God Is Not Great | Christopher Hitchens | Talks at Google

Hello everyone. Welcome to today's Google Authors event. After the talk, we will have a question and answer session, and I would like to remind everyone to use the microphone in the middle of the room if you have questions. It is my pleasure to introduce you to Christopher Hitchens. Mr. Hitchens was born in England and educated at Oxford. In 1981, he immigrated to the United States and recently became a U.S. citizen. He is the author of several notable books, including "Why Orwell Matters" and "Letters to a Young Contrarian." As one of our most notable public intellectuals, he has been a columnist for "Vanity Fair," "The Atlantic," "The Nation," "Slate," and "Free Inquiry," and taught at the New School, UC Berkeley, and the University of Pittsburgh.

In his new book, "God Is Not Great," he presents the case against the religion he spent his entire life developing with anger, humor and a formidable style of argument that defines all of Hitchens' work. About the book, Michael Kinsley wrote in the New York Times: “Hitchens has outwitted Hitchens watchers by writing a serious and deeply thoughtful book, entirely consistent with the beliefs of his life. And God should be flattered; Unlike most of those clamoring for his attention, Hitchens treats him like an adult. Always contrary and always eloquent, he is here today to discuss the book, answer his questions, and confront anyone who dares to challenge him to a debate.

Then he will sign books. And with that, please join me in welcoming Christopher Hitchens to Google. HITCHENS: Thank you, honey. Sweet. Well, thank you very much for that suspiciously reticent introduction. And thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, for coming. I understand that we only have one hour left together, so I will try to break the rule of my life and be concise. I think I'll put it like this. It is true that editors sometimes want to give a book an attractive, suggestive or challenging title or subtitle. And so when we discovered or they discovered, well, how religion poisons and why religion poisons everything, I knew what would happen, people would come up to me and say, you mean absolutely everything, you mean everything. stuff?

They would take me literally. I thought, well, okay. One of the things you have to do in life as an author is live up to your damn subtitle. So today I would defend the subtitle because I think the title probably, when it came to me in the shower, I realized it pretty much speaks for itself. Unlike that huge sign outside the Little Rock airport, we had a black sign that you can see from the airport that simply says "Jesus," a word I have used myself and a name I know, but saying it like that seems to say too much and too little, you know what I mean?

Well, in my opinion, this is how religion has this effect: it is derived from the infancy of our species, from the crying and fearful period of childhood. It comes from the time when we did not know that we lived in a world. We thought we lived in a disk. And we didn't know that we revolved around the sun or that the sky wasn't a dome, when we didn't know that there was a germ theory to explain disease and countless theories to explain things like famine. It comes from a time when we didn't have good answers, but because we are pattern-seeking animals, that's good for us, and because we prefer even a conspiracy theory or a garbage theory to no theory at all, that's bad for us. .

This is and was our first attempt at philosophy, just as, in a way, it was our first attempt at science, and everything was and continues to be based on a complete misunderstanding of the origins, first of the universe and, second, of nature. human. We now know a lot about the origins of the universe and a lot about our own nature. National Geographic just sequenced my DNA. By the way, you should do this. It is incredibly important to discover how this extraordinary scientific advance would abolish racism and creationism, how you can discover your kinship with all your creatures originating from Africa; but also your kinship with other forms of life, including not only animals but also plants, and you get an idea of ​​how you are part of nature and how wonderful that is.

And we now know a lot, thanks to Stephen Hawking and others, Steven Weinberg and many other

great

physicists, about what Professor Weinberg's brilliant book calls The First Three Minutes, the concept of the Big Bang. And we can be sure, as we probably would need to, that neither this enormous explosion that set in motion the universe, which is still moving away from us at

great

speed, nor this astonishingly complex period of evolution of billions of dollars, billions of dollars. years, I can be pretty sure that it was not designed so that you and I could meet in this room.

We are not the object of any of these plans. These plans don't know we're here. I'm sorry to say that I wouldn't know or care if we were no longer here. We have to face this alone with the intellectual and moral equipment that we have been given, or that we have acquired, or that is innate to us. And here's another way religion poisons things. It starts by saying, well, why don't we lie to ourselves, why don't we pretend that we're not going to die, or that an exception can be made at least in our case if we take the right steps? propitiations or correct movements.

Why don't we pretend that things like modern diseases, for which we can now sequence genes, like AIDS, are the punishment for evil and fornication? Why don't we continue to fool ourselves into thinking that there is a divine superintendent for all of this because it would abolish the feeling of loneliness and possibly even irrelevance that we might otherwise feel? In other words, why don't we give in to desires? That poisons everything, in my opinion. It immediately attacks the basic integrity we need to conduct the scrupulous investigations, experiments, and interrogations of evidence we need to survive, thrive, and grow.

