Religion, Morality, and the Threat of Theocracy

Opening

Thank you, Shalom. Um, I thought I had been to the largest Jewish temple in the world, the show in Budapest where Theodor Herzl once used to return. But I’m told, and I now believe it, that this one outranks it. The last one I went to, because usually I don’t go into houses of worship unless I’m wearing about a ton of garlic around my neck, was the very tiny temple on the Tunisian island of Gerba, the foundation stone of which is said to have come from the original temple itself. A wonderful gem, a little gem of a synagogue, blown up in 2003 by Al Qaeda but recently repaired along with its tenacious community. So, comparing and contrasting that miniature and that grandiosity, I’m very glad to find myself this evening speaking in what appears to my disordered senses to be the dining room of Hogwarts School. Though I dare say, I couldn’t have picked a less apt name for a Jewish house of worship.

I also have a question just before we start. I’d like everyone to put up their hands who knows why the World Series is called the World Series? One, and she could be wrong. Um, feverishly for years, I asked when I arrived here as an immigrant from England, why do they call it the World Series? No one else in the world plays this game except Canada, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and I think Japan. How dare they call it the World Series? No one could tell me why it’s called the World Series, and no one here can either. This thing, why not, it’s our game, naturally it’s the World Series, and we’re the world champions at it. The New York World, ladies and gentlemen, used to sponsor this series, now defunct newspaper. That’s why it’s called the World Series. It could have been called the Post Series, it could have been called the Newsday Series. Just a warning against hubris before we start, and against man-made rarification and myth of the sort that can turn into something rather dangerous, morally and intellectually.

Which brings me to my theme. When I was looking for a subtitle for my book “God Is Not Great,” I thought, let’s not be sensational, let’s not be catchpenny, let’s not be cheap. But let’s try and get people’s attention. I thought “God Is Not Great” might do that already. I called it “How Religion Poisons Everything.” I knew what would happen, people would say, what, everything? What do you mean by chess? You mean tantric sex? You mean tourism? It poisons everything? Well, in a way, as I’ve gone on with this debate and as I persist in it tonight and as I will tomorrow, I would be more and more willing, ever more willing, to defend myself in saying that it’s a universal toxin from which nothing is exempt.

First, I believe and I maintain that it attacks us in our very deepest integrity, in the core of our self-respect. Religion says that we would not know right from wrong, we would not know an evil, wicked act from a decent human act without divine permission, without divine authority, all without even worse, either the fear of divine punishment or the hope of a divine reward. It strips us of the right to make our own determination, as all humans always have, about what is and what is not a right and good action. To give a trivial example that I hope none of you will find really actually trivial, as you know from the archaeological work of Israel Finkelstein and others, the story of the wandering in exile described in Exodus is a mythical one, it’s an entirely invented one, a metaphorical one at best. But it does tell a very important story, and it does say that after a very long wandering, my mother’s ancestors got to the foot of Mount Sinai and were informed that perjury, theft, and murder were non-kosher.

Now, my question to you is this: how far would the Jewish people have got, what they have got that far, even wandering around in the desert leaderless sometimes, if they’d been under the impression that murder and theft and perjury were okay? I think it’s an insult to have it said that that was the case. I think, in other words, that all one needs to know about is human solidarity and the need for it and human evolution from the savannah and from the places in Africa where we very nearly died out, and were very nearly exterminated, before the escape. That we wouldn’t have made it this far if we didn’t have this knowledge in us as an aid. There is no need for divine permission, and those who say that there is are willing to prostrate themselves before an altar. And they may say, well, at least it’s a Jewish altar. Well then, how will they deny the Wahhabi Muslim the right to say the same thing, to prostrate himself in front of God? The Salafi Muslim to prostrate himself in front of God and say, only from you can I receive anything, only from you can I receive an idea, only from you can I receive a principle. Will we say, well, that’s fine, Louis Farrakhan’s racist crackpot cult organization can get black people off drugs in prison, they say, so they get the same privilege? It all comes from on high? That’s the first point.

