Opening – Christopher Hitchens

Well, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades, friends, thanks for coming out, at Senator Larry Craig actually did say at his press conference.

Thank you, Mr. Hewitt and Dr. Craig for being among the very many, very, very many Christians who have so generously and hospitably and warmly taken me up on the challenge I issued when I started my little book tour and welcomed me to your places to have this most important of all discussions. I can’t express my gratitude enough. And thanks to the very nice young ladies who I ran into at The Elephant Bar this afternoon where I hadn’t expected a posse of Biola students to be on staff, but where I thought, “God, they’re everywhere now.”

Tonight’s Debate

Now, what I have discovered in voyaging around this country and others in this debate and debating with Hindus, with Muslims, with Jews, with Christians of all stripes, is that the arguments are all essentially the same for belief in the supernatural, for belief in faith, for belief in God, but that there are very interesting and noteworthy discrepancies between them.

And one that I want to call attention to at the beginning of this evening is between those like my friend Doug Wilson with whom I’ve now done a book of argument about Christian apologetics, who would call himself a presuppositionalist, in other words, for whom really it’s only necessary to discover the workings of God’s will in the cosmos and to assume that the truth of Christianity is already proven and what are called, they include Dr. Craig with great honor and respect in this, the evidentialists.

Now, I want to begin by saying that this distinction strikes me first as a very charming distinction and second as false, or perhaps as a distinction without a difference. Well, why do I say charming? Because I think it’s rather sweet that people of faith also think they ought to have some evidence and I think it’s progress of a kind.

Refuting Paley’s Natural Theology

After all, if we had been having this debate in the mid-19th century, Professor Craig or his equivalent would have known little or probably nothing about the laws of physics and biology, maybe even less than I know now, which is, to say, quite a lot in it’s way.

And they would have grounded themselves, or he would have grounded himself, on faith, on Scripture, on revelation, on the prospect of salvation, on the means of grace, and the hope of glory and perhaps on Paley’s natural theology.

Paley, who had the same rooms, or had had the same rooms later occupied by Charles Darwin in Cambridge with its watchmaker theory of design that I know I don’t have to expound to you but which briefly suggests that if an aborigine is walking along a beach and finds a gold watch ticking he knows not what it’s for or where it came from or who made it but he knows it’s not a rock, he knows it’s not a vegetable, he knows it must have had a designer.

The Paley analogy held for most Christians for many years because they were willing to make the assumption that we were mechanisms and that, therefore, there must be a watchmaker.

But now that it’s been, here’s where the presuppositionalist-versus-evidentialist dichotomy begins to kick in-now it’s been rather painstakingly and elaborately demonstrated to the satisfaction of most people, I don’t want to just use arguments from authority, but it’s not very much contested any more, that we are not designed as creatures, but that we evolved by a rather laborious combination of random mutation and natural selection into the species that we are today. It is, of course, open to the faithful to say that all this was, now that they come to know it.

Evolution by natural selection

Now that it becomes available to everybody, now that they think about it, and now that they’ve stopped opposing it or trying to ban it, then they can say, “Ah, actually, on second thought, the evolution was all part of the design.”

Well, as you will recognize, ladies and gentlemen, there are some arguments I can’t be expected to refute or rebut because there’s no way around that argument. I mean, if everything, including evolution, which isn’t a design, is nonetheless part of a divine design, then all the advantage goes to the person who’s willing to believe that.

That cannot be disproved, but it does seem to be a very poor, very weak argument because the test of a good argument is that it is falsifiable, not that it’s unfalsifiable. So this I would therefore, this tactic, or this style of argument, which we’ve had some evidence of this evening, I would rebaptize or when I dare say rechristen it as retrospective evidentialism.

In other words, everything can, in due time, if you have enough faith, be made to fit. And you too are all quite free to believe that a sentient creator deliberately, consciously put himself, a being, put himself or herself or itself to the trouble of going through huge epochs of birth and death of species over eons of time in which 99% of all life forms ever to have appeared on earth have become extinct, as we nearly did as a species ourselves.