And it is no coincidence, it is no coincidence that almost all scientific advances have been achieved despite religious opposition in one form or another that says we should not alter God's design. I suppose the most recent and dangerous of these is the attempt to limit stem cell research. But probably everyone could think of all the other forms of scientific, especially medical, research that had led to religious persecution, in retaliation. Third, I think it is an attack on what is also very important to us: our innate morality. If there is one point that stands out to me more than another when I go to debate religious people, it is this: They say, where would your morality come from if God did not exist?

It's actually a question posed in Dostoevsky's wonderful novel, The Brothers Karamazov, says one of the brothers, Snelyakov, actually the evil one, says it. If God is dead, isn't everything permitted, isn't everything permitted? Where would our ethics be if the duty of supervision did not exist? This, again, seems to me to be a very profound insult to our deepest nature and character. I assure you that it is not the case that we do not engage in killing, raping, and robbing each other right now just because we are afraid of divine punishment or because we are seeking divine reward.

It's an extraordinarily low and insulting thing to say to people. On my mother's side, part of my ancestry is Jewish. It turns out that I don't believe in the story of Moses and Egypt or the exile or the wandering and the Sinai. And in fact, now even Israeli archeology has shown that there is not a word of truth in that story or any of the others; but take it as truth. Are you expected to believe that my mother's ancestors came all the way to Mount Sinai, a long journey, under the impression until they got there that rape, murder, perjury and theft were okay, only to be told Did they say when they reached the foot of Mount Sinai?

Mount Sinai, bad news, none of this stuff is kosher at all. They are all prohibited. I do not think. I think, I think we can, in fact, since then I have a better explanation, both superior and better, that no one would have been able to go as far as Mount Sinai or any other mountain or in any other direction. unless they had known that human solidarity demands that we consider each other as brothers and sisters and that we prohibit activities such as murder, rape, perjury and theft. This is innate in us. If those activities are not innate, sociopaths who don't understand the needs of anyone but themselves and psychopaths who positively enjoy breaking these rules, well, all we can say is that, according to one theory, they are also made in the picture. of God, which makes the image of God quite problematic, doesn't it? or that they can be explained by better and further investigation and that in the meantime they must be restrained and disciplined, but in no case here is religion a help whence it came. to help more our morality, our ethics.

Finally, I would say, not because it's over here, not because it's over at all. Don't relax. Everyone has to drink, something to eat, but as for poison, I think there is the real temptation of something very poisonous for human society and human relationships, which is the fear of freedom, the desire to be slaves, the desire to be told what to do. Now, just as we all like to think and live under written documents and proclamations that encourage us to think that it is our birthright and our most precious need to be free, to be liberated, to be unencumbered.

So we also knew that, unfortunately, what is innate in people is servility, the desire to be told what to do, the adoration of strong, brutal and cruel leaders, that this other most basic element of the human constitution must be had. into account and causes us a lot of problems around the world as we speak. Religion, in my opinion, is a reification, a distillation of this desire to be a servant, to be a slave. Ask yourself if you really wish it were true that there was a heavenly dictatorship that watched over you from the moment you were born, actually from the moment you were conceived, throughout your life, night and day, knowing your thoughts, awake and asleep. , they could actually condemn you for a thought crime, the absolute--the absolute definition of a dictatorship, they can condemn you for what you think or what you privately want, for what you are talking to yourself, that admonishes you like this under constant surveillance, control and supervision and he doesn't even let go of you when you're dead because that's when the real fun begins.

Now, my question is this... my question is this: who would want that to be true? Who wants to live the life of a servant in a heavenly North Korea? I have been to North Korea. I am one of the few writers who has done it. In fact, I am the only writer who has been to all three axes of evil countries: Iran, Iraq and North Korea. And I can tell you that North Korea is the most religious state I have ever been to. When I was a child I used to wonder, what would it be like to praise God and thank Him all day and all night?

Well, now I know because North Korea is a completely worshiping state. It is set up just to do that, for worship and it is just one less than a trinity. They have a father and a son, as you know, the Dear Leader and the Great Leader. The father is still the president of the country. He has been dead for 15 years, but Kim Jong-il, the youngest, is only the head of the party and the army. His father is still the president, head of state. So in North Korea we have what we could call a necrocracy or what I also...

I called mausolocracy, thanatocracy. One, just one less than a trinity; father, son, perhaps no holy spirit, but they do say that when the youngest was born, the birds of Korea sang in Korean to commemorate the occasion. I have verified this. It didn't happen. Take my word for it. It didn't happen and I guess I should add that they don't threaten to follow you after you're dead. You can leave North Korea. You can get out of his hell and his paradise by dying. For the Christian and the Muslim, it is not possible. This is the desire to be a slave.

