With your permission, I’ll take Dinesh’s points in, so to say, reverse order. The last one will be reverberating in your heads, the loudest, I dare say. It was not I, the atheist, but Archbishop Rowan Williams, the head of the Anglican and Episcopalian Communion, who recently demanded that Britain adopt sharia law, at least for its Muslim population, rather than face any more threats of terrorism or the inconveniencing of Islamic propagation and promulgation of extremist ideas. Now, I regard that as not an accidental concession on the part of a spiritual leader of the West.

Rowan Williams’ hypocrisy

I regard it as first, very suggestive, and second, almost inevitable. There is something, to me at any rate, I simply have to state it, masochistic about Christianity. It wallows in guilt, it believes its adherence to be guilty from before they were born of original sin. If someone despises it, it looks for the reason why that contempt might be justified, and it proposes the hideous, the disgusting, the contemptible, the revolting, the dangerous, the suicidal idea, which everyone in this room must teach themselves to repudiate, that we should love our enemies. This is an obscene conceit.

Dr. Rowan Williams, who does the most perfect impersonation of a Welsh sheep I have ever seen, can go love his own f***ing enemies. I don’t want him loving mine. I don’t want him telling me that I must learn to adore the misunderstood al-Qaeda sympathizer. I don’t want him saying in the name of his contemptible Nazarene ideology that I must give up my freedom, that the rule of law in the country of my birth is over, that there’s a separate law for people of a separate religion, that we are not all governed by the same courts, not all by the same understanding, that no one with a different faith can claim a different jurisdiction.

That is moral and political and cultural suicide, and not to call it Christian would be to miss the point. Now, there are those who say that Buddhism is not really a religion, and I know that Buddha is not considered by his fans to be exactly a god. He was born out of a slit in his mother’s side, which makes me suspicious. You notice how most religions seem to think of the birth canal as a one-way street, something they abhor about the female genitalia. It puts me on my guard.

All right, let them not say it’s a religion. It’s faith-based to me. It stinks of that. Burma, the Burmese military dictatorship, is a Buddhist dictatorship. It stays in power by building itself bigger and bigger pagodas in its own name, and asking its luckless inhabitants and subjects to identify it, the anonymous military kamarilla, with the precepts of Buddhism, which include the terrible, immoral doctrines of fatalism, surrender, reincarnation, and the idea that those who suffer in this life are being punished for the sins of a previous one.

Okay, some brave Buddhists also oppose this dictatorship, but on no basis that one can understand except a rivalry within a certain cult. I’ve been to North Korea, the most perfected totalitarian system, probably in the history of the world. I’ve actually been to all the axis of evil countries, but North Korea, as you may know, is run currently by someone who is only known as Mr. Chairman, Kim Jong-il. He can’t be called Mr. President because his father, Kim Il-sung, is still the president of North Korea.

North Korea’s totalitarianism

He’s been dead for ten years, which makes North Korea into what I call a necrocracy, or a thanatocracy, or a morselocracy, but he’s still the president. Kim Jong-il is only head of the party and the army, not of the state. You notice this, and he’s considered to be a reincarnation of his father. You notice this leaves North Korea one short of a trinity. This is not an atheist state. It’s the most worshipful and religious country I have ever seen.

When I was young, I used to wonder, when they told me what hell was like, I could believe it. When they told me what heaven was like, eternal praise. You get to sing the praises of God forever, every day, all the time, around the clock, forever. Not just for the rest of your life, forever. That’s heaven. Sounds like hell to me, but I still couldn’t actually imagine it. Now I’ve been to North Korea, I’ve seen it happen. That is your only right.

Your only right as a North Korean is to sing the praises of the eternal, thankful, beautiful, brilliant leader for all time. Don’t let Dinesh or anyone else fool you by saying that that is secularism. I’ve got a minute, right? Well, then let me squander it with just some vulgar knockabout. You might not have thought this election, this our great republic, the United States, was being fought to a very, very high standard from the start, and nor it was.

But if you’ve noticed, every one of the cheapest and nastiest moments in this campaign, from both sides of those seeking not just the nomination but the presidency, has been inflicted upon us by a clergyman. All the low moments in this are the greatest secular constitutional republic, the only country on earth with a secular constitution, the only one that has a constitution that doesn’t mention the word God, anyway, by design, has been subjected to a consistent attempt to degrade the political process by people who prove that anything is permissible to any thug, any bore, any demagogue, any racist, any creep who can get the word “Reverend” put in front of his name, whether it’s Jeremiah Wright or Hagee or, my favorite, the Reverend Rod Parsley.

