“The Bible Will Destroy Us” - Harris’ Terrifying 2007 Speech that Became True

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Even if even if religion made people moral, this would not provide evidence for the existence of God or that Jesus is his son or any specific doctrinal proposition to which people are attached. Every religion could function like a placebo. They could they could be extremely useful and entirely barren of content. The God of the Bible hates sodomy and will kill you for it, but he rather enjoys the occasional human sacrifice.

[00:00:23]But I think at the very least we can we can say he doesn't quite have his priorities straight. All religious people are atheists with respect to everyone else's religion. I mean, we're all atheists with respect to the thousands of dead gods who lie in that mass grave we call mythology. I mean, think of Thor and Isis and Zeus. I'm not being deliberately provocative. I'm simply extremely worried about the role that religion is playing in our world.

[00:00:44]Uh, I think religion is the most divisive and dangerous ideology that we have ever produced. Uh and what's more, it's the only ideology that is systematically protected from criticism both from within and without.

[00:00:59]Uh it it remains taboo. You you can you can criticize someone's beliefs on really on any subject, but it remains taboo to criticize their beliefs about God. And I think we're paying an extraordinary price for maintaining this taboo. So I'm going to break this taboo rather enthusiastically over the next hour. uh and I'll get I will leave some time for questions and I'm I'm happy to take your your criticism. Uh I also want to to point out up front there's nothing that I'm about to say that should be construed as a denial of the possibilities of spiritual experience and indeed of the the importance of spiritual experience. And that's a subject I'll come back to at the end.

[00:01:38]Here's here's my basic concern. Our ability to cause ourselves harm is now spreading with 21st century efficiency.

[00:01:49]And yet we are still to a remarkable degree drawing our vision of how to live in this world from ancient literature.

[00:01:57]Th this marriage of of modern technology, destructive technology, and Iron Age philosophy is a bad one for reasons that I think nobody should have to specify, much less argue for. And yet, arguing for them has has taken up most of my time since September 11th, 2001.

[00:02:16]That day that that 19 pious men showed our pious nation just how socially beneficial religious certainty can be.

[00:02:26]Now, as someone who has spent a few years publicly criticizing religion, I've become quite familiar with how people rise to the defense of God. As it turns out, there are not a hundred ways of doing this. There appear to be just three. Either a person argues that a specific religion is true or he argues that religion is useful and indeed so useful that it might be necessary or he argues that that atheism is essentially another religion dogmatic intolerant uh or otherwise worthy of contempt. And I I want to I want to differentiate these three strands of argument because they're they regularly run together and any conversation between a believer and non-believers is is liable to fall into one of these ruts.

[00:03:11]Let's let's begin with the specific claim that a a given religion is true.

[00:03:17]There are two problems with arguing this. The first is that as Bur and Russell pointed out over a century ago, they can't all be true. I mean, given the sheer diversity of of religions on offer, even if we knew that one of them was absolutely true, I mean, even if we knew this was this was God's multiple choice exam, is it a Judaism, B Christianity, C Islam, even if we knew we were in this situation, every believer should expect to wind up in hell purely as a matter of probability.

[00:03:50]It it seems to me this this should give religious people pause when they before they espouse their religious certainties. It never does, but it should.

[00:03:59]The second problem with arguing for the truth of religion is that the evidence for our religious doctrines is either terrible or non-existent. And this subsumes all claims about the existence of a personal God, the divine origin of certain books, the virgin birth of certain people.

[00:04:18]uh the veracity of ancient miracles, all of it.

[00:04:23]I mean, consider Christianity. The entire doctrine is predicated on the idea that the the gospel account of the miracles of Jesus is true. This is this is why people believe Jesus was the son of God, divine, etc. This textual claim, this textual claim is problematic because everyone acknowledges that the gospels followed Jesus ministry by decades and there there's no extra biblical account of his miracles. But but the the truth is quite a bit worse than that. The truth is even if we had multiple contemporaneous eyewitness accounts of the miracles of Jesus, this still would not provide sufficient basis to believe that these events actually occurred.

[00:05:09]Well, why not?

[00:05:11]Well, the problem is that firsthand reports of miracles are quite common even in the 21st century. I have met lit literally hundreds at this point of Western educated men and women who think that their favorite Hindu or Buddhist guru has magic powers.

[00:05:30]All the powers ascribed to these gurus are every bit as outlandish as those ascribed to Jesus.

[00:05:36]Uh now I I actually remain open to evidence of such powers. But the the fact is that people who tell these stories desperately want to believe them. All to my knowledge lack the kind of corroborating evidence we should require before believing that nature's laws have been abregated in this way.

[00:05:56]And and people who who believe these stories show an uncanny reluctance to look for non-miraculous causes.