And from my point of view, it is poisonous for human relationships. Now I have actually babbled for almost twenty minutes. I'll be quick. It is argued, well, that some religious people have done great things and have been motivated to do so by their faith; The most cited case I have found is that of Dr. Martin Luther King, who I know I don't need to explain to you. Two quick things about that: first, he was really a minister. He preached the Book of Exodus, the exile of an enslaved and oppressed people as a metaphor. But if he really meant it, he would have said that the oppressed, as the Book of Exodus finds them, had the right to kill anyone who stood in their way and take their lands and property, enslave their women, or kill their children. . and commit genocide, rape, ethnic cleansing and forced land theft.

That is what the Exodus described as happening: the total destruction of the tribes. It is very fortunate that Dr. King only wanted to use the Bible as a metaphor at most and, after all, he was using the only book that he could be sure his audience had already read.As Thomas Aquinas said, a one-book man, you know, you should read a Bible, you don't really need anything else, they are destroying libraries in the Muslim world, which might have books that contradict the Koran, this is no way. to live. But having said all that, and said what the—and the consolations of philosophy also that are not that difficult to study, are very rewarding.

And the ethical and moral dilemmas that arise from the study of literature, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, people like that, James Joyce. Still, it is only a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. There are no guarantees and an atheist can be a nihilist, sadist, Stalinist or fascist, it would be unlikely that it would be the latter, but it is possible. Well. But we... there are no guarantees and part of it is the recognition of that, that is the beginning of wisdom and, I think, the beginning of freedom. One short and one longer, I just want to be sure, I guess have you read "Captain Stormfield's Journey to Heaven" by Mark Twain.

HITCHENS: I'm sorry. Yes, I have read a lot of Mr. Clemens on religion. Yes. It seemed like a kind of definitive work on the hierarchical structure of a more standard religion. HITCHENS: Yes. By the way, you can't read too much Twain, ladies and gentlemen, on the subject. But now all his things are available. There are websites about Mark Twain and religion. It used to be very difficult to get hold of his writings on religion even 10 years ago. I'm sorry. And my longest question that I hope doesn't drown you. In fact, I have several friends who are very well educated, in some cases in science, who became religious at an older age.

They've been an atheist or agnostic, and then they just decided they were feeling something and became religious. Do you have anything to say about those kinds of reasons or why that might be happening? HITCHENS: Yeah. I guess I could speculate, but that's all I would do. Of course. HITCHENS: I think for some people, the Hubble View, for example, has the opposite effect than it has on me. It makes people feel, well, then whoever designed this must be even more amazing than I thought. And that's... now there are attempts by creationists to say that. Instead of saying, "No, Darwin was wrong.

God made all this." Now they say, "Well, okay, there was evolution, but God did that too." So, as you know, the arguments that explain everything, explain nothing. I think that's a definite principle underlying full cognition. If they can twist your argument so that you can understand everything, understand everything, then it's not an argument. But I think we are certainly made in such a way that we have an inclination towards worship, let's say. That tendency is certainly within us. And when people think there is something overwhelming, what they feel is amazement. And then what you feel is well, maybe there is some majesty that I should recognize here, although that is not a logical step at all.

By the way, do you know about "astonishment"? In what sense? HITCHENS: Did John Wayne play the Roman centurion in one of the crucifixion movies? I don't... HITCHENS: And there's a certain point at which the rain has to fall hard, and there's thunder and lightning and the veil of the temple splits and so on. And John Wayne, standing as a centurion, is supposed to say, "Truly, this was the son of God." So he does this. I don't remember who the director was; I think he's Houston. And the rain and thunder and lightning appear, so Wayne stands there stoically and says, "Truly, this was the son of God." And the director: "John, that was great.

That was fantastic. I wonder if we could have it with a little more awesomeness." Then they again indicated rain, thunder, the temple veil splitting in Wayne, earthquakes, you know. It's all happening and Wayne says, "Oh, really, this was the son of God." So this is kind of a follow-up to Tom's question. I have a friend who presents himself as some kind of allegorical pagan. And he has received many angry criticisms of the religion, many of which echo his own. But at the same time he feels in himself a kind of biological need to be part of a circle of believers in a community that, in his opinion, helps his rather fragile emotional behavior.

He goes through depression and things like that, and he finds that belief. So what he did was try to find what he considered the least unpleasant religion he could find and then not take it too seriously. What would you say to a person like that? HITCHENS: Well, that used to be called the Church of England, or the Unitarians, of whom Bertrand Russell said, "The good thing about them is that they believe in only one god at most." Peter DeVries is very good at this. He says that people used to be pagan and polytheistic and believed in multiple gods, and then they started believing in one god and got closer and closer to the true figure.

