The Most Brutal Atheist Speech in 8 Minutes

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]I can't believe the special stories that have been made up about our relationship to the universe at large because they seem to be too simple, too too connected, too local, too provincial.

[00:00:10]The earth, he came to the earth. One of the aspects of God came to the earth, mind you. And look at what's out there.

[00:00:17]How can you It isn't in proportion.

[00:00:19]These are the good moments from the debate that I remember and I liked them all. Which moment will you choose? Write in the comment and by the way, the original source are in the description.

[00:00:30]Thank you.

[00:00:31]>> What do you think happens when you die?

[00:00:33]As Bertrand Russell said, I believe that when I die, I shall rot and nothing of my ego shall remain. That's it. Yes. The end. Nothing. There's nothing else. How could it How could it be otherwise? I mean, you you have a brain an evolved brain which works by nerve impulses and when that decays, what could possibly be left? When you're dead, you don't know anything. It's just like before you were born.

[00:00:54]I think it was Mark Twain said, I was dead for billions of years before I was born and never suffered the smallest inconvenient. The supposed good news of the gospel is really just solving a problem of its own making. It's like how much respect should you have for a doctor who runs around cutting people with a knife so he could sell them a band-aid. You know what I mean? So that's kind of what Christianity is.

[00:01:15]You are rotten. You are doomed. You are horrible.

[00:01:22]But we're still aware that we're reading fiction.

[00:01:26]Why then do so many of us suspend our judgment so that we can be scammed by people who would sell us felt insoles with embedded magnets, enjoy the fantasy, the fun, the stories. But make sure that there's a clear sharp line drawn on the floor. To do otherwise is to embrace madness. What I find I'm particularly difficult about Christian readings of the New Testament and other early Christian Jewish texts that didn't make it into the New Testament for various reasons. What I find really difficult about those readings is this claim to exclusivity when it comes to the resurrection. Resurrection wasn't some kind of amazing new idea that just popped up in the time of Jesus. Um this is built on a model in which all sorts of deities, half human, half divine beings resurrected [music] from the dead, some even 3 days later. This is a recycling of religion.

[00:02:18]>> What if you're wrong?

[00:02:20]If I'm wrong, then I'm wrong. I'm risking being wrong [music] about every religion, and you're risking being wrong about every religion except yours. And I don't know how much time you've spent worrying about other religions' heavens or hells, um but I don't think it's probably very high.

[00:02:35]And I don't spend any time worrying about anybody's heavens or hells. As we know more and more that and it seems harder and harder to prove that anything might exist like that, where does that leave us?

[00:02:47]On our own. Which to my mind is much more responsible than hoping that someone will save us from ourselves, so we don't have to make our best efforts to do it ourselves.

[00:02:58]People who are well don't go to the doctor.

[00:03:02]It's only people who are sick who go to the doctor.

[00:03:06]And I said, "There you go. We atheists and agnostics don't view ourselves as sick. We don't view ourselves as damned.

[00:03:11][music] We don't view ourselves as corrupt and degraded. We view ourselves as well, thank you." So, my take on on salvation, if salvation is the cure, then atheism is the prevention.

[00:03:31]And if so, why is God so immoral? First of all, why is God so immoral? I don't think that God exists, but if we're talking about the God character [music] in the Bible, it's a pretty horrible, jealous, angry being that advocates slavery. You either have a God who sends child rapists to rape children, or you have a God who simply watches it and says, "When you're done, I'm going to punish you." Well, here's the thing, though. If I were in a situation where I could stop a child rapist, I would.

[00:03:53]That's the difference between me and your god.

[00:03:54]>> Yeah. He watches and says, "I'm shutting the door and you go ahead and rape that child and when you're done, I'm going to punish you."

[00:04:01]If I did that, people would think I was a freaking monster. Yeah. What is faith?

[00:04:06]It is belief in the absence of evidence.

[00:04:09]Believing when there's no compelling evidence is a mistake. Who is more humble?

[00:04:15]The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved in the writing of this book. Redemption after being oppressed is a very common myth throughout history.

[00:04:38]>> [music] >> And you can understand the psychology behind it.

[00:04:41]The Native Americans in 1890 began a Messiah myth with a Paiute Indian, Wovoka, who received visions of God. He was thought to be the Messiah or the deliverer of the Messiah, in which the buffalo would all return, the white man would leave and go back to Europe, [music] and life would become better again. This is what oppressed peoples do. They make up stories that make them feel better.

[00:05:07]There's 50 more stories like this of of uh the geographical location, the time you happen to been born, [music] the anthropology religion, the psychology religion, the sociology religion. We we know exactly how this happens. Now, all the way down to the neurology, the neuro scientifically. We know that people are making this up. What's more likely?

[00:05:28]It's obvious that all these other gods are made up. You already know that. You agree with me on that. You're all atheists for all those other gods.

[00:05:37]So, I would just implore you to go one god further. Thank you.

[00:05:44]Suppose you were walking by my house one day.

[00:05:48]You've been walking by for a long time, and I were to go up in the porch and say, "Hey, stop. I've got some good news. Good news for you people. Stop.

[00:05:56]Stop. Stop."

[00:05:58]You don't have to go down in my basement.

[00:06:01]>> [laughter] >> This is great news. You've been walking by all this time. You've been ignoring me.

[00:06:07]And I deserve to be recognized and honored. And you've been ignoring me and it's made me so angry and so mad that I just can't So I horribly mad. So I built this torture chamber down in the basement.

[00:06:21]And there's some hooks down there and there's some sharp things and there's some vats of sneaky stuff and there's a furnace and there's some chains and it's horrible and it's flames, but you don't have to go down there.

[00:06:34]I sent my son down there.

[00:06:40]And And it was gruesome. I tell you it was really horrible, but that satisfied my anger. And now his blood was shed and now I'm now now you now you're free. You don't have to go down All you have to do come on up here.

[00:07:06]Just come up and tell my son that you love him and hug him and then you can move in with us. We'll live up in the attic and you can you can tell me how great I am. You can You can You can just tell You can just tell me how much you love me and we'll do that. Won't that be great?

[00:07:21]So would you keep walking?

[00:07:24]Suppose you have a baby that dies in agony only a few months after its birth some from some disease that we can do nothing about. Tell me, can anything that happens in some afterlife remedy that [music] or make it right? No, it can't.

[00:07:40]And the idea that God is calculating things in such a way that this baby's suffering is weighed on the balance as something that can be compensated is pretty disgusting.

[00:07:51]But even if if it's possible, it's wishful thinking. Suppose you go to a restaurant and you you're going to have a four-course [music] dinner and you you you have the starter and it's absolutely disgusting.

[00:08:04]What is the rational view to take about what the rest of the courses are going to be like?

[00:08:10]Well, probably they're going to be disgusting, too, right? You don't say, "Oh, well, that was really awful, but the next course must be fantastic to make up for it."

[00:08:18]>> [laughter]