[00:06:05]But it remains a fact that yogis and mystics uh are said to be walking on water and raising the dead and flying without the aid of technology, materializing objects, reading minds, foretelling the future right now.

[00:06:22]In fact, all of these powers have been ascribed to Satya Sai Bababa, the the South Indian guru by an uncountable number of eyewitnesses. He even claims to have been born of a virgin which is not all that uncommon a claim in his in the history of religion or in history generally. Genghask Khan supposedly was born of a virgin as was was Alexander.

[00:06:40]Apparently parthonogenesis doesn't guarantee that you're going to turn the other cheek. Um but Satya Sai Bababa is not a fringe figure. He's not the David Caresh of Hinduism. His followers threw a birthday party for him recently and a million people showed up. So there there are vast numbers of people who believe he is a living God. You can even watch his miracles on YouTube.

[00:07:05]Prepare to be underwhelmed.

[00:07:09]U it's true that he has an afro of sufficient diameter as to suggest a total detachment from the opinions of his fellow human beings. But I'm not sure this is reason enough to worship him.

[00:07:20]Uh in any case, so consider as though for the first time the foundational claim of Christianity. The claim is this that miracle stories of a sort that today surround a person like Satya Saiiba become especially compelling when you set them in the pre-scientific religious context of the first century Roman Empire decades after their supposed occurrence.

[00:07:51]We have Satya Saiiba's miracle stories attested to by thousands upon thousands of living eyewitnesses and they don't even merit an hour on the Discovery Channel.

[00:08:01]But you place a few miracle stories in some ancient books and half the people on this earth think a legitimate project to organize their lives around them.

[00:08:13]Does anyone else see a problem with that?

[00:08:18]Speaking more generally, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are founded on the claim that the Bible and the Quran were dictated by the creator of the universe. There is a there is a creator, there is a personal God, and he occasionally writes books.

[00:08:38]He doesn't he doesn't code software. He doesn't produce films.

[00:08:44]Mel Gibson's claim to have been toiling all the while under the influence of the Holy Spirit I think is probably an exception here. Uh but in any case, God is principally an author of books and this idea has achieved credibility because the the content of these books are deemed to be so profound that they could not possibly have been produced by the human mind.

[00:09:08]>> The problem with Christianity begins with evidence. The whole belief depends on ancient miracle stories written decades after the events with no strong outside confirmation for the miracles themselves.

[00:09:20]Today, people still claim gurus heal the sick, walk on water, or read minds. But we do not accept those claims without serious proof.

[00:09:30]So why lower the standard for Jesus? A miracle claim needs more than tradition, emotion, or an old book.

[00:09:38]Christianity asks people to treat weak testimony as absolute truth. That is dangerous because once faith outranks evidence, almost anything can be justified.

[00:09:48]Please consider how implausible this is.

[00:09:52]Consider how differently we treat scientific texts and discoveries.

[00:09:57]In the year 1665, beginning in the summer of 1665, Isaac Newton went into isolation to dodge the outbreak of plague that was incidentally laying waste to the pious men and women of England. Uh, and when he when he had emerged from his solitude, he had invented the integral and differential calculus. He had discovered the laws of universal gravitation and motion. He had set the field of optics on its foundation.

[00:10:27]Now, many scientists think this is the most awe inspiring display of human intelligence in the history of human intelligence. And yet, no one is tempted to ascribe this to divine agency. We know that the these accomplishments were were affected by a mortal and a and a very unpleasant mortal at that.

[00:10:50]And yet literally billions of us deem the contents of the Bible and the Quran so profound as to rule out the possibility of of terrestrial authorship.

[00:11:01]Now given the depth and breadth of human achievement, I think this is almost a miracle in its own right. It seems to me a miraculous misappropriation of awe. I mean, it it took two centuries of continuous human ingenuity on the part of on on the part of some of the smartest people who have ever lived to significantly improve upon Newton's achievement.

[00:11:25]How difficult would it be to improve the Bible? Anyone in this tent could improve this this supposedly inherent text scientifically, historically, ethically, spiritually in a matter of moments.

[00:11:41]I mean, consider the possibility of improving the ten commandments. This may seem to be setting the bar kind of high because these this is the only part of the Bible, the only text that the that God felt the need to physically write himself and in stone.

[00:11:56]Consider the second commandment. Thou shalt not erect any grave and images.

[00:12:01]Is this really the second most important thing upon which to admonish all future generations of human beings?

[00:12:09]I mean, is this as good as it gets ethically and spiritually?

[00:12:16]You remember the Muslims who rioted by the hundreds of thousands over cartoons?

[00:12:20]What got them so riled up? Well, this is it. The second commandment.