This is progress. In one article, I think he was the one I read, he seemed reluctant to endorse, if not criticize, Richard Dawkins's attempt to organize atheists under the title Brights. HITCHENS: Yes. And I think your comment was that we infidels don't need such backup machinery. My question is, if like-minded people don't organize, especially if those whose ideals we oppose are more organized, how can we try to, in a sense, steer our society in the direction we would like it to go? HITCHENS: Well, I should have said this to the previous question. I mean, in some ways I'm the wrong person to ask these questions.

I am no longer a member of groups. I no longer feel the need to belong. I used to do it when I was younger and more left-wing that now I feel the need to get involved in an organized way. Not now, and I think I probably have more influence as an individual than as a cog in a supposed party. Point for anyone to wonder who was asked if he ever considered registering as an independent, for example. People can fight harder for their vote if they don't give it away in advance. Separate question, and it is very important to me that I do not belong to a church.

People who believe like me don't need to get together all the time and remind us what we believe, reinforce it, insist in case we forget the amazing propositions that, you know, we're singing about and all that kind of stuff. things. You just know a fellow freethinker when you meet one. That should do it. And in any country and in any language too. In October there will be a big meeting in Washington with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, myself and many others: Victor Stinger. Because now there has been an extraordinary trend of successful books on this subject, and I think there is a change in the Zeitgeist about religion.

And let me say this: if that Zeitgeist has occurred, the change has occurred in that Zeitgeist, it has not been by any organization. It's because of a group of like-minded people who write from their hearts and refuse to be intimidated by religious harassment. Or allowing schools to teach religious nonsense, for example, instead of science. Or allow euphemisms to be spread about the behavior of God's parties in Iraq or elsewhere. That is what created it, not an organization but what we could call an intellectual tendency. I think it's okay. I think it's encouraging. Hello. Some of the things you said really don't seem consistent with our experience in the United States.

Two things in particular: One is that you said, you know, once people have Hubble telescopes and microscopes, the burning bush won't be as interesting. And the other thing you said is that, you know, religion fits in with innate human nature, you know, to be told what to do or not to have so much freedom. Well, in the United States we have the most advanced, richest, most powerful nation probably in the history of the world, and we probably have the most freedom-loving, you know, almost inventive nation; not inventing, but actually embracing philosophy. of freedom and individuality and trying to, you know, spread it around the world.

However, you also have the most religious nation. Good is true. I mean, you can argue about the methods, but I mean, there's no question that we're trying to promote democracy. And yet you have, yes, the most religious nation. You get the impression that people going to church are probably the largest number of all time. Religious people greatly affect who the leaders are. So how is this contradiction explained? HITCHENS: Well, I don't think it's a contradiction because the religious section of the constitution means that you can have religious pluralism. Now, for example, where I come from, originally, you can say that I was born in England.

The head of the church is the head of the state and the head of the armed forces. It's an official church and you have to pay for it whether you want to or not. And the moment Her Majesty the Queen dies, the head of the Church of England will become a half-Muslim with bat ears and no taste in women, from what I see, the gloomy Prince Charles, who is going to Islam classes and

talks

to plants and he's crazy. That's what he gets for founding a church based on Henry VIII's family values. In the United States you can't have any of that.

That would be unconstitutional. You can belong to any church you want, the government has nothing to do with it. And I think people have a Toquevillian view, if you will, of the church. Many of them go to church for social reasons. Some of them for ethnic reasons, some for charitable reasons, some for community reasons, as you might say. If you ask anyone now, I've been doing this a lot lately. I have debated at every stop on my book tour. Okay, so you said you're a Baptist minister, yes. Well, do you believe in John Calvin's teachings on predestination and hellfire?

Because you want to know? Well, because you said you were a Baptist. Yeah, but I mean I'm Southern Baptist, you know, that kind of people. Well, come one. They don't love the question. They... or ask Catholics if they really believe in what their church teaches or what the Pope tells them. Of course for the most part they don't. The fastest growing group of people in the country has been measured to be those who have no beliefs or are atheists. It is by far the fastest growing; has doubled in the last ten years. It is evident that people lie in opinion polls, that there are not enough churches in the country;

There are a lot of them. They are not enough to take all the people who say they go to them, it just couldn't be done, they couldn't fit. I don't think people who have doubts about religion are going to be told by opinion pollsters who call them at dinner time. They'll say, yeah, I'm a Methodist or whatever, they won't say I sometimes wonder if John Wesley was really the man. Not when you're checking multiple choice boxes. Unfortunately, there are people who think that is the way to go politically. The president, for example, thinks that saying someone is a person of faith is axiomatically paying them a compliment.