I invite you to look up the very alarming and beautiful and brilliant account by the National Geographic’s coordinator of the genome project. By the way, you should send in your little sample from the inside of your cheek and have your African ancestry traced. It’s absolutely fascinating to follow the mitochondrial DNA that we all have in common and that we have in common with other species, other primates, and other life forms and find out where in Africa you came from.

Our real Exodus story

But there came a time, probably about 180,000 years ago, when, due to a terrible climatic event, probably in Indonesia, an appalling global warming crisis occurred, and the estimate is that the number of humans in Africa went down to between 40 and 30,000. This close, this close, think about fine-tuning. This close to joining every other species that had gone extinct.

And that’s our Exodus story is that somehow we don’t know how because it’s not written in any Scripture, it’s not told in any book, it’s not part of any superstitious narrative but somehow we escaped from Africa to cooler latitudes was made, but that’s how close it was.

An unintelligent designer

You have to be able to imagine that all this mass extinction and death and randomness is the will of a being. You are absolutely free to believe that if you wish. And all of this should happen so that one very imperfect race of evolved primates should have the opportunity to become Christians or to turn up at this gym tonight, that all of that was done with us in view.

It’s a curious kind of solipsism, it’s a curious kind of self-centeredness. I was always brought up to believe that Christians were modest and humble, they comported themselves with due humility. This, there’s a certain arrogance to this assumption all of this, all of this extraordinary development was all about us and we were the intended and the desired result and everything else was in the discard. The tremendous wastefulness of it, the tremendous cruelty of it, the tremendous caprice of it, the tremendous tinkering and incompetence of it, never mind at least we’re here and we can be people of faith.

It doesn’t work for me, I have to simply say that and I think there may be questions of psychology involved in this as well. Believe it if you can, I can’t stop you. Believe it if you like, you’re welcome. It’s obviously impossible, as I said before, to disprove and it equally obviously helps you to believe it if, as we all are, you’re in the happy position of knowing the outcome, in other words we are here. But there’s a fallacy lurking in there somewhere too, is there not?

“No evidence that atheism is true”

Now it’s often said, it was said tonight, and Dr. Craig said it in print, that atheists think they can prove the nonexistence of God. This, in fact, very slightly but crucially misrepresents what we’ve always said.

There’s nothing new about the New Atheists, it’s just we’re recent, there’s nothing particularly, Dr. Victor Stenger, a great scientist, has written a book called The Failed Hypothesis, which he says he thinks that science can now license the claim that there definitely is no God, but he’s unique in that, and I think very bold and courageous.

Here’s what we argue. We argue quite simply that there’s no plausible or convincing reason, certainly no evidential one, to believe that there is such an entity, and that all observable phenomena, including the cosmological one to which I’m coming, are explicable without the hypothesis. You don’t need the assumption. And this objection itself, our school falls into at least two, perhaps three sections.

There’s no such thing, no such word though there should be, as “adeism” or as being an “adeist” but there if was one I would say that’s what I was. I don’t believe that we are here as the result of a design or that by making the appropriate propitiations and adopting the appropriate postures and following the appropriate rituals we can overcome death I don’t believe that and for a priori of reasons don’t.

A God who watches

If there was such a force, which I cannot prove by definition that there was not, if there was an entity that was responsible for the beginning of the cosmos, and that also happened to be busily engineering the very laborious production of life on our little planet, it still wouldn’t prove that this entity cared about us, answered prayers, cared what church we went to, or whether we went to one at all, cared who we had sex with or in what position or by what means, cared what we ate or on what day, cared whether we lived or died.

There’s no reason at all why this entity isn’t completely indifferent to us. That you cannot get from deism to theism except by a series of extraordinarily generous, to yourself, assumptions.

The deist has all his work still ahead of him to show that it leads to revelation, to redemption, to salvation or to suspensions of the natural order in which hitherto you’d be putting all of your faith, all your evidence is on scientific and natural evidence or, why not, for a change of pace for a change of taste say, “Yes, but sometimes this “same natural order, which is so miraculous in observation, “no question about it, is so impressive in its favoring “the conditions for life in some ways, “but its randomly suspended when miracles are required.”

