The Atheist Manifesto

Christopher Hitchens

Contents

The Case Against Theism

The Moral Necessity of Atheism

The 4 New Commandments

An Exemplar: Thomas Paine

Copyright Information

I.

The Case Against Theism

I thought I'd begin by posing a sort of Rorschach-test question or two, from recent developments that will be familiar. Here's your moral Rorschach test.

On New Year's Eve a man aged 75 years old is having a sleepover with his five-year-old granddaughter. Suddenly, an axe is taken to the outside of his front door, which is successfully broken into by a man still wielding said axe and a knife. If the 75-year-old man hadn't had the presence of mind to get his granddaughter very quickly into a bathroom and lock it behind him, whereupon that door began to splinter as well, and actuate a panic call to the police, he and she would have been hacked to pieces as the last year turned.

I'm assuming you're of average moral character. What's your reaction when you hear about a thing like that? Do you think, there is such a thing as evil in the world? And that there are good people, and there are bad people. And the good people do good things, at least they do the best they can do. And the bad people seem to rather enjoy doing things that, in our worst nightmares we wouldn't want to do, or if we were found guilty of doing, would almost want to die. To hack a five-year-old girl into pieces in front of her grandfather before killing him; or maybe the grandfather in front of the little girl first.

Simple, you might think, as many moral questions essentially are. I read yesterday an article in the Guardian of London, probably one of the most famous liberal daily newspapers in the world, certainly in the English-speaking world. It was a long article by an academic saying, no, don't look at this picture like that. It's not a Rorschach test at all. What you need to understand is that this old man, grandfather to that girl, once drew a cartoon that very gravely upset some believers in a religion. I won't have to mention that religion to you, I don't have to identify it, but it was the religion professed by the man who thought New Year's Eve would be a good time to break in with an axe and try to kill them both.

Surely, the fault here is with the man who drew those cartoons. If he hadn't done that, this crime wouldn't have occurred. Just revolve this thought in your mind for a second. It's not the only instance I have for you.

Not very long ago in a United States Army Base in the state of Texas, a man who'd taken the Hippocratic oath, a physician-in-training, unshipped his weapon. Actually a private weapon he'd bought off the base. With it, he sprayed people who were waiting for a medical examination with lethal fire, killing them in some number, after having shouted a very well-known religious slogan. There's no need to mention which monotheism he was affiliated with.

Actually, I get ahead of myself when I say he shouted a slogan. What if he hadn't? What if he had not? What if he had kept quiet about his faith? Would the president of the United States have said, and The New York Times have said, and CNN have said this appears to be something that's too early to pass judgment upon. Let's not rush to a conclusion. Let's consider the influence of post — in fact, in this man's case, pre — traumatic stress disorder, since he didn't actually experienced any warfare yet, but was ostensibly helping other caregivers to help people who do suffer from it.

No, I don't think that if you left out the religious question anyone would have found any reason to euphemize, to otherwise characterize, to relativize, to try and minimize, to diminish the full effect of the atrocity that was confronted right in front of our eyes.

I have a couple of other examples of this sort, but I have a feeling that you know what I mean. It's not for its own innate interest alone that I mention these examples. It's for this reason. I must have debated now in several hundred religious venues as the guest of every kind of religious institution, university, private group, public church. I'm always confronted with the argument that without a belief in a one God and a creator and a religiously dictated code of ethics and morals, I myself would not know right from wrong. Without heavenly authority I could not know right from wrong. Without the mandate and warrant that comes from a celestial dictatorship … a sort of North Korea with more clouds… and a Dear Leader and a Great Leader, just one short of a trinity. But at least you can die and leave North Korea, whereas when you die with the faithful, that's when the fun really begins. But I actually almost deliberately digress.

The idea is that I, born in roughly the same way as you were, with roughly the same morally innate instincts, wouldn't be able to trust them. That I would not be able to guess myself what was right from wrong. I would be sunk in a mere swamp of modernism, relativism, and hedonism. I would have no true north to which my compass could turn without the divine to know what was a wicked or iniquitous action.

I return you now to the two examples that I was able to pick easily just from today's headlines, and say to you, who is relativizing evil here? Who is making the excuses? Who is saying that for people of faith you must make allowances for the horrific crimes they commit, and the terrible cruelty that they advance?

Who here is being, if you like, soft on crime? Is it not, in fact, the reverse? It is not without God that all is possible — as Dostoyevsky once rather brilliantly put it in The Brothers Karamazov — but it is with God that someone who feels that once they're on a divine mission anything is permitted to them, and of course to nobody else. What is this but the most abject, slimy, euphemistic, obviously man-made moral relativism?

So to the main point that my antagonists make against me, I have at least in opening, this reply. And I urge you to try and keep it in mind the next time you hear it yourself. How dare people who issue warrants for murder and torture of other humans say that without God people would behave worse?

I have evolved an equally simple question relative to that same challenge. I've replied to it with a charge of my own. I'd like to meet, and I haven't yet met in all these debates, a spokesman for faith who will say to me: here is the moral statement made, or moral ethical action undertaken by a believer that you, Hitchens, or one of your co-thinkers, couldn't as an unbeliever make. You couldn't duplicate it.

I've never yet had a reply to it. I have, in thought experiments, thought of one such example and, if you press me very hard in the question time, I'll tell you what it is. But it doesn't solve the problem of relativism.

That challenge, which I've now issued to quite senior theologians and men of God in holy orders, I've not yet had a reply. And I consider it significant that an amateur like myself can defeat professionals of that sort with such an obvious question. But remember, religion is supposed to be for the humble, for the simple. It's supposed to be obvious. It's supposed to be morally self-evident so as to be a matter of faith. If I can baffle them like that, how good is their casuistry and sophistication?

Pressing on and getting a bit cruder, I have a corollary to my challenge, which is: can you think of an evil action performed by a religious person, or wicked statement made because of their faith? And everyone immediately has thought of one. And if you think again for a second, you'll be able to think of another. The suicide murder community is more or less exclusively faith-based. Not entirely, I won't say that; but more or less exclusively faith-based. The genital mutilation community, I regret to tell, you is faith-based by definition. The child abuse community. It's not said that there's a sin, an iniquitous one, one that most of us really would rather die than even be suspected of, that is of course part of the proof that we are not all made in the image of God, but that we are in fact a poorly evolved primate species. We're capable of appalling cruelty to our offspring. But it's very rare that such a thing is institutionalized over generations, and made into something where senior prelates of a church that believes in mortal sin and undying punishment will regularly subject themselves and protect their colleagues from the consequences of a vileness that is almost unimaginable. It proves to me they can't really mean what they say.

Jesus of Nazareth says one moral thing for sure, which is, rather than harm a child you should rather be drowned in infinite water with a millstone 'round your neck. It's been the profession. It's been an institutional crisis for a major church. I vulgarly say in my book, their motto in Latin would read "no child's behind left," if crudely translated.

This is not a venial sin. Everyone can understand a priest who perhaps has an affair with his housekeeper, but the rape and torture of children, which is what abuse really means, is something frighteningly evil. It's had to be admitted as something that has run from top to bottom through a church that, of course, will excommunicate you if you're found to have used a contraceptive. A church that says that AIDS in Africa may be very much to be deplored, but not as much as condoms are to be deplored.

This is moral relativism of a very low order. It's not even a sophisticated casuistry. It's a very crude kind. A church that never threatened any German, or Austrian, or Bavarian with excommunication for taking part in the Final Solution, the Holocaust. Not once were they threatened with excommunication for that, but they excommunicated Joseph Goebbels because he had married a divorced Protestant. Excuse me, we do have our standards.

You see what I mean about the relativist problem. How dare they say to me that without their faith I might fall into error? It's insulting to be talked to in this way. And I think it's time that we developed the fortitude to talk back to people of faith and say, why exactly do you demand respect for what you say? Why is it that the profession of "Well, I'm a person of faith" is expected to bring a smirking look of agreement onto the face of the television interviewer? Well yes, of course. We all understand that. Now you've said that, you're entitled to run for office.