The second point is, in a sense, imprecated in and necessitated by what I’ve just said. In the veil of tears in which we live, of insecurity, anxiety, doubt, combat, and struggle, all these things, by the way, I think are good for us and help us to grow up. We shouldn’t wish for a world where there was eternal peace and tranquillity and banality. We should welcome the chance to take part in struggle and to be afflicted by anxiety. But in this world, there are problems that the human race has always faced and always will, and that philosophers have wrestled with and always will have to, and that aestheticians and artists have tortured themselves about. There’s only one solution to this that doesn’t work, and that is to refer it upward and to say, if only there was a celestial dictator who could just take this responsibility from us and legislate the whole thing for us and accept our blind, obedient, self-abnegating trust, then maybe everything will be all right.

I hope it shouldn’t be necessary to say in a place of this kind of refuge, that there is no totalitarian solution to our problems. Very fortunately, I think we are on our own, and we have only our own responsibility, our own mentation, intellect, and principles with which to face these things. It can’t be said that a god, whose authority is unchallengeable, can convict you of thought crimes while you sleep, tell you that you’re condemned for something you thought you might do, know your thoughts, and have unchallengeable authority over you. Their rule makes that of Kim Il-sung make the idea of a celestial North Korea seem laughable. Such authority cannot be the answer to our problems. It’s perhaps sad, but I think it’s good that we don’t have that resource. We cannot prostrate ourselves before a dictator, an absolutist, and we can’t hope to refer these things upward. Those are my two main points, and I don’t know how far I’ve got, but I must be trespassing on the rabbi’s time. I think I ought to add that if this belief was moral, because some say it may not be true, there may not actually be a god, the holy books may not tell a true story, they may be metaphorical, all the evidence points to all holy books being man-made, as all religion is, and not god-made. Nonetheless, we derive our morality from them, and at least religion coerces people into behaving better. As an English duchess once said, they don’t fornicate in the street and frighten the horses; that’s all she asked of the lower orders. I think again we’re being asked to insult ourselves, disrespect ourselves, and think of ourselves as servile, slave-like, abject, and lacking self-respect. We don’t need permission to act morally; religion takes morality from us. Human solidarity is the basis of morality. We would not have come this far, lived this long, or evolved this much if we didn’t know that we had to look out for one another. Well before Rabbi Hillel enunciates the golden rule, the same instruction is found in the analytics of Confucius: “Do not do to others what would be repulsive if done to you by another.” These are insights that we possess innately as of right. The last time that right was called divine, and the idea that rights could only be derived from the divine, it was the divine right of kings which replaced the idea of a celestial unalterable dictatorship in heaven, and said that it was the permission for totalitarian rule also by other human beings here on earth. If you ask yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, brothers, sisters, comrades, friends, what is the greatest threat not just to our moral but our physical survival, what is the greatest insult to our intellectual integrity at present, I think at least a number of you would be inclined to agree with me that the threat is probably theocratic.

Humans who claim divine authority, and those who dictate our actions, particularly those who express a willingness to die for their cause, present a profound threat. These individuals, driven by a cult of suicide and a belief that they have divine permission, are not just a physical threat; they endanger the very essence of civilization, including the progress in thought, reflection, art, and aesthetics. Therefore, those who assert they have a direct line to the Almighty must first disprove their association with the most severe and impenetrable forms of tyranny one could face. I am incredibly grateful for your invitation and very thankful to all of you for listening. Thank you.

Notable Quotes:

“Religion says that we would not know right from wrong, we would not know an evil, wicked act from a decent human act without divine permission, without divine authority, all without even worse, either the fear of divine punishment or the hope of a divine reward.”

“We cannot prostrate ourselves before a dictator, an absolutist, and we can’t hope to refer these things upward.”

“Human solidarity is the basis of morality. We would not have come this far, lived this long, or evolved this much if we didn’t know that we had to look out for one another.”

“If you ask yourselves, what is the greatest threat not just to our moral but our physical survival, what is the greatest insult to our intellectual integrity at present, I think at least a number of you would be inclined to agree with me that the threat is probably theocratic.”