And if you remember, he did it to Vladimir Putin, KGB thug and thug, and increasingly evidently a very dangerous man to be in charge in Russia. The president gathers himself and immediately says, "Right away, well, looking into his eyes and seeing that he was wearing his grandmother's crucifix, I realized that he was the perfect guy for me." Now, in a strong field, I think that's the stupidest thing the president has said so far. And I think that sometimes he must regret that. And I tried to look into this to find out, I just need to know one thing: Has Vladimir Putin ever used his grandmother's crucifix since then?

Had he ever been seen using it before? Or did he just think this should be enough for the president of the United States? For if it were so, he would show that religion is not only metaphysically incorrect, but, as I believe I have said, it is a danger and a poison to us all. If our republic can be, and its president can be taken down, in that way, like someone offering garlic to a vampire, then we really are in trouble. Just a follow up, though, it seems like you would have almost no religion in the US if... if it's true that you were saying that once you became an advanced scientific society, you know, you would lose. interest in religion, which is not the case.

HITCHENS: Okay. I would say a little more, I mean, let's take the case of the so-called “intelligent design school”, they want at least equal time, before they wanted to ban evolution, now they want equal time in schools. Thus, with their friends at the Discovery Institute in Washington, they brought movements to school boards and courts in Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, and the most conservative county in Pennsylvania, around the city of Dover. And they have been humiliated in each case. And this is in Kansas, in Texas, in Oklahoma and in the most reactionary area of ​​Pennsylvania. Expelled from the school board by the electorate and expelled from the courts as flatly unconstitutional by judges, in all cases, appointed by Reagan Republicans.

And I don't know what they're going to do next, these rednecks, I don't know what they're going to do. But I know why it doesn't work and why it's not going to work, because there may be a lot of parents in Kansas who say, "Well, I personally believe that God made therocks and so on and he only made them 6,000 years ago." But they don't want their children to be taught that in school. They don't want to come from a state where they are laughed at when they say where they are from. Oh, you're from Kansas, that's the place where... they don't like that.

The same thing happened with the issue of the Confederate flag, apart from racism. A lot of people who didn't want to come from a state that had a Confederate battle flag. Among other things, people will not have conventions in your state and you will suffer for that too. They will laugh at you when you travel, they don't want this. And they shouldn't have to put up with it because of a bunch of nutcases either. So, no, I'm not saying there aren't many devout people in this country and I'm not saying science simply denies religion. But I say that the influence of religion over scientific rationalism is enormously overestimated, yes.

You shouldn't... you shouldn't impress people to the point where they feel you have to... you can't object. Thanks for coming. I think you already answered one of my questions about organizing a larger effort. Other than that, I want to get just some comments and thoughts based on the idea of ​​whether there is going to be an independent movement, whether in the atheist or anti-theist movement, whether you are a part of it or not, if you have any suggestions for the average person, maybe there isn't, say, a publishing house or a production company, but they do have the Internet, you know, they have their own thoughts...

HITCHENS: Right. And write in front of them what they can do to provide resources to other people or to express their thoughts in ways that you consider exceptional. HITCHENS: Yes. Encourage some type of movement, if there is one. . HITCHEN: Yes, my friend Rich Dawkins, in fact, at the end of his book, The God Delusion, he has a list that you can look at, and his is a great book, I should say, of websites where, so to speak, it helps . is available. Well, there is one, for example, there is a very important one called “Leaving Islam”, which is about people who want to leave and are afraid or are being intimidated, ways to do it and find contact with people who feel the same way. shape.

Very serious because there are now many of our fellow citizens who do not feel that they have religious freedom because they are imprisoned in a religion that can kill them for even considering changing their mind on the matter, this is no small matter. But I tell you what I would do: I would subscribe to a magazine called Free Inquiry that is published in Amherst, New York, I think every month, a very, very good rationalist and skeptical magazine that has in itself a lot of local activities that you can Consult. And then there's another magazine called Skeptical Inquiry, published closer to here, perhaps more appealing to people of a scientific or technical bent that does things like expose frauds that appear on television and claim to be able to put you in touch with your relatives. or divine water or all those crazy types that often appear on primetime shows.

And it also puts you in touch with the work of the great magicians, Penn and Teller and James Randy, who once again prove that miracles are easy. And they can also show the fraud of anyone who tries to exploit them, a world of wonders awaits you. And these magazines will also show and point out to you the areas where resistance is needed, for example, the continued attempt to teach nonsense in American schools: “Yes, children, that concludes the biology period, and now prepare for your creation studies time.” and hour". After the astronomy class we will have the astrology class for the same time, and then the chemical alchemy period.” It's enough to make a cat laugh, right?

