Shadowing Practice: This Debate Made Christopher Hitchens a Legend (Al Sharpton Career Ending) - Learn English Speaking with Video
Choose a practice mode
Each mode opens a full-screen practice room.
662 sentences
If sentences are too short or too long, click Edit to adjust them.
1
I'm offended that people in this country believe
2
that they have the right to advocate the teaching of garbage to children under the fatuous name of intelligent design.
3
If there is no God and if there is no supreme mechanism that governs the world, what makes right right or what makes wrong wrong?
4
Why don't we just go by whoever is the strongest at any given period in history?
5
Stephen Weinberg puts it very well.
6
He says, left to themselves, evil people will do evil things and good people will try and do good things.
7
If you want a good person to do a wicked thing, that takes religion.
8
Christopher, I would like to start with you.
9
What have you got against God?
10
Good grief.
11
So I hadn't really sunk in on me that as you were being ordained, when I was nine, I was just getting out of there completely.
12
It was nine when I thought I saw through it, when my biology teacher told me that God was
13
so good as to have made vegetation green because it was the color most restful to our eyes.
14
And I thought, Mrs. Watts?
15
That's his nonsense.
16
I knew nothing about chlorophyll or photosynthesis, nothing about the theory of evolution, nothing about adaptation, nothing of a sort.
17
I just knew she'd got everything all wrong.
18
And of course the argument against faith, against religion falls into two essential halves, not necessarily congruent, but I believe congruent.
19
The first is it's not true.
20
Religion comes from the infancy of our species.
21
I won't say race because I don't think our species is subdivided by races.
22
Infancy of our species when we didn't know that the earth went round the sun.
23
We didn't know that germs caused disease.
24
We didn't know when we were told in Genesis, you're given dominion over all creatures that this did not include microorganisms.
25
Because we didn't know they were there.
26
So you didn't know they had dominion over us when diseases broke out, it was blamed on wickedness, or sometimes on the Jews,
27
or if it was by Jews, on the Amalekites, or as you will.
28
We didn't know anything about the nature of the earth's crust, how it was cooling, earthquakes, storms, all of this were a mystery.
29
Well, we are at least to that extent a reasoning species.
30
Even a conspiracy theory is often better than no theory at all.
31
The mind searches for form.
32
We're now stuck with the forms that that we've found in our infancy, in our primitive barbaric past.
33
Well, that could be fine, still.
34
No nation can be without mythology or myth or legend.
35
And there are people who say, well, it's not exactly true.
36
Virgins don't conceive, okay.
37
Bushes don't burn forever.
38
Why that would be so impressive, I've never understood.
39
Dead men don't walk and so on and so on.
40
OK, it's not really true, it does come from a rather fearful period of the Dark Ages, but at least it's nice to believe it.
41
It teaches good precepts.
42
This, I think, is very radically untrue.
43
I give in my book the example, which I'll give you now, of a person very much influential on my youth,
44
and I know on the reverends too, Dr. Martin Luther King.
45
My friend Taylor Branch's book about Dr. King, I would rather call him doctor than reverend,
46
because I'm sorry to say I think it's a higher title of honor.
47
Taylor Branch's trilogy about him is called Parting the Waters, The Pillar of Fire, and At Jordan's Edge.
48
And everybody literate here knows the story of Exodus.
49
And understands what Dr. King meant when he demanded that his people be free of bondage.
50
But if you think about it for a second, it's a very good thing that the good doctor was only using this metaphorically
51
if he'd really been invoking the lessons of Genesis and Exodus,
52
he would have been saying that his people had the right to kill anyone who stood in their way, to exterminate all other tribes,
53
to mutilate their children's genitalia, to make slaves of those they captured, to take the land and property of others,
54
to engage in rather long and hideous and elaborate arguments about ox -goring, and finally, which is the sentence that ends that,
55
or the verse that ends that section of the book, should not suffer a witch to live, the warrant for witch burning.
56
In other words, in these books, there are the warrants for genocide, for slavery, for the torture of children,
57
for disobedience, for genital mutilation, for annexation, for rape, and all the rest of it.
58
It's a very good thing that this is man -made.
59
There are those who say that they wish they could believe,
60
and I suppose a decent atheist could say that if only for lack of evidence he wishes he or she could,
61
I can't be among their number.
62
I'm very glad it is not true that there is a permanent, unshakable, unchallengeable celestial supervision.
63
a divine North Korea in which no privacy, no liberty is possible from the moment of conception,
64
not just till the moment of death, but until well after.
65
I've been to North Korea, and now I know what a prayerful state would look like.
66
I know what it would be like to praise God from dawn till dusk.
67
I've seen it happen, and it's the most disgusting and depressing and pointless and soulless thing you can picture, but at least with North Korea,
68
you can die, and you can leave.
69
Christianity won't let you do that, because I mentioned another thing about the Old Testament.
70
The Old Testament may have, and any Jews and Christians who like it may like this too.
71
They may have genocide, rape, racism, all the rest of the things I've mentioned, but it never mentions punishment of the dead.
72
When you're done, when you're in the mass grave into which you've been thrown as an Amalekite, it's over.
73
Not until gentle Jesus, meek and mild, is the concept of hell introduced eternal torture,
74
eternal punishment for you and all your family for the smallest transgression.
75
I have no hesitation in saying this is a wicked belief.
76
I've also no hesitation in saying, and I mustn't trespass on the reverence time, that we don't need it in two senses.
77
One is it's wicked.
78
Two, we have and always have had a much superior tradition.