“Those who assert they have a direct line to the Almighty must first disprove their association with the most severe and impenetrable forms of tyranny one could face.”

The Dangers of Divine Justification: A Critical Examination of Religion and Totalitarianism

Rebuttal

Well done. I overran my time last time, so I’ll try and condense and get nearer to our exchange this time. But it’s good, you know, you have a sense of Jewish time, right? Jewish time will do. Thomas Jefferson, whose biographer I am in a small way, once said, meditating on slavery in his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” he said, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” Once you’ve heard that statement, I’m sure many of you have heard or read it before, once you have, you’ll know you won’t forget it again.

You’ll always remember that you said that. But when you think about it again, or even at all, you realise it’s a nonsensical statement. Almost an idiotic one. If there was a ‘just’ God, what would there to be to tremble about? If we were in the hands of a benign deity – a father who always looked out for us and wished for the best, where would the rest of Jewish history – where would human history – be? There’d be nothing, really, to worry about. It would be like scraping your knee in the famous playground. How bad could it be? There’s a ‘just’ God. Now, I don’t think anyone here whose studied human society and human history and the human tragedy, whether you define tragedy as the greeeks did – as the fatal flaw in our own design; or whether you define it as Hegel did – as the terrible moment when there’s a conflict between two concepts of ‘right’. You can’t just say “Well, thank heavens. At least Daddy is still on duty” and I’m afraid to say that the only believe who do say that are childish.

It is a childish thing to say and a childish thing to believe. The whole concept that we are God’s children and that we have an eternal father is itself quite obviously man-made. Did man make God in his own image, or did God make man in his own image? Ask yourselves and see what your reason and the evidence of your study of history and society will tell you. I’m relatively impartial between different monotheisms. I think Bertrand Russell is essentially right that they all make the same mistake. However, since you mentioned the tradition of Rabbi, let’s agree that Judaism has a couple of claims it can make. It doesn’t proselytize, and anyone can join. That’s not bad compared to some religions. It doesn’t make the idiotic mistake of saying the Messiah has already come, so what’s there to worry about? The greatest remark, I think, is by the Rambam saying, “Okay, the Messiah will come, but he may tarry.” In that sort of shrug, you have everything from Lenny Bruce to Woody Allen to Marx, Freud, and Einstein. But to remind you of this is also to remind you that the great tradition, the real great tradition, is diaspora secularism. It is not the belief that if you go on talking to a bit of wall in far-off Jerusalem that you will be heard. That’s a nonsensical belief and has led to a terrible error.

Now, on the point of The Brothers Karamazov, or rather, I think the character in the book is actually Smerdyakov, who says, “Without God, all things are possible.” Let’s examine what you said about divine condemnation of murder. I say that the condemnation of murder is human; that humans know, without being told, whether it’s Cain or any other example, that this is a crime, an illness. You say, “Well, irrelevant, clear things.” It will do. Cain is understood to have been a murderer, so would any human have known that he was, though there were apparently only about two other humans around at the time. But here’s the point: what about the divine mandates for murder? What about the times when God tells you that you must be a murderer? When God says you must destroy every member of the Amalekite tribe down to the last child, saving only a few virgins of theirs for purposes probably somewhat better imagined than described? What about that? What about the Quranic injunction to treat the Jews as if they were treacherous, murderous, and deceitful? Wasn’t that dictated by God also in the desert? What about His Holiness, the Pope, saying until 1965, ladies and gentlemen, that every Jewish person was collectively guilty of deicide?

Wasn’t that said by the Vicar of Christ on Earth, the man who held the keys of Peter and had divine authority? By what right, Rabbi, do you say that you know God better than they do? That your God is better than theirs? That you have an access that I can’t claim to have to knowing – not just that there is a God but to knowing his mind. You put it modestly, but it is a fantastically arrogant claim that you make – an incredibly immodest claim.