There are people who think this is what should be done to brutalize American children. So getting together with other people you might think is a bad idea. Yes, two things, one observation and one concern, my first observation is that I think they share something in common with Jesus in that they both seem to be attacking aspects of religion, but often in his case, he specifically attacked religious leaders while attacking religion itself. And I was... HITCHENS: No, our similarities are often pointed out. I'm sad to know, I thought for sure it would be the first. And secondly, a little bit of concern, if we start going more and more towards atheism, you mentioned some of the horrible things that happened in the name of religion, but I look at one of the biggest genocides or at least mass murders of all the times. by the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin when, in the name of, among other things, atheism, they killed an enormously large number of their own people.

And what do you think would stop that from happening if you were actually successful? HITCHENS: I have a chapter on this in my book because it is a question that is asked very often, I think it is also very serious, I have to condense the chapter if I may, but this is the situation. Until 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, millions of Russians, millions and millions of them, had been told for hundreds and hundreds of years that the head of the state, the tsar, was also the head of the Church and was a little more More than human, he was the little father of the town.

He was not entirely divine. He was more of a saint than a human. And he was the owner of everything in the country and everything was due to him. This is how a gigantic layer of Russian society was instilled with servile and fatalistic ideas. If you are Josef Stalin, you should not be in the dictatorship business in the first place if you cannot realize that this is a great opportunity for you, who have inherited a population that is servile, gullible and superstitious. Well, what does Stalin do? He organizes an inquisition. He has heresy hunts, heretic trials, Moscow trials.

He proclaims miracles, Lysenko's agriculture that was supposed to produce three crops a year or whatever, pseudobiology that would feed everyone in a week. He says that all thanks are due at all times to the leader and he must be praised at all times for his goodness and kindness. And by the way, he always kept the Russian Orthodox Church on his side, which split. He divided the church and some of them moved to New York and created a rival. But the Russian Orthodox Church remained part of the regime; He was not so stupid as not to know that he had to do it, just as Hitler and Mussolini made an even more aggressive deal with the Roman Catholic Church and with some of the Protestants.

And let us remember that the other great axis of evil of that time, the Emperor of Japan, was not only a religious person but actually a god. So fascism, communism, Stalinism and Nazism are not as secular as some people think, and much more religious than most people believe. But this is what would be a fair test: finding a society that has adopted the teachings of Spinoza, Voltaire, Galileo, Einstein, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and has sunk as a result into famines, wars, dictatorships, torture and repression. . . It would be a fair test. That's the test I'd like to do... that's the experiment I'd like to do.

I don't think that will end in a gulag. Hello. Thanks for coming. HITCHENS: Thanks for having me. More women asking questions would be great and please, I implore you to be really funny so we can prove Mr. Hitchens wrong about why women can't be funny. HITCHENS: I was wondering what you would do... I must say what have you done with your chicks here. We are a technology company. So, I'm not religious, but I just want to play devil's advocate, what do you say about studies that show that people who consistently go to church, who pray, and who believe in God have lower blood pressure and live longer lives? long? , etc?

HITCHENS: Well, I would say no... I wouldn't try much. I mean, if it's hard to prove, I'm not sure I can trust the methodology, but suppose it were true, the same could be said for being a Moonie, for example. I mean, it's said...it's said that Louis Farrakhan's eccentric, racist Nation of Islam and his sectarian gang entrap young drug addicts, for all I know, they may do that, but that doesn't recommend it to me. It also doesn't prove anything about his theology, if you know what I mean. Whereas I can absolutely tell you that of the suicide bomber population 100% are faith based.

And I don't think that in itself discredits the faith, but I think it should make you skeptical of that kind of random sampling. Sure. There seemed to be... HITCHENS: The same can be said about the genital mutilation community. I have a lot of progressive religious friends who... I used to be pretty condescending about religion, but I feel like I learned a lot from them and learned about their religious practice and what it means to them, like you said. Before, anyway, many religious people don't really believe in all the tenets of what their faith says. So I feel like those friends of mine are looking for a community and a feeling of unity with other people and with the universe and ultimately on a scientific level that is confirmed anyway because on a quantum level everything is one and it is the same. .

So I feel like churches, at least in this country, provide a sense of community that I don't think exists otherwise in our culture. I don't feel like I had that growing up and I feel like my friends who went to church can go back to their church now and there are all these adults who, other than their parents, were there to raise them as they were. growing up and then asking them how they're doing and I never had that. So in a sense, I'm jealous of that. HITCHENS: It takes a lot to make me cry, but you...

Look at me later, I mean, the way you just... look, that's actually what I said about is there anyone who reads, who reads De Toqueville , in Democracy. in America should, that's what he said, about communitarianism and religion. It's very... it's the reason America is so religious, but it's a different form of religion. Ask yourself a related question: I'm surprised how many Americans change religions when they get married. You hear it all the time, you've heard it. I used to be a Seventh-day Adventist but my wife was a Congregationalist, now I go to the Congregationalists. It doesn't matter, said the Seventh-day Adventist, if you don't stay with us you will go straight to hell.

