Thank you, Dinesh. Am I audible to all? Make it more convincing. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Thank you, Dinesh. Dinesh was quite right to say, to have said to you, that there’s no element of prearrangement in any of our debates. We’ve never concerted or compared notes before starting and I hope we never will. We’ve never given the same speeches twice. We’ve sometimes repeated each other and each other’s arguments, but there must have been an energy leak somewhere this evening because he wanted to praise me and my fellow atheists for our compassion.

There must be some mistake here, at least in my case. One of the very few times I’ve ever felt like being a Christian is when reading how the early church fathers lost for an account of why it is fun to be in paradise, the alleviation of the first hundred million years of saying thank you, for example. And I’d say, “Well, at least you can go to the lip of the thing and look down and see the screams and wails and torments of the damned when you want to be cheered up.” And I think, “That’s me.

I’d be religious on that basis.” One of my very few pleasures, actually, is crowing over the misfortunes of other people and trying to add to those misfortunes. I’m hoping, in fact, to score a few points of that sort tonight. Thomas Quinas, like me, didn’t believe in astrology, or rather he didn’t think you should try it because it would only let the demons in. He thought it was a very dangerous science, the sort of thing that could allow the devils a foothold.

Unlike me, believed himself capable of levitation, had a higher opinion of himself, in fact, as a debater than I do of myself, but Dinesh has left me with no alternative but to start at a position I hadn’t ever begun with before, which is to ask anyone here if they’ve read a novel called When It Was Dark by Guy Thorne. There’s an off chance. I thought someone waved there. It was a huge bestseller before the First World War, enormous international bestseller. I’ll very quickly summarize its plot for you.

The Nazarene’s Myth

From Palestine, there comes a report that the bones, that the grave, in other words, the cadaver, the remains of a Nazarene martyr, evidently someone who’d been subjected to crucifixion, have been discovered in a tomb where a stone had to be rolled away to unearth it. And more and more, the rumor is believed and reported in international press that the mortal remains of Jesus of Nazareth have been found. What are the consequences?

Well, the consequences are just what you would expect. People start having sex in the streets. They don’t care for family values anymore. They dissolve the ties of kinship that bond them with their own relatives, indeed with other human beings. They steal, they rob, they cheat, they lie. All restraint is gone. And it’s only by the miraculous discovery that all this initial stories of fraud put around by Jews and secularists and Freemasons and other riffraff that morality is restored to the human race.

I recommend a reading of this piece of trash novel, which makes the Da Vinci Code or the Left Behind series seem like Proust or Balzac or George Eliot. Because unless you believe something like that, everything Dinesh says, just said to you is complete nonsense from beginning to end. I invite you to the thought experiment. If it could be shown to you that the figure of the Nazarene was in fact as we believe, entirely mythical, as was the figure of his mother, as was the figure of Vishnu, as was the revelation supposedly given to the illiterate Arabian merchant peasant, Muhammad, the man calling himself the prophet, as was the existence of Moses and the legend of the exodus, if all of this can be shown as it can be, I have time for it, but I’ll take any challenge on any of these points, to be an entirely man-made legend, would you really look at your neighbor differently?

Are you telling me or are you willing to be told, even by someone as fluent and charming as Dinesh, that it would be true of yourself that you would then become a thief, that you would then become a liar, that you would then not condemn a rapist, that you would then have no knowledge of the difference between a right action and a wicked one?

I don’t think there’s anyone in this room who could be so abject, so wanting in self-respect, so masochistic, so subject, and I’m coming back to this, so servile as to believe any such thing. And if I had to stop now, that’s all I would really have wanted to say this evening, but as I say, I didn’t come to be compassionate. I have some more suffering to inflict on you before I’m done.

Morally, ethically, I submit we would be in precisely the same case as we are now, if as is in fact the case, these stories are proved to be man-made legends. We would be faced with the same questions that we are ever faced with. What are our duties to one another? Why are we here? Does our existence have a meaning or a purpose or a pattern beyond what we can discern?

How can we build the just city? Does our presidency have a point? These questions predate monotheism, were debated very earnestly in schools of philosophy in the Mediterranean long before monotheism was inflicted upon us, and these questions would remain as urgent, and they would have to be posed again and anew in every generation if monotheism were by chance to decline, as it has been doing, or even to pass away, which I don’t think that it actually will. The same would be true if polytheism was to undergo a similar collapse.

Now the believers say that the problems I’ve just mentioned don’t really exist. They’re only problems in the mind of philosophers. The question of how to be moral and why has already been decided. Dinesh, I think rather too, tolerantly said that he had an open mind on matters of faith. He wasn’t here to defend the Christian religion or revelation or any of these things.

Religious Duty

I don’t know what kind of, I leave it to the good father, what kind of Catholic Dinesh now seems to be in his own eyes or anyone else’s, but in fact religion means you must believe that God has revealed himself to us and his purpose, that his commandments and wishes are knowable and indeed known by human beings, that this revelation has in fact taken place and that all that is required is for us to live up to, created sick as we are, commanded to be well as we also are.

