"Does A Good God Exist?" Debate - Christopher Hitchens' Parts

thank you for an extremely beautiful and generous introduction during which I began to feel while surveying the audience as well and having been listening to your music a bit as if Daniel was introduced to a den of, I am sure, very charming, very charming puppies of lion, um. a different experience than my average one, let's get straight to it because time is of the essence. I guess there are three forms of the Divine and if you remove polytheism, which I think we can all do for today's purposes, there are two ways to approach it: one. is the deist and the other is the theist I hope I am not telling you anything that you do not know but if you do not know it is useful and it is a very important initial distinction there are those who have been among them many of the founders of our great Republic, um in Particularly Mr.

Thomas Jefferson, who were not Christians, but who were deists, believed that the evidence of the universe and nature showed that a designer seemed to imply it by his patterns and repetitions in a very, very The common use of um in those days was that of the watch uh, which later appears in Mr. Paly's um natural theology, which for many years was the central Christian text in the argument for design. He says very simply if you are an Aboriginal and you are walking on the beach and you find a pocket watch ticking you don't know what it is for you have no education to judge its purpose but you can say it is not a rock and you can say it is not It is a vegetable and you can tell that it is being made by someone for some purpose.

That's what you should know even if you don't know anything else. The clock metaphor was widely used by deists, and of course clocks break and break. Many of them believed that if an intelligence had begun, the universe had begun the process it had taken, it took no further interest in it, it did not intervene in human affairs, it did not care who won the war, it did not care what country it was. leader. one um observed relatively well or did not observe uh with indifference uh plague in war and so on um that is a very difficult position to oppose by the way it is quite, it is very difficult, in fact, impossible to refute, one can only say that the evidence is.

It is not strong enough to be persuasive, to be a theist, in other words, to occupy the position that many people here currently occupy and my opponent occupies, to be a member of a monotheistic religion that believes that the truth has been revealed and that God has intervened. in her. Human Affairs that has a plan for each of us individually and as a species and that proves to be a much more difficult task. I'm going to show why I think it's more or less impossible. There are generally three ways. in which people try to prove it, one is looking at the cosmos, the vault of the sky, the world beyond what we can see or apprehend, the second is human history and its development, and the third is ourselves, our own bodies, our composition, um. again I will I will have to condense I hope you will forgive me but I will outline what I think the objections are um unless you don't believe I don't know what they have been teaching you unless you don't believe in the theory of what is now conventionally called the big bang, that our universe is billions of years old and began with a gigantic explosion, you, who are still going on, are forced to be very, very, very modest about it.

What worries most scientists now is not how much they know compared to 50 years ago, although that is a huge difference, but how little they know compared to what they are discovering. All of these conclusions are very provisional. but at the very least they must involve this for a few M seconds of cosmic time. In reality our species has lived on a very, very small rock in a very small solar system that is part of a fantastically unimportant suburb in one of an uncountable number of galaxies. and that every second since the Big Bang, every second, a star the size of our sun has exploded, shrank to what is called a dwarf and disappeared, and the stuff we are made of, take heart from the way it you are all done. of stardust, which is a

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way to think about yourself, um, but that's the price of that stardust and every second that I've been talking, another one of those children has come out and, in fact, there are now physicists , you can tell you the date more or less. exactly one where our son will do the same thing, so the old Christian evangelist who used to stand on the street corner with signs saying repent, the end of the world is coming was right up his alley, right?

We know when it will end. I know what it will be like, but we know something even more extraordinary, which is that the rate of expansion of this explosion we are experiencing is actually accelerating. Our universe is separating further and faster than we thought. I don't know about you, but I find it and all those who study it professionally find it impossible to reconcile this self-destructive, chaotic and extraordinarily destructive process of the IC, to find in it the Finger of God, to find in it the idea of ​​a design, and That's not just because we know so little about it, it's because what we know to be essential

does

not seem to be the desired outcome brought about by a benign Divine Creator who loves each of us who live as we do on this little Rock in this suburb. insignificant of the cosmos, so again,

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luck if you want, but if you seek God in the first instance, those are the difficulties you will have to start encountering if you want to take human history as a vindication again.

I recommend that you be very cautious and, if I may, I will take a non-Christian example. I think that in all cases it is a great mistake to think that his own cause, his own country or his own side has God in his power. To begin with, you commit the sin of pride, which I know you have been warned against, what the Greeks call hubis. It's probably better, as Abraham Lincoln said at a time when two groups of Christians were fighting over whether slavery was Christian or not. to decide the future of this Union Abraham Lincoln, who was also not a Christian but a deist, if something were said, it might be more useful to know if we are on God's side than if he is on ours, but the temptation to enlist the cause of a God well it is very strong, in fact there are many people in the world today, they are well known as jihadists, muslim fundamentalists, people who want to kill, they really want and intend to kill everyone in this room who get the energy they have. and they are willing to give their lives because they are very sure that God is with them and, if so, if you want to believe that God intervenes on one side or the other and that God intervenes in history and human affairs, you have to do it .

Grant it to them too. I don't know if you're ready to do that or you'd have to say no, it's only true when we say it, which I think would be a pretty unsatisfying argument. the Christians nor the Jews but the Muslims excuse me neither the Christians nor the Muslims but the Jews who say they have a pact with God whose Testament we Christians CH we Christians of Western civilization include in the holy book uh those who say they have known to God o He was a leader who met God face to face on the Sinai Peninsula, who received the law, who received a direct revelation of morality from him, who had a special Covenant.

