The limitations of human understanding

The reasons for atheism, or as I would prefer to say, anti-theism, are, I would say, as follows. The first and the simplest objection to religious belief is that its metaphysical claims are not true.

In fact, are false, and come from a period that I would describe as the infancy, or the fearful childhood, of our species.

When, because we have brains that seek for information, and seek for explanation, brains that even now prefer a conspiracy theory to no theory at all, and are bound to do so, and indeed in some ways are right to seek in this way, explanations had to be found for things that seemed at the time inexplicable.

And in the absence of crucial information, we didn’t know, we had no way to know, that the Earth went around the Sun. Didn’t know that there was a germ theory that would explain disease.

Didn’t have any means of knowing that earthquakes were the result of living on the crust of a cooling planet, in a rather odd solar system where most of the planets are either too hot or too cold to support life, and our own is in large part too hot or too cold to support it either, and where the remainder lives on a climatic life edge, and always has.

The inference of a designer

Some design, by the way, and that’s just of one solar system. We didn’t know that matters of this kind, earthquakes, waves, disasters were not punishments.

It was quite possible to listen to those and even to believe those who thought that they could explain. But for these people, a double problem arises. There is first the difficulty of, if not the impossibility, of demonstrating the existence of any creator or designer at all.

I think I say something uncontroversial when I say that no theologian has ever conclusively demonstrated that such a designer can or does or has existed.

The most you can do, by way of the argument from design, is to infer him or her or it from an apparent harmony in the arrangements. This was at a time when that was the very best that, so to speak, could be done.

But religion goes a little further than this already rather impossible task and expects us to believe as follows. That the speaker not only can prove the existence of the said entity, but can claim to know this entity’s mind. In fact, can claim to know it quite intimately.

Can claim to know his or her personal wishes. Can in turn tell you what you may do in his name. A quite large irrigation of power you will suddenly notice is being granted to the speaker here.

Yahweh’s obsession

The speaker can tell you that he knows, he cannot tell you how, but he can tell you that he knows, for example, that heaven hates ham. God doesn’t want you to eat pork products. He can tell you that God has a very, very strong view about with whom you may have sexual relations.

Indeed, how you may have sexual relations with others. He can indicate, perhaps a little less convincingly, but no less firmly, that there are certain books or courses of study that you might want to avoid or treat with great suspicion.

Now, this suggests to me already a design. I think I can see a design shaping up here, and I think I can see who designed it and created it. I think it was man-made. I think the whole inference, because you can certainly see a design at work, is that this is human. That it was designed at a time of great distress and great ignorance, and that it had an enormous advantage, the design of which can be inferred from every one of its practices.

It gives to people, ministers, priests, rabbis, shamans, whoever’s cell phone that is should know that we know where you live, by the way, and where your children go to school. It gives to those people power in the here and now, the only place where it really counts.

If you are His Holiness the Pope and you have arrogated to yourself, for example, the power to bind and to loose and to decide who may read what and how many tithes must be paid, how many holy days must be observed, how many disciplines must be foiled, are you seeking power in the hereafter or are you seeking it now? It seems to be very obvious, that’s an inescapable conclusion, that it’s temporal power that’s being talked about.

The yearning for subjection

And of a very dictatorial kind, I might add, an absolutist kind, the kind that is not open to the ordinary challenges.

The divine right of kings was something you had to challenge, not just at the risk of your life, which might end quickly, though the end itself would be slow and painful; the end would be final, but you were told you risked your immortal soul and the rest of your life too.

That’s quite a powerful instrument of secular discipline. And everyone can name their favourite example, I think, of how and where that kind of tyranny over the minds as well as the bodies of men was exerted.

We think of it as belonging to our prehistory, but we only have to look, ah, as far as today’s Iran, for example, to see a classic theocracy, a country from which I’ve recently returned, where I wonder how to convey sometimes the flavour of what theocracy really is like.

Well, if you’re a woman who gets in trouble with the regime and has committed a capital offence in Iran, but you’re underage, you’re a virgin, you may not be sentenced to death under the law of Iran because the law forbids the execution of virgins.

But you may be raped by the revolutionary guards so that you’re no longer a virgin in the prison and then executed. I think that sort of conveys what people feel they’re allowed to do when they think they have gone on their side, and I could tell you far worse than that about what the arrogance of power is when it thinks it’s backed by the divine.

Well, this aggregation of power in the material world is really nothing compared to the dictatorship that is suggested by those who infer the whole celestial design that backs it. That’s why I want to spend a moment or two telling you why I’m an anti-theist.

You may be an atheist and wish that there was a god who loved you and took care of you. It’s possible, but just to decide there isn’t enough evidence for it, just as Mr. Jefferson was a deist but didn’t believe in religion.

He didn’t think God intervened. These positions are equally compatible.

If it were true

I know several atheists who would happily say that they wish it were true, but that they can’t find that it is believable.

My own view is that it’s very fortunate for us that it isn’t true, and I shall say why.

If there was a supervising creator who took a personal interest in your life, what you would have from the moment of your conception, at least in one interpretation, would be a permanent, inescapable, unchangeable, unalterable, unchallengeable rule which would involve round-the-clock surveillance and supervision of every single waking and sleeping moment of your life.

The abolition of any privacy in your life or even in your mind and your most private thoughts. The most complete form of totalitarianism ever imagined.

