We'd be better off without religion: Christopher Hitchens

in total square Christopher Hitchens author journalist critic writer over here a figure in the cultural life of this country before he moved to Washington when he wrote the Vanity Fair and the notion he started off on the left-wing move very right and has recently been defending the neo-cons and his latest book which is absolutely germane to this subject is be published in the coming months and it's called God is not great Christopher Hitchens thank you very much Joan for that slightly misleading introduction to someone who may no longer be associates but still vibrates to Marxism thank you ladies and gentlemen for coming I think I'll be able to be reasonably terse given the very heavy artillery that follows me on our side 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 ok to have at least one extremists 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 sir 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 no I braced myself I accepted the challenge unseen he said he want to imagine yourself in a strange city where you've never been before you were 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 and 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 our United Kingdom as everybody here knows everything culturally educationally economically politically socially has been very gravely for at least four 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 horrible things are done not just in pubs and clubs but on the streets on housing estates on university campuses in that city still despite the relatively good news we've had today where the situation remains dominated by barbaric sectarian party leaders on this and no other basis both churches demand that their children are sent to separate schools they each agree with the other that above all things their own children must be protected from the faith of another faith I don't think I need to elaborate very much more on how horrendous the concert of that've been and how they are enshrined by the way in our own Constitution which mandates that our own head of the church is also the head of the state and of the Armed Forces with all the ludicrous wins or Consequences that you get if you found a National Church on the family values of Henry the eighth these conditions which are farcical in England Wales and Scotland are tragic and ugly only a few minutes flying time from where we sit if I pass on from Belfast to say a Baghdad where I've recently been and without reopening any of the arguments about the rightness or otherwise of the coalition intervention in Mesopotamia I think it can be granted by any fair-minded person that what was most needed in Iraq after 30 years of fascism and war was a period of reflection a short interlude of calm the journey which Iraqis could look about themselves and decide perhaps whom they'd like to vote that's what kind of country they'd like to live in what kind of federal system they might wish to evolve and to do so unmolested by violence or terror so the parties of God have vetoed every hope of that process the parties of God now have the Iraqi people in their jaws and they're saying to them it's not enough just to kill foreigners or to rail against Jews or Christians or secularists if that's nothing like enough it's only in Iraq not only mainly chiefly in Iraq that it's considered perfectly all right in fact a religious duty to blow up the mosques to destroy the religious schools of other Muslims of the Muslims of another school not unlike the pattern of Belfast it's not enough to have faith you must have the right version of your own faith or risk death mutilation and humiliation and the destruction that the immiseration the torture of Iraqi society is something all of us can read about every day suppose we have to go to Beirut the Pearl of the Levant the most civilized and beautiful and cultured city of the Middle East to to see what happens when for politicized reasons the sectarian Constitution is in place which says that the president of Lebanon must always be a Maronite Christian that the speaker of its Parliament must always be a shear that his vice-president must always be a Sunni that the Druze must have their share and so on leaving out at the very bottom I'm afraid such forces as Kurds and Armenians but making everyone defined in their citizenship by their faith do I need to elaborate what that's done to to bankrupt to beggar to disfigure and to degrade what could have been an ideally plural and diverse and happy society remaining with letter B should I say Banja Luka shall I say Belgrade or just say Bosnia again one of the most civilized enclaves of the Balkans for many years protected by a secular Constitution and the remains of what had been a secular and democratic republic and just look what happens when it is decided that it is that it is a matter of faith that determines your citizenship your allegiance your identity your nature your rights see the recrudescence in the Europe of the late 20th and early 21st century of Catholic fascist parties we thought we'd left behind at Nuremberg the Ustasha the recrudescence of forces like the Chetniks the serbian orthodox fascists who took exactly the same view except the other way around see the craven way in which our finalists media which always defers to people of faith say that it was serbs who shelled sarajevo or crow hats who shelled muster when what they should have been saying was today the christian orthodox militia bombard an open city around the clock or yesterday the catholic forces shelled mostar from dawn till dusk they didn't do it because it's a matter of chase we're supposed to respect people of faith and we were supposed to respect them while they do that and do that and make the sort of excuse the wrath there aren't enough words in my lexicon to express the contempt that I think any right-thinking person must feel for this conscription of this kind of medieval barbarism Jen will tell me when I've got a minute I don't know how whether i'm yet trespassing on my my rivals in my allies time but 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 if you're Muslim you may have to lose your life on the proposition you may not just be a Hindu was Bombay more or less survive this the terrifying ethnic cleansing and the pogrom that ensued when the subcontinent was mutilated and maimed and partitioned on this basis in the hopes of a genuine Indian the unity and independence ruined by way of appeasement of of people of faith 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 judge if you do not follow the right god if you don't accept the supernatural as a real force in everyday life you are not worth what here whatever it takes to become or to remain or be treated as an ordinary democratic civilized human being in again one of the great cities of Asia now it's not part of my case and I'm sure it's not part of Professor Grayling's or professor Dawkins is either to say that religion is the reason for all of this or the exclusive or sole reason for all of it I think it would be crude and reductionist to say that but who is going to argue I'll be fascinated to see who is going to argue that the matter of faith that the religious allegiance that the preachings of religion have not in all these cases gravely exacerbated gravely deepened gravely poisoned and prolonged all of these things that have made our tenuous civilization extremely difficult to defend uphold maintain let alone to advance I don't believe this case could be made that's for simple reason because 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 places I've mentioned and I exempt Basra and all the other bees I could take you around well it wouldn't be enormous Lee welcomed if there was a mass conversion to secularism or a mass adoption of the secular idea and principle of the principles of Bertrand Russell who wants to famously from this platform of Thomas Paine of Thomas Jefferson or Voltaire and and others and I'll close by saying that I want you to be on your guard against two force issues in this respect and I'll be very brief when I mentioned those gentlemen and I could mention some ladies too in this connection I Mary walleston well don't let anyone tell you that oh well secular tyranny is just as bad after all there's been fascist and communist dictatorships which have been just as revolting fascism as you know it was supported by the Catholic Church all through its life ineffectual after it had died and still is defended by it one of the leaders of the axis was actually the Japanese leader was actually a God there's no way of saying fascism and National Socialism when the actors were secular and in the case of Stalinism and Maoism in the Khmer Rouge the same mistake is made and a religion is made out of man it's the religious impulse itself that I think we need to oppose to criticize to criticize in ourselves as well as in others the argument from faith in other words the argument from certainty so those of us who maintain this may not be described my closing point as fundamentalists or secularists a certain cheap and demagogic and opportunist forces have recently been suggesting 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 Jo that anyone dare to imply there's 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 you

Channel: Intelligence Squared

Views: 274,406

Rating: 4.8190632 out of 5

Keywords: intelligence squared, iq squared, iq2, intelligence2, christopher hitchens, hitch, hitchslap, religion, debate, god, atheist, atheism, christianity

Id: WpKmje75kZo

Length: 14min 5sec (845 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 16 2011

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[u/Granpa0]

He is missed.

[u/delphininis]

Of course we would... just like we'd be better off without racism, sexism, extreme nationalism, bigotry.etc etc. But people gonna people, and I can't see any of that happening in the near term, at least short of the second coming of a fictional deity!

[u/arischs]

Christopher Hitchens presents his views in favor of the debate topic: "We'd be better off without religion"

Courtesy: Intelligence Squared

[u/rainbowwwwwwwwww]

Hitch isn’t my favorite, but he speaks the truth in this instance