So with caprice and contempt these laws turn out to be not so important after all as long as the truth of religion can be proved by their being rendered inoperative. This is having it both ways in the most promiscuous and exorbitant manner, in my submission.

“Seek and ye shall find.” I thought it was a sinister injunction because it’s all too likely to be true.

Religion: Our first and our worst attempt

We are pattern-seeking mammals and primates. If we can’t get good evidence we’ll go for junk evidence. If we can’t get a real theory we’ll go with a conspiracy theory. You see it all the time. Religion’s great strength is that it was the first of our attempts to explain reality, to make those patterns take some kind of form.

It deserves credit. It was our first attempt at astronomy; our first attempt at cosmology; in some ways our first attempt at medicine; our first attempt at literature; our first attempt at philosophy. Good, while there was nothing else, it had many functional uses of mankind.

Never mind that they didn’t know that germs caused disease, maybe evil spirits caused disease, maybe disease is a punishment; never mind that they believed in astrology rather than astronomy.

Even Thomas Aquinas believed in astrology. Never mind that they believed in devils; never mind that things like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tidal waves were thought of as punishments, not as natural occurrences on the cooling crust of a planet.

The pattern seeking has gone too far and it’s gone, I think, much too far with what was until recently thought of as Christianity’s greatest failure, greatest of all failures: cosmology, the one thing Christianity knew nothing about and taught the most abject nonsense about.

For most of its lifetime Christianity taught that the earth itself was the center of the universe and we had been given exclusive dominion as a species over it. Could not have been more wrong. How are we going to square the new cosmology, the fantastic new discoveries in physics with the old dogmas?

Well, one is the idea of this fine tuning about which I’ve only left myself three and a half minutes. I’ll have to refer some of this to later in the discussion. This is essentially another form of pattern seeking on the basis of extremely limited evidence. Most physicists are very uncertain, as they have every right to be.

In fact, I would say for physicists as they have the duty to be, at the moment, extremely uncertain about the spatio-temporal dimensions of the original episode, the Big Bang at it’s sometimes called. We’re in the very, very early stages of this inquiry.

We hardly know what we don’t know about the origins of the universe. We’re viewing it from an unimaginable distance, not just an unimaginable distance in space, perched on a tiny rock on an extremely small suburb of a fairly minor galaxy, trying to look, to discern our origins, but also at a very unbelievable distance in time and we claim the right to say, “Ah, we can see the finger of God in this process.” It’s an extraordinarily arrogant assumption. It either deserves a Nobel Prize in physics, which it hasn’t yet got,

I notice. I don’t know any physicists who believes these assumptions are necessary. Or it deserves a charge of hubris.

An infinite regression – who made the designer?

Let me make three tiny quick objections to it as it stands, and I’m no more a physicist than most of you are. I’ll make these lay objections. One, was there pre-existing material for this extra-spatio-temporal being to work with, or did he just will it into existence, the ex nihilo? Who designed the designer?

Don’t you run the risk with the presumption of a god and a designer and an originator of asking, “Well, where does that come from, where does that come from,” and locking yourself into an infinite regress?

Why are there so many shooting stars, collapsed suns, failed galaxies we can see? We can see with the aid of a telescope, some we can with the aid of a telescope, some we can see with the naked eye the utter failure, the total destruction of gigantic unimaginable sweeps of outer space. Is this fine tuning, or is it extremely random, capricious, cruel, mysterious, and incompetent?

And, have you thought of the nothingness that’s coming? We know we have something now, and we speculate about what it might have come from and there’s a real question about ex nihilo, but nihilo is coming to us. In the night sky you can already see the Andromeda galaxy, it’s heading straight for ours on a collision course.

Is that part of a design? Was it fine tuned to do that? We know that from the red light shift of the Hubble telescope, or rather Edwin Hubble’s original discovery, the universe is expanding away from itself at a tremendous rate.