And if it’s made by a fanatic, a bully, or a murderer, I’ll take it to the next stage and reply directly to Karamazov and Smurdyakov. Isn’t it rather the case that with God, anything is permissible? Once someone has said, “God told me to do it,” what is not allowed?

Is it not the case that the genital mutilation community, the child genital mutilation community, is exclusively religious? They only do it because God wants it done. The suicide-murder community, pretty much exclusively theocratic, they only do it because God tells them to do it. The slavery community, there’s no place in the world where slavery has ever been practiced when it hasn’t been justified by reference to the holy books, entirely religious. Isn’t it the case that once people think they have divine permission, there’s no crime, no wickedness, no cruelty, no misery that they won’t inflict on their fellow creatures? If you accept the first injunction, it seems to me you are absolutely obliged to consider the second. And if we are made indeed in the image of God, if that is the case, then how do we explain the psychopath, the torturer, the Nazi, the sociopath, the sadist? Are these not also cast from the same coin and falling from the same press? I’ll just have to close by denying what you say about North Korea, where I’ve been. I’ve been to all the Axis of Evil countries in my day. North Korea is the most religious state in the world by far.

I used to wonder when I was a kid, what is it like to praise God all day and thank Him all the time, forever, always thanking, always praising, always groveling, always abject? What would that be like? They say that’s what heaven is like. It sounds like hell to me, but I still couldn’t picture it. Now I’ve been to North Korea. Do you know why President Bush writes to Kim Jong-il and calls him Mr. Chairman, not Mr. President? Do you know why? Because he’s only the chairman of the Communist Party and actually the head of the armed forces. He’s not the president of the country. The president of the country is his father, who’s been dead for 15 years. So North Korea is a necrocracy or a thalatocracy or a mausology. I tried all these in my time. And the son is the reincarnation of that father by official doctrine. And I’m sure, I know, believe me, that I’m not speaking in a Christian church, but just to whisper, that’s only one short of a trinity that they’ve got there, and it’s worship all the day and all the time. But there is one difference, you can get out of it. North Korea, you can defect, you can die, you damn well die. And then you’re afraid of it. With monotheism and theocracy, you can’t because it will pursue you after you’re dead. This is totalitarianism by definition. It is the most frigid, rigid, unalterable dictatorship. There’s no appeal from it. It knows your thoughts. It can convict you of thought crime. It is much, much worse than Big Brother. It’s much more sadistic. It’s much more totalitarian. And there is so much reason to be grateful that there’s absolutely no evidence that any rabbi or priest or mullah has ever produced that would make you believe there was a single word of truth in it. So at least we have that much to celebrate. Thank you.

Notable Quotes:

“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” – Thomas Jefferson

“”Without God, all things are possible.” – Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov

“”Once someone has said, ‘God told me to do it,’ what is not allowed?” – Christopher Hitchens

“”There is so much reason to be grateful that there’s absolutely no evidence that any rabbi or priest or mullah has ever produced that would make you believe there was a single word of truth in it.” – Christopher Hitchens

The Oldest Argument in Human History: A Debate on Faith, Change, and the Fine-Tuning of the Universe

Questions and Back & Forth

Moderator:

We are resuming what you could call the oldest argument in human history, right? And we’re certainly there. One question that comes to mind after hearing both of you, and I ask you both to respond. Maybe we’ll start with you, David. In doing your research and engaging in other discussions, other debates about God, and from tonight as well, what’s the most compelling case that the other side has made? You want me to give away the game?

