Introduction

Well now, Mr. Cheung, ladies and gentlemen, comrades, friends, brothers, sisters, I would be self-sacrificially a Christian if I cut into my own time, limited as it is to pay any compliments, so I won’t accept to say that Dinesh is one of the most formidable debaters I’ve ever encountered on any subject.

That he has the further great advantage of actually believing in this stuff. You try it. You go up and down the country, ask a Calvinist, ‘Does he really believe in Calvin’s theory of predestination?’ Ask a Roman Catholic, ‘Does he really believe in the virgin birth?’

You get all kinds of Life of Brian evasions from them. It’s metaphorical, really. No. Dinesh believes this. That’s very useful.

And then I want to thank the alarmingly polite and wholesome faculty and staff of the King’s Hall. Now, I’m asked to prove that Christianity is the problem, and I’ll try to do that, but for now, all I think I need to say is it’s a problem or part of the problem, being as it is what we know it to be, a loose plagiarism from Judaism, and along with Judaism, one of the other two religions plagiarized in turn, that’s given us all the blessings of Islam.

So it’s part of man-made religiosity that goes under the – trades under the brand name of monotheism, and the problem that all three have in common is that of faith. Faith, in other words, that a man-made religion can actually keep a promise of salvation, not just in this life and the next.

The Problem with Faith

Dinesh, you’ll notice, was careful to say, ‘Well, certain social ameliorations can be written down to Christianity.’ He didn’t claim that it was a salvation in this life or the next, just that some of its adherents have occasionally taken liberal stances. Well, I think he’ll find he has a higher standard of proof in front of an audience like this.

That’s the first belief that faith involves, and second, the belief that faith is in itself a virtue, transcending reason and dispensing conveniently enough with the need for evidence.

Now, it’s my proposition straight out and straightforwardly that what we think of as our morality, as our ethics, comes from human solidarity and predates all forms of monotheism. Don’t let it be said in your hearing, ladies and gentlemen, any of you who have any self-respect, that – though I – we know the story to be fiction of the exodus and the wandering and the encounter in Sinai.

We know that really to be a metaphor, but taking it to be true that my mother’s ancestors wandered all that time under the belief that perjury and murder and theft were okay, only to eventually bump into Mount Sinai and receive the news wasn’t kosher after all. We have to have more respect for ourselves than that.

Any human society that had believed those things wouldn’t have got that far. I think it’s pretty safe to say. Christianity, in other words, is masochistic as well as partly sadistic. It attacks us in our deepest integrity. It says that you and I wouldn’t know a right action, wouldn’t be able to derive it or a right thought, a right thought, without the permission of a celestial dictatorship that guards us while we sleep, that can convict us of thought crime, that supervises our every waking moment, that is, in fact, the origin of totalitarianism in the obeisances that it demands of us, and that will continue to judge us and persecute us and supervise us even after we were dead.

This, in my view, as well as being utterly untrue, utterly falsified by fearful human beings, is something that it is very fortunate we possess no evidence for. How horrible it would be if we were condemned to live in this posture of gratitude, permanent gratitude, to an unalterable dictatorship in whose installation we had had no say.

And let me add, the worst of that would be if that dictatorship was benign. That would be the thing that would make it insufferable. Some of us refuse it, and we do so on what we confidently say are moral grounds, as well as the ground that the story is a fairy tale made up by fallible and opportunistic human beings.

The Immorality of Vicarious Redemption

Why else would I say, in the time I’ve got left, that Christianity is as well as untrue immoral? Well, it offers something horrible, vicarious redemption. You’re told that by applauding a human sacrifice, a particularly cruel and revolting one, that took place before you were born to fulfil a prophecy in which you had no say, condemns you either to punishment and sin if you don’t accept it, or if you do accept it, offers you the chance that your own sins can be forgiven you.

Well, everything is wrong with this picture. First, as with the original proposition of a deity, it requires of you compulsory love, as well as compulsory fear. You have to simultaneously love someone, you’re commanded to love them, and be frightened of them at the same time. This is no way to teach morals.