79
We know that Democritus and Epicurus worked out, in ancient Athens the world was made of atoms,
80
that the gods did not exist and certainly took no interest in human affairs
81
and would be foolish to do so and would be wicked if they did.
82
We have the tradition that brings us through Galileo and Spinoza
83
and Thomas Paine and Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein,
84
men of great wisdom and insight, by all means struck by the awe -inspiring character of our universe,
85
by all means open to devotional music and architecture and poetry, by all means aware of the transcendent,
86
but look through the Hubble telescope if you want to see something that is awe -inspiring.
87
And don't look to blood -stained old myths.
88
Now, why now?
89
Why am I doing this now, people ask?
90
Well, I'll tell you why now, because in the last few years, it's become impossible to turn a page of a newspaper without being,
91
as the religious would say, offended.
92
In other words, I don't think I sound self -pitying
93
if I say that I'm offended that a cartoonist in a tiny democratic country in Scandinavia, Denmark, can't do his job without a death threat,
94
and that no American magazine or newspaper would reprint those cartoons, either to elucidate the question or in solidarity.
95
I'm offended that civil society in Iraq is being destroyed, leveled by the parties of God.
96
I'm offended that people in this country believe
97
that they have the right to advocate the teaching of garbage to children under the fatuous name of intelligent design.
98
I believe that we're… Oh, I thought you'd never clap.
99
Religion often filled the gaps before science had answers.
100
People once explained disease, storms and earthquakes as punishment from God but germ theory biology and geology gave better explanations even
101
Genesis says humans were given dominion over living creatures yet microorganisms can kill us
102
and were unknown to ancient writers the Bible also contains commands tied to slavery violence and witch execution including
103
Exodus 22 18.
104
that raises a hard question why treat ancient fear as eternal truth.
105
I'll be very brief.
106
An end to this, an end particularly to the cultural cringe
107
that says that if someone can claim to be a religious spokesman, they are entitled to respect.
108
I have to say it in your presence,
109
sir, I think that the title reverend is something people should be more concerned to live down than to live up to.
110
Thank you.
111
Thank you.
112
Thank you.
113
We will get back to some of that, but Reverend Sharpton, in your rebuttal,
114
would you take a moment to correct Christopher on his misconception that religion was somehow incidental to the civil rights movement?
115
That's all you want me to rebut?
116
No. I guess you'll feel free.
117
Cover that.
118
Well, first of all, let me thank you for inviting me to have this debate.
119
It is the first time in my long career that I was not...
120
assumed to be the devil in a debate.
121
It's an unusual place for me on the stage.
122
So I couldn't turn down representing God and the divine in a public encounter.
123
But I think that several things in rebutting with Brother Hitchens says,
124
you don't have a problem with living up or down to being brother, do you?
125
Yeah, right.
126
I think that you made a very, interesting analysis of how people use or misuse God,
127
but you made no argument about God himself.
128
And by attacking the quote wicked unquote use of God does not at all address the existence of God
129
or non -existence of God.
130
We are sitting in a room that because of lights we assume that there is electricity in the building.
131
Electricity can light up a room or burn it down.
132
It does not mean electricity does not exist because it burns the building down or that it is inherently wicked.
133
It is how people use it.
134
So clearly people have misused God as they've misused other things
135
that are possibly positive but its existence is not in any way proven
136
or disproven by you giving a long diatribe on those
137
that have mishandled and misused God because there are many
138
that you can cite that have acted in a way that shows the goodness of God.
139
Your book, God Is Not Great, could be refuted by many that feel he is great or she is great, whatever way you relate to God.
140
Science, to me, does not wipe away the existence of God because science had to start somewhere.
141
So to pick up mankind in its evolving state does not tell me where mankind began,
142
how it became a long story of ordered steps.
143
Well, who ordered them?
144
Why do things follow such a natural progression?
145
Who set the progress?
146
And in fact, even the term wicked, if there is no God and if there is no supreme mechanism that governs the world,
147
what makes right right or what makes wrong wrong?
148
Why don't we just go by whoever's the strongest at any given period in history?
149
Because nothing is wicked.
150
Because whoever's in power at the time would determine what is wicked and what is not wicked.
151
Because there's no real moral code because there's nobody to judge that.
152
So at one hand, we're going to argue God doesn't exist.
153
At the other hand, we're going to call people wicked.
154
Wicked according to who?
155
And according to what?
156
It would be based on whoever has the power at that time.
157
So I think that the real thing that I'm interested in, Mr. Hitchens, is to really discuss the idea of God
158
and the idea of a supreme being and how creatures and creation have just,
159
by some great coincidence, an unexplained scheme follows some order that just happened by itself something,
160
some force, some overruling force had to set all of that pattern in and it continues thousands of years later.
161
Can you give a million examples of where people have misused that,
162
where they've distorted it, where in the name of God or North Korea or other tragedies have happened?
163
Yes.
164
In terms of the civil rights movement, it was absolutely fueled by a belief in God and a belief in right or wrong.
165
And had not there been this belief that there was a right and a wrong, civil rights movement that you alluded to or
166
that you referred to would not have existed because what made it wrong for people to be slaves?
167
What made it wrong for humans to be treated unequally? because there was nobody to say that they were all equal.
168
It was whoever had the strength.
169
But at the end, what is refreshing is that you are a man of faith
170
because any man that at this date still has faith
171
that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has more faith than any religious person I know.
172
Very well.
173
It's a very generous response.
174
Do you mind if I take it in reverse order?
175
The belief that the weapons of mass destruction, or rather the conviction, as Saddam Hussein was interested in weapons of mass destruction,
176
you could, I suppose, describe as an argument from design.
