R.Dawkins and C.Hitchens ripping apart proponents of religion

and he has done several television series of which one was called digging for Jesus dr. Spivey I'm gonna start by saying this isn't a debate about of the existence of God it's a debate about us us mortals The Crooked Timber of humanity and how the practice of religion in general affects us Karl Marx famously described religion as an opiate Jonathan Miller thinks it's more of an amphetamine gets people overexcited and my own meager religious experience disposes me to think of it as a sort of anesthetic it is flat-out not true to say the Karl Marx referred to religion as an opiate or an opium what he says I can quote it from memory from his contribution to the critique of Hegel's philosophy of right is this he says religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature the heart of the heartless world the spirit of the spiritless situation it is an opiate for the sufferer for the people when John Lennon or Richard Dawkins asks us to imagine a world without religion you find your mind wandering and you're wondering what a world would look like without King's College Chapel without the Taj Mahal without higher Sophia the Blue Mosque the Parthenon the pantheon the Sistine Chapel he also said if we had no religion how would we do without King's College Chapel the Sistine Chapel etc well you know artists have to make a living and in the time when the Sistine Chapel was built in its ceiling was painted you know who had the money artists such as Michelangelo had to go where the patronage was we shall never know the ceiling that Michelangelo might have painted if he had been commissioned to paint the museum of science for example we shall never know what Haydn's evolution oratorio might have sounded like or Beethoven's mesozoic Symphony for the next hour or so can I tell you this in a sense we are wasting our time debating that we'd be better off without religion it's not an option religion is part of our human makeup and it's going to be a very interesting time that we spend but essentially it's not a topic for debate it's the way that we are he says we're fighting a losing battle because religion is a part of our human nature well speak for yourself it's not a part of mine and it's not a part of the great majority of my friends in universities in England and the United States and elsewhere the question about the line-drawing Jew the practice of religion being about the tone of living a framework and about self-restraint well that's dead easy just like the rabbi of just know his religion is man-made - he decides what he'd like to believe it's a la carte he says shouldn't my children be taught what was it self-restrained responsibility care for others and so on I don't believe in the rest of it I believe in the prophets don't believe in the mountaintop they believe in the revelation well nor should you but how dare you suggest to us that we couldn't teach our children self-restraint and respect for others in the golden group how dare you secularism being its own religion and these being its high priests well this is slightly cheeky suggestion if worm what dr. Spivey says his right and I'm inclined to agree with him then of course there is a religious need in all of us and if the religious belief systems that we've inherited are suddenly for whatever reason unpersuasive is obviously true that if that if what he says true people will look for other ways of satisfying the religious urge they will write passionate books condemning the old religious belief perhaps called The God Delusion or something like that and accuse the advocates of of the false sciences of heresy we recognize with a certain element of sadness our inability to go out and kill on behalf of our faith which and professor Dawkins is obviously not lost so maybe it is true with one of the high priests like to respond Bridget I face two questions firstly is religion true and second is it necessary for human psychological welfare or something of that sort if it isn't true then for anybody to maintain that somehow humans need it and you're wasting your time trying to get rid of it what an amazingly patronizing and condescending thing to say we intellectuals of course know that it's not true but but all those all those poor people out there they need religion I mean what a condescending thing to say about about all those people either it's true or it's not and I have enough respect for people to say that if it's not true people will reconcile themselves to that and will not find any need for it now I was asked a specific question is there is it in the genes is there some Darwinian reason for religiosity maybe there is but that doesn't bear in the slightest degree on whether it's true I care about whether it's true I don't like it when people say oh humans need it or we have it built into us but in our genes or Darwinian natural selection has built into it therefore that somehow validates it of course it doesn't validate it it merely says that it's been built into us by natural selection just as all sorts of other probably disagreeable things have been built into us doesn't mean we can't try to cure ourselves we're running late and I know many of you currently have dinner appointments but I'm now going to ask for a summing up from each of these people in turn I'm going to ask them for two minutes summing up of what they have thought throughout the evening but but while they're doing that you will be voting and you will have brought into the hall a card like this please tear it in half and vote either for or against the motion and if you wish to abstain then don't tear it and put the whole lot into the box people will come round with the boxes and while they are doing that we will hear from each of the speakers in turn okay if you're going to hear them you'll have to the risk of confusing anyone everyone can I try and organize a straw vote I'm in a hands in the air sort of folks and can I ask you to be absolutely we're taking a vote right now I know this is something different this is this is that this is a question it's not about it could have been about who in this audience has ever shown violence against their laptop but I've used a big contingent example hands up and don't be bashful about this I'm