It was thought that rate would go down for Newtonian reasons. No, it’s recently been proved by Professor Lawrence Krauss the rate of expansion is increasing. Everything’s exploding away even faster. Nothingness is certainly coming. Who designed that? That’s all if before these things happen we don’t have the destruction of our own little solar system in which already there’s only one planet where anything like life can possibly be supported.

All the other planets are too hot or too cold to support any life at all and the sun is due to swell up, burn us to a crisp, boil our oceans, and die as we’ve seen all the other suns do in the night sky. This is not fine tuning, ladies and gentlemen, and if it’s the work of a designer, then there’s an indictment to which that designer may have to be subjected. I’m out of time, I’m very grateful for your kindness and hospitality.

Thank you.

Rebuttal – Christopher Hitchens

The proposition that “atheism is true”

There is a terminological problem here which may conceal more than just terminological difficulty. The proposition that atheism is true or is a misstatement of what I have to prove and what we believe.

There’s an argument among some of us as to whether that we need the word at all. In other words, I don’t have a special name for my unbelief in tooth fairies, say, or witches, or in Santa Claus. I just don’t think that they’re there. I don’t have to prove ‘atoothfairyism.’ I don’t have to prove ‘asantaclausism.’

I don’t have to prove ‘awitchism.’ It’s just, I have to say, I think that those who do believe these things have never been able to make a plausible or intelligible case for doing so.

That’s not agnosticism because it seems to me that if you don’t think that there is any evidence you’re wrong to take refuge in saying you’re neutral. You ought to have the courage to answer the question which one is regularly asked, ‘Are you an atheist or not?’ Yes, I will say, I am.

You can’t tell anything else about me. You can’t tell anything else about what I think, about what I believe, about what my politics are or my other convictions. It’s just that I don’t believe in the existence of a supernatural dimension. I’ve never been shown any evidence that any process observable to us cannot be explained by more satisfactory and more convincing means.

The great physicist Laplace, when showing his working model of the solar system to the Emperor Napoleon, was asked, ‘Well, your model seems to have no room for God in it, for a deity,’ and he said, ‘Well, Your Majesty, it still all operates without that assumption.’ Now, here’s what you would have to believe if you thought that this was all designed.

Where was God all that time?

Dr. Craig gave a slight parody of what I think about this. It could be true, but you’d have to imagine, let’s say the human species has been, Homo sapiens has been with us, some people say as long as quarter of a million years, some say 200, some say 100,000. Francis Collins and Richard Dawkins oscillate about this. It’s not a very big argument. I’ll just take 100,000 if you like.

You have to imagine that human beings are born, well actually most of them, a good number of them aren’t born, they die in childbirth or don’t long outlive it. They’re born into a terrifying world of the unknown, everything is a mystery to them, everything from disease to volcanic eruptions. Everything is, life expectancy for the first, I don’t know, many, many tens of thousands of years would be lucky to be in the twenties, probably dying agonizingly of their teeth, poorly evolved as the teeth are and from other inheritances from being primates such as the appendix that we don’t need, such as the fact that our genitalia appear to be designed by a committee, other short comings of the species, exaggerated by scarcity, by war, by famine, by competition and so on and for 98,000 years or so heaven watches this with complete indifference. [phone pings] We know where your children go to school, by the way.

Heaven watches this with total indifference and then with 2,000 years to go on the clock thinks, ‘Actually, it’s time we intervened. We can’t go on like this, why don’t we have someone tortured to death in Bronze Age Palestine? That should teach them; that should give them a chance at redemption.’

“That should give them a chance at redemption.” You’re free to believe that, but I think the designer who thought of doing it that way is a very, or was a very cruel, capricious, random, bungling, and incompetent one. The news of this, Dr. Craig talks as if, “Okay, but since then they’ll be more people born so it might have been a good time in terms “of population growth,” well, there are a huge number of people who still haven’t even heard of this idea.

The news hasn’t penetrated to them, or where it has, it’s been brought to them by people who Dr. Craig doesn’t think of as Christians, such as Mormons, for example, and it’s taught to them in many discrepant and competitive and indeed incompatible and violently irreconcilable ways.