What kind of dictatorship creates you ill and then orders you to recover? I’ll come back to that. But created sick as we are, our duty is simply to live up to these preachments, this revelation. That is what religion means to me. If anyone wants to stand up and say it’s not what it means, I’ll take the question. I can’t wait for it in fact.

And that what we’re short only of prayer and faith and good works and that we can have our sins expiated for us, that there can be vicarious atonement, that our shortcomings can be taken upon someone else whose pain and misery and suffering can redeem us. In other words, that I come to you, madam or sir, and say, not that I will pay your debt because I know you’re in trouble and I have some spare money, not that I will take your place in prison, which I might if I really loved you be willing to do, not that I would take a risk for you, put my own body in front of yours to prevent suffering from falling upon you or coming upon you as I would with a child of mine, but know that I can take away your sins, that I can make them go away, that vicarious redemption and expiation is possible.

In other words, that personal responsibility means nothing, that you can throw your sins onto a scapegoat, and rightly is scapegoating considered by us to be a contemptible term and contemptible verb. No, it won’t do. It won’t do morally. It won’t do ethically. And there is no reason to suppose that any such moment of vicarious expiation or redemption ever took place. Now, when I said in my subtitle, this is a lousy microphone, isn’t it?

Evolutionary origins of morality

Was it only for me? When I said in my subtitle that there’s something about religion that poisons everything, I know publishers like controversial subtitles, but I was willing to stand by it, and I knew people would say everything. I mean cricket, tantric sex, Chinese food. Yes, I sort of do mean in a way everything. For this reason, it attacks us in our deepest integrity. In some of the ways I’ve just tried to describe, it says we don’t ourselves have any innate knowledge of what’s good or wicked.

We couldn’t, on our own responsibility, out of our own self-respect, decide upon an action in this way and decide to defend its integrity. We would need divine permission and maybe even a human sacrifice or two to ram it home. For this to occur, and I go on to say that it makes intelligent people say stupid things, and it makes decent and kindly people do and say very cruel things. And I’ll just give a couple of examples. What would you say, Dinesh, was the lifetime now established scientifically of homo sapiens?

Francis Collins, the Christian chairman of the Human Genome Project, thinks it could be 150,000 years. Richard Dawkins thinks it could be as much as a quarter of a million. I don’t know, does anyone have a… I’m excluding those who think it’s only 6,000. What if I call it 100,000? All right then. For 100,000 years, homo sapiens have been on the planet, a fragment of evolutionary time. During that time, people are born, usually dying in the process, or at least 10 to 20% chance of doing so.

If they survive infancy, the odds go up there a lot. They probably have a life expectancy for the first 50, 60, 70,000 years of about 25 to 30 years, usually dying of their teeth. The rending pains of childbirth killing the mothers as well, famine, disease, fear, terror, earthquakes, where they come from, thunderstorms, why, hurricanes, what is this, volcanic explosions that blot out the sun, appalling life of fear and want and disease where germs are not known of, you know, don’t have to draw your complete picture.

And that’s to leave out the wars over territory, over sex, over womanhood, over possession, that would additionally take life. And this is the Hobbesian situation. Life is, as Thomas Hobbes describes it in Leviathan, very nasty, brutish, and short. And I’m just asking for 100 years, 100,000 years of this. For the first 98,000 years of it, heaven watches with indifference. Who cares?

Doesn’t look terrific, but you know, they’re inching along, I guess. I mean, sometimes moving forward, sometimes a bit back, but no. Anyway, let’s just see how it goes. Two thousand years ago, it’s decided, actually now we have to intervene. But only in illiterate parts of the Middle East to reveal our face to the species and tell them how to behave. That should do it. Now, I can’t prove that that did not happen. I cannot disprove that. But I can say of someone who does believe it, that they’re willing to believe pretty much anything.

And I don’t just mean believe pretty much anything that they’re told. I mean to believe almost anything about their deity. Because if that is how it happened, it’s the same as saying that a universe that contains perhaps 100,000 million planets, contains just one, which has one favored mammalian species alone chosen for salvation, while the others go into black holes, white dwarfs, shooting stars, imploding comets, and the rest of it. You could believe that if you want. I can’t tell you that wasn’t the design.

But I can tell you, or I can assert, I can make you think, I can ask you to consider whether the person responsible for this is not either very incompetent, very tinkering, very capricious, or very, very cruel. And I won’t let you, I hope I won’t let you go home without leaving these questions in your mind. I’m not going to answer them for you. I’m going to hope I’ve placed them where you’ll have to think about answering them for yourselves. And I see my time is very nearly exhausted.

In other words, I think that our morality is innate, our ethics are innate to us, as there are in other mammalian and primate species. It’s observable that there are solidarities, there are ways of group behavior, family function, and so forth that make it clear that without this kind of evolution, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. We wouldn’t be here if we only looked out for each other, and other primates and mammals know this too. In that case, since the evils are innate in us as well, what are we to do?