It changes very easily. Instead, go to another church. Maybe I wouldn't consider not going to one, but it shows the depth of strength of religious loyalty. I also think that, well, it's notable that, say, Polish Catholics in Chicago or Greek Orthodox or many Jews, the church has also been a means of transmitting and preserving an ethnic tradition. Solidarity in the face of often quiet and gloomy lifestyles, and now there is even a phenomenon known as churchianism. It is expressed in megachurches, people who live a semi-transitory life, without employment or very stable residence and who often move around the country.

One Sunday they want to know where they can go to drink the old jalopy and be among friends, and these characters are waiting for them, believe me, to take away the little savings they have left. Because that's another inextricable fact about American religion, just as community and blood pressure can be involved. It must be mentioned in the same breath as open fraud to an absolutely astonishing extent. I mean, the extortion community, the genital mutilation community, the suicide bombing community, the child abuse community, I would rather say child rape communities, these are all communities of faith, believe me.

Oh, is it my turn? HITCHENS: What's going on? Try to deviate a little from the immediate topics. You expressed your regret for this perverse impulse of the human spirit that seems to desire to be dominated, to prostrate itself before the mysterious altar of power. It occurs to me that the current government of this nation has calculatedly exploited this perverse desire and exploited the language that seems to inspire or attract it. Now, I strongly oppose a particular policy of this government which is the indefinite detention of so-called terrorism suspects in Cuba and, in particular, I do not like the way the government tries to justify this policy using these same discourses of power and secrecy. that come from a particular religious seal.

So I would like to ask you, and I don't want to be flippant, how you can reconcile what you said today with other comments you have made apparently in support of this same policy. HITCHENS: There's no danger of you being impertinent so don't worry about it. I just got back from Guantánamo, when I say I was there last month. It took me a long time to get depressed and I haven't written anything about it yet, so you won't know my views as I'm not sure I know them fully, but about your question, I know what my views are.

They refer in principle to indefinite detention. I did not see nor should I have overlooked any allusion that all of them made to religion, in the decision to declare them enemy combatants. Are you suggesting that there was a religious justification for the detention policy? It is not a religious justification per se, but in my opinion, the Bush administration in its public statements often uses language of power very similar to that used by religious tyrants and demagogues throughout the centuries and this language appears with specialforce when it justifies controversial actions. like Guantanamo Bay. HITCHENS: Well, again I think we have a disagreement, I mean the language that they seem to use to me is the secular language of emergency powers and special circumstances requiring extraordinary measures and that is a very old argument, especially in the United States.

Joined. United States, dates back to President Lincoln's attempt to suspend habeas corpus in the Civil War. It reminds me of that and not any discussion about or with theocracy. Emergency powers and extraordinary deliveries and other moments like this smell to me a lot like secret jargon at the same time used by preachers. HITCHENS: Or by secular despots. I just don't think you're getting your point across about the theological. If of course we want to discuss the issue of civil liberties, let's do it, but it is a departure from the rubric. The Bush administration is not waging a holy war in this regard.

However, he faces a holy war. One thing you can't miss about the Guantanamo residents is how faith-based they are, and that's part of the reason we're presented with this problem. The difference seems to me to be this: if you treat them like criminals, as some argue, then you can't really say you're fighting a war, so it's just a matter of law and order. If you say you are fighting a war, in what sense are these not enemy soldiers? If they are enemy soldiers, how can they be judged as criminals? Why do they consider people as criminals and build a military court?

I visited the courtroom where they are going to be tried, where they will be able to say, “Well, thank you for inviting me here and admitting that I am a soldier, when the point is that the Geneva Convention says that you are not. So that's bad enough to begin with and it's territory no government has had to tread yet. But also, apparently we are not allowed to do any of those things, nor are we allowed extraordinary renditions nor can we return them to their countries of origin in case their own governments mistreat them there. Well, this apparently leaves only two alternatives.

It's about taking no prisoners. And the other is to let everyone say that we have no right to keep you. And none of these seem to be very attractive. This is as far as I have come with my reasoning. But don't you dislike how all of these actions might not be unconstitutional? They are not justified in constitutional terms but in language such as extraordinary deliveries, emergency powers. HITCHENS: Yeah, I don't like that very much, yeah. I mean, no one has ever been able to point out to me that Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus helped defeat the confederacy, for example.

And I certainly don't believe that the president has the right, under the Constitution, to suspend habeas corpus. Only Congress can do that. It does not mean that it cannot be suspended. Congress has to do it, the president can't. I'm pretty rigorous about that kind of thing. Call me old-fashioned if you want. Well, I feel like I've taken too much time now. HITCHENS: A very welcome question, believe me. I would argue that the Bush administration has restrained itself or needs to be restrained from using genuine religious language in the way it addresses so-called war and terror and I believe that the word crusade was used earlier in the campaign by President Bush, It has not been used since.