Now let me tell you briefly what the problem with that has been for the Jewish religious leadership. About 10 years before I was born, about 50 to 60% of the Jewish people of Europe were executed in disgusting ways through mass murder and gassing in Christian Europe in the mid-20th century and many people wondered how God could allow them. This to a people with whom he had established a special relationship and many people left the synagogue as a result, they stopped going. The Jewish people are mostly now secular post-religious largely for this reason and some rabbis were bold enough to say there is no reason for this you turned away from God and you forgot about Israel you forgot about Jerusalem it is a punishment for exile is a punishment for in keeping with the Covenant many people who had seen their children burned alive uh he said it's me I'm not listening to this, I'm leaving, I'm leaving, I'm leaving religion and many rabbis remained silent thinking that maybe not They should give too immediate an explanation for such a fantastic human disaster and human crime, and they waited and then the Israelis won a war in 1967 that gave them back control of the holy places in Jerusalem and then the rabbis blew the Ram's Horn again and They said no, no, we should have waited, now we see the Finger of God, it was all to take us back to Palestine, where we should have always been and make us masters of Jerusalem, now we see what the design was.

I dare say you read the newspapers and watch the news; There is not a single Israeli now who

does

not wonder if the victory in that war and the conquest of those holy places was not a disaster, has not led them into a terrible trap of endless war and confrontation in the Middle East, where their own arrogance, their own occupation of other people's territory and sacred places. has led to a terrible buildup of food, food, I hope in any case, I thought probably the most I can do today is sow a little doubt and suggest a little reading to get our bodies back on their feet again.

I don't know what they've been saying. you about Mr. Darwin and about where we come from and our kinship with other animal species, but I consider it a fairly settled issue that our relationship, our resemblance to other primates, is not exactly accidental, it is now possible to measure it in the chromosomes that we have. you are maybe half a chromosome away from the chimpanzee our closest relative um all of you when you were born when you were inside your mother's womb you grew a layer of hair at about 4 months and then you lost it again you don't need it anymore um all of you Some of you They have an appendix that is no longer necessary for the type of digestion they do.

They all have the same teeth. That's why they have to work so hard on their wisdom teeth and other things for the type of diet. They are the primates accustomed to um they have to live off of all of you they carry what Charles Darwin himself at the end of The Origin of Species calls the confusing seal of their our humble origin you are a mammal a primate cheer up primates can do very great things but we are adapted to an environment the African savannah that we abandoned why we abandoned it because if we didn't abandon it we were going to become extinct there was such a climate crisis in Africa uh all those thousands of years ago that the That was a small tribe So we made the very smart decision to move north and get away.

As calculated by National Geographic, I recommend you look up this: the human species had dwindled to less than 2 or 3000 people at that time and if I hadn't made this move, I would have followed Mark's path, this figure would have followed the path of 99.8%, 99.8% of all other species that have ever

exist

ed on this planet and have become extinct. Now I just rub it one more time, 99.8% of all. The life forms that once appeared on this terrestrial globe have disappeared and it was almost us and it is not like that, this does not give me evidence of a design from the finger of a god of any kind and much less one who wishes us well, rather it suggests to me that nature and the world are a struggle and human life is a struggle, you will tell me when you arrive, uh, where, sir, a minute or two, wave.

I appreciate you not doing that. I felt like I was about to invade Dr. Demy's time. Now, it really is worth going straight to National Geographic. They will send you a kit back. You will rub the inside of your cheeks. You will put it in a solution. You will send it back. They will show you a map of where your ancestors came from in Africa and what time and what route they took to get to where you are now. It will open your eyes. I strongly suggest you do it while I have your attention. I also suggest you.

On the subject of evolution, you read a book by Dr. Francis Collins called The Language of God. Dr. Collins, as you probably know, led the Human Genome Project that analyzed our kinship to other animals and we now know the full extent of our genetic code and ID, including the messy gaps that are Dr. D's specialty, um, and He brought this in ahead of time and under budget, and is the best student of DNA and stem cells and all that entails, that we have among us. I would say the best. Living American doctor. I have prejudices. He is a great friend of mine.

He has also been a great help to me in my current illness. He is a great American. He is also a great Christian. That is why I recommend it to you, a very strong Christian and believer, and the chapters. in his book The Language of God that tells you don't waste your time not believing in evolution don't let anyone tell you that it didn't take place nice simple clear brilliant chapter is a chapter you are not educated if you haven't read it I will close and say why I just have a minute why wouldn't I believe in this uh why why why one might not want to believe in it even if it might be true because my opinion is that it's not just that it's not true but it's probably something.Well it's not because it's not a good thing because I don't think it's healthy for people to want there to be a permanent, unalterable, immovable authority over them.

I don't like the idea of ​​a father who never follows the path and neither do you if you think about it when you approach Fatherhood you won't tell your children don't worry I will never die you won't be at my funeral I will be at yours I will be at the funeral of your grandchildren You will never hear the end of me, that is I don't really love fatherhood uh the idea of ​​a king who cannot not be deposed very un-American and very undemocratic idea the idea of ​​a judge who does not allow a lawyer or a jury or an appeal This is an appeal to absolutism.