[00:12:25]Now, was all that pious mayhem, the burning of embassies, the killing of nuns? Was all of that some kind of great flowering of of spiritual and ethical intelligence?

[00:12:36]Or was it egregious medieval stupidity?

[00:12:40]Well, come to think of it, it was egregious medieval stupidity.

[00:12:46]The truth is that almost any precept we would put in place of the second commandment would improve the wisdom of the Bible.

[00:12:53]How about don't mistreat children?

[00:12:57]How about don't pretend to know things you do not know?

[00:13:01]Or what about just try not to deep fry all of your food? Could could we live with the resulting proliferation of graven images? I think we would manage somehow.

[00:13:27]So I submit to you that there is not a person on this earth who has good reason to believe that the Bible and the Quran are the product of omnisient intelligence.

[00:13:41]And yet billions of pe people claim to know that they're the word of God. In fact 78% of the American population claims to know that the Bible is the word of God. 70% of college graduates believe that the Bible is the word of God.

[00:13:58]So let's leave aside questions of of religion's truth for a moment. The second way of arguing in defense of God is to argue that religion is useful and so useful that it may in fact be necessary.

[00:14:12]Now this this line of argument is also problematic for a few reasons. The first is that it really is a total nonsequittor. I mean this is not even even if religious belief was exquisitly useful. I don't doubt there are circumstances in which it is in fact useful. But even if it were useful across the board, this would not give us reason to believe that a personal god exists or that any one of our books are his word.

[00:14:39]I mean the fact that certain ideas are useful or motivating or or give people meaning in their lives. The fact that that the idea that that God has a plan for me or every everything happens for a reason. The fact that such ideas are consoling does not offer the slightest reason to believe that they are true.

[00:14:58]And in fact, ironically, they even if we had good scientific reasons to believe that these ideas were true, their power to console us wouldn't even offer an additional reason to believe that they're true. I mean even if the even if the cosmologists and the physicists came forward suddenly and said you know sorry for the misunderstanding guys but it seems there is a god and he he has a plan for you. The fact that so many of us would would would find this consoling would give us further reason to be skeptical in scientific terms. This is why we have phrases like wishful thinking and self delusion and selfdeception.

[00:15:36]This is why scientists do double blind controlled studies wherever possible.

[00:15:40]This is why they submit their data for peer review.

[00:15:44]If we have conquered any ground in in in our career of rationality, it is on this point there is a profound difference between having between having good reasons for believing something and simply wanting to believe it.

[00:16:03]Now, of course, there are other reasons to doubt the usefulness of religion, and many of these are enunciated on a daily basis by bomb blasts.

[00:16:13]I mean, how how useful is it that millions of Muslims believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom?

[00:16:19]How useful is it that that the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq have such heartfelt religious differences?

[00:16:29]How useful is it that so many Jewish settlers think that the creator of the universe promised them a patch of desert on the Mediterranean?

[00:16:37]How useful has has Christianity's anxiety about sex been these last 70 generations?

[00:16:47]Now, those who conflate usefulness and truth in defense of religion generally argue that that religion provides the most reliable foundation for morality.

[00:16:57]Now again before we even were even tempted to evaluate this claim please notice that it is a nonsequittor. It is not even if even if religion made people moral this would not provide evidence for the existence of God or that Jesus is his son or any specific doctrinal proposition to which people are attached.

[00:17:17]Every religion could function like a placebo. They could they could be extremely useful and entirely barren of content. The Bible is often treated like it came from a perfect mind, but that claim falls apart fast. A perfect moral book should not need modern humans to improve it. Yet, almost anyone today could add clearer rules against child abuse, slavery, rape, or pretending to know things without evidence. That matters because usefulness is not truth.

[00:17:45]A belief can comfort people and still be false. Science protects us from wishful thinking through testing, peer review, and evidence. Religion often asks for belief first and evidence later. That is why it becomes dangerous.

[00:18:02]But let's talk for a moment about the supposed link between morality and and religion. It seems to me that religion gives people bad reasons to be good where good reasons are actually available.

[00:18:16]You may ask yourself, which is more moral?

[00:18:19]Helping the poor, feeding the hungry, defending the weak out of a mere concern for their well-being, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it?

[00:18:35]The truth is people do not need to be threatened with damnation to love their children, to love their friends, to want to collaborate with strangers, or indeed to recognize that helping strangers can be one of their greatest sources of happiness.

[00:18:54]And what kind of morality is it that is entirely predicated on a self-interested desire to escape damnation? This seems to bypass the very core of what we mean by morality, which is an actual concern for the welfare of other human beings.

[00:19:11]Clearly, it is possible to teach our children to form such a concern and to grow in empathy and compassion without lying to ourselves or to them about the nature of the universe, without pretending to know things we do not know. You can teach your children the golden rule as an utterly wise ethical precept without pretending to know that Jesus was born of a virgin.