177
In other words, he'd had them before, he'd known how to conceal them, he'd used them several times,
178
he seems to be prepared to risk his entire political career on the idea of reacquiring them.
179
I would say that was not a belief that had no evidence,
180
and I would say that anyone who treated him as if he was innocent on the subject would be a sap,
181
actually, would be my short word for it.
182
Second on the civil rights movement, I expected you to be more assertive.
183
I don't know what Dr. King's private convictions about religion were.
184
I know that he studied Hegel.
185
I know that he studied Marx.
186
I know that among his very close entourage were a large number of secular socialists and communists.
187
You know their names too.
188
Stanley Levinson is probably the best known, but among the black civil rights leadership,
189
Bayard Rustin, secular socialist, Philip Randolph, secular socialist, trading leader, these were the building blocks for the March on Washington,
190
as was Victor Reuther and many others.
191
The belief that it is illegal as well as evil to keep black
192
Americans in subjection does not require any supernatural endorsement.
193
It had been proved repeatedly in law and in morality and in ethics and demonstrated in practice.
194
The only thing that had always been consistently justified by the churches was initially slavery, the right to hold someone as a slave,
195
biblically warranted, and the right to keep the races separate, which is endorsed by a church that, just to give a contemporary example,
196
one of the current candidates for the Republican nomination is a member of a church, the so -called
197
Mormon Church of Latter -day
198
Saints, that until 1965 had it as an article of faith that the Bible separates the sons of Ham and makes them lesser.
199
Well, I don't have to discredit a text like that because I don't think it has any authority.
200
So, you know, since I return the question to you.
201
Now, I didn't say that God was misused.
202
I hope I wasn't so poorly understood by everybody.
203
I said that the idea of God is a dictatorial one to begin with.
204
The belief in a supreme, eternal, invigilating creator who knows what you think and what you do
205
and cares about it and will reward or punish you and watches you while you sleep is, I think, a horrific belief,
206
a man -made one, fortunately.
207
I'm very glad there's evidence for it.
208
Let me, in case I was misunderstood, let me assert again.
209
I think it's innately an awful belief.
210
However, the cleverest theologian, and have been some, has never been able to demonstrate that such a person exists.
211
The God is needed for morality argument falls apart fast.
212
Humans can build moral rules through empathy, reason, law, and the fact that societies survive better when people are treated fairly.
213
Religion did not create equality.
214
In fact, the Bible gives rules for owning slaves in Leviticus, 2544 -46, and tells slaves to obey masters in Ephesians 6 .5.
215
Civil rights did not need supernatural approval to know racism was wrong.
216
Human dignity is enough.
217
It's impossible to do so.
218
It's not possible either for me to demonstrate conclusively that no such person exists.
219
That cannot be done either.
220
But one thing can be done.
221
A person who claims not to know only that this person exists, a task beyond our brain, but to claim to know his or her,
222
I accept your correction, reverend, mind, to say, I know, because I'm in holy orders, what this entity wants you to do,
223
what he wants you to eat, who he wants you to go to bed with and how he wants you to go to bed with them.
224
What you may read, in what associations in private you may form, what thoughts you may have.
225
That person is out of the argument now, it seems to me.
226
We know that no one knows that.
227
So the claim made by the religious that they know God,
228
they know his mind, and they can tell us what to do in his name is, I think, exploded.
229
Further, it is not argued by my side, at any rate, by no one I know on it,
230
that our presence here on the planet is something that is susceptible of a smooth, logical, reasonable explanation.
231
To the contrary, we are still very much in doubt as to precisely how we came to be human
232
and to separate ourselves from some of our common ancestors.
233
We also know that of the species that have been on this small planet in this tiny solar system
234
since the beginning of measurable time, of the number that were ever in existence, more than 98 .9 % have become extinct.
235
A certain solipsism, I think, is required to believe that we as a resulting species are somehow the center of the created cosmos.
236
This is not modesty, as the Christians call it.
237
It's not humility.
238
It's an unbelievably arrogant claim to make.
239
But at least it makes up for the other claim we're supposed to put up with,
240
which is, yes, but we're also miserable sinners conceived in filth and doomed to abject ourselves.
241
Both of these positions are too extreme, too strenuous, too fanatical.
242
Both of them reinforce each other in unpleasant ways, and both should be outgrown by us.
243
Voila.
244
Well, I think you probably had a...
245
I think you probably had a bad Sunday school teacher
246
because a lot of what you're saying is based on dogma
247
and has nothing to do with one's belief in a supreme being.
248
You're discussing, again, religions, dogmas, denominations, not the existence or non -existence of God.
249
I'm glad to hear you concede you can't prove he
250
or she doesn't exist any more than you claim that those that believe,
251
are you going to claim that that's God speaking on my behalf?
252
Or the devil, which is what you choose.
253
But I think that, again, the basic core question of God goes way beyond any example,
254
no matter how witty or humorous, of those that come in God's name.
255
Because it is the dictates of denominations or organized religious groups
256
that tell you what to eat and what to wear and who to sleep with and all of that.
257
It has nothing to do with the existence of an order to the universe that is clear and evident.
258
that science, I think, confirms that it evolved from somewhere.
259
That's how I relate to God.
260
To your point, however, since I wasn't assertive enough in the first going forward,
261
and I think one guy said that the other night in Vegas, and Mayweather got more assertive.
262
He won the fight, so watch out on that.
263
But I'll get a little more assertive.
264
Dr. King's organization of Brother Hitchens' name was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
265
So there's no question that he himself saw that the basis of the movement was God -based.