It is the part of ourselves that is not so pleasant, the one that wants security, the one that wants certainty, the one that wants to be taken care of for hundreds and hundreds of years. The human struggle for freedom was against the worst type of dictatorship of all theocracy, the one that claims it. has God on its side the divine right of kings the feudal system the monarchy against which the American Revolution took place with its secular humanism I believe that we must resist the totalitarian temptation and I believe that this is one of its central points and origin and so what I invite you to do is to consider emancipating yourself from the idea that you are selfishly the only object of all the wonders of the cosmos and of nature because that is not a humble idea at all, it is very arrogant and there is no evidence From it, it is better that you emancipate yourself and do a real study of genetics, biology and cosmology, and then again a second emancipation to think of yourselves as free citizens who are not within any Supernatural Eternal Authority that you will always find. interpreted for you by other mammals who claim to have access and to this Authority that gives them special power over you, do not allow yourselves, do not allow your lives to work like this, I have used up my time, I am truly grateful. for your attention, I can't wait to come back, thank you, thank you, Mr.

Hitchens, we're going to go ahead and collect cards for those of you who want to ask a question, if you can pass those cards into the hallways. I will have some people around to collect those cards and those cards will come to me after we hear the rebuttal from each of our speakers, so Mr. Hitchens 10 minutes for the rebuttal. I'll try to do anything. less if I can because I prefer to reserve time for questions if possible, but um, yes, after all, I have been challenged on several fronts and that is what I enjoy. I was trying to think of something that I agreed with, um, but I found that I had to disagree almost with Abino, so to speak, an atheist doesn't have to be an evolutionist.

Atheism long predates the discoveries. Atheism long predates the revolutionary discoveries of Charles Darwin. There was a time when the word scientist didn't really

exist

. The word scientist is a late 19th century coinage that I sometimes feel we could do without. In Sir Isaac Newton's time, for example, people who did work like him were called natural philosophers and I think it's important to realize that the science is not just the study of the material world um o o Laboratories, I mean, after all, Einstein um s Isaac Newton may have been a very, very, very great scientist, but he kept an oven in his room in Cambridge at all times because He was also an alchemist and believed that one day he would discover how to turn base metals into gold.

He is one of a long line of people who were nutty geniuses. He believed, for example, that the Pope was the Antichrist, maybe that's true, um, uh, and if he could find the measurements of the ancient Temple, that would be much more useful than knowing what the measurements of gravity were, but he was a natural scientist, I knew absolutely nothing about evolution, the work of Spinosa, the work of Voler, I am trying the work of Lucretius. It's true that Lucretius also solved Democrat and Epicurus in that period of the Hellenistic period that they did solve that the world was made of atoms, something very brilliant for them at that time, the mystery to me is just this, uh, because none of these things necessarily depend on each other why organized religion has always been so hostile to discoveries of this type why it should take so personally the work of Lucretius De Urum which established that we are made of atoms and so is the rest of humanity The system was hated by the church for centuries, only one or two copies were allowed to survive, they didn't want you to know this, as you know the church didn't want Galileo to look through a tube and see and make the disconcerting discovery that the sun doesn't go around us We go around the sun I guess now no one is going to give me an argument about that today why would anyone care which way it worked well because if we don't?

We spin if the sun doesn't spin around us, we're not the center of the universe, which makes it a little less likely that we're the objects of the whole thing, if we spin around something else it might be us. You are not the only object of a huge Cosmic Divine Design, so what I have been trying to attack today and giving no reason to want to attack it any less is this reassuring idea that it is all about us, this solipsistic and selfish idea, I think. that not scientific, of work. Darwin's and later countless writers, many of whom are Christians, on evolution shows that there is absolutely no need for an incompatibility between a private belief in God and the recognition that we arise from natural selection and random mutation.

Let me just take the question of the eye uh, I think Dr. Dempski said he was obsessed with it, that's not entirely true, it's simply that Darwin himself doubted at first that the eye could have evolved given its complexity and because the eye is the most commonly mentioned example, so I thought. Well, in my book I will take the most complex, most difficult, best-known example, and you can look at my book or you can look at a very brilliant chapter by Richard Dawkins, his book Climbing Mount Improbable, a beautiful, short chapter on the 25. I have contributed to the different evolutions of the eye and the different ways that it has taken place because I'm not a scientist, just a little thing, but I'll give it to you anyway, you might have seen, you should have seen a wonderful one. series made by the British Broadcasting Corporation Called Planet Earth, it is the best photograph of the natural world you have ever seen.

It is absolutely extraordinary. And in a very fascinating case, they go to Indonesia and it has the largest underground caves that we know of on Earth. They have a whole host of life forms within them, many of them not yet fully understood or explored, including a large number of life forms that we already understand fell into those caves when they formed and stopped living on the surface of the earth. Earth and in the sunlight and began to make their lives underground are more or less exactly the same as they would be if they had stayed where they were, but I noticed the salamander, the beautiful Indonesian lizard, everyone has seen one in a zoo, there was, had been living for David aten told us on the show or outline of an eye but no socket had disappeared the eye itself had disappeared all that could be seen was the vestige that had adapted had decided to lose the eye most of our studies are about how people took over their eyes Dawkins is the best Whatever Mr.

