank you [Applause] well that brings us to the end tonight uh we would love to see you all uh in the bar uh after this so do congregate in socially distanced coronavirus safe fashion of course um when you leave in a second uh you'll see there are doors for the nose and for the eyes and you should walk through there according to which side of the motion uh tonight you agreed with um just very briefly firstly i'd like to thank all of you members who've come tonight uh for a wonderful year of supporting us making us all feel very loved it's lovely to see so many faces uh in the chamber tonight and it's been really rewarding i think for all of us to be involved in the union over the last year so thank you very much to you you

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Rating: 4.7647057 out of 5

Keywords: Cambridge Union, Cambridge University, Speech

Id: GAD1WyktueI

Length: 97min 29sec (5849 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 25 2021