[00:19:39]It's also worth observing that the most atheistic societies on the planet like Sweden and Denmark and the Netherlands are in many respects the most moral.

[00:19:48]They they have rates of violent crime that that are far lower than our own in the US. uh and they're more generous both within their own population and in the developing world on a per capita basis. Sweden, which opposed the war in Iraq, has nevertheless admitted more Iraqi refugees uh into its borders than any country and many more than the US has. So, if you're looking for a state model of Christian charity, the most atheistic societies at this moment fit it better than the most Christian societies do.

[00:20:22]What about this notion that we get our morality out of scripture?

[00:20:26]Well, clearly we don't get our most basic moral impulses out of scripture because these can be seen emerging very early. I mean, toddlers 18 months old will will spontaneously try to comfort somebody who looks upset.

[00:20:39]And a person clearly doesn't learn that cruelty is wrong by re reading the Bible of the Quran. Because if you don't already know that going in, you're just going to be confronted with with endless celebrations of cruelty in these texts.

[00:20:52]And these these books are are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine.

[00:21:00]The God of the Bible hates sodomy and will kill you for it, but he rather enjoys the occasional human sacrifice.

[00:21:09]But I think at the very least we can we can say he doesn't quite have his priorities straight.

[00:21:14]In the Old Testament, we witness the most immoral behavior imaginable.

[00:21:19]Genocide, ethnic cleansing, sexual slavery, the murder of children, kidnapping, all of it, not only permitted by God, but mandated by God.

[00:21:34]If you doubt this, take another look at books like Exodus and Leviticus and Deuteronomy and 2 Samuel and Numbers and 1 and 2 Kings and Zechariah. I mean these books on these book in these books the the most unethical behavior is celebrated. If if if these events occurred in our own time, half the prophets and kings of Israel would be shackled and brought to the Hague for crimes against humanity, including Moses for slaughtering the Midionites, including Joshua for slaughtering the Amalachites, including Elijah for slaughtering the the prophets of Bal.

[00:22:17]These men by by our standards today, they were utter psychopaths, as was Abraham. for, as Christopher Hitchens recently put it, for taking such a long and gloomy walk with his son Isaac.

[00:22:36]Now, you might wonder, well, what about the Ten Commandments? What about thou shalt not murder? Well, the problem is the Ten Commandments simply give us more bad reasons to kill people. I mean, what are you supposed to do when your best friend breaks the Sabbath or erects a graven image or takes the Lord's name in vain?

[00:22:57]>> You're supposed to kill him. And if you're unwilling to kill him, your neighbors are supposed to kill you.

[00:23:04]Is this really the best book we have on morality?

[00:23:08]Is it even a good book?

[00:23:11]Now, happily, most Christians and Jews now disregard the morality on offer in the Old Testament.

[00:23:18]And they rationalize the barbarity we find there by saying, "Oh, this was appropriate to the time. It was appropriate to the ancient world." The idea being that the Canaanites were so ill-behaved that just getting together a short list of reasons to kill your neighbor and sticking to it was a great improvement over the the general barbarity of the time.

[00:23:38]No, it wasn't.

[00:23:40]It was it was within the moral compass of human beings then to recognize that killing somebody for adultery was evil.

[00:23:50]The Buddha managed it. Mahaviraa, the Jane patriarch, managed it.

[00:23:57]Numerous Greek philosophers managed it.

[00:23:59]So, so Jews and Christians are simply lying to themselves when they talk about the impediments to morality that prevailed in the fifth century BC.

[00:24:09]And and the other thing to notice is that rationalizing the barbarism we find in the Old Testament merely renders it irrelevant. It doesn't render these books morally wise. I mean, it is faint praise indeed if the best that can be said of much of scripture is that it can now be safely ignored.

[00:24:31]Now, and despite what what Christians say on the subject, the New Testament isn't so good as to make the Bible a reliable basis of morality.

[00:24:40]In fact, much of the book is an embarrassment to anyone who would say it is a moral book, much less a perfectly moral book. And nowhere is this clearer than on the question of slavery.

[00:24:50]And the truth is the Bible in its totality, Old Testament, New Testament, support slavery.

[00:24:57]If we recognize anything, if we if we converge on any point in ethical terms now, it's that slavery is evil.

[00:25:05]Nowhere in the Bible is this evil recognized, much less repudiated.

[00:25:13]The slaveholders of the South were on the winning side of a theological argument. They knew it. They never stopped talking about it.

[00:25:21]The best God does in in the Old Testament is to admonish us not to beat our slaves so badly that we injure their eyes or their teeth or or not to beat them so badly with a rod that they die on the spot. If they die after a day or two, no problem.