Demsky Dr. Demsky may say about the different ways different creatures have different eyes, but no one until your humble servant because I threw out my friends and enemies and said, has anyone noticed? of this before? I had thought now how animals lose their eyes. in the same way they got them by not needing them anymore by adapting if you live underground in the humidity and darkness, it is a great danger to your survival to have a damp and useless place that cannot receive any light, two of them in your expensive. you can get an infection it can make you vulnerable you lose it it takes millions of years but you will lose it we are wrongly talking about adaptability it is said that Darwin talked about the survival of the fittest people they often draw cruel and inhumane draw conclusions from this and attribute it to Darwin He didn't say anything of the sort what he said was that adaptability is what helps survival if I told you that in

parts

of Africa where elephants are killed for their chores, the elephants grow shorter tusks as a reaction, I'm sure, laughs, how would the elephant know how to do that?

The elephant sees Hunter exercising. Hunter wants Tusk to be made of ivory. Hunter retracts his fangs to minimize the chance of being shot. Don't be ridiculous, well, no, that's not, of course, what's happening. What happens is that those we give long tasks get shot quite a bit and those who have shorter tasks or none, therefore, have a better chance of being the ones that survive and reproduce, and their offspring actually have shorter tasks or none, that's what adaptability is, that's what evolution is. It's not some kind of trick, um with the time that I have, that's the best I can do at those points, at that point, because I want to get at what I have left to the accusations made about my um, my theology, well, archaeologists of the state of Israel after the 1967 war, when Israel became for many years the possessor of the Sinai Peninsula, now it has been returned to them and the West Bank, Judea and Samaria, the biblical territories had an unprecedented opportunity to prove that the biblical story was archaeologically demonstrable and The founding leader of the state of Israel, David Benorian, told them to go out and dig and find.

He said to dig up our state's Deed Title. They had the strongest motive and the greatest opportunity that any archaeologist has ever had and the standard of Israeli archeology is already extremely high, as can be seen in their national museums and in the work of many great archaeologists such as Professor Finlin and they had many years to do so, they could not find a single trace of anything that was even remotely compatible with the Exodus story. the wandering and the conquest of Canaan, not one trace after another, what they were able to find with the help of the Egyptian archives was enormous evidence in the opposite direction, an excavation of history, it is a very easy book to read, very easy to read, it is a very impressive demonstration of what I call and this is what you should look for when you are looking for intellectual honesty in life evidence versus interest in other words people will say I really wished I really hoped I could find this this was my ambition this is how It was not compatible, it was not feasible in light of the facts.

I think this is very impressive objective work by Israeli scholars. If you think Jesus is not a historical figure, it really only matters to you. um, what do I mean by that for me the most important thinker is Socrates and the most important source of morality and philosophical comfort by far there is no evidence that Socrates existed nor is it conclusive that is to say we only have like in the case of Jesus? Uh, secondhand eyewitness reports about him are quite persuasive but not conclusive. um he never wrote anything nor did Jesus um the stories about him are much more compatible than those of Jesus, the four gospels contradict each other in everything since his birth. uh the circumstances of this uh the flight into Egypt uh the Cru very crucial in the four cases about the crucifixion and the resurrection that you all just read for yourselves.

I'm sure you must have already read them, the discrepancies are extraordinary. Couldn't they not be equivalent to a historical figure in the same way that we know from coins, from construction, from scrolls, not scrolls, but from document tablets, things that Alexander the Great, for example, was a historical figure, but for me, if Socrates were not? exist, it would not matter because we have his method, we have his teaching and he teaches us what this is. I return now to the first element of Dr. Dy's criticism of having to know that to be educated is to understand how little you know. and what little you understand, Dr.

Dembsky seems to think that he has laid a kind of gigantic egg from which a huge sarking hen is about to hatch when he points out that among evolutionists and between physicists and others there are enormous differences and disagreements, that is True, it's also going to get a lot more intense, if you want to see a really strong plot, go and talk to Richard Dawkins and ask him about his take on Steven J. ghoul, another great paleontologist. The arguments about punctuated evolution there are tremendous differences within our school, there is an enormous amount yet to be known or explained eh, but we do not take anything on faith, there is no dogma, there are no tablets, we go where the evidence takes us and, therefore For example, when the last outbreak of the flu virus occurred, because we now know something about the genetic things we have in common with bacteria and viruses and we were able to sequence the DNA of the last such virus in 1919.it took us a long time to get a vaccine that could prevent the last flu from being as bad as the last one the last one works it works you can make solid medical predictions based on it medicine is impossible without the work of evolution and genetics and you should be grateful for that , but that doesn't mean there is no God, it just means we have what we think. they are better explanations for our human nature um I think that leaves me speechless and again thank you for your attention Christopher you have five minutes five minutes on five minutes on the goodness of God um okay, I never want to turn down a challenge.