I'm going to stop with the child torture and rape thing now because I don't want you to think I'm being demagogic on this obscene question. But as it happens, in the last month or two the Catholic Church in Ireland had to see the resignation of three senior archbishops. Not for not reporting the hideous stuff, but effectively for complicity with it, for covering it up, for empowering it, for keeping it going for a long time.

The government's report on the subject appears to say that in the period covered by the investigation, it's the number of Irish children who were not subjected to abuse that are the minority. This is a very, very, very serious moral question. That report I think was published in November. Two or three senior archbishops had to offer their resignations. Resignations? Why weren't they fired? Why aren't they on trial? Where is Cardinal Law of Boston, the man who, in our own country, protected and empowered and covered up this atrocity?

Why has he not, as the laity of Boston, on trial? Because he's fled the jurisdiction and has a sinecure in the Vatican under the protection of his Holiness the Pope. He's the Vicar of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, and voted in the College of Cardinals to pick the next Pope who is the Vicar of Christ on Earth.

How can these people live with this kind of thing? But as I say, I'm not going to say any more about that.

In the midst of all this, as of yesterday, a new law came into force in the Irish Parliament that creates the new offense in Ireland of blasphemy — saying that you may not lampoon or abuse, you may not laugh at, you may not insult, you may not decry religious faith. In Ireland that essentially means only one religious faith in particular, and this law was forced through by a church that obviously feels itself somewhat on the defensive. The response to the proper inquiry into the horror that was allowed, the injury that was done to society and its most precious members by an established church suddenly is blocked. The law will say no. You may not offend the faithful.

Is this not something absolutely extraordinary? I ask you. Is it not rather sinister that it wouldn't probably have the face to succeed if it only defended the Catholic Church? But it says, no, no, we include all the other churches, too. Rather defensively, protectively. All other faiths — don't try and lampoon them.

So let me see if I've got this right. Religion makes a rather large claim. I mean, the debate between me and a non-believer is not really at all like a dispute between a supporter of the Democratic and Republican parties, for example. I say there's no evidence of a supernatural dimension of any kind. None. And that there's no other sort of divine intervention. None. The tests of it ontologically and otherwise have generally failed. That's my view. He or she says, no, we think there is evidence of the supernatural. And anyway, people would behave much worse if they didn't think so.

But remember, this is not a disagreement of emphasis. What is claimed by religion is the power to bind and to loose, to save or to condemn, to offer real salvation, to make the promise of paradise or the threat of hell. A great deal rests on it. The religious are claiming to know more than, in my opinion, any primate or mammal can possibly know. I don't admit the right of any other human being to have access to supernatural information that's denied to me, clever as they may be or stupid as they sometimes are.

I don't admit that they have access to privileged information about the cosmos. And they've never been able to suggest that they do. But remember the large claim they make. Extraordinary claims, it seems to me, demand extraordinary evidence. What do these extraordinary claims have to back them? Nothing. Nothing but assertion and the implied threat that if you don't believe in it, we'll kill you. Which is a back-up of a kind. That they’ll in other ways make your life extremely unpleasant; and where they can, they’ll legislate to prevent you from writing an article, publishing a novel, writing a book of non-fiction, or otherwise getting in their way.

This is totalitarianism by definition because it says this is the faith that has to be absolute in a world which we now know in all our studies of physics, and biology, and cosmology is governed by various principles of very radical uncertainty. No, no. Only believe. Be sure. Be certain. We already have all the information we want. We don't really need any more books. We'll grudgingly sometimes look at some of them and say these appear to confirm what we said all along.

In essence, it's a dogma; but it may not be criticized. That is precisely the message of modern totalitarianism and ancient absolutist theocracy as well. And now it's armed and dangerous and getting onto our airplanes and killing, or trying to kill, elderly cartoonists and their granddaughters in Denmark. Although you may seem remote from some of these atrocities, don't you worry. All this is coming to a place near you.

My feeling of the totalitarian leads me to my next point. I'm sometimes grouped with a tendency or faction. I don't know quite how to call it. It's an informal assembly of people anyway, called the New Atheists. There's nothing particularly new about what we say.

The inclusion of myself in this list of names is exorbitantly flattering to myself, because professors Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, and Dr. Samuel Harris are respectively very renowned biologists, philosophers, neurologists, philosophers of science, and so forth. I'm a mere amateur in this. But if there weren't four of us, we wouldn't be called the Four Horsemen, because you know what cliché is like.

I just thought I'd say what the challenges to this totalitarian worldview are — what I've learned from the recent advances in scientific endeavor that seem to me to make the claim of religion to be unassailable and uncriticizable, both laughable and sinister.

Every second I've been speaking, every single second, and every second since the first moments of the Big Bang; every second mark you (your brain isn't big enough really for this, but you can try), a sun, a star, like ours blows up. That's the way it is, and that's the way it's always been. That's a lot of suns gone while I've just been driveling on here.

How this goes with an argument from design I'm never quite sure, but let's localize it a bit. That's too much for any of us to really speculate about. We can localize it a little bit. I owe this point to Lawrence Krauss, who I think he's the best physicist currently writing on these matters. It used to be thought, yes we can detect the Big Bang from the Red Light Shift. We can. We can see it. It's still ongoing all around us. But surely, the rate of expansion of the universe from this original amazing explosion will slow down. Newtonianism seems to suggest this. It'll go on flying away from itself, but the rate will decrease. Well, Edwin Hubble first pointed out that it was increasing.

Then it was thought, even so, it'll slow down. Lawrence Krauss said, no, no, actually the rate is accelerating still. So that we're quite lucky to have taken the bearings on the cosmos that we have done in the last few decades. If we waited another few tens of thousands of years, probably the evidence wouldn't have been so easy to see. It's moving apart so fast.

Those of you interested in global warming may be intrigued to know that the luminosity of the sun is increasing at a very rapid rate meanwhile, and that in measurable time, the surface of the world, whatever we do about it, will become the same temperature as Venus now is. And there are physicists actually working on the possibility of moving earth into a different orbit. I don't joke. This is a serious conversation, because otherwise we're surely done for. The religious people are right in saying that everything proves they are right all along, because yes, the end of the world is at hand.

And if you look in the night sky, you can see the Andromeda Galaxy heading towards us. It's absolutely on collision course for our galaxy, but our sun will have swollen up and our earth would have boiled up, and dried, and gone to a crisp long before that happens, so you can scratch that from your list of things to worry about.

 Am I alone in thinking that, if we'd known all of this when it was first proposed to us that God had intervened in Palestine 2,000 years ago, if we'd been the possessors of this information then, we wouldn't have been quite so impressed by it. I'll put it another way.

Just moving to our little suburb, our species has been on the planet for, let's say, at least a hundred thousand years. Some people say 150. There's a dispute. Francis Collins, the great Christian, who's also a scientist, who did the human genome project reckons at least 100,000 years. I'll give him that, don't need any more. You have to picture this, for 100,000 years, the human species is alive. 99.8 percent of all other species that ever were on the planet died, gone, leaving no descendants, extinct. Our species makes a late appearance in Africa, very nearly gets wiped-out then and manages to expand. 100,000 years of struggle and fear, life expectancy perhaps 25 years, dying of their teeth, terrified of comets, volcanoes, tsunamis, storms, eclipses. No idea of what's happening. No germ theory of disease. Added to that, endless war with other human tribes.

Pretty grim. Lot of suffering, lot of misery, lot of ignorance, lot of terror. But heaven, the Creator, manages to look with ordinance on this. "They don't seem to be doing that well. Gee, I'm glad I'm not one of them. Especially not her." Dying in childbirth in that epoch, that would not be pretty. It shouldn't happen to anybody. The kid will die, too. But then a change of plan. Around 3,000 years ago, after 97,000 years of indifference, time to intervene.

Where shall we show ourselves? Well not in China. They can read there. They've actually managed to do quite a lot better than most of the other primates. No, not China. Not the Indus Valley. Not even Mesopotamia, where quite a lot is going on. They've learned to brew beer, just to dull the pain of God's attention.

