If there is no god, why do you spend your whole life trying to convince people that there isn't? Why don't you just stay home?
Host [rephrasing and clarifying the question]: The question is: if there is no god why spend your life and career trying to refute that? Why not just leave it alone and stay home?
0:40-5:34 Hitchens: Well it isn't my whole career for one thing. It's become a major preoccupation of my life though in the last eight or nine years --especially since September the 11th, 2001-- to try and help generate an opposition to theocracy and it's depredations internationally. That is now probably my main political preoccupation: to help people in Afghanistan and Somalia, in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Israel, to resist those who sincerely want to encompass the destruction of civilization and sincerely believe they have god on their side in wanting to do so.
Maybe I will take a few minutes just to say something that I do find repulsive about monotheistic/messianic religion. With a large part of itself it quite clearly wants us all to die. It wants this world to come to an end. You can tell the yearning for things to be over whenever you read any of its real texts or listen to any of its real authentic spokesmen -- not the pathetic apologists who sometimes masquerade for it.
There was a famous spokesman for this in Virginia until recently about The Rapture saying that those who have chosen rightly will be gathered to the arms of Jesus, leaving all of the rest of you behind. If we're in a car, it's your look out, that car won't have a driver any more! If we're a pilot, that's your look out, that plane will crash! We will be with Jesus and you can go straight to Hell. The eschatological element that is inseparable from Christianity... if you don't believe that there is to be an apocalypse, there is going to be an end, a separation of the sheep and the goats, a condemnation, a final one, then you're not really a believer. The contempt for the things of this world shows through all of them. It's well put in an old rhyme from an english Exclusive Brethren sect that says
"we are the pure and chosen few
and all the rest are damned
there's room enough in Hell for you
we don't want Heaven crammed!"
You can tell it when you see the extreme Muslims talk, they cannot wait for death and destruction to overtake and overwhelm the world. They cannot wait for what I'd call without ambiguity A Final Solution. When you look at the Israeli settlers --paid for often by American tax dollars-- deciding if they can steal enough land from other people and get all the Jews into the promised land, and all the non-Jews out of it, then finally the Jewish people will be worthy of the return of The Messiah. And there are Christians in this country [United States] who consider it their job to help this happen so that Armageddon can occur. So that the painful business of living as humans and studying civilization and trying to acquire learning, and knowledge, and health and medicine, can all be scraped and the cult of death can take over.
That to me is a hideous thing in eschatological terms, in 'End Times' terms, on its own. A hateful idea, a hateful practice, a hateful theory, but very much to be opposed in our daily lives where there are people who sincerely mean it. Who want to ruin the good relations that could exist between different peoples, nations, races, countries, tribes... who openly say they love death more than we love life, and who are betting that with God on their side they're right about that.
So when I say as the subtitle of my book that I think "Religion poisons everything" I'm not just doing what publishers like and coming up with a provocative subtitle. I mean to say that it infects us in our most basic integrity. It says we can't be moral without Big Brother, without a totalitarian permission. It means we can't be good to one another because we can't think without this. We must be afraid. We must also be forced to love someone whom we fear: the essence of sadomasochism, of essence of abjection, the essence of the master/slave relationship, and that knows death is coming and can't wait to bring it on.
I say this is evil, and though I do on some nights stay home I enjoy more the nights when I go out and fight against this ultimate wickedness and ultimate stupidity.
Loading...
2:48
Hitchslap 26 - كريستوفر هيتشنزby ExMuslim2011228 views
All Comments