I really don't. I know what it is to be a Christian, but it seems to me that if I were, there are reasons why I would first want to object to Dempski's point of view. I think this is an attempt to prove the existence of God by what we would normally call something. as scientific evidence, um, which is a disturbing need that religious people have, I think partly because we keep making fun of them for not coming to conclusive enough conclusions.evidence, so they keep coming up with more, I mean, after all, the big bang was originally thought up by a Catholic priest with holy orders at the University of Louan in Belgium and he took it to the Pope, uh, Pope Leo, I think that's who said. well if you want I will make it official dogma I will say that Christians have to believe it and the professor said well no, your holiness, that is not exactly what I mean but very often when it is not in this case but when something wonderful and varied and and everything inspirational like the theory of evolution or the Big Bang theory is eventually accepted by most, if not all, people.

Christians just say well, that proves that God is even more resourceful than we thought. He should be responsible for all that too. Please always be careful. an argument that seems to explain everything is very likely to explain nothing, but there is another reason why I think I would feel a little uncomfortable with arguments of this type that try to give theological shape to the evidence, where this is my question for you to reflect on . Where is the need for faith in that case if it can be proven in the same way that a proposition of mine has to be proven or has to fall?

What need of faith? What need of suffering? The struggle to reach faith and keep it there. There would be no need for Faith. If there really was evidence, would there be? I do not see. I would love to know how this limit is overcome. Maybe someone in question period will give me a thought at the time and then another reason. Why would I stay far away from this idea of ​​holding God responsible not only for our existence but for our behavior and what happens to us? Does he condemn you to having to continue bothering him with questions that have no answers?

In the end I found a complete point of agreement with Dr. Demsky. It is absolutely true. If I were a Christian I would not think that God owed me an explanation. There would surely be something disproportionate in that. Something conceited, but people wonder if there is a good God and if he is good. where does all this evil come from? This is strictly a time wasting question. Things like war and pestilence arise because we are not highly evolved animals who live on a climatically unstable planet and we don't know much yet about our circumstances, the way we behave towards each other is recognizable from the way other animals behave. each other, unfortunately, but we have a very clear idea and fortunately it is almost impossible for us to get rid of it if we do not act responsibly. among us, whether for altruistic reasons or not, the motives do not necessarily have to be pure, but if we did not have a social dimension, one that binds us, we would not survive, we would have already left, we would not have left Africa, the question in In some sense it answers itself, now you can call this morality if you want and there are certainly some individuals who act in what seems to us a way of self-sacrifice and have always had tremendous honor in all tribes in all societies in all and sundry. at all times, but it is only really necessary to recognize that we have a kinship and solidarity and that without it we are lost, morality cannot be dictated to us, it is not like that. comes in the form of a tablet that can be swallowed comes from the Socratic method of moral persuasion long thought why should this be called wrong why would this be a dishonor um otherwise why does the Ten Commandments say nothing about slavery nothing about genocide nothing about child abuse nothing about countless other things that worry us and make us think about which we believe to be evil and about four instructions on how to worship a very jealous, capricious and bad-tempered God.

How come if you based your morality on these tables you would be missing out on an enormous amount of what we consider morally urgent now again. I happen to be a secular humanist. I have my own policies described quite accurately by Dr. Demsky that do not address the question of whether there is a God or not. He is in favor of going Rand. I'm sure some of you have read The Fountain Head, one of his best essays. Unlike me, you can be an atheist and a sadist, you can be an atheist and a fascist, most fascists were actually Roman Catholics, it doesn't matter, you can be an atheist fascist, Melinia I think I think he was an atheist, uh, pretty weird, being a communist a stalinist is almost a necessity being an atheist um there are as many options as you want what we are saying is that there is no supernatural dimension there is no rescue coming to us from the invisible there is no such thing as salvation um and we are as alone as other species are in this in this fight I'm sorry, looking at the clock and realizing that it's over for me.

Can I then have you see that as a stimulus for question period? I would be very grateful if you would. generous, thank you, well, the first question, uh, and these are for both of you to answer, um, obviously, they point towards one person or another, um, but the first one is, uh, for Mr. Hitchens, um, using the evolutionary process. and you answered this a little bit, but if you could explain it, um, where does the concept of human thought and the ability to reason come in, especially when dealing with things that would seem to go against um, uh?

The evolutionary concept, um, the idea. What you mentioned before was self-sacrifice, why would there still be something like self-sacrifice if that is not going to continue to advance the species? So where does this idea of ​​the ability to reason using Evolution come from? Well, I think it seems. The question may be confusing the idea of ​​reasoning with the idea of ​​personal sacrifice, which is not necessarily irrational. My favorite example, I think it would be because no, we need an explanation or it would be nice. I have one, it's a good speculation why people enjoy doing things that aren't necessarily in their interest just for the sake of other people.

I hope no one in this room hasn't had that feeling at some point, um and it's very nice that we have it along with all of our predatory, selfish and other attributes necessary for survival. I think my favorite example is donating blood. I like to donate blood. I like the feeling that I am giving another person a life-giving fluid. I'm giving it, I'm not going to lose it either, it doesn't take long to replenish the pint of blood, so it's a really wonderful gift relationship that you haven't lost a single pipe, but you've given one, um, so there's no need to any kind of feeling good or complacency about it you haven't really made a big sacrifice but you've taken a little time you've thought about other people and then I have a very, very rare blood type um and I'm very anxious that there will be enough blood when It's my turn, so there's a lot of interest in the good feeling that I have, the warm feeling of being someone that Evolution has given me for myself and for everyone else, I don't think.