[00:25:36]I think it should go without saying that this is not the kind of moral insight that got rid of slavery in the United States.

[00:25:43]Or consider the treatment of women.

[00:25:45]And for millennia, the great theologians and and prophets of our religions have set to work on the the riddle of womanhood.

[00:25:56]And the result in various times and places has been widow burning and honor killing and genital mutilation, a cultic obsession with virginity, uh just other forms of of physical and psychological abuse. so kaleidoscopic in variety as to scarcely admit of being summarized.

[00:26:21]Now I I I have no doubt that much of this sexist evil predates religion and can be ascribed to our biology. But there's no question that religion promulgates and renders sacrosan attitudes toward women that would be unseemly in a brachiating ape. Religion does not own morality. Empathy appears in children before they can read scripture and social animals show cooperation without theology. The Bible also fails as a moral foundation because it never clearly condemns slavery. In fact, both the Old and New Testament accepted as part of society. That is a brutal problem for anyone calling it perfect. Modern morality improved when people challenged scripture, not when they obeyed it literally. If a book needs to be ignored, reinterpreted or softened to sound moral today, then it was never a flawless guide from God.

[00:27:16]Now, while man was made in the image of God, woman was made in the image of man according to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Her her humanity therefore is derivative. It's azot.

[00:27:30]The Old Testament values the life of a woman at 1 half to twothirds that of a man. The Quran says that the testimony of two women women is required to offset the testimony of one man and every woman is is deserving of one half her brother's share of inheritance.

[00:27:50]But the biblical God has made it perfectly clear that women are expected to live in in absolute subjugation to their fathers until the moment they are pressed into canubial service to their husbands.

[00:28:03]And the New Testament offers no relief.

[00:28:05]I mean, St. Paul put it in his letter to the Ephesians. Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord.

[00:28:12]For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives be subject to their husbands in all things.

[00:28:20]The the Quran delivers the same message and on most translations argue says that that u disobedient wives should be whipped or scorged or beaten.

[00:28:33]The 11th century sage Al Gazali, perhaps the most influential Muslim since Muhammad, described a woman's duties this way. She should stay at home and get on with her spinning. She should not go out often.

[00:28:45]She must not be wellinformed, nor must she be communicative with her neighbors and only visit them when absolutely necessary. She should take care of her husband and respect him in his presence and in his absence and seek to satisfy him in everything. She must not leave the house without his permission. and if given his permission, she must leave surreptitiously. She should put on old clothes and take the deserted streets and alleys, avoid markets, make sure that a stranger does not hear her voice or recognize her. She must not speak to a friend of her husbands, even in need.

[00:29:13]Her sole worry should be her virtue, her home, as well as her prayers and her fast. If a friend of her husband calls when the latter is absent, she must not open the door nor reply to him in order to safeguard her and her husband's honor. She should accept what her husband gives her as sufficient sexual needs at any moment. She should be clean and ready to satisfy her husband's sexual needs at any moment. Now, recall the blissful lives of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Or think about the the millions of women who even now are forced to wear the veil under Islam or who are who are forced into these these forced marriages with men they have never met. and you will realize that the these kinds of religious opinions have consequences.

[00:29:59]The net effect of religion, especially in in the Abrahamic tradition, has been to demonize female sexuality and portray women as as morally and intellectually inferior to men.

[00:30:12]Every woman is it is imagined holds the honor of the men in her lives for ransom and is liable to tarnish it with a glance or or destroy it outright through sexual indiscretion.

[00:30:25]In this in this context, rape is actually a crime that one man con commits against another man. It's the woman is only shame's vehicle and often culpably acquiescent being all blandishments and guile and winking treachery.

[00:30:44]In the Old Testament, in Deuteronomy 22, God says that if a woman doesn't scream loudly enough while being raped, she should be stoned to death as an accessory to her own defilement.

[00:30:58]There's no escaping the view in the in the Bible and the Quran that women have been put on earth to serve men, to keep their homes in order, and to be incubators of sons.

[00:31:10]So I think this is a fact that that really cannot be disputed. If we ever achieve a global civilization that that truly values and honors the the rights and capabilities of women, it will not be because we paid more attention to our holy books.

[00:31:29]So to summarize, the basic claim that we get our morality from religion is clearly false.

[00:31:38]The claim that we're the only species that has moral impulses is also false.

[00:31:44]We clearly our abil our ability to cooperate with one another can be explained in evolutionary terms. I mean chimpanzees with whom we share 99% of our DNA find one another's emotional lives contagious just as we do. They're motivated to reconcile after disputes, to comfort one another.

[00:32:09]Chimpanzees have even died trying to save other chimpanzees from drowning.

[00:32:16]They react negatively to situations that they perceive as unfair, like the unequal distribution of food.