No. In the most Stone Age horror show, the most terrified, ignorant, illiterate peasantry of the lot we'll show ourselves to them. I submit that if you'd known anything about ethnology and anthropology, before these myths began to circulate, there isn't a chance of them being accepted.

Once you reverse engineer it, which they would like to do in reverse, dare I say. Now we know about Darwin. We think God is even cleverer than we used to say when we thought Darwin should be banned. Because evolution just shows how clever God is after all. Same with the Big Bang. No. You can't take it back having pretended it wasn't there or having tried to ban its teaching.

Suppose you don't do reverse engineering, you enlighten yourself about the past. What chance is there of accepting the Bethlehem myth or the idea that a sixth century Arab illiterate merchant receives instructions from the Archangel Gabriel, which cannot later be challenged, or that Moses can part water to lead his stricken people to the one part of the Middle East where there's no oil. Well chosen.

I can submit in all seriousness that if we had known any of these things, and we haven't known all of them for very long, and some of them we haven't known at all — only discovered over the last 150 or so years — it would be impossible for anyone to come to your door and say, "Have you heard the good news about..." as it might be "Joseph Smith?" Fastest growing Christian religion in the world and outright, abject, obvious fraud, and racket.

In light of this, it seems to me sinister, as I said, and laughable, as I also said, to allow the claims of religion as metaphysics, or to respect them metaphysically.

A great man, Stephen J. Gould, one of the great evolutionary biologists, proposed a compromise in the same way as T.H. Huxley, Darwin's great deputy in debate, proposed a compromise. T.H. Huxley, who I very much admired, in his debate with Bishop Wilberforce in Oxford, did for Europe what the later debate between William Jennings Bryan, H.L. Mencken and Clarence Darrow did in the Tennessee Scopes trial 50 years later, and simply laid low the church's belief that God had put the fossils in the rock to test our faith, and so forth. But he did propose a compromise of the word agnostic. It comes from Huxley. As to those who can't decide, or feel that one should remain undecided, in something of the same way, Stephen J. Gould used to say that religion and science were non-overlapping magisteria, as he put it.

I don't think this kind of compromise is really any longer thinkable. To say you are an agnostic is to say that you have no belief. Not that you are an atheist, but that you have no belief in God. If you have no belief in God, then you might as well say that that's what you don't have.

It seems to me cowardly to lurk in-between and say well, it could be true, but I just don't know. If you don't know, the religious will tell you, you don't believe. They're right, I think, to be strict on the point. Of those of little faith, they have no patience, and neither do I.

On the possibility that the magisteria could overlap, I think I've shown as a real amateur, someone who is terrified of the thought of my scientific colleagues listening to my puerile explanation of the extraordinary work that they've done, that it isn't really possible. If you had known all of the things I was talking about, you could not no longer believe that the world, or its design, or its humanity, or its speciation — it's amazing, actually rather beautiful, actually rather miraculous — none of that is compatible with the supernatural or the superstitious.

Everything we're made of... cheer up, we're not just materialists here… everything we're made of is star dust. You don't have to despair and become a bored, old, morose materialist. You still have irony. You still have music, love, sex, landscape, Chinese food, philosophy, which is much more consoling than mere incantation. And you still have the sense of wonder that comes from the extraordinary beauty and symmetry of the universe, and the wonderful kinship that we're beginning to find out that we also have through our genome with other creatures. And by the way, the interesting responsibilities and reflections that arise from knowing that we're made out of the same material.

But for the idea that we are not allowed to know any of this without divine permission, that it only comes to us as a gift, that we're mere passive recipients of wisdom, and that without submission to this celestial dictatorship, we wouldn't even know how to behave well to one another. I think it's time to go a bit beyond ridicule, and beyond indignation, and to say very staunchly that we will resist that. And that we will enforce and protect our Constitution, and its patrolling of the frontier between church and state, and its liberty of conscience, and its long record of people who've been willing to die to uphold. As I put it: Mr. Jefferson, on that wall of separation, build up that wall. And to reply to those who want to bring their ideologies of medieval cruelty and stupidity at gunpoint, and with violence, into our own homes, and into our civil aviation: no, we will resist, we will fight you. And don't get this wrong, we, too, have real principles and unalterable convictions, and these we will maintain.

Q & A

Q: Which is more satisfying, writing about politics or writing about literature?

A: Emphatically the latter. It goes to the point I was trying to make before, that I don't think that morality and ethics are to be found in the holy books. Partly because in those books so many things are recommended that are wicked and evil. It's not that you have to rely, for your own morality, on a god figure. That would be bad enough, abject enough. It's that if you do accept the instructions, then Moses will tell you to go and destroy all of the children of the neighboring tribe, for example. Take their land, enslave their women for purposes better imagined than described, and so forth. Or to mutilate your children, or to burn witches, for example. All of these divine injunctions are in the books.

Whereas, if you read George Eliot, for example; in particular, I think Middlemarch, Felix Hoult, Mill on the Floss — there's more — and some of her translations of German philosophy into English; there's a great deal more reflection. Hard, but enlightening and encouraging of a humanistic kind, reflection is to be found in the contemplation of those texts than the scrutiny of severe, ancient, contradictory Stone Age texts. Bear this in mind for the education of your children.

One of the reasons why I think it's much more interesting to debate Dostoyevsky than it is Leviticus, for example, does proceed from the study of literature. Of course, it should be said that religion gave us our first texts, and accustomed us to textual criticism, and that's to its credit. In a way, we owe them that much. But it's regrettable that very often they say those texts aren't really available for anything but repetition. They're not to be scrutinized, they're not to be unpacked. Literature doesn't subject you to that terrible inhibition.

So I'd far rather be writing about literature than about politics, but politics won't leave me alone; or you, either. By the end of the last century, I've increasingly tried to move away from writing political polemics and I was trying to write a book about Marcel Proust, if that doesn't make you laugh. But always in my mind was the realization that my friend, Salman Rushdie, had told me one day a few years before that he thought it would be interesting to write a book that took holy writ as if it were literary text. In particular, to examine those very odd verses of the Koran that Muslims say are so wrong, that they must have been dictated not by the archangel but by the devil; the so-called satanic verses.

How interesting it would be to write a novel on that theme? Yeah, well, so it proved. It's a regrettable fact, but it's the case that that novel, though it and its author did survive a huge campaign of defamation and violence, no publisher would now publish a novel along those lines by any other author, even someone as eminent as Salman. We all now live in the climate of self-censorship (exemplified by the Danish case and others) that's been imposed on us. That's not just a literary question, but also a political one. Anyway, to the extent that the distinction can be made, give me literature every time.

Q: What do you think of the question on the front of last month's Atlantic Monthly? Did Christianity cause the crash?

A: No. Capitalism caused the crash.

Q: Why did you send your children to Quaker school?

A: My youngest daughter goes to school at Sidwell Friends in Washington, where the President's children go, and the Vice President's granddaughter goes.

Until recently, I would've thought that meant she was safe, at least during the day; but now that all you need to get on an airplane is a certificate saying that you aren't on a terrorist watch list, or now that anyone can go to the White House dinner without an invitation, I'm really not so sure.

As for Quakerism, well, it was the religion of Richard Nixon. It immorally preaches a non-resistance to evil, but they do have a respect for education, I must say. I don't send anyone anywhere, but some of my children are smart enough to go where they want to go.

If it wasn't for me, none of my children would know anything about religion, by the way, because so gun-shy is the American system now that very few people in school are even taught, say, the King James authorized version of the Bible merely as wonderful literature, simply as something beautiful to read.

Anyone who wants to know what I'm arguing about would often have to have me tell them what it actually is. This, I think, is a big sign of cultural desertification, I have to say.

Q: If Karen Armstrong were willing, would you debate her?

A: Yes. There's no one I've ever refused to debate.

Q: You support war in Iraq, yet condemn the attack on a military base in Texas. How is this different from US military or Blackwater attacks killing Iraqi civilians? It's well known that the US military is filled with fundamentalist Christians. Are we justified in killing 500,000 Muslim civilians because we have uniforms?