It sounds like a PG Woodhouse character on a bad day, one of McCain’s advisors who says that the mission of the United States is to have a holy war with Islam. In other words, don’t, as we have been up till now, don’t confine your apprehension, ladies and gentlemen, of this threat to, in part of us, infidelium, to those countries far away on the horizon and far out of our immediate ken, where barbarism and superstition reigns.

Bear in mind that this nonsense, this idiocy, this evil, this wickedness, is coming soon to a place near you, too, and get ready to resist it while you still can. Thank you.

That was terrible, Dinesh. [Laughter] Just before we stop on the virgin thing, if these poor fools had read the Talmud instead of the Qur’an, they’d know that they get 72 mothers-in-law as well. [Laughter] Look, Dinesh is correct in saying that in my book I say that there’s no reason at all to believe that the so-called Jesus of Nazareth ever existed, but here’s what I say about Socrates.

The original collision between our reasoning faculties and any form of organized faith, this is my book, though it must have occurred before in the minds of many, is probably exemplified in the trial of Socrates in 399 BC. It does not matter at all to me that we have no absolute certainty that Socrates even existed. The records of his life and his words are second-hand, almost but not quite as much as are the books of the Jewish and Christian Bible and the Hadiths of Islam.

Philosophy, however, has no need of such demonstrations because it does not deal in revealed wisdom. Now, as it happens, we do have some very good descriptions of the life of Socrates that make his existence to me plausible, but it doesn’t matter to me at all whether he was real or not. What matters is that someone advanced his method of reasoning, his testing of evidence against experience, his commitment to a certain kind of dialectical honesty, and that if it hadn’t been him it would have been someone else. That’s what’s precious to me.

And that he never said, “You’ve got to believe in everything I say or go to hell or heaven.” Because, and here’s why you’ve got to agree with me, because my mother never went to bed with anybody. And that proves the truth of what I say. Or, by the way, I must have looked very dead when they took me down from the cross, but I didn’t die. And that proves my point. I’m willing to grant it all.

I’m willing to grant the Immaculate Conception first, then the Virgin Birth, then the Resurrection, and the Annunciation and the Assumption. I’m willing to grant all of it. It doesn’t prove the truth of the proposition that you should take no thought for the morrow. The central doctrine of Jesus of Nazareth, take no thought for the morrow. No investment, no thrift, no care for your children, that you should abandon your family, not worry about construction, about investment, about anything. Just follow me. A ridiculous and immoral proposition that, as C.S.

Lewis so cleverly, and I must say for him, very honestly puts it, means that the man must either have been a maniac, a sick man, an evil man, or he must have believed that the world was coming immediately to an end and that he was commanded to announce this fact to the deluded Bronze Age inhabitants of Palestine. Because if he didn’t believe that, if he didn’t believe he was divinely mandated, then his words would not have been inaccurate or false. They would have been wicked. That’s what you have to be talking about.

Now, there is, on the historicity point, there are only two reasons, I think, to suppose that there may have been the figure of some kind of deluded rabbi present at that time. The first is the fakery of the story. The fakery itself proves something. The prophecy says this man must be born in the house of David, of David’s line in David’s town. It means he must be born in Bethlehem. Jesus of Nazareth is well known to have been born in Nazareth. In order to get him to Bethlehem, a huge fabrication has to be undertaken.

A census is proposed by Caesar Augustus. No such census ever took place. The people of the region were not required to go back to their hometown to be registered. That’s never happened. Corinius was not governor of Syria in that year, as the Gospels say. None of the story of the nativity is true in any detail, and not one of the Gospels agrees with each other on this fabrication. But the fabrication itself suggests something.

Archaeological Contradictions in the Nativity Story

If they were simply going to make up the whole thing and there had never been any such person, then why not just have him born in Bethlehem right there and leave out the Nazarene business? So the very falsity of it, the very fanatical attempt to make it come right, suggests that, yes, there may have been a charismatic, deluded individual wandering around at that time. But which is most impressive to you?

The fantastic fabrications, the unbelievably inane and inarticulate preachments, or the inconsistencies in the story? You could mention another thing about the resurrection. Most of the witnesses to this are women. Illiterate, stupid, deluded, hysterical females. Of the kind who in a Jewish court at that time would have had about as much chance of being listened to as they would in an Islamic court today. What religion that wants its fabrication to be believed is going to say, “You’ve got to believe it because we have some illiterate, hysterical girls who said they saw this.”

No, it’s impressive to me. It’s impressive to me that the evidence is so thin and is so hysterical and is so feeble and is so obviously, strenuously cobbled together. Because it suggests that something was going on, there was some character, and I don’t want to therefore profane those who think that there must have been something and say, “No, there was nothing.”