Retrospective redemption

And there’s been a lot of argument in the church and the churches all this time about, well, “Okay, what is the answer to that? “What about all the people who never could’ve heard the good news or who never will hear it or still haven’t been reached by it and who’ve died not knowing about it? “What happens to them? “How can they be saved?” Well, the argument is that it’s all somehow made retrospective. And as, with so many of these arguments, I just comment on these, well how convenient.

Now, I didn’t have to chance, oh, and just on Mr. Wright, sorry I scrawled a little note to myself, in your first round, Doctor, you said that N.T. Wright, who is an impressive person, says that no explanation of the success of Christianity is possible that doesn’t rest on the terms of its being true, in other words Wright says, “It was so successful, it must have been that the people were so strongly motivated to believe it, that it must have been true.” I regard that as a very, very unsafe assumption.

Or, if it is a safe one, then it must surely apply to Islam and to Mormonism. I mean, these are two very, very, very fast growing religions; have people prepared to sacrifice enormously for it; have ancestors who were absolutely determined of the truth of it at the time and who made extraordinary conquests in its name.

If you’re going to grant this for one religion it seems to me you have to be willing, not just willing, you may indeed be compelled to make this concession for all of them and that, I think, would be not just an unsafe assumption but for most of you here a distinctly unwelcome one.

Absolute vs Objective vs Subjective Morality

Now, I didn’t get the chance, because I out-talked myself, I’m sorry for it, to get to the moral dimension and I’m interested in the fact that “objective” morality is the one that Dr. Craig chooses. Usually the arguments about morality are whether the morality as, so to say, “absolute,” or whether it’s “relative.”

As to objectivity, I think it’s a very good compromise word by the way and I’m very happy to accept it. But the problem with morality is this, in respect of religion: You can’t prove that anyone behaves any better if they refer to this problem upward to a supreme dictator of a celestial kind. There are two questions that I’ve asked in public and I’ll try them again because I try them on every audience.

Hitchens’ Compass – Morality cannot come from religion

They’re very simple ones. First, you have to name for me, challenges, let’s say, rather than questions, you have to name for me an ethical action or an ethical statement or moral action or moral statement made or undertaken by a believer that I couldn’t undertake or say, I couldn’t state or do.

I haven’t yet had an example pointed out of that to me. In other words, that a person of faith would have an advantage by being able to call upon divine sanction. Whereas if I ask you to think of a wicked act undertaken by someone in the name of God or because of their faith or a wicked statement made, you wouldn’t have that much difficulty, I think, in coming up with an example right away.

The genital mutilation community, for example, is almost exclusively religious; the suicide bombing community is almost exclusively religious; there are injunctions for genocide in the Old Testament; there are injunctions, warrants for slavery and racism in the Old Testament too.

There’s simply no way of deriving morality and ethics from the supernatural. When we come to the question of the absolute, well, the most often cited one is the Golden Rule, the one that almost everyone feels they have in common. The injunction not to do to others as you wouldn’t want them to do to you.

Secular Humanism

This doesn’t in fact come from the Sermon on the Mount or from Christianity, or it doesn’t originate with it. It’s certainly adumbrated by Rabbi Hillel, a Babylonian rabbi, and it’s to be found in The Analects of Confucius, too. But it has, since we’re talking about objective, relative, and absolute, a crucial weakness in it, unfortunately. We’d like to be able to follow it but it’s really only as good as the person uttering it.

In others words, if I say I won’t treat you as I don’t want you to treat me, what am I to do when confronted with Charles Manson? I want him treated in a way that I wouldn’t want to be treated myself.

Anything else would surely be completely relativistic.

So the argument isn’t at all advanced by saying that I couldn’t know any of this; I couldn’t have any moral promptings; I couldn’t decide for myself if I see a pregnant woman being kicked in the stomach that, because she’s pregnant, that’s obviously worse than if it was just a woman who wasn’t pregnant being kicked in the stomach.