There's something very mysterious about that, apparently not, okay, it doesn't require, it doesn't require you to have a divine spark, it doesn't require any design, it doesn't require any programming and I'm perfectly aware of that. The fact that a lot of people don't do it, they don't do it and of course there are a lot of people who don't care at all about others, we call them sociopaths and the design apparently makes a lot of people psychopaths as well. that they can only be happy by making other people unhappy, they are all children of God too, according to you, it's not my problem, that's exactly what would be expected from imperfectly evolved primate species.

There are no mysteries there, nothing to explain, nothing to invoke God about why you allow Hitler, we know where Hitler comes from, no it's not real, the principle of Oam's Razer is in logic and philosophy, keep it with you in At all times, do not make mysteries where they do not exist, do not increase the number of unnecessary and complex mysteries. questions a very important principle is death to religion that principle would you like to answer that too maybe just follow just a few verses after the Ten Commandments? God instructs the children of Israel to kill all the other tribe, the Amalekites, the Midianites, everyone, all the men, all the children and leave only the marriageable women alive, that is, um and it is an instruction that is repeated very frequently and invariably carried out um when Tomas Payne pointed out that in the Age of Reason a couple of centuries ago there was a Welsh bishop who wrote to him complaining saying that the Bible doesn't say that those women were held for immoral purposes, you're free to believe that, if you wish, you are going to raise rape and evolution and the way Humanity actually behaves under Divine instruction.

I'm pointing out here that you should stop saying what I wanted to correct for having said before that what I'm attacking is what people do in the name of religion, no they don't. They confuse religion when they obey commandments like this, what I object to is what is in the original instructions and these are instructions for rape, genocide and slavery, they are instruction manuals for that and also how to behave like a slave yourself just to come, but he has an atheist character. worldview and that has problems in itself in a fallen world no worldview is going to be perfect it's not going to cover things I mean, that's that's the problem and then we have a problem with evil, we have a problem with good, we have many of the problems, we can go back to the questions that you can continue with, do you have an answer to that?

Well, in an evolutionary melan world, it's also pretty obvious that there is no perfect solution either, as I said, that's what I wouldn't need to say. Once you've described that as being imperfectly evolved mammals on a short-lived planet, people now object to that, even though it's true and there's all the evidence in its favor, we're poorly evolved mammals on a short-lived planet. life and in danger of extinction, people say well. if you think that's a depressing nihilist, it makes things seem so random and capricious and so good, yes, but is it true or not? What is true from your point of view?

What is true according to your point of view? Sir, you just said that God invents, makes the human being. Species looks at him briefly and decides that he is in Rebellion against me, he doesn't know how this is done, but that is his verdict, you are in Rebellion against me for one thing, you have broken the rule I gave you, don't believe it. for you you you deliberately went and sought knowledge now you are in Rebellion now you are going to suffer now there is nothing that will not happen to you I made you and I can break you and I will flood you I will torment you now what is this?

This is like being a terrible insect or rodent in the laboratory of a cruel and stupid person and what could be more what is more nihilistic what is more nihilistic and alienating than and it all comes down to one line if you want to believe what Dr. Demsky believe and your co-thinkers believe that you must consider yourself created incurably ill and then ordained under penalty of death and eternal torture to be well, this is not morality in the early Christian years there were many um early church leaders who thought that Christianity it should be a new religion um, which it is not unfortunately for you and the other, the reason it will never succeed um is because it now insists on chaining itself to the terrible books of the Jewish Old Testament. great Christian thinkers like Martian was the best known, there were Marcionite churches throughout the Middle East just for the study and worship of the Nazarene message, but it was decided that no, all of Nazarene history had to show that they had to reverse the engine here . and prove the truth of the books of the Old Testament too and with this unbearable burden you have burdened yourself with an incredible and perverse religion. um, it's a shame, sometimes I think, but I think there are also deformities in the pure Christian religion and he mentioned the name I give one of them a doctrine that I think is strictly immoral the idea of ​​Vicarious Redemption now although I say no I don't think there is any definitive historical proof of the existence of this person because all the accounts about him are so discrepant that there are so many of them that it is enough to persuade me that some such figure must have existed and it is not that unlikely that there was a charismatic rabbi. wandering through a region that was hungry for messiahs and still waiting to find them.

It's very littleIt was probable that there was one or that he had gotten into trouble with the Romans and being treated very harshly like people who get into trouble with the Romans, this does not prove, nor even suggest that his birth was or that his father was God or that his mother was a virgin none of these things are remotely demonstrable nor are they even really debatable they can only be stated but let's assume that they are then they have to tell me that the torture in human sacrifice of someone that if I had been present it would have been my duty to try to prevent what which I did not ask for which I have no control what happened thousands of years ago According to some before I was born it compromises me and they have no choice in the matter and that my sins are forgiven by this Human Sacrifice now what is wrong with If I like you enough or love you enough, can I pay your debt?

I say this was crazy of you, but I will pay for you in extreme cases, people have been Known to volunteer to take other people's place in prison or even one or two very famous cases on the scaffold, they will say : I will do it for you. I will do it for Love or I will do it for the Humanity that suffers but that is the most they can do and it is not bad. What they cannot do is take away your sins because that would be taking away your responsibility. I can't say you didn't steal or lose that money I have to pay now.