266
Did he have some socialists that did not believe in God that associated with the movement?
267
Absolutely.
268
But they joined SCLC's endeavors after SCLC was formed.
269
In In fact, SELC was formed in 1957 in New Orleans before many of them that organized the March on Washington.
270
When Bayard Rustin, who I knew,
271
went down south, his problem was he debated a lot with the ministers there who was the core of that group.
272
So to try and secularize the civil rights movement is just totally inaccurate.
273
It was a church -based, faith -based movement.
274
There's no question about that.
275
And Dr. King, way before he studied Hegel and the rest, he grew up in Ebenezer Baptist Church, was an ordained minister, first went to Morehouse,
276
then Crowes of Theological Seminary, then went to Boston to study those that you have referred to.
277
So let's not reinvent Dr. King any more than we try to reduce God to some denominational convention.
278
And as for the one
279
Mormon running for office, those that really believe in God will defeat him anyway, so don't worry about that.
280
That's a temporary situation situation.
281
But I think the core challenge that I would have is
282
that I would say to you that if your argument is
283
that there are those that have used religion as in slavery
284
or as even today to oppress people and use religion to be unfair to people or have misinterpreted scriptures,
285
you would get no debate from me.
286
I think that is a fact of history and one
287
that many of us have had to fight against
288
that still does not disqualify God any more than using anything in nature that is wrong.
289
To say that one eats food that is poisoned does not mean one should therefore starve because food is inherently bad.
290
I think you're confusing the misuse of religion with the existence of God.
291
There are those that have no religious affiliations at all that believe in God.
292
There are people that don't deal with organized church at all that still believe in God.
293
So when you say God is not great,
294
let's not then debate organized religion is not great or some that have exploited organized religion is not great.
295
You in the title of your book
296
and I've had a chance to go through your book attack God not those
297
that express that they are therefore standing in in God's place or representing God.
298
And your whole ority about weapons of mass destruction and he thought he had it and all of that,
299
when we found him, he was in a rat trap with a .22 pistol.
300
He knew he didn't have any weapons of mass destruction because no one, as one that comes out of the hood,
301
no one that has atom bombs would just retreat with a .22 and wait on the cavalry.
302
Any order you like.
303
I think I better stick to the reverse order.
304
No, that's why a very good time to attack him was before
305
he would get back what he'd lost by way of WMD.
306
He didn't have any then, and he wasn't going to get them back either,
307
any more than he was going to improve his relations with Al -Qaeda.
308
They were as good as they were ever going to get, and that was fine by me.
309
Maybe an argument for another time, but believe me, I'm not reluctant to have it.
310
Then we're of one mind, essentially.
311
I mean, after all, I did not deny what's common knowledge
312
that Dr. Martin Luther King was the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, and was indeed at the Ebenezer Baptist Church at Tom and Doreen.
313
No, no, I said I cannot say to you that I know that he was a believing Christian.
314
No, I cannot.
315
I mean, neither can you say that to me any more than we seem to be of one mind on this too.
316
Neither of us can prove or disprove the existence of God.
317
The difference is between us.
318
I don't say that I'm an ordained minister, and I don't think I could push it that far.
319
on the on the uh since you're evidently an agnostic
320
which is a confession that i'm very welcome to have not extracted from me
321
but heard you make now religious leaders claim to know what god wants
322
but they cannot prove god exists cannot show god's mind
323
and cannot explain why their version is the true one even
324
the bible says no one has ever seen god in john 1 18.
325
saying the universe has order does not prove a personal god is watching people's thoughts.
326
Nature also shows extinction, suffering, and waste.
327
That looks nothing like a perfect moral design.
328
Here's the question.
329
You say these texts are misused.
330
I say that they are not.
331
The Old Testament says or does not say
332
that Abraham was doing a noble thing by offering to sacrifice
333
a son to prove himself loyal to God ought to the voices he was hearing in his head.
334
It says there was a noble thing for him to do.
335
He was rewarded for it by a great posterity and a great long life,
336
offering to murder his son because of hearing voices in his head.
337
This is not moral teaching to me.
338
Is it not the case that the Old Testament says that the Amalekites must all be destroyed down to the last child, every one among them?
339
Leave not one.
340
Yes, it does say that.
341
The Bishop of Landaff in an argument with Thomas Paine once said, well, when it says keep the women, as Paine had pointed out,
342
he said, I'm sure God didn't mean just to keep them for immoral purposes.
343
But what does the Bishop of Landaff know about that?
344
He says, kill all the men, kill all the children and keep the virgins.
345
I think I know what they had in mind.
346
I don't think it's moral teaching.
347
To this day, there are nutbag settlers, some Israeli citizens, some of them
348
Americans, some of them
349
Israeli Americans, trying to settle the West Bank in the name of this prophecy
350
and throw other people off their land and establish a theocracy that will bring on the Messiah and,
351
they hope, Armageddon and the end of the world.
352
Well, I think the United States Supreme Court should hear argument
353
that not one American dime can be used constitutionally for that project.
354
Okay?
355
It's high time.
356
Cut it off.
357
These people mean us real harm.
358
And I'm not going to dilate about what their Muslim brothers say about us.
359
The Koran does not say that you may be killed for changing your religion, but the Hadith, the so -called sayings of the Prophet,
360
which are taken just as seriously, do say that.
361
So when someone says, I'm a Muslim, and I'm telling you, Mr. Rushdie, if you apostatize from his faith, you're dead, he's not misquoting the texts.
362
Sir, he's not.
363
He's quoting them accurately.