This is part of my patrimony as a human being. It’s part of the essential emotional solidarity that I need to have with my fellow creatures to make us realize that we are brothers and sisters, one with another. We are dependent upon each other; we have duties; we have expectations of one another and that if we didn’t have these, and try and fulfill them, we couldn’t have gotten as far as we have.

We couldn’t have evolved as a species; we couldn’t have ever had a society. There’s never been a society found where rape and murder and perjury are not condemned. These moral discoveries long, or absolutes, if you want to call them that, long predate the arrival of anything recognizable as monotheism. It’s a bit like the argument of free will.

Free will

People say, “Well, how do you have free will? Do you think you do have it?” Well, it’s a very, very difficult subject indeed. Some religions say you don’t in effect have it. That all is determined by heaven, you’re really only a plaything in a larger game. I take that to be that some of the point of Calvinism.

There are some schools of Islam also that say, “It is only as Allah wills.”

There’s no will of yours really involved as long as you’re willing to make the prostration and the obedience. So the connection between religion and free will isn’t as simple, as easy as some people think it is. But I would say, yes, I think we have free will. And When asked why,

I would have to resort to philosophical irony and say, “Because I don’t think we have any choice but to have free will.” (audience laughing) At least I know that I’m being ironic and that some of the irony is at my own expense, and it’s a risk I have to be willing to take. However, the Christian answer is, “Of course you have free will, the boss insists upon it.”

Religion necessitates servility

This somewhat diminishes freedom and redefines the idea of will. It also seems degrading to me that morality is derived in the same way. That it comes from on high, that we ourselves are not good enough, that we lack the dignity, self-respect, and character to know what the right action or statement is when we see it or want to perform it.

It’s this servile element in religion. I know that strictly speaking, it’s not the subject of our debate this evening, but I won’t completely let it go. It’s the idea that buried in the religious impulse is actually the wish to be unfree, the desire for an unchanging celestial authority, a kind of heavenly North Korea that will take our decisions away from us and commit us only to worship, praise, and thank a Great Leader and his son, the Dear Leader, forever and ever and ever. I’m so glad that there’s no evidence that this is true.

Thank you.

Closing – Christopher Hitchens

I think, you’ll correct me if I’m wrong, it’s Tertilian, isn’t it, who says something like, it’s variously translated “credo quia absurdum?”

That the very improbability of the thing, the very unlikelihood of it, the unlikelihood that anyone would fabricate such a thing, for example, that a Jew could be brought to believe something so extraordinary, is testimony to its truth. I’m sure there can’t be anyone here who doesn’t thinks that’s a little too easy, a little too facile.

Mother Teresa

I myself, for example, have followed the career of a woman known vulgarly in the media as “Mother Teresa,” an Albanian named Agnes Bojaxhiu, a Catholic fanatic operating in the greater Calcutta area, and I watched every stage of her career as a candidate for, and then the recipient of, beatification and shortly, canonization.

The canonization will require, as the Vatican demands, the attestation of a miracle performed by her posthumous intercession. And the miracle’s already been announced, a woman in Bengal, fortunately already a devout Catholic, by pressing a medal of Mother Teresa to her stomach, made a tumor go away, or so she says.

All the witnesses to this have since recanted, all the doctors have given a much better explanation of how she was cured of the swelling and the growth and what the medicines were and so forth, but they’re still stuck with it.

They have to go ahead with this process because, which will lead to countless, untold suffering in India because it will appear to license the bogus charlatanry of shaman, medicine and intercessory medicine rather than the real thing. All of this will have to be gone through, this awful display, in the name of faith.

And I just happened to have watched it at every stage and I can tell you it’s depressingly easy to get a religious rumor started. You can count on an enormous amount of pre-existing credulity among illiterate, frightened, ill-educated populations.

The Gospels of the Bible

There isn’t a literate, written-down, properly attested witness of any real sort in the Gospels. It is, and you may as well admit it, and stick to it because it’s what you’re good at, it involves an act of faith. Second, on the matter of my moral question.

Yes, it’s true that Doug Wilson said that tithing was something I couldn’t do, but then not just, I’m not moving the goal posts here, I don’t think I’d regard giving all my money to the New Saint Andrews church as a moral act.