And indecent too when you think of how many private moments would have to be supervised in this way and invigilated permanently. And that would go on not just for the rest of your life as it would if you lived in Iran. It would go on after you died.

In fact, after you died the real invigilation would begin. They’d only have started with you at the moment when you left this veil of tears.

The two offers are, at that point as you will know, at least from two of the leading monotheisms, either an eternity of praise and servility, everlasting praise and adoration of someone who has only done his job by creating him, hasn’t been advised to do so, a proposition that sounded more like hell to me when I first heard about it, or a very much more unpleasant one derived not from the Old Testament but from the new.

There’s no hell in the Old Testament. There’s genocide, there’s racism, there’s slavery, there’s child mutilation, there’s everything else you could wish for, but there’s no punishment of the dead.

Not until the arrival of the gentle Nazarenes it’s suggested that for a crime you probably were forced to commit because after all you’re created a sinner. You’re created sick and commanded to be well, the essence of the totalitarian principle, but for that you might face an eternity of torture to which there’ll be no end.

Yearning for abjection

Now, I think this is a horrible proposition. I think those who wish for it are wishing for slavery and servility, for the abdication of their own responsibility, for the dissolution of their minds, the abolition of their individuality.

I’m therefore very glad to say that there is no evidence for it at all. We can relax. I’ve been to all three axes of evil countries actually in the last four years, including North Korea.

I’m the only writer who can claim to have done this, and Iraq, and it took me a long time but now I do know what it would be like. Well, the question is, well, how to answer the question I had when I was little, what would it be like to have to praise someone all the time from the moment you got up to the moment you lay down again?

North Korea – the religious state

And that would be your only right and your only recreation, and it would be the only culture that you had, because in North Korea that’s what you get to do. In North Korea, you can praise the Dear Leader and you can praise the Great Leader.

The Great Leader and the Dear Leader are in fact the same person. They’re reincarnations of each other according to the dogma.

The place is only one step short of a trinity. The Dear Leader, who we lampooned as a dwarf, is only the head of the party and the army, not of the state. His father is head of the state.

His father’s dead now, has been dead for some years, but he’s still the head of the state and will be forever.

North Korea is therefore what one might call, I tried to call, a necrocracy, or a morselocracy perhaps, or a thanatocracy, and you have the right only to praise and adore and thank for every single thing that you get. You owe thanks to these people.

That’s what it would feel like. The most unending pointlessness, the most unending nothingness, the nullity, smashing of the personality, destruction of everything that counts as self-respect or dignity, but at least you can die and get out of North Korea, and you cannot do this with Abrahamic religion, which I therefore renounce as something essentially evil.

Mutual Exclusivity

Now one consequence of its man-made character, and one reason, I won’t say reason, one way of demonstrating beyond very much doubt that it is man-made is its proliferation. We have I think two choices here, either man-made God or God-made man.

If it’s the former, nothing much remains to be explained. If it’s God-made man, it’s very hard to see why there are so many religions and why they’re constantly at war with one another.

Make the opposite assumption that man has invented religion and God, nothing is left to be explained, there is no mystery, there are of course innumerable proliferating cults, sects, confessional discrepancies, warring churches, schismatic groups.

Most of the violence in Iraq as we know is not directed at our own brave soldiers and their allies among Iraqis, but at other Iraqis by other Muslims who think it’s cultural to blow up each other’s mosques, something the secularists would never agree to do, to blow up say the Golden Dome at Samarra.

We know from pre-monotheistic times, we know from Sophocles and Antigone that any person of ordinary morality has a natural resistance to desecration, to profanity.

We wouldn’t do that, we would leave it to the religious to do it, which you always can. The last time American troops were needed in a context like this, it was because the Christians of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia were tearing each other’s throats, burning each other’s churches, killing each other’s children, all of it with a divine warrant, all of them, every last one of them, a faith based on that occasion, the Muslims were the most civilized people in the case.

Hitchens’ Citizenship

It doesn’t make any difference, almost everybody gets, as it were, their turn at bat to be the most intolerant among the religious, but to say that this is man-made, it seems to me to say something that’s almost obvious. Now, I’m saying all this in the United States, where I must now say something I’ve been waiting for months to say. Actually, years to say, my fellow Americans.

Thank you.

The United States’ Constitution

I sometimes think you don’t understand how lucky you are. Yours is the country that has the only constitution ever written that absolutely insists on the separation of these ideas from the state.

When the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, wrote to Mr. Jefferson calling for a wall of separation, they were worried about what? Who do they think was going to persecute them?

The Congregationalists of Danbury, Connecticut, was the one they were afraid of, and rightly so, because the Congregations would have given them a really hard time if they’d been allowed to, if they could have seized any local power.

This fighting, not just about religion but between the religious, this desire to have the freedom not just of religion but from religion, is enshrined in the founding documents of this country in a way that should make you very proud, and it should therefore put you very much on your guard that there are people who don’t seem content with it, who seem always to wish to impose their own religious belief on this, to say if only we could ban alcohol, as in the 20s, we’d have a more pure and perfect union.

If only we could forbid the teaching of evolution or get equal time for pseudoscience, like the alchemy class that follows the chemistry period in presumably these schools, or the astrology class that comes after the astronomy studies moment. Everything will be fine.

Resist this with every fiber of your being. Join me in fact in my new favourite slogan.

Mr. Jefferson, build up that wall.

Thank you.