David Wolpe:

Are you going to ask him the same? Okay, fair enough. What gives you pause? You want to know what really gives me the most pause? Honestly, I’ll tell you. What is hard for me? For me, the greatest difficulty sometimes, in some ways that which I find most compelling, also gives me the hardest time. What I find most compelling, in some ways, is human beings. When I look at another human being, I don’t believe that they’re accidents of ancient chemicals. I don’t believe they’re just sophisticated animals. I believe that I see before me a spirit, an embodied spirit, but a spirit nonetheless. And I feel sometimes what the Protestant theologian T.R. Deschardin said, which is that we are not material beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a physical experience. That’s the good sign. The hard part for me came, and I remember when I first realized it, was when my mother had an aneurysm. Because she had an aneurysm and her brain was flooded with blood when she was 52 years old, she became aphasic. That is, she can’t speak, she has difficulty reading, her thoughts often get confused. And I thought, if in fact we are spirit, then how can it be that a change to our physiology changes our personality so powerfully and so dramatically? And I have answers that sometimes satisfy me, but for me, that is the most difficult challenge personally to religion. And the only thing that I will end with is to say that for me, challenges and questions are not necessarily antagonistic to a religious spirit. It seems to me that challenges and questions can bring you deeper into faith, and that I’m comfortable being what Rabbi Nachman of Breslov said about himself. He said, “I am a moon man. My faith waxes and wanes.” So, I posed the same question to you, Christopher.

Christopher Hitchens:

Yes, and just for the sake of clarity, according to what you’ve said, I have a great difficulty with most people I meet, believing that they’re even intelligent primates. I think that, however, if you make the assumption that we are bodies, not just have bodies, then there isn’t any mystery that remains to be explained about why a bleed in your brain will make you behave as if you weren’t human anymore, unable to speak or think. The explanation is quite straightforward. If you presume that we are here not because of divine design or supervision, but due to the combination of random mutation, natural selection, and evolution, again, there’s no mystery. There’s nothing ridiculous that you have to impose on yourself. There’s no violation of Occam’s rule of not introducing absurd assumptions. On the other hand, if you consider how long we’ve been on Earth as a species, Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project says a hundred thousand years, while Richard Dawkins thinks it could be as long as a quarter of a million. I’ll take a hundred thousand for those years. In those years, the human species is born, most die in the process of being born, life expectancy is perhaps 25, and it’s pretty miserable. You’ll die mainly of your teeth and very unpleasantly. There’ll be turf wars over women, animals, and land. Panic when the sky darkens for an eclipse, madness, rage, fear when there’s a tsunami. No one will know, there’s no germ theory of disease, unbelievable horror. But it goes on, millimetrically things improve. For the first 96,000 years of this, the heavens watch indifferently. And then, about the largest monotheistic claim is six to four thousand years ago. They say, actually, it’s time to intervene, maybe in some illiterate part of the Middle East. If you can believe that, you can believe absolutely anything. But you would have to believe that this supervising deity was either very cruel, very capricious, or, because it’s not exclusive, very incompetent. And this is the best argument for faith. Now, as to why I’ve ever questioned my own atheism, all of my colleagues agree. We’ve all discussed this many times. The most intriguing argument against opposition is what’s called the fine-tuning argument. If a few details of science, physics, biology, and chemistry were slightly different, there would be nothing instead of something. It’s a very intriguing thought. The fact that there is something, not nothing, doesn’t prove a designer, certainly doesn’t prove a deity, doesn’t prove a deity who cares about you, intervenes in your life, or supervises you waking and sleeping. But nonetheless, it’s a thought that has to be confronted. I’ll just close by saying what I’ve contributed to this argument, which is the following: as we now know, because of Edwin Hubble and many others, the universe is expanding very fast, has been ever since the original Big Bang. The rate of expansion, which not even Hubble quite predicted, Lawrence Krauss worked this out a few years ago, is not slowing down as Newtonians might have thought. It’s increasing. The rate of the expansion is increasing. The redshift light. So very soon, there won’t even be any evidence in the cosmos that there ever was a Big Bang. Things will be flown so far apart. And in the meantime, as you can see in the night sky, the Andromeda Galaxy is headed directly towards ours, as it has been doing since long before we could think about such things. So very soon, something we have will be replaced by whole or nothing. So who designed that? What divine father arranged that for us? What caring person who watches over bedsides and gives people hope, designed things that way? I ask you. There’s only one way to grow up, and it is to stop believing that there is either a tyrannical or a benign parent looking out for you. In my opinion, that tyranny would be much worse if it was benign. But you have your choice. Thank you for asking. I know I have a tendency to talk too much, don’t I? Do you wish I’d talk less? Never mind. Look, I think it’s very important to distinguish the numinous from the supernatural or the superstitious. The numinous, or you might want to say the transcendent. For example, I’ll make it quick. I wrote a book about the Parthenon, a building I can’t tire of. There are so many ways of looking at it, from the outside, from the inside, its measurements and symmetries, the stories told by its mutilated sculpture, the interiority and exteriority of it, its positioning in the ancient world. A good person interested in aesthetics could give a life to the study of the thing. But I have no conviction at all about the cult of Palace Athena, which inspired its being built. I don’t think the cult of Palace Athena was a valid religion. I have no belief in the Eleusinian mysteries holding any real mystery. I think it was a piece of priestcraft. It looks very likely as if one or two of the stories on the frieze actually are about human sacrifice to propitiate a bad god. Athenian imperialism in respect of not just Sparta, but the Delian and Milos islands was a terrible tyranny. Nonetheless, I couldn’t be without that temple. One of the great cultural and aesthetic tasks, I think, is separating the numinous, the transcendent, the beautiful, and the aesthetic from the superstitious and the supernatural, which is a dimension that doesn’t exist, that we don’t need, and that can’t help us.