I can't say this course of madness didn't land you in prison, yeah, and now look what you're doing to me. I can't relieve you of that. I cannot wash you white as snow and make you new again. It is more than can be promised and more than should be promised. Vicarious Redemption is a scapegoat. It is throwing your sins at an animal. It is an old primitive practice. of the Middle East does not deserve the attention of civilized or thoughtful people, so let us admit that it is kindly offered to me anyway. I give all these objections.

I think it is very implausible. I don't really believe the story. um, I didn't. ask for it and having considered it I would rather go on living trying to lead a decent life without it okay thank you but thanks for asking oh no sorry you didn't hear us right the first time it wasn't an offer you turned down. pain of death, excuse me, you will not speak to me with that tone of voice. Something about me. I hope something about some of you too. What was it that I am not free to reject this offer? Are they making me an offer that I can?

Decline was a threat. Are you saying that if I turn away from this blood of the Lamb that I'm supposed to be washed from and say I don't believe I'll be cleansed? Well, that means an eternity of torture, you know? I hope you'd better keep that in mind before considering our offer of eternal love. No, no, this is North Korea, this is the heavenly dictatorship, this is the worship that only a slave could participate in. Stephen Hawking's latest book about um the Big. Bang, the first one in which he explicitly says that everything works without God, in fact, works better without the idea of ​​a Creator, contains a statement that I don't agree with, he says that these latest discoveries in physics are also death. of philosophy I don't want that to be true because I'm not a scientist and I worship philosophy U, but what he means by this is that there was a time when a philosopher, a natural philosopher, someone like Newton um or Kant um could They speculate about the natural world, which is why they were also called natural scientists and they do it better than many professionals.

For example, I was sitting in a room in Königsburg after the Lisbon earthquake when people first began to doubt that earthquakes were caused by God or were judgments, this was only in the 18th century, people began to wondering for the first time whether these were verdicts as the Christians had been telling them, no longer seemed to work. K proposed the idea, he said, it may seem fanciful, but perhaps it exists. There are underground caverns, some of them even under the sea, that sometimes collapse and lead to what he didn't call comic events because we didn't have a word for seismology there, but there were philosophers who could do scientific work speculating about the natural world. and using their heads as Lucretius would with atoms, what Hawking means is that we may now be beyond the point where you can say anything useful unless you are a member of a certain scientific discipline.

I really hope this is not true. for selfish reasons, but now you must take this thought very seriously. Lawrence Krauss, who I think is one of the greatest living physicists, has a lecture that you can go to YouTube and take a look at. It's called a whole universe out of nothing. He explains what it is like. how with what we now know about the quantum, which by the way is dangerously little so far, but what we know about it we can pretend to know, suggests that in reality nothing out of nothing is not as big a contradiction as it might seem and that is approximately the origins of the matter I recommend that my only philosophical contribution if you want would be towards the end of the question which is a little easier I think that whether we come from nothing or not, certainly we are directed towards that or it is directed towards us, you can choose believe that this little speck of planet in an explosion expels a million children a second every second, sorry, an entire sun every second and has done so for 10 billion years, that all of that happened so that we could gather here today, you can choose to believe that if you want, it's not even disproportionate, you just refuse to use the new language and the New Evidence as if it means anything, but assume that's true if you want.

If necessary, if you look at the sky, you can see the Andromeda Galaxy heading towards us. We now know that physicists can tell you the date when our galaxy will collide with Andromeda. You can see it with the neite. The future is over. I don't know if that will happen first or if our son will join the billions of suns that have exploded or now that we have discovered that Edwin Hubble's red light shift shows the speed and rate of expansion of the universe in the way it's flying in pieces that, as I said before, the speed and the pace, this was only discovered a decade ago, is increasing all the time, completely contradicting everything we thought before that we are flying faster than we We thought, nothing much comes close to us.

Now, what design it is a part of is what you have to ask yourself: what design, much less what benign design, could it conceivably be a part? since 9.8% of every species created on Earth has been dispensed with since it began it has been dispensed with it has become extinct it has exceeded requirements what a waste what a profusion what cruelty if you want to give it a human or spiritual name Ah, that's what You have to believe that's the kind of manipulator, the kind of capricious, incompetent Tyrant, obviously modeled largely on our human experience of authority and that's enough to convince me of what I'm now sure man didn't create, God, men and women created. many, many, many gods and they always have been since the dawn of our history and they still are and one of those gods could be true of all of them could be real or all could be false or all could be true and the overwhelming probability me It seems like the Cults that join together are that they are all false and for the same reason they are made up of creatures half a chromosome away from being chimpanzees and I am afraid that it shows thanks to the subtitle Hitch's book reads how religion poisons everything.

Trapped by the idea that religion poisons everything, he cannot allow people who are religious precisely because of his religion to do good. Hitchens takes this idea to ridiculous extremes in his attack on Mother Teresa in his 1994 BBC documentary, Hell's Angel. her 1995 book The AR position and briefly in God Is Not Great Hitchens portrays her as a selfish hypocrite among today's audiences. My good friend Mary Poppin is a teacher at Claremont. She was in Calcutta with Mother Teresa when Hitchin published her book. Contrary to her, Poppin recently published Finding Kolkata in which she recounts her time with Mother Teresa.