A: Well, I don't think that the United States Army, or even its most fundamentalist preachers — to take the question at its strongest — train or encourage their soldiers to get as close as they can to a group of people waiting for vaccinations and spray them, unarmed, in the back. I don't think that is the way our troops are instructed. In fact, very often American soldiers are required to endanger themselves, and to take risks to their own personal safety rather than endanger what might be a civilian target.

I also think that you make two kinds of mistake when you say 500,000 Muslim civilians. Firstly, I don't think there's any evidence at all that 500,000 people have been killed in the wars, altogether, in Afghanistan and Iraq. But to the extent that hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, it's by the Taliban and Al Qaeda — they're allies — whose victims are mainly Muslim. That, I would take as an axiom.

Second, I think it's entirely wrong to describe these as Muslim countries. I mean, if you're going to get, as The New York Times sometimes does, people saying Major Hassan was worried about American troops on Muslim soil, are you going to say that France and England belong to Christendom? Wouldn't you write into the New York Times if they said that? I hope you would. What about Jewish soil? Does such a concept exist? I'm not sure. Muslim soil we let them get away with. I'm sorry, Iraq was Christian, and Mesopotamia was Christian, and the buildings and the architecture show it, long before the birth of Islam. There's still millions of Christians there to prove it, though they're being diminished in horrible ways, by terrible persecution; as were the Christians of Afghanistan, as were the dissident Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq. If you're the wrong kind of Muslim, you're easy prey — you're announced as fit for slaughter by the pious.

Who doesn't know this? I'm sorry, I don't feel like saying that men and women are the moral equivalent of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and I'm not very interested in hearing from people who do.

And I bet you wouldn't dare say it to their face, either. That's that, and I'd be really against nominating land as religious. That's the beginning of wickedness. The whole problem with the Old Testament in the first place is that it says that some land belongs to you, and you can kill, in my name, anyone else who happens to be living or working there.

That's the fons et origo, the radix malorum. Anyone who talks like that, or allows themselves to talk like that, is playing into the hands of barbaric, theocratic propaganda. Have nothing to do with it. Stay well away from it. Don't echo it. Be glad you live in a country that lets you do so, however.

Q: Are the priests refusing Communion to politicians who support abortion rights trying to influence their vote, or banish the politician?

A: I think the Catholic Church is well within its rights to excommunicate people who don't follow its precepts. You don't have to be a Catholic. It's a voluntary association. It has certain dogmas, some of which are, in my opinion, quite admirable, such as the defense of the idea of the unborn child. It's probably the only real principled question that the church has left. If one of its elected politicians compromises on that point, I think that the church doesn't influence Congress by saying, you can vote that way, but you can't come to Communion.

They're well within their rights to do so. It's self-pitying, and I think the politician should decide what kind of moral courage they have. Which is the position I really want to take? Do I want to be a member of a church that can tell me what to do on matters of faith and morals, which has an infallible leader in his Holiness, the Pope; or would I rather think for myself and represent my voters?

Well, I think they should be forced to make the second choice, but I don't mind the church helping them to do so.

Q: If you're dying, and the only person left on earth who can cure you is a Christian who wants to pray for you before operating on you, would you let him or her?

A: Yes.

Interesting, by the way, that in Washington, my home town, recently the Catholic Church has said they won't take part in the social solicitant charity stuff anymore if the city carries on with its gay rights legislation. So you get, again, a sense that it isn't all done just for the love of uniting.

II.

The Moral Necessity of Atheism

The title that I chose is obviously stolen, annexed, plagiarized from the essay that got Percy Bysshe Shelley thrown out of Oxford University. He wrote a short, rather beautiful essay called The Necessity of Atheism. At that point you couldn't attend any university in England, certainly not Oxford, unless you professed a certain kind of Anglican Christian orthodoxy.

Those days actually are not very remote from us. It's not at all long since these religious tests and censorships were commonplace, even in the academy. But what I want to appeal to when I mention Shelley — and also to attack, to reproach, to some extent — is a well-known tradition of nostalgia among ex-believers. I think probably the largest community in the world at the moment of former members of different churches, it's very common to hear them say that though they had no choice but to abandon their faith and find their reason, that they feel the loss like a missing limb, like an absence of something fundamental. I suppose my first task, therefore, is to say to any such people today, Cheer Up!

The best book such as this that I know about was written by Michael Harrington. He was the author of The Other America, a wonderful study of poverty in this country that is credited with starting President Johnson's War on Poverty, and was read by President Kennedy.

He was a deeply devout ex-Catholic. He wrote a book called The Politics at God's Funeral, where he offered a mourning for the departed. Agnosticism says, in a way, that the loss of God is a loss of comfort, of consolation. The agnosticism of many people maintains that belief, however, is optional at best. It may be unsupported by any facts, but it may not necessarily be inconsistent with them.

Many, many humanists can be found to this day to say that they wish it were otherwise. They wish it were true. They wish the foundations of faith could be found in reason or in evidence. They regret that it cannot and they rest their case there. This is not just a paradox of people like Michael Harrington, who were in their day the backbone of the secular socialist American left. It's a paradox too — very little pointed out, I think — for American conservatism, especially in its modern form.

Who are the two great intellectual gurus, if you don't mind the word guru — intellectual authors of the American right in our time? There might be an argument about which the top two would be, but in any group of the top three or four, you'd have to include Leo Strauss, and you'd have to include Ayn Rand.

In all the arguments about the politics and the interstitial politics of the present administration, for example, it's now become commonplace to point out, sometimes inaccurately or with exaggeration, the debt owed by Paul Wolfowitz in particular and the neoconservative school in general to Leo Strauss. And I suppose everybody knows that the man who has controlled the Federal Reserve through many, many administrations, Mr. Alan Greenspan, is an unrepentant member of the family of Objectivists, made up by Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden, who used to meet to discuss The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

You wouldn't be able to tell in general, perhaps, from the presentation that the Republican Party gives to the country that its intellectual muscle is provided by unbelievers, but such is the case. Such is the fact.

Leo Strauss I think we could define as a nonbeliever rather than a positive infidel or unbeliever. He had a sentimental reverence, or respect for belief, but he couldn't achieve it himself or respect it too much in others.

I suppose Ms. Rand could be described as a Nietzschean in some ways, because she thought that religion, all of it, but particularly Christianity, was a religion for slaves. I don't agree with her about that, if only because for such a long time Christianity was the religion of slaveholders, and slave-takers, and slave traders; as well as, because we must be fair, for abolitionists and campaigners against slavery. Don't mistake me, I don't propose any simpleminded Nietzscheanism here, but I do want to propose the concept of the anti-theist as opposed to the non-theist or the agnostic.

The anti-theist, such as myself, someone who's hostile to the idea of religion, takes no position as between different faiths. We maintain that the extraordinary pluralism of faith (and the schism within existing faiths), the number of churches or synagogues or mosques or gurdwaras or temples claiming to possess or open an avenue to the truth and competing with one another, is susceptible of a very simple explanation. The pluralism of religion is attributable to the fact that man created God and not the other way around. If you accept the posture that man makes gods, there is no mystery in the proliferation of gods and religions that has always existed in human society.

If you, on the other hand, accept the idea that God made man, such a phenomenon is inexplicable; especially if you add, as so many do, that God made man in His own image. In other words, he must have made an image of someone extremely schismatic if not in fact schizophrenic.

The only ones in this argument, therefore, who must be wrong, for whom there's no help and no excuse, are those humans — fellow mammals like ourselves, made of the same errant and torpid and sinful flesh as ourselves — who claim that they do know the mind of God and his intentions, and indeed his minute instructions on private and public behavior.

Only those who affirm this must be, by definition, ab initio, mistaken. And if I was a religious or spiritual person and I heard someone talking this way I would in that instant recognize profanity and blasphemy. No fellow mammal, no one who I know who is at least made in the same image as I am — I know myself reasonably well — is going to tell me he knows what God's will is.

That must be profane even to the spiritual and the religious. It is certainly very deeply offensive to the active rationalist mind because of its arrogance no less than because of its impossibility. If I've made this simple point of repudiation clear, I still haven't carried my point about the moral imperative of anti-theism or unbelief, which I will now assert.