This is not a whole cloth fabrication, but it is a very human and very intelligible and very pitiable, I think, practice of fraud that may have worked on stupefied peasants in the greater Jerusalem area, but should really have no power to influence anyone in this room, whereas the noble methods and words and systems by which Socrates reasoned will continue to illuminate our path for as long as we care about the only real gift we have, which is our independent intelligence.

Now, I think that will do for now, but if you want to ask me, yes, I’ve run out of time, but if you would care just to look at the chapter I’ve written about the discovery, the concession now by every Israeli archaeologist, by the whole school now of Israeli archaeology, that the entire story of the Exodus, the captivity, the wandering, the conquest of Cain, and the rest of it is also a complete fabrication.

You will see a perfect collision between the two things that do allow us to make progress as scholars and intellectuals, the weighing of evidence against interest, and that the great school of Jewish archaeology, given every motive to find the contrary, given every motive and every chance in the Sinai and in the region, to dig up and find what David Ben-Gurion, the founding of the state, called the title deeds of Zionism, to come back empty-handed and say, “We admit it.

This story has no basis of any kind, whatever,” I submit to you as something far more noble, far more worthwhile, far more honest, far more courageous, far more moral, and far more Socratic than any of the nonsense that Dinesh just tried to pass off on you. Thanks. All right. Dinesh has asked for two minutes to rebut Christopher, so then Christopher, I’ll give you two minutes to rebut Dinesh, and then we’ll go straight to questions. Well, you notice when we were talking about Socrates, the question I was discussing was historicity.

Do we know if there was, in fact, a Socrates? Christopher shifted ground, and he said, “Look, I don’t care if there was or not. I’m concerned about his ideas.” He shifted, you may say, from historical evidence to the value of his philosophy, but we weren’t discussing the value of Socrates’ philosophy. It would be a bit like if we were debating here, and I think you might have had a debate earlier. Did Shakespeare write those plays?

The value of historical evidence

An historical question. You can say, “Well, we can enjoy Cymbeline without whether he did or not.” That’s a separate question. Either he wrote them or he didn’t, and that’s what history is aimed at investigating. Now, the Bible. Look, I want to argue here that when you look at this stuff, and I know earlier you debated Islam and so on, and it’s very common in this situation to have people, usually secular guys, do something that is rather surprising of them, which is they do something, they behave exactly like, you might say, the most ignorant fundamentalist.

And by that I mean they read the Bible in the most narrow, literal way they can. Now you might say, “Well, there are some Christians who do that.” Yeah, but most of them are uneducated. The atheists who do it are well educated and should know better. And so, for example, in looking at a passage in Scripture, or even in the Quran, the intelligent question isn’t to ask, “Well, if I read it out loud and read nothing else, what will it say to me 2,000 years later?”

But rather, how have all the people who have followed with great seriousness this teaching for centuries understood and acted upon that passage? So, for example, I know it’s fashionable even among conservatives, “The Quran says slay the infidels!” Yeah, but we’ve had Islam for 1300 years, we’ve had numerous Islamic empires, the Umayyad dynasty, the Abbasid dynasty, the Ottomans in Turkey, the Mughal empire in India, ruling over tens of millions of Hindus and Jews and Christians. Why aren’t those people all dead?

Because the Muslims didn’t interpret that passage that way. No Muslim empire has wantonly killed all the infidels under its control. Why not? Couldn’t they read the Quran? They did, but they read it a different way. Now, Jesus, I just want to make one point, because this is really not the subject of our debate, but C.S. Lewis, I believe, once noted that there are just a couple of people in history that when you read about them, if they walked into the room right now, we would all instantly recognize them.

Religious figures as real people

He said one such person is Samuel Johnson, that Boswell’s account is so vivid that if Samuel Johnson walked in right here, we’d know right away it’s Johnson. And I would submit that’s also true of Jesus. Jesus is actually not only more real, but in some ways his sayings are more memorable, more powerful than any single character in Shakespeare. Can you name a single character in Shakespeare who utters as powerfully aphoristic, memorable and influencing statements as Christ?

You can’t. So here’s the point. Either Christ was made up by a bunch of illiterates who apparently were unknown Shakespeares of their own time, creating a character more memorable than Hamlet, or as Albert Einstein himself said, he said, “This man of the gospel so pulsates with life that nobody who really encounters him in an open-minded, unprejudiced way will deny that there was such a man walking around.” Now, you might not believe him, but it’s not that difficult to believe that he existed. Okay, so it goes on getting worse.

First, Dinesh says, “People like me who will say that Jesus didn’t maybe exist will never concede that, say, Socrates didn’t.” I produce my own book, I say that this is the first concession I make, but it doesn’t matter because we don’t say with Socrates that he had miraculous powers, that if you don’t believe in what he said, you’ll go to hell or heaven and so forth. There’s no shift here, Dinesh, at all on my part of any kind.