[00:32:22]Given how gregarious all primates are, it is not a surprise that evolution would have selected for a variety of ethical concerns and and social instincts.

[00:32:34]Now, religious people, I think, are right to believe that our morality isn't merely a product of culture. I mean it it it is deeply hardwired in us and it it clearly is is massively empowered by our ability to speak and to write. I mean language gives us the capacity to extend our moral horizons beyond our mere family and kin and even beyond our species. But it's also it should be pointed out that language also empowers our hatred and stupidity to a remarkable degree. We are the only species, to my knowledge, that can forsake life-saving medical research, demonize homosexuals or fly planes into buildings because of what we tell one another about God.

[00:33:20]The the fact is, the basic fact is on this point of morality is that we decide what is good in our good books. I mean, we come to the Bible and we see that it says in Leviticus, if a woman is not a virgin on her wedding night, you're supposed to stone her to death on her father's doorstep. We choose to reject this pearl of ancient wisdom and then we choose to emphasize something like the golden rule.

[00:33:44]So that the guarantor of our morality is in our brains not in our books.

[00:33:55]So I've spoken about the the problems in arguing that religion is true and in arguing that religion is useful. The last way of defending God is to argue that atheism is dogmatic, intolerant, or otherwise worthy of of reproach. Now, as I pointed out in my second book, Letter to a Christian Nation, atheism is really a term we do not need. I mean, it in the same way that we don't have a word for someone who's not an astrologer. You know, no, you know, we don't have websites for non-astrologers. There are no groups for non-astrologers.

[00:34:31]Nobody wakes up in the morning feeling the need to remind himself that he's not an astrologer.

[00:34:43]I mean the irony is atheism is completely without content. It is not a philosophical position. And all religious people are atheists with respect to everyone else's religion. I mean, we're all atheists with respect to the thousands of dead gods who lie in that mass grave we call mythology. I mean, think of Thor and Isis and Zeus.

[00:35:05]You know, the these were once gods in good standing among our ancestors.

[00:35:12]Everyone now rejects them. Well, actually, not everyone. I occasionally get hate mail from people who do believe in Zeus, but that's a another story. Um, >> religion's record on women is one of its biggest moral failures.

[00:35:25]The Bible tells wives to submit to husbands and Deuteronomy gives brutal rules around rape and virginity. That does not sound like divine wisdom. It sounds like ancient men protecting male power. Modern society moved forward by rejecting those ideas, not obeying them.

[00:35:43]Equality, consent, education, and women's rights came from human moral progress. Christianity cannot take credit for values it spent centuries resisting. If morality came from holy books, women would still be treated like property.

[00:35:59]>> But the more importantly, every Christian rejects the claims of Islam just as I do. You know, Muslims claim that they have the perfect word of the creator of the universe. Why do they believe this? Because it says so in the book.

[00:36:13]Sorry, not good enough. So, so this term atheism really is misleading. We're talking about specific truth claims and their evidence or lack thereof.

[00:36:29]Now, what about the charge that atheism is dogmatic?

[00:36:33]Let's get this straight. Jews, Christians, and Muslims claim that their holy books are so profound, so preient of humanity's needs that they could have only been written by an omnisient being.

[00:36:48]An atheist is simply a person who has entertained this claim, read the books, and found the claim to be ridiculous.

[00:36:59]This is not dogmatism. There's nothing that an atheist needs to believe on insufficient evidence in order to reject the biblical God.

[00:37:08]What dogma have we all embraced to not take Apollo and Zeus into account as we go about our day? What would it be dogmatic to doubt that the Iliad or the Odyssey was dictated by the creator of the universe?

[00:37:26]The atheist is simply saying, as Carl Sean did, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If ever there were an antidote to dogmatism, this is it.

[00:37:39]There there's a related claim that atheists and scientists generally are arrogant.

[00:37:45]Now, this is rather ironic that the truth is is that when scientists don't know something like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed on Earth, they tend to admit it.

[00:38:01]Pretending to know things you do not know is a profound liability in science.

[00:38:05]You get punished for this rather quickly.

[00:38:09]But pretending to know things you do not know is the lifeblood of faith-based religion.

[00:38:15]any this is really one of the profound ironies of religious discourse in the the frequency with with which you can hear religious people praise themselves for their humility while tacitly claiming to know things about cosmology and physics and chemistry and paleontology that no scientist knows any any person who who dignifies Genesis as an account of creation or as even as as informative is essentially saying to someone like Stephen Hawking, Stephen, you're a smart guy and and you know I see you got a lot a lot of equations over there but you don't know enough about cosmology. You know it says here that that that that God did this in six days and then rested on the seventh and I don't see how you've really grappled with the the nuances of the biblical account.