What if then it was true (against the evidence or without any evidence, you choose), that somehow ontologically, we are all part of a grand divine design. What would that actually mean if it were to be true?

It would mean a regime of permanent supervision and surveillance over our lives and our personalities that never stopped, that began before we were born, went through every moment of our earthly life, and continued after our deaths. An inescapable, authoritarian surveillance, control, and supervision. It would be like living in a celestial North Korea.

I'm one of the very few people who've been to and written about North Korea, which has now transformed itself from a being an atheist totalitarian state into a fully religious, quasi-Confucian state of worship in the reincarnation of the son, Kim Jong-Il, of the father, Kim Il-sung. You have only one right as a North Korean. That is the right to praise your leader and to thank him for everything he's done for you and everything he's done for everyone you know and to continue praising him and thanking him all the time, without cessation, for these benefits and this shower of gifts.

In other words, in North Korea has been manifested the promise of the Christian paradise. A permanent system of praise for something that, after all, you didn't choose to have. There's a difference though. You can die and leave North Korea. You can, if you're very, very brave, you have a very small chance of a physical escape, of a defection from North Korea, an option more and more people are exerting.

But in the celestial paradise, where you have only the right to praise and the right to thank and the right to give thanks, and then the right to give some more praise for something that was never in your power to refuse, there would be no escape. What I often ask myself and ask people who want to believe is, why do you want such a thing to be true?

What a hideous realm of permanent, total, inescapable un-freedom is being proposed to you. Thank God, I will say for the first and last time, that there is no evidence at all that we do live under any such system of surveillance, control, supervision, and the compulsory exacting of our thanks.

Bear in mind how much worse that system would be if it was benign, if it was run by someone who was kind and for your own good. That would be even more horrifying and degrading than to live under a diabolic exaction of the sort.

Hence, I think, because this is the origin of totalitarianism, not in our outside world, where it's menacing enough, but within our own minds; the struggle to throw off this servility is the precondition for any struggle for liberty, whether intellectual or personal or moral.

And to some of us, the idea of such a subjection, an infinite, inescapable subjection, is revolting, the more especially because it is preached by fellow mammals who have no special claim to knowledge or wisdom, who clearly want to exert power. Ask yourselves this question as I ask it to myself. In which dimension does His Holiness, the Pope, want to exert power (I'll take him as an example): in this world or the next? He seems to be more interested in exerting power in the here and now. That's what I would do if I was him. If he was to say our kingdom is not of this world, he might surrender the secular power that the claims of the knowledge of God and his intentions gives him right here and right now. It's a fairly easy trick, I think, to see through.

I've written some about Mother Teresa. Let me give you an example because she is, I think, of all the religious figures in the recent past, the most revered, respected, automatically and axiomatically praised by the secular, by the liberals, by people who granted to her sainthood, in its human sense. Now, why should a woman who is not preoccupied with the things of this world, who doesn't care enough even to have more than a pair of sandals and a sari, why should she care that the Republic of Ireland, the state of Ireland, the government of Ireland, should have in its constitution, as no other European country now does, a legal ban on divorce and civil marriage or remarriage? Why should it matter to her that that's the case? The kingdom is not of this world.

The teachings of the Catholic Church on divorce and remarriage may be very strict for Catholics. Catholics must observe them. Catholics put themselves voluntarily under the name of this church. But there's no authority in Catholic doctrine for a state saying that all its subjects, Catholic and Protestant, must take Catholic canon law as their own law. They can't escape it. They must submit their own marriages, their own morality, to this. Mother Teresa left Calcutta for a long time to campaign in Ireland to make sure that it stayed in state law, knowing that if state law in Ireland enshrined only the teachings of the Catholic Church, that it made peace between Protestant and Catholic in Ireland impossible, unthinkable, unobtainable. Knowing that, an Irish woman who might have been married to a child abuser, a drunk, a rapist, and a bully, could expect no absolution if she left this man, let alone if she sought to remake a life for herself and her children with another man. For that, there could be no forgiveness. Not this time just the revenge of the Irish state, but later, in the afterlife, further punishment for this blasphemy would ensue. That's how Mother Teresa devoted her political life and energy.

Except that the same year, her friend, the Diana Spencer girl who some people prefer to call Princess Diana — I don't myself recognize the claims of the House of Windsor — got divorced. Mother Teresa gives an interview to The Ladies Home Journal in which she says, "I'm so glad to hear that my friend Diana got divorced. Her marriage was so obviously an unhappy one."

This, in other words, completes the picture by returning us to the days of the sale of indulgences by the medieval Church to the rich while preaching abstinence, misery, shame, guilt, and revenge to the poor. This is something about which I do not believe moral neutrality is possible.

It is a false claim of power in the secular world based upon a false claim of knowledge about an ethereal world beyond. No one who is subject to this thinking is, in my opinion, intellectually or mentally free. I allow myself the digression of the favorite religious object of the secular, liberal community.

Now there are those who say, and I sympathize with them, is there not something bleak and tedious in what I'm saying? Isn't there something rather forbidding and dull and literal-minded in what I am advocating? Are we to just live as if there was nothing but ourselves? What about the sense of the transcendent? What about the feeling of awe?

Can I tell a quick joke about awe, by the way, before I go on? I'll risk it. I've recently been to see Mel Gibson's hideous film. Disgusting appeal, as far as I can see, to the gay Christian sadomasochistic niche market, which may be larger than Gibson wants it to be, and which has a number of other theological and philosophical deformities. But reviewing this meant that I had to go back and watch all the other Biblical epic movies as well. It's in The Greatest Story Ever Told, where John Wayne plays the Roman centurion standing at the foot of the cross, holding a spear in the rain as the clouds gather and the thunderstorm begins, who says, "Truly this man was the Son of God." The director watched him do it, they had the rain machine on, the earthquake rumbles. He says, "Cut. John, that was great. That was really good. But could you do it, next time, with a little more awe." The Duke is a professional to his fingertips. Sure. Cue rain, cue earthquake rumbles, darkening sky. The pelting comes across the centurion's face. He grasps his spear and says, "Aw, truly this was the Son of God."

Anyway. Are we to live without awe, without transcendence? I think not because we have innate in us an appreciation for beauty, an appreciation for literature, an appreciation for irony, which is the great saving element in the human discourse. More than that, and here I trespass into an area where I'm much less secure, if you want awe, and if you want a sense of wonder and splendor, spend a few minutes with a page or two of Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time. Or have a look at what the Hubble Telescope has been sending back to you. Or spend a little time looking at the extraordinary discoveries that have been made by the unraveling of the string of our own ribonucleic DNA.

We are, you are, particularly the younger among you, privileged yet again (as if you weren't privileged enough, for heaven's sake), to be the first generation to whom it's become possible to look really at, and closely at, and close up at, what the origins of our universe and our cosmos and our human nature and species really is. It's wonderful. Look at the reflection into the future and the past that the Hubble Telescope provides. Look at what Hawking has discovered about the extraordinary majesty of this universe. Realize, in it, that you can contemplate this without any argument from design, that the argument from design, or the argument of an original cause, is too paltry to take account of anything so splendid and so various.

I'll give you a single case, that of the event horizon. The event horizon is the lip, or the cusp, of the black hole. If you could, by any scheme or stratagem, travel to the edge, lip, cusp, of such a black hole and tip over what is called the event horizon into it, you would at that moment in theory be able to see the past and the future. The limiting fact, of course, is that of all things you wouldn't have enough of, at that moment, you wouldn't have enough time to register it. But in theory you could be doing this.