going to start off putting my own hand up who in this room has ever or can ever remember kissing a photograph slightly less than I might have anticipated but if you if you've done that you have bet you have behaved as in a sense Wittgenstein is saying we all behave as ceremonious animals we do things that don't have reason although I can't recall ever having kissed a photograph I have wept when reading poetry when listening to music I think that those on this side have come to rather resent the suggestion that religion has a monopoly on emotion on courage on sympathy on empathy I think it might perhaps have been felt when I was chosen that the case for atheism should not be made by the spokesman for its moderate wing Richard Dawkins it might be okay to have at least one extremist on the panel and I'll begin at once by recalling an exchange I had recently in Colorado Springs with a spokesman of America's evangelical broadcasting wing a much overrated but nonetheless significant force in American politics this a broadcaster asked me in response to my own statement of unbelief he said I insist that you answer the following question and that you answer it with a yes or a no I braced myself I accepted the challenge on the scene he said you want to imagine yourself in a strange city where you've never been before you ought to imagine nightfall coming on and you to be without friends or succor in this town and you too ought to ask yourself whether you would feel safer or less safe when you saw a dozen men coming towards you in the dusk if you were to know that they had recently come from a prayer meeting this is the time I think I can justify we say I'm relaying to you comrades friends brothers sisters the challenge that was put by the religious to me you'll see it once it's not a yes/no answer you can't give it yes/no answers that but I accept it anyway I said very well I won't give a Sesame Street reply but just without leaving the letter B I have been in that situation in Bombay in Belfast in Beirut in Belgrade in Baghdad and many other places too I won't tell you about all of them but let me just let me just as it were fill in some of those latent blanks in Belfast the capital city of one of the provinces of this hour United Kingdom as everybody here knows everything culturally educationally economically politically socially has been very gravely retarded for at least a quarter of a century excuse me at least half a century and maybe more since partition and before that this partition is both the outcome and the cause of sectarian warfare in this town by the simple fact that there are people there who are willing to kill not just one another but one another's children on the basis of what kind of Christian they are if I was to add Bombay to this list the city that was very nearly ruined by the sectarian partition of India in 1947 1948 where once again you were told it's a matter of faith what kind of Indian you are you may have to become a Pakistani or feel Muslim you may have to lose your life on the proposition you may not just be a Hindu was Bombay more or less survived this the terrifying ethnic cleansing but Bombay sort of recovered and so recently when now its name has been changed its minority citizens persecuted intimidated driven out by a new Hindu nationalist party the Shiv Sena that says that again if you don't if you do not follow the right god if you don't accept the supernatural as a real force in everyday life you not worth religion is not provided to us by Revelation it doesn't come from the heavens it doesn't come from the beyond it doesn't come from the divine it's man-made and it shows it shows very well that religion is created invented imposed by a species half a chromosome away from the chimpanzee it shows doesn't it well why do we deceive ourselves on this point is there anywhere I'm now going to wind up is there anywhere of the the places I've mentioned and I exempt Basra and all the other bees I could take you around did we do believe in evidence we do believe in skepticism we do believe in reason we hold our views we hold our views with as much conviction and principle as any God bother a does but we are open to the argument and we're going to prove it tonight to you and do that anyone dare to imply this a moral equivalence between us and the fanatics and the fools and those who think they know God's will and can tell you what it is who are our enemies and your enemies too so I beg to propose the notion that stands in our name thank you a quote from Kurt wise who is an American geologist he studied geology at Harvard no less under Stephen Jay Gould no less and he was set for a good career as an academic geologist which all his life he had desperately wanted the problem was it came from within it was his religious upbringing his firewall of faith and he couldn't reconcile the to his scientific education with his religion and he literally got a pair of scissors and went right through the Bible and cut out every verse that would have to go if he accepted his scientific education and in the end he decided there was nothing left of his Bible he therefore tossed out science and said and from then on he said with that in great sorrow I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science he goes on I am a young age creationist because that is my understanding of the scripture as I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism I would be the first to admit it but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate here I must stand if religion can do that to a highly educated Harvard geologist just think what it can do to an average school child or student thank you also I would before you all rushed off the moment I've given the results say how grateful we all are for hearing this debate tonight it's been effective in making up a lot of minds there are only a hundred their nose and the vote now for the resolution that we'd be better off without religion is 1205 and against that's also gone up 778 so the motion is carried you

Channel: Truth Seeker

Views: 1,968,357

Rating: 4.8468604 out of 5

Keywords: Richard Dawkins (Academic), Christopher Hitchens (Author), Religion (TV Genre), Darwin, God, Debate

Id: zCSIjPE2X3Q

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 10 2015