As to the historicity of it, or the reality of it, let’s take something that for some reason Christians think is important, which I conceded, I said it could have been true, it wouldn’t make any difference to me, the virgin birth. According to the Bible, the birth of Jesus Christ was in this wise. I quote, “When his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together she was found with the child of the Holy Ghost.”

I add in my book and I’ll quote, “Yes, and the Greek demigod Perseus was born when the god Jupiter visited the virgin Danae as a shower of gold and got her with child. The god Buddha was born through an opening in his mother’s flank. Catilicus the serpent-skirted caught a little ball of feathers from the sky and hid it in her bosom, and the Aztec god, who it’s the Lepoptal, was thus conceived.

The virgin Nana took a pomegranate from the tree watered by the blood of the slain Agdestris and laid it in her bosom and gave birth to the god Attis. The virgin daughter of a Mongol king awoke one night and found herself bathed in a great light, which caused her to give birth to Genghis Khan. Krishna was born of the virgin Devaka. Horus was born of the virgin Isis. Mercury was born of the virgin Maya. Romulus was born of the virgin Rhea Silvia. Even the Quran agrees that the virgin Mary was born by an immaculate conception.

By the way, the Quran says that Jesus was not crucified at all. The Jews crucified someone else in his place and he never died. There’s no end to the way in which this kind of thing can be fabricated, but those who say that you can just tell by the potency and pungency of the story, the memorability of it, that there must be something true about it, are simply inviting you to rely not on your thinking faculties or your intellectual capacity at all, but on straight out credulity and on the repeated manufacture of things that appear to be part of the hard and soft wiring of legend in our mammalian primate history.

Apparently, if you want to have a prophet, it’s better if his mother is a virgin. If you want to fabricate another one, that’s what will happen. Actually, Joseph Smith, as far as I know, never made that claim. But I think Mrs. Smith was well enough known to the local newspaper reporters of the greater New York area, in which you can read up the whole history of that family, to make it rather unlikely that thing could be sold. Now, here’s what Lewis actually does say, and why I… because I’m not going to…

I take so few occasions to praise C.S. Lewis, and let alone to defend him against Inej, that I’m going to insist on doing it properly. Here is what Lewis says. The alternative he gives you is not that of authenticity or otherwise, a Johnsonian, a Boswellian test at all. He says, “If Jesus claims to be able to take your sins on himself, remember what we’re talking about here.

The, to me, revolting idea of human sacrifice, of vicarious redemption, of scapegoating, the idea that you can throw your sin on someone else, and make him die and take your sin with him. The repulsive, immoral idea of vicarious redemption. I can pay your debt, brother, sister. I can. I will if I can. I could serve your, your sentence in prison if I was brave enough, or if it was allowed to me. Maybe. But I cannot take your responsibility from you, because it would be immoral to do so.

You have no right to ask it of me. You can’t shed that responsibility. The whole basis of morality requires that you face it and take it upon yourself. Nonetheless, Christianity offers the repulsive idea of vicarious redemption, and Lewis faces it, and this is what he says. He says, “Now unless the speaker who offers that is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic. We can all understand how a man forgives offenses against himself. You tread on my toes, I forgive you. You steal my money, I forgive you.

Lewis’ critique of human sacrifice

But what should we make of a man himself unrobbed and untrodden upon, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men’s toes, and stealing other men’s money? Assinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct.” This is Lewis. Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult the other people whom their sins had injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if he was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offenses.

This makes sense only if he really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit, unrivaled by any other character in history. To people like Thomas Jefferson, a hero of mine, who said that Jesus wasn’t divine but he was a great moral teacher, Lewis quite properly spoke with scorn and said, “That’s the one thing we must not say.

A man who was merely a man and said the sorts of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic or else he would be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the son of God or else a madman and something worse.” And Lewis, who’s argued so well up to then, can’t complete a syllogism. Poor guy, he never quite could do that.

He said, “Since I don’t think he was the devil of hell, I have to conclude he was the son of God.” Well, you don’t have to follow the paltry logic of that to see that at least Lewis is not making it easy on himself. And that to prove that this deluded individual did actually exist, if it could be proven which it cannot, would leave you as a Christian with all your work still ahead of you and you’d still have to face my objection, brilliantly phrased by Lewis, that the teachings of Christianity from vicarious redemption to the love of enemies, no thought for the morrow need be taken, that no thrift or care or family or society or solidarity is necessary, that these are immoral teachings that have done and continue to inflict untold moral and physical harm on our species. And until we outgrow this nonsense, we have no chance of emancipating ourselves. Okay, we’re running out of time. We’ll start the questions. Go right ahead.