Stephen Hawking is himself very gravely ill and has labored under a terrible disadvantage of a frightful malady for many decades. He is an extraordinary example of humanistic survival, and when asked, as he had to be, by the Vatican to a conference on the attempt to reconcile religion and physics a few years ago, he made the very arduous journey. When he was asked if there was anything else he'd like to see in Rome while he was there, he said, yes, he'd like to see the transcript of the trial of Galileo. They do actually have that in the Inquisition Office, still locked up. And Hawking has a colleague who is also unwell, who says that if his illness gets any worse and if things advance ever to the stage where he could have his wish, and he decided that things were so bad he'd have to take his own life, a journey to the event horizon is the journey he'd like to take as his conclusion. Now isn't that more awe inspiring, more transcendent, more impressive, than the burning bush? I would maintain that it is. It's a great deal more intellectually rewarding to study and doesn't rely upon the unsupported word of Stone Age peasants either.

As through the DNA we find, in some sense, some of Genesis is vindicated. We are, in a way, part of an animal creation and we share part of their material in our own makeup. I, as a mammal, never kind of doubted that I had this relationship with roundworms and other creatures. It does make short work of racism. It means racism is no longer something we have to argue with. We may be some distance from being able to completely pronounce its utter defeat, but it's over as an argument. There is no gene for race. Racism is a primitive, stupid construct made out of, literally, nothing. It goes the way of creationism once you study the origins of the species properly, which we are now able to do.

Or you might want to just look at the history of the meteorites that hit the Yucatan Peninsula and very nearly put an end to all life on this Earth but did not. It destroyed the dinosaurs and many, many other species. But somehow led to our emergence, pathetic, bare, forked creatures as we are, from a long period of global winter and gloom. If that fact, which can now be established from scientific inquiry, doesn't strike you as enormously more impressive than any creation myth, or tale, ever told, I will be surprised. But then I'm surprised all the time.

Faced with this extraordinary treasury of study and wonder, there are people who, in effect, take the truffle, unwrap it, throw the truffle away, and eat the wrapper as fast as they can. Don't bother them with Hawking or DNA or the Hubble Telescope. All they want is some more astrology in their lives.

The Washington Post, my hometown paper, has a horoscope column every day. It annoys me more than my New York Times which still has that stupid "All the news that's fit to print" on its top left every day. I always try to begin my day slightly annoyed. It never fails because these are the two papers that come to my house.

There are people who want to teach our children that we, as a species, shared the Earth at the same time with stegosaurus and pterodactyls. They want this lie taught, officially, to children. I remember that Al Gore, at a low point...Was there a low, lower or lowest point in his career? He did say, at a press conference in Tennessee, that he would not, himself, want to assert the truth of evolution, which seemed to be an extraordinary betrayal on his part.

But I'm not referring, as H.L. Mencken did, with any intention to condescend to the ill-educated or the unfortunate. What worries me is the fashion among the supposedly educated, and the pseudo-intellectual, and the semi-educated for matters like witchcraft, or divination, or cultism of various kinds. All of which can claim the sanction of faith if they wish, but look at what they're throwing away to sink themselves into this shallow morass of sentimentality and superstition.

Does this matter? Yes, it does, in my judgment, because as it happens, we are faced at present with a root and branch challenge to and assault upon our society, and our freedom, and indeed our life and liberty. Mounted by faith-based, monotheistic fanaticism that's utterly cruel, utterly nihilistic, utterly without any doubt of it's own rectitude, and utterly reactionary. And elements of this crusade, or jihad, as it calls itself, have managed to form a secret army within the borders of the United States. Not just within some of the mosques paid for by spoiled and opportunist Wahhabi princes, mosques into which FBI agents have refused to set foot  — they're in our prison system, in our armed forces, and in some of our ghettoes. This secret army means to destroy us all, and it means to do it in the name of faith.

What has been the response? In my view, it's been very pallid, almost apologetic. You hear people say not all religion is like that. It's not fair to judge all faith like that. Perhaps not, but let me take the example that preoccupies us the most, and that may be central to the same argument, the Israel-Palestine dispute.

Some of you may remember a rather distinguished Israeli foreign minister named Abba Eban, who was also, for a while, Israel's representative at the United Nations. He's now deceased, at last. I used to know Mr. Eban slightly. He was a very great attender of and giver of seminars on this matter, and I remember he used to say in the opening of his speeches, "When you look at the Israel-Palestine question, the first thing that strikes you, the very first thing that will strike you is the ease of its solubility."

Now, admit to yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, most discussions of the Israel-Palestine dispute don't begin in that tone of voice. He went on to say, "What could be simpler? There are two nations, one Arab and largely Muslim, partly Christian, anyway an Arab nation in Palestine; and there is an ancient yearning for a Jewish national homeland there. There's a fair amount of land, neither of these populations are very large. The solution has been self-evident for a long time, a partition and two states, one for each. There's room for both. Indeed, both, in theory, recognize one another as national movements.

It is that simple, as a matter of fact. There is nothing making it toxic except what? Except the intrusion of religion into the simplicity, the human simplicity of this argument. Because there are those among the Zionist leadership who think that God gave them all this land, and there's nothing to argue about with anyone that just happens to live there who isn't Jewish. They're an inconvenient population, condemned by prophecy.

As you are well aware, there's no shortage of Muslim spokesmen who are more than able to take them up on that claim, and say you have it entirely wrong. This has been Muslim land forever. It belongs to the Caliphate that was holy, the empire that will one day come again if the faithful bear witness long enough. Then there'll be no need for any Jews here, and they'll all be destroyed.

As if this wasn't declarative enough, there are a number of Christian Zionists who say that actually this would make quite a good launching pad for Armageddon, and for the return of the Messiah, since his last visit was so unpersuasive. The instrument of this will be the Jewish Second Temple, which will inflame the Muslims sufficiently to bring about the final conflict and the return of the divine.

Lenin used to say about social democrats that he supported them, as the rope supports the hanging man. The Christian Zionists who claim friendship with the Jews on this basis don't always tell them that this coming Armageddon means that all the Jews will have to convert to Christianity. Having done their job of bringing on the holy war and the Armageddon, they'll either have to convert to Christianity or go straight to hell. That's in the small print.

But these three wonderful monotheisms have made a perfectly ordinary human dispute insoluble and poisonous. And some of them hope that they can arrange matters so that this dispute leads to the destruction of us all. They don't think of that as a risk they are running, they think of it as a favor they are doing.

I don't think they're sufficiently rebuked, and I'm very sorry to say that in Washington, DC, where I live, and where the Congress meets, and where our deliberative assembly occurs, and where our president sits, that from these secular United States which forbid any state establishment of religion, support goes to the fanatical, messianic settlers in the first instance. To the Saudi Arabian and princes, in the second instance. And through a bundle of faith-based initiatives to the fanatical Christian Zionists in the United States in the third instance. All of this is being paid for by your tax money. A conspiracy of religion, a reverse ecumeniscism, if you like. A shady Hitler-Stalin pact between the monotheisms that really does risk the destruction of the human race, and that has already shown how much it cares for human values in Palestine. In other words, I think the situation is extremely serious, and more is required than a bit of bleating about the wall of separation.

Further, after the atrocity that took place, the assault on our civil society that took place in September of 2001, there was a ceremony at the National Cathedral, attended by the President, the leaders of Congress and so on, where the official sermon for the United States was preached by the Reverend Billy Graham.

Mr. Graham and his colleagues have been found many times to have published obscene and defamatory remarks about the Jewish people, and they never tire of drawing attention to the heresies and vileness of the Prophet Muhammad.

On this occasion, I think the Reverend went little further. He said that all those who have died in those buildings had died and gone straight to heaven. I had no idea that many people in New York were in a state of grace around the clock, and wouldn't have credited it on empirical evidence. They'd gone straight to heaven, were there, were happy and would not come back if they could. Now, what is this but the theology of bin-Ladenism? It claims to know the way to paradise, it claims to know how to get there by violence, it claims to know what it's like when you are there.

This is an appalling piece of impudence, but it is bin-Ladenism in every detail except that of the 72 virgins who would accompany every victim to his last reward. That, some textual scholarship has asserted, is a misprint, and as long been a misprint for "grapes." It's 72 bunches of grapes. By the way, there's a further Talmudic commentary on this, not very well known, which says that you may get 72 virgins, but they come with 72 mothers-in-law. Only the rabbis know this.