The only challenge that I’ve had so far that I really couldn’t get out of, I should share it with you, was I was told well you couldn’t do this: You couldn’t say, “Father, forgive them “for they know not what they do.”

No, but nor could you as people of faith, you wouldn’t dare. It would be blasphemy to do it. There’s only one person who can do that even on your account so, with respect, ladies and gentlemen, I think both my challenges stand. It hasn’t been shown that I couldn’t be a moral person despite my unbelief and it has certainly not been demonstrated that unbelief with guarantee you against, excuse me that the belief will, I’ll say it again, that unbelief will ensure you against wickedness.

Religiously endorsed oppression

You mentioned things like apartheid and Nazism. Well, let me just run it by you. Partly this often comes up because people say, “What about the crimes and wickedness of the secular world?”

The apartheid system in South Africa was actually a creation of the Dutch Reformed Church. It was justified theologically as the giving of a promised land to one Christian religious tribe in which everyone else was supposed to be hewers of wood and drawers of water.

It wasn’t until the Dutch Reformed Church, under pressure, agreed to drop their racist preachments of many years that the apartheid system could be dismantled. The dictatorship in Greece in 1967 to ’74 was proclaimed by the Greek Orthodox Church as a “Greece for Christian Greeks.”

The Russian Orthodox Church at present, maybe this is one of the churches you don’t recognize as Christian, I don’t know, but it’s currently become the bodyguard of the Vladimir Putin dictatorship in Russia. They are now producing, the Russian Orthodox Church, actual icons with halos around them of Joseph Stalin for distribution to extreme Russian nationalists and chauvinists for whom the church has become the spiritual sword and butler.

Fascism, also known as The Christian Right

In Nazi Germany, prayers were said every year on the Führer’s birthday by order of the churches for his survival and well-being. The first concordat signed by Hitler and by Mussolini, in both cases, was with the Vatican.

If you take out the word “fascist” from any account of the 1920s and ’30s, any reputable historical account, and you insert the words “Christian right-wing,” or actually “Catholic right-wing,” you don’t have to change a word of the rest of the sentence.

And the third member of the axis, the Japanese Empire, was led by someone who actually claimed he was himself a god and to whom everyone in Japan was a serf and had to admit his god had indivinity and it was said to all of them, “Where would we know without the Emperor?

How would we know what to do? How would we know what a right action was? Without him, there would be screwing in the streets. There would be chaos, no one would know their bearings. Without our god, we would be rudderless.”

Many Japanese people, in fact, it is pitiful to report, still actually believe that. Now, I want to say, in other words, that religion is the outcome of unresolved contradictions in the material world, that if you make the assumption that it’s man-made then very few things are mysterious to you.

This is man-made

If you make the assumption that religion is man-made, then you would know why.

It would be obvious to you why there are so many religions. When you make the assumption that it’s man-made, you will understand why it is that religion has been such a disappointment to our species that despite enumerable revivals, enumerable attempts again to preach the truth, enumerable attempts to convert the heathen, enumerable attempt to send missionaries all around the world, that the same problems remain with us.

That nothing is resolved by this. That we, if all religions died out or all were admitted to be false instead of, as all believers will tell you, only some of them are false, in other words, we’re faced with the preposterous proposition that religion, either all of them true, or none of them true, or only one exclusive preachment is true.

And none of these seem, to me, coherent, and all of these seem to be the outcome of a man-made cult.

Assume that all of them were discredited at the same time, all of our problems would be exactly what they are now:

• How do we live with one another?
• Where, indeed, do morals and ethics come from?
• What are our duties to one another?
• How shall we build the just city?
• How shall we deal with the baser, what Darwin called the “Lowly stamp of our original origins,” which comes, not from a pact with the devil, or an original sin, but from our evolution as well?

All these questions, ladies and gentlemen, would remain exactly the same.

Emancipate yourself from the idea of a celestial dictatorship and you’ve taken the first step to becoming free.

Thank you.