[00:39:10]This would be amusing if it were not having such a disastrous effect upon our public policy. It it is impeding medical research and the teaching of science in this country. 30% of biologist biology teachers in the United States at the high school level don't even mention evolution because of the the h to because of the hassle occasioned by the just the the religious hysteria that it provokes in their students and their students parents.

[00:39:41]You all remember the the recent presidential debate where three Republican candidates for the the presidency solemnly raised their hands to testify that they don't believe in evolution and there was no there was no follow-up question.

[00:39:55]I mean this is embarrassing and it seems like every few months the opinion page of the New York Times publishes another defense of this kind of ignorance.

[00:40:07]There's no question that this is eroding our stature in the eyes of the rest of the developed world.

[00:40:13]It it's not arrogant or dogmatic to point this out. It seems to me that our intellectual honesty lives or dies in this trench.

[00:40:26]Now, it's it's also commonly imagined that atheists think there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding. The truth is that atheists are are free to admit that there's much about the universe we don't understand. I mean, it is obvious we don't understand the universe.

[00:40:44]But it is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Quran reflects our best understanding of it.

[00:40:53]There could be life on other planets, complex life, technical technically uh accomplished civilizations. I mean, just imagine a civilization a million years old as opposed to a few thousand.

[00:41:05]Atheists are free to imagine this possibility. They're also free to admit that if such brilliant extraterrestrials exist, the Bible and the Quran are going to be even less impressive to them than they are to human atheists.

[00:41:23]It's often imagined that atheists are in principle closed to spiritual experience.

[00:41:29]But the truth is that a there's nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing self-trcending love or ecstasy or rapture or awe. In fact, there's nothing that prevents an atheist from going into a cave for a year or a decade and and practicing meditation like a proper mystic.

[00:41:51]What atheists don't tend to do is make unjustified and unjustifi unjustifiable claims about the cosmos on the basis of those experiences.

[00:42:04]There's no question that disciplines like meditation and prayer can have a profound effect upon the human mind.

[00:42:12]But do the positive experiences of say Christian mystics over the ages suggest that Jesus is the sole savior of humanity?

[00:42:24]Not even remotely because because Christians have been having these experiences but so have Buddhists and Muslims and even atheists. So so there's a deeper reality here and it makes a mockery of religious denominations.

[00:42:38]The fact is that whenever human beings make an honest effort to get at the truth, they reliably transcend the accidents of their of their birth and upbringing. I mean, just as it would be absurd to speak about Christian physics, though the Christians invented physics, and it would be absurd to speak about Muslim algebra, though the Muslims invented algebra, it will one day be absurd to speak about Christian or Muslim ethics or spirituality.

[00:43:07]Whatever is true about our circumstance in ethical and spiritual tr ethical and spiritual terms is discoverable now and can be articulated without offending all that we've come to understand about the nature of the universe and certainly without making divisive claims about the unique sanctity of any book or or pegging these most beautiful features of our lives to rumors of ancient miracles.

[00:43:39]Finally, there's there's this notion that atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in the 20th century.

[00:43:44]Now, this is actually it's quite amazing to me. This is the most frequent objection I come across. So, I think I should deal with it briefly. Um, it is amazing how many people think that the crimes of Hitler and Paul Pot and Mao were the result of atheism.

[00:44:00]The truth is this is a total misconr of what went on in those societies and and of the psychological and social forces that allow people to follow their dear leader over the brink. I mean the problem with fascism and communism was not that they were too critical of religion. The problem is they're too much like religions. These are these are utterly dogmatic systems of of thought.

[00:44:23]>> Calling atheism dogmatic is a weak defense. Atheism does not require worship, scripture, priests, or blind belief. It simply says extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence.

[00:44:37]Christians already reject Zeus, Thor, Islam, Hindu gods, and thousands of other religions. Atheists go one step further and apply that same standard to Christianity.

[00:44:49]Science admits when it does not know something. Religion often pretends certainty without proof. That is the dangerous part. Faith rewards confidence even when the evidence is missing.

[00:45:03]I recently had a debate with Rick Warren in the in the pages of Newsweek and he suggested that that North Korea was a model atheist society and that any atheist with the courage of his convictions should want to move there.

[00:45:16]The truth is, North Korea is organized exactly like a faith-based cult centered on the worship of worship of Kim Jong- the North Koreans apparently believe that the shipments of food aid that they receive from us to keep them from starving to death are actually devotional offerings to Kim Jong-un.

[00:45:37]Is too little faith really the problem with North Korea? Is is is too much skeptical inquiry? What is wrong here?

[00:45:48]Awitz, the goolog and the killing fields are not the product of atheism. They are they're the product of other dogmas run a muck, nationalism, political dogma. Hitler did not engineer a genocide in Europe because of atheism.