364
I think, I'll phrase it as understatedly as I can, I think we could do without a lot of this.
365
Christopher?
366
No, let me respond.
367
I think enough already would cover a lot of this stuff.
368
Again, you are debating points I didn't make.
369
I said you keep confusing the existence of God, again, with religious denominational beliefs.
370
I'm not debating whether… Are they separable?
371
Yes.
372
Well, fine.
373
Very much so.
374
I think that you're quoting the Bible.
375
If you said everything in the Bible, you reject it.
376
You still have not established why a belief in God, maybe a belief in God through that vehicle may be your debate.
377
But you're not addressing God.
378
You're talking Koran, Bibles, people's interpretation of God.
379
That is not my debate.
380
My debate with your book is that you're saying, therefore since they did this to since Abraham was going to murder his son,
381
there is no God.
382
That's like one plus two equals seven.
383
I mean, we're not, so Abraham may have been incorrect, if that's your point.
384
Or what they did with the Amalekites, or what's going on in the Middle East.
385
What does that have to do with the existence of a universe
386
that is set on an order that I believe was set by a supreme being that continues to evolve today,
387
that I think science has done a credible job in analyzing.
388
Now you can debate which one of the Bibles, Korans, religious books may have had it right or interpreted it right,
389
but that does not address the central question.
390
You, sir, did not attack the Christian church or the Muslim religion or the Pope.
391
You attacked God, and to attack God is a whole lot.
392
You hit here and you debate here.
393
Let's talk about God.
394
Let's not talk about those that came in his name
395
and you have some maybe credible arguments against whether or not you felt that they were correct or incorrect.
396
And again, I raise, as I did my opening statement, who decides what is wicked, what is right, what is ethical?
397
If there's nothing there that governs humanity, whatever's ethical is whatever we decide is ethical, because we're in charge.
398
It's all up to us.
399
Okay, once again, in reverse order, if I may, religion gets its morality from us.
400
I think it's very easy to demonstrate that.
401
I'll do it from one of each of the two testaments.
402
You're back on testaments.
403
Why don't you write a book, testaments are not great.
404
I spend a lot of time with my Bible, okay?
405
My Babel.
406
I do.
407
I told you how to make some of this you can teach.
408
I do.
409
There's a very famous parable in the New Testament where the
410
alleged Jesus of Nazareth tells a story about a man from Samaria.
411
We call him the Good Samaritan, who finding a fellow creature in enormous distress and pain
412
goes well out of his way to alleviate his suffering
413
and to follow up to make sure that his sympathy hasn't been a waste of time, to do the aftercare, if you like.
414
Well, we know one thing about this person from Samaria.
415
He cannot have been a Christian.
416
Jesus is telling this story about someone he's heard of, who acted, as far as we know, from no other prompting with elementary human solidarity.
417
What other prompting do we need?
418
Our species would not have survived.
419
We wouldn't be met here if we didn't have, as well as many selfish instincts, the need, and often for our own sake,
420
to be of use to others, to combine with them, to take an interest in them,
421
to care for them, and to worry when they're in pain.
422
No supernatural authority, as with the civil rights movement, is required for this.
423
Morality comes from us.
424
Religion claims to have invented it on our behalf.
425
Then, okay, another example from the Older Testament.
426
Is it really to be believed that until they got to the foot of Mount Sinai, the followers of Moses believed that up to them,
427
adultery, murder, theft, and perjury were okay?
428
They're suddenly told, oh, hey, we've got some new ideas for you.
429
I don't think so.
430
It's a bit of an insult to the ancient
431
Jewish faith, of which Jacob and I are both rather disgraceful ornaments in our different ways.
432
I think our ancestors were smarter than that and even if they weren't smarter,
433
they wouldn't have got that far if they'd been under the contrary impression.
434
The golden rule is something you don't have to teach a child.
435
There's no need to say, and if you don't follow this rule, you'll burn in hell forever.
436
That's immoral teaching.
437
Now, I hope I've made myself clear on the, but I'm wondering if I have because you face me, Reverend, with two very unwelcome thoughts.
438
Either I have been completely inarticulate in everything I've said this evening, or you have misunderstood me. Or both.
439
I have to throw myself...
440
Or these are not mutually exclusive and I should have seen that coming. Have faith, son.
441
I thought I said it's common ground.
442
We cannot know that there was a creator whether of ourselves or of our cosmos.
443
You may wish to assume one, but that's the best you can do.
444
The evidence is all that the cosmos evolved and the evidence
445
that there was a single mind purposeful creator of it is nil.
446
There's no evidence for that at all.
447
Religion tries to claim morality, but the Bible itself shows that humans are better than the text.
448
Most decent people today would reject child sacrifice, genocide, and sexual violence immediately.
449
Yet Genesis 22, 1 Samuel 15, 3, and Numbers 31, 17 to 18, place those ideas inside sacred scripture.
450
Morality did not come from religion.
451
Morality improved when people learned to question religion.
452
By all means believe it as long as you don't try and make me believe it or teach it to my children.
453
Well, let me say...
454
On that I have to insist because that's no difference within it.
455
I would meet you on common ground there.
456
But I would say that many people, I among them, in our own lives have had experiences
457
that make me believe that there is a God
458
and make me believe that my seeking God and seeking the guidance of a supreme being is real to me.
459
I'm not going by Moses.
460
I'm not going by Peter.
461
I'm not going by the man that you said was allegedly Jesus of Nazareth.
462
I'm talking about in people's personal experiences with their interaction through their own faith with God can say that,
463
that you or no one else can tell me that did not exist.