I know one Senator's wife who walked out of that disgusting ceremony, and as a consequence of that appalling speech. But it seems to me extraordinary that such a thing, at such a time, could be so easily and so readily accepted.

We have an attorney general who says that in these United States, according to his permission, we have no king but Jesus. This statement is already two words too long. We have no king in the United States, and that's all the attorney general needs to know about it.

The Pledge of Allegiance is also now two words too long. The words "under God," that were inserted into it, breaking such rhythm as it had in its original pledge, inserted opportunistically in the 1950s are deliberately designed to exclude or make to feel uncomfortable those of us who are members of the fastest growing minority, not just in the United States, but in the world. Those of us who are firm; no religious authority for us.

When the president meets in times of crisis, places are set for imams, for rabbis, for bishops, for preachers of the television and of every other stripe and kind. There is no heresy you can be promulgating and not be invited to the White House to show pluralism, but there is no room, and there never has been any invitation to the secular humanist organizations of the United States who are presumed to have nothing to say in this great crisis of holy war and jihad.

This in the country that distinguishes itself above all by not being just the first but still the only nation in the world to be founded on written documents and promises of rights that are innate in humans, that are the reward or promise of nobody, and to have a constitution that specifically does not mention the word "God."

There is no country in the world, in my opinion (and I've been visiting a lot of them lately in pursuit of this argument), that wouldn't be a great deal better off if it was to adopt some version of that Constitution, and that Bill of Rights.

It shows something that has become increasingly evident over the last few years, that the American Revolution is the only one still standing. The only revolution that has any combat, or merit, or virtue left in it. This I think confers upon us, upon you, a certain responsibility.

If this is to be defended, and asserted, and protected from its enemies abroad — it, as a godless and secular system, should be a great deal better appreciated than it is, and a great deal more cherished, and a great deal more firmly upheld at home as well.

Q & A

Q:   I think your admission at one point is that benevolent monotheism is actually worse than monotheism, and I wonder if you would elaborate on that?

A: Yes. It's because I think that dictatorship for your own good, as it were, is the most oppressive kind. In other words, the paternalist that claims to know what your interests are, and to always be looking out for you, is much more irritating, in a way, than someone who says as long as you pay the taxes and bow the knee as I pass with my chariot, I couldn't give a damn about you.

I'd far rather live under the second regime, myself. It's a conundrum for believers, this. It's obviously not much of a conundrum for me, because I don't believe in either God or the devil. But it was noticed by William Blake, who had a strong interest in the transcendental that throughout Paradise Lost, John Milton appears to sympathize with Lucifer. He gives him all the best lines, and awards him all the brave actions, in effect. And Blake said, "Is it possible that John Milton was of the devil's party without knowing it?" Because I think that literature is the way to investigate these arguments, and it gives us a much more sensitive register than theology or hermeneutics, I've always thought that was a very good question.

It's quite clear that when Milton tries to imagine what Paradise is like, he can't do it, or not in a way that he can make attractive to anyone else. It sounds ghastly, but a rebellion in heaven by someone who says I would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven, who repudiates the idea of being a permanent, adoring, fawning flunky in Paradise — I'd rather have my own deal, even if it took me to the infernal regions — that's actually what the Puritan Revolution was all about. It was the assertion of right in that way, and that's why I find all this so fascinating. There's more empirical evidence, of course, for the devil being at work in the cosmos.

A lady on her way out, who just asked me a question which comes up often: what about Aquinas' fifth proof? Where's the first cause? How can you do without a first cause? I said what I think, which is that this has become, given what we now know and how far we've been able to evolve the argument, a late-night squabble for sophomores, quite frankly. It only gives you a sterile, infinite regression. Where did the first cause of the first cause come from, then? The argument from design, gives you the same problem. Who designed the designer? There's an interesting wrinkle in the argument. If you're a theologist you're also supposed to believe in the evil one, in the existence of Satan. Where's the first cause of that? It has to be God, presumably. Again, not my problem, but I'm glad it isn't. Who designed hell?

Q:   I think you made reference in your essay to a Disneyland of the mind. What is that? Where does that come into play? Is it the idea of transcendence or infinity, and the possibility of something being a God above, or metaphysical?

A: The gentleman asked me, taking me up on a phrase I don't remember as well as I might, actually, but never mind, from my essay in Daedalus about the Tillichian Disneyland, the transcendent, the infinite, the unknowable.

If that's what you think about it, don't claim to know what it's like, would be my argument.

Ask yourself, is the universe finite or infinite? You don't know. There's no way of finding out. Which is the most impressive idea? Which would over-awe you the most: that it's eventually going to come to some kind of end, or that it can't possibly end?

Fortunately, as mammals, we are constructed in such a way that we cannot understand that question. The late professor Haldane was a very important scientist in the last century, he said that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose.

That seems, to me, to be a settled conclusion. Therefore, do not, for a moment, trust anyone who says that he knows what the design is, or what the plan might be. Those people must be wrong. You can start by excluding anyone who makes a claim of that sort, and it hugely simplifies matters once you have. Unless you remember the story of the Buddhist and the hot dog vendor. You don't remember it?

The Buddhist goes to the hot dog vendor and what does he say? "Make me one with everything."

Aha, that's not it. The Buddhist only has 10 bucks on him, so he hands it to the hot dog vendor, receives a slathered hot dog, and no more. He says, "What about my change?" The hot dog vendor says, "Change comes only from within."

The essence of the all is the godhead of the true. Make us all one with the absolute. This is piffle. The people who talk it are simply trying to dull their own senses into a nirvana where there will be no pain, no conflict, no anxiety, just reconciliation and love. Can you picture anything more horrible than that? The death of the mind is what they have stored up with. Well, your call. I wouldn't go near it.

Q:  I have a question about the Haldane quote that the universe is greater than we can suppose. Do you agree with this quote?

A: No, the literal word, this was a time when the word queer simply meant strange or bizarre. He said it's not greater than we can suppose, it's queerer than we can suppose.

Q:  Do you agree with that statement?

A: Yes.

Q:  Wouldn't that leave room for the possibility of a God or a possibility of design other than science or other than anything that we can possibly grasp?

A: The lady asks me if it's true that the cosmos is beyond our own mammalian comprehension, doesn't that mean that there could after all be a God, or a prime mover, or a first cause?

Not in the sense in which theology intends us to deduce a God from. No, it could not. Clearly it could not, because the argument used to be: obviously someone must have created this system, because here we have the earth at the center of the universe, the moon going around it, then the sun going around it, then heaven and below that hell, and obviously we, and particularly the church, in the middle.

That was the belief until a very, very short time ago hence the resistance to the whole idea of the investigation of the motions of the universe even of the planets or the stars, because religion is a form of solipsism. It pretends to say that we should all sacrifice ourselves and be abject to the creator.

But it's not as modest as it sounds. There's a trap in that. It also says it's all about you and me. He has a plan for me, for you, so hence my rejection of it. As with the Mother Teresa type of people you see sometimes scuffling around in Rome for example, or Jerusalem, or actually anywhere else. They slightly shove you off the pavement and they say, "Sorry, I can't wait. Don't mind me I'm just very modestly on an errand for God." I don't find this modest at all. I find it the height of arrogance and conceit, and vanity, and false modesty. They can't possibly know that and if they claim to, they cannot have deduced it from the operations of the universe, which appear to have been caused by a gigantic explosion, which will also finish it off. That we are fairly sure of. If that's the design what need of monks and rabbis? If the design, if this is done in God's image, what Moloch or random dice player could this be?

The more you contrast the two things, the more it's impossible to derive divine authority from the extraordinary variety and majesty of the cosmos.

Now, do you have to be an atheist to be an anti-theist? In theory, not. No. You could say, "There better not be one." Or you can say what you would think of the one who would have to be discovered by it. So ontologically you could be dealing with an enemy rather than a nonentity. I would in that case take the Miltonian line. I would be of the devil's party. I wouldn't worship it, I wouldn't agree to be bound by it, I wouldn't become one of the serfs.