Moderator:

Would you like to respond?

David Wolpe:

Sure, I’d love to. First of all, I think that this is really an area where we agree. I also don’t hold with the cult of Palace Athena, and I think that for us to find these commonalities is important. I’m honestly intrigued by the peremptory statement that there is no supernatural. If we’re talking about intellectual arrogance on the part of the believer, how can one say that, as opposed to saying that there isn’t a persuasive case for the supernatural? To say that there is no realm of the supernatural is taking an awful lot on oneself. I believe that the reason you have a place like Palace Athena is because human beings actually grope towards something real, though it finds many different kinds of expressions. The intangible matters, not just intangible as we’re experiencing right now. I’m saying words to you which are essentially intangible, but they’re changing something about you. The physical world is changing because of the intangibility of thoughts, ideas, words, all of that. We have an intuition that, as Emerson said, the unseen things are eternal, and the things that we see are temporal. The intangible lasts forever. The reason that consciousness seems so important is that we dwell in this world that we actually can’t explain physiologically. We have intuitions that aren’t purely a function of firing synapses. Not everything can be explained by neurons. The world is remarkably fine-tuned, and there are things that we cannot prove, that we cannot see, that are what we call intuition. These things were real to the ancient Greeks as they are real to us. To assume that they are not real is to flatten out the world in a way that’s not true to any of our experiences. You have to do violence to human experience to assume there is not an intangible realm, as opposed to honoring it.

Moderator:

Just a note to the audience, if you have questions that you want to have submitted, now is a good time to write them down. You’ll find people who will collect them because we’re going to get to that in a couple of minutes. I wanted to ask you both, in reading your works and reading about you, you’ve both made major changes in your thinking and outlook as adults. David, in your book, you talk about being the son of a rabbi, and at a tender age of 11 or 12, after seeing a very gory Holocaust film, you became an atheist. You wondered how there could be a god, and that lasted for a number of years until you were a young adult and eventually became a rabbi.

Christopher, from the opening pages of your book, you talk about being nine years old and seeing through the god that your teacher was talking about. Politically, you have changed from someone on the left to, perhaps after 9/11, becoming a supporter of the Bush administration’s actions in Iraq. I wonder if you could both talk a little bit about change, which is a very popular word these days, and how you came to question your long-held beliefs and what you learned from that.