[00:46:03]In fact, Hitler doesn't even appear to have been an atheist. He he regularly invoked Jesus in his speeches. But that's beside the point. He did it on the basis of other beliefs, dogmas about Jews and and the the purity of German blood.

[00:46:17]The history of Muslim jihad, however, does have something to do with Islam.

[00:46:24]The atrocities of September 11th did have something to do with what 19 men believed about martyrdom and paradise.

[00:46:32]The fact that we're not funding stem cell research at the federal level does have something to do with what Christians believe about conception and the human soul.

[00:46:42]It's important to focus on the specific consequences of specific ideas.

[00:46:48]So I want I want to make it very clear that I am not holding religion responsible for every bad thing that a religious person has done in human history to be balanced against all the bad things that that atheists have done.

[00:46:59]I'm only holding religion responsible for what people do and will continue to do explicitly for religious reasons.

[00:47:15]So I submit to you that there there really is no society in human history that has ever suffered because its population became too reasonable, too reluctant to embrace dogma or too demanding of evidence.

[00:47:31]So in conclusion, let me say that I I think civilization in the 21st century is is passing through a bottleneck of sorts formed on the one side by 21st century destructive technology and on the other by by iron age superstition.

[00:47:51]And we will either pass through this bottleneck more or less intact, more or less painfully, or we'll destroy ourselves. Now, perhaps this fear sounds grandiose to some of you, but the truth is that civilizations can end.

[00:48:07]In fact, every civilization in human history virtually has ended. Over and over again in history, some unlucky generation has had to witness the ruination of everything they and their ancestors had worked hard to build.

[00:48:22]We are part of history.

[00:48:24]There is there is no guarantee that things can't go spectacularly wrong for us. In fact, it's an article of faith in many religious communi communities that things will go spectacularly wrong and that this is a good thing.

[00:48:42]79% of Americans think that Jesus is going to come down out of the clouds and rectify all of our problems with his magic powers at some point in history.

[00:48:54]20% of Americans claim to be certain that it will happen in their lifetime.

[00:49:00]This is precisely the sort of thinking we do not need. And I think it should be rather obvious that prophecies about the end of the world could well be self-fulfilling.

[00:49:10]So the uniqueness of our circumstance with respect to the growth of technology I think also shouldn't be ignored. I mean techn not only is technology growing but the rate at which technology is growing is also growing. I mean futurists like Ray Kurtzwhile have have said that the rate is doubling every 10 years. So that if you look at the rate at which technology was growing in uh the year 2000 as your metric the 20th century represents something like 20 years of change. Now, we're in the process of of making another 20 years of of change in about 14 years and then seven and then three and a half. If this trend continues, the 21st century won't represent a hundred years of technological change, but 20,000 years.

[00:49:58]I mean, 20,000 years ago, human beings exactly like ourselves with the same size brains, the same biological capacity for creative thought had been languishing for at least a 100,000 years and had produced nothing more complicated than a bow and arrow. We went from a bow and arrow to the internet in 20,000 years. Imagine seeing this much change in a single century.

[00:50:21]And let's be utterly utterly conservative. Let's just say we're going to have as much change in this century as we did last century. Even this is sobering when you when you recognize who is going to have access to this kind of technology. I mean, just just look at how the internet has facilitated the global jihadist movement among Muslims.

[00:50:42]Look how difficult it is proving to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

[00:50:52]So I think if we accept that the I think quite reasonable premise that it's going to remain easier to break things than to fix them or defend them, the growth of technology is is is quite sobering in the way that it is interacting with religion, especially in a world that has been shattered into competing religious and moral communities and especially among communities who think death is an illusion that this world is is fit only to be consumed by God's fury and that the destruction of every tangible good will itself be the highest good because it will be a gateway to eternity. These are explicitly religious ideas.

[00:51:34]They have no basis in fact and yet they are amazingly well subscribed.

[00:51:40]It seems to me that it is everyone's responsibility to help break this spell.

[00:51:47]Thank you very much. The atheism caused the worst crimes argument is dishonest.

[00:51:53]Dictatorships like North Korea behave more like cults than freethinking societies. The real danger is dogma. One leader, one truth, no questions, no evidence. Religion becomes dangerous for the same reason. When people believe death is an illusion, prophecy is real, and the end of the world is part of God's plan.

[00:52:14]Add modern weapons, the internet, and nuclear technology, and ancient supernatural beliefs become a serious risk. Christianity does not get a pass here. Beliefs have consequences, and bad beliefs can become deadly. So, what do you think? Is religion still a source of morality, or is it one of the biggest dangers in the modern world? Comment your thoughts below and don't forget to like and subscribe.