464
If I was only sitting up here arguing with you over scriptures, then you would have points that I would consider valid to this discussion.
465
But I'm not here to defend scriptures.
466
I didn't write no scriptures.
467
I lived my life.
468
And in my life, the existence of God has been confirmed to me in my own personal dealings
469
and my own faith being vindicated and validated that had absolutely nothing to do with scriptures, whether they were right or wrong.
470
And again, I pose the question, when you raise the issue of morality, if there is no supervisory being,
471
then what do we base morality on?
472
Is it based on who has the might at any given time?
473
Who's in power?
474
What is morality based on?
475
If there is no order to the universe, and therefore some being, some force that ordered it,
476
then who determines what is right and wrong? what is moral or immoral.
477
You use very religious terms interchangeably while you attack the idea of a god.
478
There is nothing immoral if there's nothing in charge
479
because everything becomes moral if in fact the species as we are is all there is.
480
We'll determine, let's decide every four years what's moral.
481
Most Republicans do, but I mean let's do it in the sense of let's just say forget all of that.
482
We'll decide morality based on every period of time because there is nothing up there governing in any way.
483
And you don't have to burn in hell to understand
484
that life has certain guiding posts that has been set there well beyond your own being.
485
And I think to think that the whole world was waiting on one's birth, your birth or mine, or death to set the framework of morality,
486
I think that is very arrogant.
487
It's also delusional, but it is very arrogant at best.
488
Again, in reverse order.
489
Don't look for help from the referee.
490
I'm over here.
491
Diane Klein, in your direction, sir.
492
Said it before.
493
Very suggestive thing that you just said.
494
If there was no one in charge, how would we know how to act morally?
495
And this is indeed a profound observation.
496
It's said in, it's argued by Smerdiakov in the Brothers Karamazov, it said, without God anything is permissible.
497
Some people believe that.
498
Some people believe that without the fear of divine total supervision, everyone would do exactly as they wished.
499
We would all be wolves to each other.
500
I think there's an enormous amount of evidence that that's not the case, that morality is innate in us,
501
that solidarity is part of our self -interest in society as well as our own interest, and very much to the,
502
argue the contrary, that when you see something otherwise surprising to you, such as a good person acting in a wicked manner,
503
it's very often because they believe they are under divine orders to do so.
504
Stephen Weinberg puts it very well, he says, left to themselves, evil people will do evil things and good people will try and do good things.
505
If you want a good person to do a wicked thing, that takes religion.
506
For example, I don't believe, I simply do not believe,
507
I do not believe that my Palestinian friends have known for years think
508
that to blow yourself up outside an orphanage is a moral act, or inside one is a moral act,
509
or people serving Neftania is a moral action that anything in their nature makes them think this.
510
But their mullahs tell them that it is, and that the person doing this is a hero.
511
I do not think that any person looking at a newborn baby would think, How wonderful, what a gift,
512
but now just let's start sawing away at its genitalia with a sharp stone.
513
Who would give them that idea if not the godly?
514
And what kind of argument from design is this?
515
Babies are not born beautiful, they're born ugly, they need to be sawn a bit.
516
Because the handiwork of God is such garbage.
517
Well, honestly, this is what I mean when I say
518
that those who think there's any connection between ethics and religion have all their work still ahead of them, and after thousands of years,
519
still have it all ahead of them more and more.
520
So you do not believe in your long and thorough research of history that atheists ever did anything evil.
521
These were only religious people that were driven by somebody representing God that made them do that,
522
and people that came in satanic ways all of that is rubbish.
523
Only religious people reading scriptures of some sort have done wicked things in the history of the world.
524
I should have raised that question myself, and I realize also...
525
But you didn't, so I did.
526
But I've never yet been at one of these meetings where it didn't come up, but I owe you yet another answer.
527
When you say you've had this confirming emotion in your own life, of course, I would not be so presumptuous as to challenge you.
528
Indeed, I believe people, when they say that they have experienced miracles, I believe that they think that they have.
529
I think I'm obliged to credit them if it comes to that, as long as they keep it to,
530
if you like, if I can put it like this modestly as I dare, to themselves.
531
If I believe that I was saved because once a baby boy was born,
532
and before mutilated, it was made the extraordinary discovery that he'd escaped the female birth canal.
533
His mother was a virgin, or at least her birth canal was only one way.
534
Thus I was...
535
A sorry thing, by the way, religions distaste for these regions, don't you find?
536
And something to put you on your guard.
537
Suppose I thought, okay, now I know that.
538
That must prove his teachings are true which it doesn't seem to me that they do,
539
but suppose I did, and I'm going to be saved by it, I think that was a wonderful secret.
540
It would make me happy.
541
It should make me happy.
542
It doesn't make people happy.
543
They can't be happy until I believe it too.
544
My children must be taught this stuff.
545
No sir, no ma 'am, no day, no way, no shape, no form.
546
You keep your illusion private.
547
And I hope it does make you happy, and there's perhaps some reason why it would.
548
But we're told the Pope's authority to say you can't have a condom comes from his ability to certify a miracle,
549
a disturbance in the natural order.
550
I think it was David Hume who put it slightly vulgarly.
551
This was again about the virgin birth,
552
I think, which is more likely that the whole natural order is suspended or that a Jewish minx should tell a lie.
553
Personal feelings are not proof.
554
Every religion has people who say they felt God, heard guidance, or saw a miracle.
555
They cannot all be right.
556
The brain can create powerful spiritual experiences through emotion, memory, stress, and reward systems.
557
That may feel real, but feeling real does not make it true.