David Wolpe:

Sure, I’d love to. First of all, I think that this is really an area where we agree. I also don’t hold with the cult of Palace Athena, and I think that for us to find these commonalities is important. By the way, I am honestly intrigued by the peremptory statement that there is no supernatural. If we’re talking about intellectual arrogance on the part of the believer, how can one say that, as opposed to saying it seems to me there’s not a persuasive case for the supernatural? To say that there is no realm of the supernatural is taking an awful lot on oneself, I think. But that wasn’t actually the point that I wanted to make.
I believe that the reason you have a place like Palace Athena is because human beings actually grope towards something real, though it finds many different kinds of expressions. The reason for that is that we live in a world in which the intangible matters, not just the intangible as we’re experiencing right now. I’m saying words to you which are essentially intangible, but you’re hearing them and they’re changing something about you. The physical world is changing because of the intangibility of thoughts, ideas, words, all of that. So, we have an intuition that, as Emerson said, the unseen things are eternal, and the things that we see are temporal, meaning they don’t last forever, but the intangible does.

The second part of this is that consciousness seems to me so important because we dwell in this world that we actually can’t explain physiologically. We have intuitions that aren’t a function purely of firing synapses, and not everything can be explained by neurons. The world is remarkably fine-tuned. If you’re interested, I have a little section on that in the book that Mr. Hitchens has, called “Why Faith Matters.” There are things that we cannot prove, that we cannot see, that are what we call, euphemistically, intuition. These things were real to the ancient Greeks as they are real to us, and even though their expression finds different cultural forms, to assume that they are not real is to flatten out the world in a way that I think is not true to any of our experiences. You have to do violence to human experience to assume there is not an intangible realm, as opposed to honoring it. Okay.

Moderator:

Just a note to the audience, if you have questions that you want to submit, now is a good time to write them down. People will collect them as we will address them shortly. I wanted to ask both of you, in reading your works and learning about you, you have both undergone significant changes in your thinking and outlook as adults. David, in your book, you mention being the son of a rabbi and how at the age of 11 or 12, after watching a very graphic Holocaust film, you became an atheist, questioning the existence of God. This lasted for a number of years until you became a young adult and eventually a rabbi.

Christopher, in the opening pages of your book, you discuss how at nine years old, you began to question the concept of God that your teacher taught. Politically, you transitioned from the left to supporting the Bush administration’s actions in Iraq post-9/11, moving from writing for left-wing magazines to those on the right. Could you both share a bit about the process of change, a popular topic these days, and how you came to question your long-held beliefs and what you learned from that?

David Wolpe:

For me, it was about learning to distrust my own certainty. At 17, I thought I knew everything, but as I grew older, I realized that this was more of a defensive illusion than reality. In my book, I discuss this issue, and while Mr. Hitchens only touches on it briefly tonight, it’s a common rhetorical strategy among atheists to attribute their beliefs to reason and dismiss others’ beliefs as psychological. I used to think religious people were weak, credulous, and uninformed, while I considered myself rational.

However, as I matured and learned about the lives of people I admired, I began to see that even the strongest can be weak and the smartest can be foolish. This realization allowed me to reevaluate what I had abandoned after being shocked by that movie and believing reason alone was sufficient for a fulfilling life. I came to understand that religion, at its best, supports values like compassion and decency, which cannot simply be replaced by reason alone. This illusion that reason alone can guide us completely may be common among 17-year-olds, but no adult should hold onto it. I suppose what I’m saying is, I grew up.

Christopher Hitchens:

My own early atheism was not the same as the rabbis in that it would never occur to me, if I did believe in God or in a supervising and creating deity, that I could possibly ask him for an explanation. You either believe that there’s someone who’s ineffable, unknowable, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, or you don’t. You don’t say there’s a God and then complain to him, “Why does he allow suffering?” What a question! How would you know? You don’t even know enough to ask the question. Otherwise, God is just a dialogue partner, man-made as I would suggest, as I believe all gods to be. I think your question gives away the fact that that is, in fact, the case. The God we’re really supposed to think about doesn’t owe us an explanation; it can’t be asked for.

“Why do bad things happen to good people?” Huh. “Why do good things happen to bad people?” That’s what worries me much more, and I see a great deal more of that. So, I saw through the stupid claim that the apparent order and beauty of the universe, as my biology and scripture teacher tried to tell me, testified to an argument from design. I could see through that when I was 11, and I don’t think anyone couldn’t see through it by the time they were about eight. It’s an argument not worth having; it’s been so conclusively discredited by now that I can’t believe I had it even at that age.