And we remember that the original name of the campaign was Infinite Justice. Another unfortunate rejected language, obviously chosen by some careful PR person. HITCHENS: Hello. Thank you very much for coming. I just had a question about something that many people probably consider a less serious issue, but I'm curious to know your thoughts on art, music, and creativity and how they fit in with your other ideas. Those were three things that formed communities where we maybe argued by faith, you know. The greatest composers throughout history always dedicate their work to God and things of that nature and I'm curious how you view these things and the beauty of these things to be similar to the beauty that you suggested you can find in the nature or how you think. so that they could be more suitable, more suitable for religion.

I'm just curious to know if you think anyone would be devalued in this new system or any other... with his ideas. HITCHENS: Yes, we don't know, about the extraordinary buildings, the great Gothic cathedrals, for example, or even the Great Mosques of Andalusia. We do not know if the architects who built them were convinced that it was for the greater glory of God. We only know that at that time you couldn't get a job as an architect if you didn't affirm that. And we certainly know what would have happened to you if you had said, "What God?" That wouldn't just be the end of your career as an architect, so we don't know that...

We don't know the same thing, not even about the devout painters, we don't know if they were believers, or the composers. Of the devotional poets, and here I am on stronger ground as a literary critic, I know a little more about it. For people like John Donne or George Herbert, it would be very, very difficult to pretend to write that if you weren't a believer. It would be extremely difficult, where would you get your inspiration from? And my feeling is that it is true devotional poetry and I personally could not do without it. We would be much poorer.

Stick with the literature if you don't mind. The King James Version of the Bible, the King James Translation, recently referred to in the New York Times as the St. James Translation, is in itself a great work of literature and one could not be without it, if not You understand the beauty of that liturgy, there's a lot of Shakespeare and Milton and Blake that you wouldn't understand, you wouldn't know what's going on. So it's part of literacy to know it. I once wrote a book about the Parthenon, a very important building for Western civilization, from which you can learn a lot about it and from it, due to its beauty, its symmetry and its extraordinary architecture and sculpture.

But I no longer care about the culture of Pallas Athena and I don't care about the mystical ceremonies, some of them involving animal and possibly human sacrifices, that took place on the road to Eleusis. And I don't have to worry about Athenian imperialism and what it did to the Greek colonies in the rest of the Mediterranean. I can just appreciate the building and something, and know the philosophical context and the works of Sophocles and all the other things that were happening at the same time without any reference to their gods. So I propose that what culture largely means to us now is how to approach the art of civilization and great creativity in a post-supernatural era.

In other words, how to preserve everything of value without having to worry about the culture of Pallas Athena, for example, or being forced to take into account that, say, St. Peter's in Rome, I actually don't think is such a building. awesome. , it was built thanks to a special set of indulgences, I mean, that's how the money was raised for it. We can consider that independently now. We can value this building without knowing it. Although I always find that it is something difficult to forget. Correct. Well. I was just curious, I mean, I wanted to do more research into how all of these things in art and music and creativity are often passed down between individuals as something spiritual or something, whether that's the actual subject matter or not.

HITCHENS: I wanted to say a little more about this when I spoke first. I believe that the human need for the transcendent, for the spiritual is undeniable but that is not the supernatural. It is very important to understand. The feeling that people get from landscape and music, or from landscape and music in combination. The feeling of war and love at the same time has had extraordinary consequences for many people, or for one or the other alone. These are the things we cannot do without, but there is no reason to attribute them to the supernatural. You're not glimpsing anything but nature from that.

Thank you. Thank you. Hello. So it turns out that if you follow the money trail for a lot of these things, all this creationism, the idea of ​​teaching creationism, you will eventually find political organizations that are trying to energize a base, right, these bases... HITCHENS: Yeah. What they would like to do is make these people feel attacked. And in a lot of the discussions we have in your presentation, there's a fine line between attacking people and attacking ideas, right? What do you do to make sure you're not going after people and making them feel like you're telling them they're idiots, for example?

Alright. How is this separation made? HITCHENS: Well, I think maybe my answer was anticipated. Okay. HITCHENS: If someone tells me I've hurt their feelings, I'm still waiting to hear what their point is. Correct. HITCHENS: It depresses me a lot that in this country they can tell you that that is offensive as if those two words constituted an argument or comment, for me they are not, and I am not running for anything. So, I didn't have to pretend to like people when I didn't. Correct. Thank you. Hello. Oh, thank you very much for speaking. I think we're going to have a book signing out here.

So if everyone got their copy of the book, thank you very much for coming. HITCHENS: How nice of you.