558
Keep private faith private.
559
The danger starts when personal belief becomes public law, school doctrine, or medical advice.
560
There has to be an answer to this kind of question.
561
As to the secular bad behavior, well, I used to be a believing
562
Marxist and I've had this argument about communism in different forms of all my life and I realize it's a very,
563
you confront me with an intensely serious question though actually secular
564
criminality on the political level wasn't really possible until pretty much the late 18th century
565
because the religious monopoly on violence and cruelty and torture and slavery and so on was so intense.
566
It has to be said that some of my non -believing forebears seized the opportunity to behave the same way.
567
Sure, there's no question about it.
568
And I'll put it like this, to take the best -known case.
569
Up until 1917, the Tsar of Russia was not just the absolute ruler
570
and owner of all of Russia and all the Russian people and everything in it, but he was also the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.
571
He was considered by the Church and the people to be something a little more than divine.
572
Like, so was me, a little more than human.
573
Not as high as Hirohito, but a bit higher than the Pope in secular and temporal power.
574
If you were Stalin, you'd be crazy
575
if you didn't take advantage of a people who had centuries of indoctrination of that kind.
576
Of course you would want to see if you couldn't replicate that, and to see about reproducing it,
577
emulating it, trading on it, taking advantage of it.
578
You'd be nuts if you didn't do it.
579
So the answer, I think, which is a very long process, will be a long cultural process,
580
is to try and move people up to a cultural and intellectual level where they are above that kind of appeal,
581
where they're not credulous, where they don't take things on faith, where they don't make gods or idols or images out of anybody,
582
including fellow human beings, and they learn the pleasures of thinking for themselves.
583
How about that for a modest proposal?
584
I'd like to use my referee's power to ask you each a question before we open it to the audience for questions.
585
And Christopher, my question for you, taking up the cudgels a little bit for Reverend Sharpton,
586
you keep coming back to various forms of biblical literalism.
587
Reverend, somewhat to my surprise, has not defended anything in the Bible and asks quite reasonably, what is your problem with deism?
588
You've written about Paine, Jefferson.
589
You write in your book about Einstein and Darwin, who are arguably deists in a way.
590
Since you say yourself, you can't prove God doesn't exist, what is your problem with faith divorced from religious text or literalism?
591
Well, religion is not the belief that there is a God, after all.
592
Religion is the belief that God tells you what to do.
593
So if we had to talk about religion, we are not...
594
A theism believes in the existence of a creating being, but it has no prescriptions for morality.
595
You can't, as a theist, cannot say, I think that this universe is so well designed that it implies a creator.
596
Therefore, don't be going to bed with another member of the same sex.
597
Theism, and deism, excuse me.
598
Did I say theism that time?
599
Deism, excuse me, is therefore not a religion.
600
That this is the first for me.
601
I've never yet met someone in holy orders who has said
602
that the words of the holy books are nothing to do with God.
603
I know there's a lot of laxity in the churches these days
604
and I've been trying to encourage it
605
but I mean it seems to me
606
I was I could have been pushing at a slightly more
607
of the well defended door Jefferson who was who could have been a great paleontologist
608
but a great botanist was in fact all of these things couldn't shake the feeling
609
that the the sheer order and beauty of it implied something and but he had these great discussions with his French counterparts.
610
How come the shells, the seashells you find them so up high up on the mountaintops?
611
What is that?
612
You have no idea.
613
He died after 1819.
614
The great day in 1819 is the day that Mr. Lincoln is born and Mr. Darwin is born, same day.
615
I know which one of them was the greater emancipator too.
616
Jefferson couldn't see as far, we just didn't have the horizon.
617
Now you can hold to the deist belief if you choose, if you like.
618
But the overwhelming evidence is that we do have an explanation for the origins of the species,
619
ours and all others, and that each new discovery made, however remote a part of the Earth's surface in paleontology,
620
will confirm or not confute or not contradict the body of knowledge that we have so painstakingly erected.
621
So everything else added to that is a work of what the Church of England used to call supererogation.
622
It's needless, it's unnecessary, Occam's razor disposes painlessly of it.
623
It's gone, it's history.
624
Let me turn it to you, Reverend Sharpton, for a moment.
625
I was expecting you to, I think you've very eloquently made a version of the argument from design.
626
You have argued of an idea of spirituality, but you haven't defended the Bible at all.
627
I mean, isn't that what you do from the pulpit?
628
Well, maybe I read the wrong book.
629
I did not get the book that Hitchens wrote, The Bible Is Not Great.
630
I didn't get a copy of the book that
631
Religion Is Not Great.
632
He said God is not great.
633
And I have yet to, after several inquiries here tonight, get him to address that.
634
And when I read his book and hear him talk, he makes a case against everything other than God.
635
Maybe the name of the book should have been God is Not Great, I Don't Think.
636
Or you have the right to think he's great if you just don't tell me.
637
That might have been a more appropriate title.
638
But I'm waiting for him to establish that God, not
639
King James, not...
640
Mohammed, not Jerry Falwell, God is not great.
641
So to ask me to defend who I have no personal relationship with, no belief in, is I'm in the wrong debate.
642
I think that we can then agree that as long as I don't bother the sedate scholarly world of Mr. Hitchens,
643
that I can believe in my God.
644
And he's fine.
645
And I'm fine with that, because I'm certainly not trying to convert Mr. Hitchens.
646
I'm just trying to have him understand
647
that he cannot impose upon me how I relate to God by quoting things that I may or may not believe anywhere.
648
I'm afraid we're not going to have any conversions tonight.