As to the question, and by the way, I don’t think any religion isn’t ultimately based on an argument from design, on the idea that because there is some kind of order in the universe, someone must be ordering it. I think the obvious fallacy of that is the beginning of one’s critique.

Why do I support the liberation of Iraq, supported, still do support it? Nothing could be simpler. All my Iraqi, Arab, and Kurdish friends, almost all of them Marxists of one kind or another, had for a long time been hoping that the United States’ policy would change from one that supported Saddam Hussein to one that asked for his overthrow. I thought that was a reasonable request. I joined a committee that urged for it. The president of Iraq is now a democratic socialist, elected, whose countrymen were being killed by poison gas or mass a few years ago, instead of a hysterical, jubilating terrorist-supporting weapons of mass destruction using Nazi. Everyone else I know thinks Iraq will be much better off if it had been left the way it was.

Fine, I don’t mind being in a minority on that. I’m as proud as I could be that those Iraqis who outlived Saddam Hussein saw the destruction of his regime and his party, the emancipation of their country and their people, can count on me as a friend. It’s not me who owes the explanation. The people who owe the explanation are those who thought Iraq was fine when it was the private property of a psychopathic fascist crime family that had a windpipe hold on a major jugular point over the world economy and thought that would work out all right because he was in a sanctions box. It was, in the meantime, killing the Iraqi people in their civil society. No, no, no. History will be very firm on this, and if it doesn’t vindicate me, I don’t care about that. It’ll certainly vindicate the liberation of Iraq.

David Wolpe:

I’m addressing this to the congregation because we didn’t say anything about asking each other questions, so I’m going to pretend that this is to you. But in fact, this is a question for Mr. Hitchens. You heard him say that the one thing that gives him pause is the fine-tuning of the universe, the remarkable fine-tuning of the universe that somehow this world exists even though the odds are astronomically small that such a world would exist. And then he said an eight-year-old can see through the argument for design. The argument for design is that this world is, in fact, designed so that it exists even though it seems very improbable that you should get such a beautiful and wonderful world. So, I wonder how one would reconcile such a contradiction.

Christopher Hitchens:

Well, the answer is actually partly supplied in your own book, sir, where you describe, you use the phrase very suggestively more than once of our creation, our little blue globe alone as it is in the cosmos, as far as we know, being on a knife-edge. This being a knife-edge difference that’s exactly by an odd coincidence the expression I employ in my own book. Why do I do so? I can’t say why you do, but I’ll say why I do. Alan, um, excuse me, Hugh Montefiore, Jewish convert to Christianity, the later bishop of Southwark and later bishop of Birmingham, in his book “Credible Christianity” says the conditions for life on our planet, you know, are so knife-edge, are so finely tuned that you can hardly believe that. Okay, yes, look how knife-edge that, just look at our own tiny little suburb of the cosmos, just our solar system. The other planets are all either too hot or too cold to even make it thinkable that they could support life, and very large parts of our own planet are much too hot or too cold to support any life, and we, well know, we have good reason to know more lately that that knife-edge of climatic crisis could tip either way very easily.

So, just out of one solar system, there’s only one planet that isn’t a complete screw-up, and it’s on a knife. Some design, I repeat. This designer is either cruel and capricious or incompetent and bungling or both because the two things are not exclusive. And in the meantime, the heat death and meltdown of the sun that will cause our oceans to boil before the planet turns into a crisp is already inscribed in all the laws of physics that we know, and the Andromeda galaxy is coming our way as I told you, and the Hubble red light shift means that there will be so much nothingness. There will be no way of remembering there was ever somethingness. What design is this? Yes, knife-edge is the right word, and that’s your deity, that’s your omnipotent, that’s your omniscient, that’s your loving, that’s your caring, that’s your efficient, that’s your designing authority. I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, I really do. Are you going to repose your faith in something that is as crackpot as that?