Poppin writes a quote and Poppin and the nuns were reading your book while she was there. Hitchens also accused Mother Teresa of receiving the best medical care when it was not available to the poor, however, she accepted an offer from the brother of a colleague who was involved in the development of a new pacemaker to replace his old pacemaker with one. new and improved. She said that she couldn't accept it, but that she would accept it for the rest. Poor thing, she also turned down another medical offer when I called her and I repeated these offers when she got sicker a few months after I left and that was close to her death.

She again refused and asked for prayers. My impression is that she mostly received good health. she cared when she was too sick to fight it and I think I'm going to leave it there rather abruptly. I think my rhetoric course would wrap things up, but I'm going to give the last word to Mother Teresa, so that's where I'll leave it, well, well, Mother Teresa was a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud, no. He was a friend of the poor as he claimed to be, he was a friend of poverty, he preached it as something as good as a gift from God, something worthy of being welcomed along with other types of suffering, he was not interested in alleviating it, he was a friend of the poor. rich, took money from the Duvalier family in Haiti, one of the most obscenely bloated dynastic dictatorships in history, took money from Charles Keting. man who robbed Americans blind through Lincoln Savings and Loan stole money, all to build convents in his own name, more than 200 of them around the world to found an order that would bear his name, this is neither modesty nor modesty. it also doesn't exhaust my criticism of her um we all know there is a cure for poverty it's rudimentary it works although it works everywhere for the same reason it's colloquially called women empowerment it's the only thing that works yes Allow women to control some control over their reproductive cycle so that they are not chained by their husbands or village custom to annual animal type pregnancies, early death diseases and therefore if you free them from that, give them some basic health . kind and if you are generous enough to throw in maybe a handful of seeds and a little credit, the whole cultural, social, medical, economic defect of that village will increase, it works every time Mother Teresa spent her entire life campaigning Against that result, he said that contraception was morally equivalent to abortion and abortion was morally equivalent to murder.

She was completely against the only thing that cures poverty. I would say that her sermons led to a huge increase in the amount of poverty, ignorance, filth and disease in the world and she would add further. no shame that it is with those things that the Roman Catholic church has always fed and made its living, otherwise the Protestant revolution that brings us here today would not have been necessary um and believe me, I barely started with that terrible person now like I said Before, you can be an atheist in anything you want, you can be an atheist in the Marquee Dard, you can be an atheist and be a great humanist.

I'm talking about most of the mission work that people do for Med Frontier, for example, for Oxfam. by many other people in the affected

parts

of the world that I have visited done by people who are not doing it to value their faith, they are not doing it by consciously handing out Bibles, they are not doing it for any reason they are doing it for its own sake, it is a beautiful humanism and I admire it, I even think it has a slight superiority, there is no hidden agenda in it, but I am not going to allow Nazism to be called secularism, if you don't mind. uh, it's just that I'm a prisoner of what I know here.

I know too much about it. I have read my camp, for example, which most people don't know about, where Hitler says several times very early on that he is doing God's work in exterminating the Jews. He went on to say that the Vatican was shown the book in those days, they would ban any book they didn't like that looked like one of the Great Books. Banning organizations in the world did not ban the book written by the leader. who made his first political treaty in Germany with them and their church and outside Germany between his dictatorship and the Vatican if you wanted to take the oath well you didn't have to want it you had to do it if you were in the German army or the SS to take the oath to the fura, which was mandatory, you did it like this, I swear to God almighty, eternal, fifty around your belt, if you were a soldier in the Nazi army, you had to wear a buckle that said, got MIT and German for God.

On our side, like any other form of totalitarianism and fanaticism, this is religious in itself and it was not, as in other countries, the Christian right in power, but rather it was the Christian right subsumed in a party that involved several others terrible. mutations too, so I just have to defend myself, it seems to me that in these two matters I will close with the implicit question that Bill asked me before, why don't you accept this wonderful Auer? Why wouldn't you like to meet Shakespeare? For example, I don't know if you really think that when you die you can put yourself back together physically and have conversations with authors ofprevious times you don't have to believe that in Christian Theology and I have to say that it sounds like a complete story To me, the only reason I want to know Shakespeare or might even want to is because I can meet him at any time because he is immortal in the works he left behind.

If you've read those, meeting the author would surely be a disappointment, but when Socrates was sentenced to death for his philosophical investigations and for blasphemy for defying the city's gods and accepted his death, he said well, if we're lucky, maybe I can Have a conversation with other great thinkers, philosophers and skeptics. also, in other words, that the discussion about what is good, what is beautiful, what is noble, what is pure and what is true, could always continue, why it is so important, why I would like to do that, because that is the only conversation worth having and whether or not it continues after I die, I don't know, but I do know that it's the conversation I want to have while I'm still alive, which means that for me the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith. that can't give way it's an offer of something not worth having I want to live my life taking risks all the time I don't know anything enough yet that I haven't understood Enough to not know enough to always be greedily operating in the margins of a potentially Great Harvest of future knowledge and wisdom.

I wouldn't have it any other way and I urge you to look at those of you who tell those people who tell their age that they are dead until you believe, like them, what a terrible thing to tell children and that they can only live and that they can only live accepting absolute Authority. Don't think of it as a gift, think of it as a poisonous chalice, put it aside no matter how tempting it may be, take the risk of thinking for yourself much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you from that way, thank you. w