Are we to invent another supernatural person who’s responsible for those, as the religious tend to do? Are those don’t come from this god, they come from another god, an evil one? Well, fine, if you wish, if you want to do it, if it makes you feel better in some way. Invent another supernatural entity. There’s an infinite multiplication of them that you can do, as Aquinas did with the demons, as Muhammad did with the desert jinns. Keep multiplying these assumptions.

But how long can a healthy mind be satisfied with the infinite replication of supernatural assumptions when the natural world explains itself, and when we already have enough explanation for why people are encoded and programmed the way they are, and where our knowledge of that is increasing all the time? What is, and I’ll close on this and I’ll be quick, what we risk if we take the supernatural route is the idea of an unchangeable, unalterable authority, one apparently benign, one apparently wicked, both of them eternal, both of them unchanging and unchangeable, and ourselves as their playthings and their objects and their raw material.

This is the origin of the idea of the totalitarian. This is where the idea of tyranny begins, with the eternal unchanging tyrannical authority, where we must try with our poor powers to guess what’s wanted of us and to spend our lives on our knees. I say the beginning of emancipation is to repudiate this antique serfdom and all the contemptible and often laughable superstitions that it requires for its maintenance. And the job can be begun tonight, and I invite you to join me in doing so. Thank you.

[applause] Well done, Mr. Chairman. I have to take back some of the nice things I was just saying. [laughter] One of them has to do with the prearrangement. I’ve heard him make that point about the bull’s horns so many times now. [laughter] Tonight was the lamest. I’ve also heard him try it on other people. I hope this is the last time I have to hear it. I notice it didn’t go down that well. It’s ’cause it’s not that good. He was also never at that rodeo.

To his second point, which I can scarcely believe I have heard made, let alone, and some of you should blush on your way home, let alone applaud it. Yes, of course, the reason why civilization stopped being barbaric and why things, stuff, started to happen was the arrival of monotheism. I mean to say, there is a one-word refutation of that, I think. You want to know what it is?

You’ve guessed. This is university, China. When the first missionaries reached the emperor of Beijing, as he sat amid a civilization that dwarfed anything that Europe and the Middle East or Latin America, even at its height, had ever produced, he said, “If what you are telling me is true, how has it taken so long to reach the people of China?” No, I’m sorry. There are some arguments that just won’t do and don’t require any further refutation.

The lost years, the lost millennia of the misery of human prehistory have to be taken into account, and after all, we were invited to touch upon them by Dinesh in considering the difference between antique and modern slavery. All right, I’m not going to reject a challenge like that. Slavery and antiquity was this. You lose. Our civilization has conquered yours. You now work. You, the victims, you work for us.

You have machines from now on, you work under our lash, you build our system for us, you build our walls, you dig our canals in return for our rations. Woe to the conquered. You can easily see how it happened. It is only with the arrival of religion that it is said in holy books that certain people are born as a race or people to be the masters and others to be dispensable, either to be slaughtered or when most of the slaughter is done for the remainder to be kept, often female slaves.

Religious Mandate of Slavery

In every holy book, from the original holy books of the Jewish people through those wrongly adopted in my view, mistakenly adopted by the Christian religion, to the Koran, to the Book of Mormon, slavery is mandated and those who are born into it, usually by a different colored skin, are clearly plainly identified, usually as the sons of Ham or some such nonsense, pseudo-ethnological garbage. Okay?

That’s what’s different. So, in the waning centuries of this foul system, it is true that some Christians out of conscience turned against it, Wilberforce is one of the best known, William Lloyd Garrison who later became a secular humanist is another very famous case. But it was never not the case, never not the case, and this is what Abraham Lincoln pointed out with such irony and bitterness, it was never not the case that all the justifications for slavery were religious too.

And that all the leaders of it, all the profiteers of it, were taking their text and their authority from the holy scriptures. That’s what you can’t get over, and that’s what you can’t accuse the Babylonians and the Sumerians of doing. So, my point remains exactly what it was. Not that religion doesn’t make people behave better, because it quite plainly does not, but that there are things in it that no secularist would regard with other than the horror that we now reserve for things like cannibalism and slavery.

The genital mutilation community, ladies and gentlemen, is exclusively, as far as I know, a religious one. The mutilation of the genitals of children, forceful mutilation of genitals, is entirely scripturally mandated. The suicide bombing community among some Tamils in Sri Lanka may or may not be partly secular. It depends, some of them are very extreme Buddhists, and some of them quite extreme Hinduists. But for the most part, the hideous idea of suicide murder is a religious mandate, not as something that has religious authority, but is a commandment. People wouldn’t do this if they didn’t have faith.

I’ll open our next session with a question. I’ll make it my closing, because I think it’s time for mine. And I’ll ask it not just to Dinesh, but I’m hoping to leave all my questions in the minds of all present this evening. There’s a baby born tonight in Pakistan. Would you rather, from the point of view of ethics, morality, the advance of human civilization, that this baby adopt my views of secular humanism, or that it become a Wahhabi Muslim baby?

Because if you think that religion is good for people, I don’t see why you don’t say the second. And if you don’t say the second, I think you ought to work out why you don’t say the second. And if you prefer it over me, see me afterwards. Okay? Thank you.