649
And I wasn't expecting any, although you never know if Christopher is going to start speaking in tongues before we're done.
650
The maybe some creator started it all argument does not rescue religion.
651
a vague creator gives no bible no church no rules no heaven no hell
652
and no right to control anyone's life science has already explained
653
the diversity of life through evolution by natural selection supported by fossils genetics
654
and observed adaptation adding god on top explains nothing it is an extra claim with no evidence
655
and religion keeps pretending that extra claim deserves authority.
656
So here is the question.
657
If religion needs faith, fear, and authority to survive, while science only asks for evidence, which one should guide our future?
658
Comment your answer below.
659
Do you think morality needs God?
660
Or can humans build morality through reason, empathy, and truth?
661
Like, subscribe, and if you want more from this debate, comment more Hitchens, and we can continue breaking down religion's claims with facts,
662
history, science, and logic.
Download App
Everything you need to speak fluently
AI PronunciationScore every sentence
IPA PracticeMaster every sound
VocabularyBuild your word bank
Vocab GameLearn while playing
FOR YOU
Recommend Video
C11
654 sentences
Stuart & Cliffe Knechtle | Do Agnostics Just Want To Have Control? | Give Me an Answer
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C1180 sentences
Why H!tler Saw Jews as a Threat to Humanity | Explained
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C1459 sentences
Is Religion Good or Evil? | Richard Dawkins vs Mehdi Hasan
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
144 sentences
Toby Young | Woke Culture HAS Gone Too Far - 3/8 | Oxford Union
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
62 sentences
Why ‘turning the other cheek’ is fundamentally misunderstood | Bishop Robert Barron
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
560 sentences
The Most Dangerous Woman in Science Says We Got the Dinosaur Extinction Totally Wrong
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
46 sentences
I Believe in One God (with Archbishop Richard G. Henning)
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
166 sentences
Gen Z's Morality Crisis
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C1117
14 sentences
Arguments for God: The Fine Tuning Argument
British AccentDaily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
607 sentences
Every Argument For Atheism
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
6 sentences
Why is Stephen Fry so passionate about the ancient Greeks?
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
186 sentences
Sabbateanism: The Rise and Fall of a Messiah
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “This Debate Made Christopher Hitchens a Legend”. This video has 662 sentences and 8295 words to shadow. The speech runs for 52:14. The speaker talks at a natural 159 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 83% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| belief noun | /bɪˈliːf/ | Mental acceptance of a claim as true. |
| morality noun | /məˈɹælɪti/ | Recognition of the distinction between good and evil or between right and wrong; respect for and obedience to the rules of right conduct; the mental… |
| moral adjective | /ˈmoɹəl/ | Of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behaviour, especially conforming to principles of rectitude. |
| reverend noun | /ˈɹɛvɹənd/ | A member of the Christian clergy; a minister. |
| misuse verb | /mɪsˈjuːz/ | To use (something) incorrectly. |
| creator noun | /kɹiːˈeɪ̯təː/ | Something or someone which creates or makes something. |
| secular adjective | /ˈsɛkjʊlə/ | Not specifically religious; lay or civil, as opposed to clerical. |
| scripture noun | /ˈskɹɪpt͡ʃɚ/ | A sacred writing or holy book. |
| defend verb | /dɪˈfɪnd/ | To ward off attacks against (something or someone). |
| argue verb | /ˈɑɹ.ɡju/ | To show grounds for concluding (that); to indicate, imply. |
| destruction noun | /dɪsˈtɹʌkʃən/ | The act of destroying. |
| slave noun | /sleɪv/ | A person who is held in servitude as the property of another person, and whose labor (and often also whose body and life) is subject to the owner's volition… |
| divine adjective | /dɪˈvaɪn/ | Of or pertaining to a god. |
| slavery noun | /ˈsleɪvəɹi/ | An institution or social practice of owning human beings as property, especially for use as forced laborers. |
| offend verb | /əˈfɛnd/ | To hurt the feelings of; to displease; to make angry; to insult. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| break down verb | To stop functioning. |
| break out verb | To escape, especially forcefully or defiantly. |
| build down verb | In solitaire card games, to place a card over another card of higher value (e.g. 4♦ over 5♣). |
| come up verb | To emerge or become known, especially unexpectedly. |
| fall apart verb | To disintegrate, to break into pieces. |
| get back verb | Return to where one came from. |
| get back to verb | Return to (an activity) |
| get out of verb | To leave, exit or escape from; to become free of. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Why am I doing this now, people ask?
- That's all you want me to rebut?
- What other prompting do we need?
- Did I say theism that time?
- I mean, isn't that what you do from the pulpit?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if you don't follow this rule, you'll burn · If you were Stalin, you'd be |
| “Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true | used to be · used to call |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | we've found · I've never understood · I've been |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | being ordained · is subdivided · were told |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 188 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, I'm, didn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: ethical /ˈɛθɪkəl/, ethics /ˈɛθ.ɪks/, earthquake /ˈɝθkweɪk/, empathy /ˈɛmpəθi/, smooth /smuːð/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: destruction /dɪsˈtɹʌkʃən/, socialist /ˈsoʊ.ʃə.lɪst/, punishment /ˈpʌnɪʃmənt/, establish /ɪˈstæb.lɪʃ/, explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: morality /məˈɹælɪti/, electricity /ɪˌlɛkˈtɹɪsɪti/, solidarity /ˌsɑ.ləˈdæɹ.ə.ti/, supernatural /ˌsu.pəɹˈnæ.tʃə.ɹəl/, explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like belief, morality, moral.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.