Second, you’re told not that you might get a second chance, or that your debts can be paid. I can pay your debts if I care enough for you. I could serve your time in prison if I wished. But I can’t forgive you the sin. I can’t absolve you of the responsibility of what you’ve already done.

I can’t wash you white as snow. And the desire to be washed in that way and to be free of responsibility is itself an immoral one, and should be rejected by anyone with any, I’ll repeat the term, with any self-respect.

So vicarious redemption by human sacrifice is an immoral preachment with very immoral implications, as is compulsory love coupled with compulsory fear. The idea that the laws of nature can be suspended in your favour if you make the right propitiations is a lie.

Dinesh points out what a lie it is. Einstein says how marvellous it is. The great thing about the universe is its laws never are suspended. They do operate according to a beauty, a logic and a symmetry that we don’t quite yet understand. We’re getting to understand them better. Dinesh points it out rather intelligently to you.

What does Christianity say? Ah, those laws can be suspended. And in your favour too, if you make the right prayers and propitiations and sacrifices. There can be – a virgin can conceive, a dead body can walk again, your leprosy can be cured, the blind can see. Nonsense. It’s not moral to lie to children.

It’s not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they will only believe nonsense, they can be saved. It’s immoral. The totalitarian concept of the afterlife, the hideous idea doesn’t even occur in the New Testament, excuse me, doesn’t occur even in the violent rape and genocide filled books of the Jewish Bible.

There is no punishment of the dead. When God has destroyed your tribe and had your virgins and your children murdered in front of you and your flocks and herds scattered and so on and you also fall down to a bronze sword, he’s done with you.

The earth can close over you. That’s it. You’ve tangled with the wrong tribe, the one he favoured. Not until gentle Jesus, meek and mild are you told, if you don’t make the right propitiations, you can depart into everlasting fire.

That one of the most wicked ideas ever preached and one that’s ruined the lives and the peace of mind of many, many children, preached to them by vicious, child-hating old men and women in the name of this ghastly cult which we have met here to discuss tonight. I don’t need two minutes to finish with this religion, but thanks.

Hitchens’ Compass

I have a moral challenge on this point. Answer me this if you think that morality comes from the supernatural and we require celestial dictatorship permission for it. Name me a moral action committed by a believer or a moral statement or ethical statement uttered by one that could not be made or uttered by an unbeliever.

I’ve asked this in a number of venues and forums now. I’m going to keep on asking it. I’ve not yet had an answer. If I was to ask anyone in this room, however, could they name a wicked action performed or a vile statement made by someone attributable only to their religious faith? There isn’t a single person here who would have to hesitate for a second in discovering what that was and saying it.

Why is it incompatible with knowledge and science is for this reason. We calculate that the human species, Homo sapiens, has been around now. Carl Sagan thought perhaps 200,000 years. I would say 100,000. Not more, not less.

A History of Human Suffering

In order to believe the Christian message, you have to believe this. For those 100,000 years, people were born, died, usually many of them in childbirth, either the mother or the child. Life expectancy perhaps 20 years, 25. Died of microorganisms they didn’t know existed. Genesis doesn’t mention them because the people who write Genesis don’t know there are microorganisms.

Earthquakes would have been terrifying. Tsunamis, volcanoes, mysterious events, war and famine superimposed on this. You can all fill out this picture for yourselves, I’m sure. That was our life for tens of thousands of years, on and on it went. Maybe a gradual upward curve of a sort.

We seem to have made some progress very painfully and with infinite suffering and labor and with our solidarity still intact. Now here’s what you have to believe. You have to believe that heaven watched that for 98,000 years. And after 98,000 years decided, 2,000 years it may be time to intervene.

And the best way of doing that would be to have a filthy human sacrifice in a very remote part of Palestine. And the news of this has still not penetrated to the rest of the world and I don’t think will be believed when it does and isn’t believed by me and can’t be believed by a thinking person.

Thank you.