But I am relieved on the whole to think that there is absolutely no evidence at all of any divine plan, and certainly not a divine plan that has me or you or any of us in mind. There might have been a first cause. It's been argued by some ancient religious arguers, actually. It could be that the machinery was set in motion by some designer and then abandoned. Doesn't care what happens afterwards. He doesn't notice what happens to every sparrow that falls in the street. He doesn't mind whether you get divorced or you have a homosexual relationship or anything of that kind. He couldn't be bothered with anything so minuscule. In other words, one can return this question to the believers. Couldn't you find yourselves stuck with a God who would be hateful to you? Yes, you could. With God all things are possible.

Q:  You've said that if there were a God in the world it would be like a prison system where there are very strict rules regarding us. It seems to me there are many, many rules in our lives, rules like gravity and physics. Those things, they form these very strict boundaries. This seems to be a sign of rules of nature.

A: The gentleman, reminding me that I had said that the belief in the Christian God, the loving creator God, would involve submitting yourself to permanent surveillance, supervision before you were born and after you were dead — reminds me again that we are rule bound as it is by matters such as gravity and the laws of physics. And he says what do I make of that.

Well, the laws of gravity don't apply to you after you're dead, whereas the laws of the Christian God do, or the Muslim God, do. That would be the first distinction.

The second is that there are indeed laws from which no one's exempt, but they don't require a permanent intrusion into your privacy or a permanent verdict upon your personal behavior or the threat that nothing you do will ever be exempted from a judgment. So those are as arbitrary, compared to the laws of physics, I think, as anything could be. It's just two different senses of the word "law."

A question for me would rather be, this being the case, why do I care? Why do I bother? That's a very good question. Also, it doesn't have any conclusive answer. What if it's random? Then, why the interest in it?

Q: I was just wondering if you would take a moment to comment on Rand.

A: I'm invited to be unpleasant at the expense of Ayn Rand and Objectivism. Well, that's easy.

The novels. As I keep trying to say that it might be there's more morality in a novel by George Eliot than there is in any of the four gospels, all the four of them put together. I care very much about literature as the place where the real ethical dilemmas are met and dealt with.

So to have novels as transcendently awful as Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead undermines my project. Though I have some respect for The Virtue of Selfishness, a collection of essays, and I've argued about them with the chairman of the Federal Reserve, as a matter of fact. By the way, a state Federal Reserve Bank is not part of the libertarian program. Though, Mr. Greenspan seems a bit iffy about this self-evident proposition. I don't think there's any need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings. I don't know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement.

Lillian Hellman was once, in her declining years, talking at some campus. She would peer out over the crowd with her very thick glasses and there was a squawking question from somewhere in the back, said, "Miss Hellman, why haven't you endorsed gay rights?"

Lillian Hellman, blearily drew herself up and said… I wonder what word I'm allowed to use in this august company… I'll quote her directly then. She said, "The forms of fucking do not require my endorsement." I wasn't that much of a fan of Miss Hellman, she could be a real bitch, but I thought that more or less said it all.

To have a book strenuously recommending that people be more self-centered seems to me, as the Anglican Church used to say in its critique of Catholicism, a work of supererogation. It's too strenuous.

Q:  I think it's been a delightful afternoon and you are the most pleasant person dealing with unpleasant things that I think I've ever seen. I think you have a gift for that.

A: Trying to work out if that's a compliment or not. Let's see. Bring it on. Bring it on.

Q:  Clearly many dark and awful things have been done in the name of religion. I think you've made a compelling case for that. I think you would also admit that many dark things have been done in the name of man and in the name of reason.

A: I think I could relay that response, but I'm hoping it was audible to all. Good. You have a splendidly carrying voice, Professor. From the philosophical pessimist's point of view, the darkest suspicion is the one I began with. Or it's located near there. That God is the creation of man. Man created God in his image, not the other way around. Consider the implications of this.

They're just as bad the other way around. What kind of God creates the kind of psyche and body that we have, and the readiness to chauvinism and panic, and the cruelty that we manifest, and the fact that our prefrontal lobes are so small, and our adrenaline glands are much too big, and our urinogenitary arrangements so conducive to obscenity and so forth?

The same is true if it's man doing the creating. Monsters may well be created that way too. There's no way around that. You're quite right. I gave the instance of North Korea because I saw there a metamorphosis from what had at one point been a very Spartan communist-atheist party state with a very strong leader cult, strong leader worship, into something that has now become fully devotional as a system. It is now a church, North Korea.

Obviously the figures of Stalin and Hitler are partly created by superstitious people who want to have an absolute leader they can trust, worship, and thank all the time and who think that's pleasurable. This is man-made as well as man-imposed, of course.

Thomas Paine, who is one of my personal... I don't have any icons… heroes I try not to have, but Thomas Paine is I think one of the most lucid writers on this. He pointed out very early on that when the French Revolution nationalized the church and took its property, it wasn't separating church from state. It was making the state and the church fuse, as if you have a goddess of reason enshrined in the church formerly of Notre Dame. All you've done is change the icons around a bit. You'll soon get the same credulous people making the same pilgrimages.

All this is true and we are stuck with it. We are a partly rational, poorly evolved species. But you asked me for the encouraging bit. It would be this. I would wager — I hope I'm not wrong in this — that everyone in this room understood everything I said this afternoon. I didn't want them to agree. I don't try and make them agree. I don't care if they agree. The hell with you if you don't agree.

I don't mind. But I bet you nothing I said was unintelligible. You people could see what it would be like to believe what I believe, I think. Not a very strong claim to make. In large parts of the United States now, and actually everywhere, nevermind where we're talking about, but I believe now in Holland, for example, a majority of the population actually identifies as unbeliever — as people who put their reliance upon science and reason and humanism.

They don't need any further reinforcement. No one converted them. Nobody proselytized them. They don't have to go to regular gatherings to reinforce their beliefs in case they fall away from them. They don't need a priesthood. They don't need any terror or coercion, either. They just, we, I mean to say we just are. That occurs in human life just as naturally as the instinct to worship, to trust, to follow the leader, to be a slave. It always has.

There have been some moments of great flourishing of it, as in fifth-century Athens and I would say Philadelphia. And they'll come again. We know how fragile they are, but everything's fragile, isn't it? We can claim... I wouldn't want to call it moral superiority. Yes, I would, actually, in a way.

This would not be true for me but it would be true of many atheists, that they don't like the idea that the end of life means that they're dead. They would wish it to be otherwise, as many people do. They all think it would be nice to have a second life, or an afterlife, so that at least an atheist can't be accused of going for wishful thinking.

Nor do we seek to force our beliefs on others and we don't proselytize. I think we can live with ourselves in a way that is just as innate in human history and just as creditable as the unbelievable claims of supernatural knowledge and authority that are made by fellow mammals.

Q:  Could you talk a bit about your university experience that led you through the Pilgrims Progress? What were strong influences? What forces might have been most influential in your progress?

A:  Have we met before today?

Q:  Yes.

A: I thought so. I just wanted to say that this gentleman, you keep hearing about Southern hospitality? I got lost on the road here and turned into St. Andrews, thinking I'd establish my bearings and asked directions of this gentleman. He said he was happy to give them, as long as I would sign his copy of my Henry Kissinger book. I thought, it's true about Southern hospitality.

I must stop more people as I get lost in Tennessee. I said earlier that I don't want to make this into a seminar about oneself, but I said earlier that I might be born without whatever it is you need to have, perhaps it's a gene… I know it's not a gene but let's call it that… for religion. As a lot of people I know, and potentially everybody, I never gave it any credit.

Actually, it was the argument from design that in a way, sort of did it for me. I must have been about eight, maybe nine. Mrs. Watts's class on Bible study. I liked Bible study. I still do. That's why I had such a good time reviewing the Gibson film.

She said, "Isn't it good, children, that God made the world in this lovely way that's so ideal for us and so beautiful?" She said, "For example, all of the vegetation, all the trees and all the grass, they're green, which is just the right color for our eyes. Our eyes like green. Imagine if it was blue or purple, how horrible that would be."

I wouldn't have known how to say argument from design, at that point, or pathetic fallacy either, or all kinds of things. But I thought, that's bullshit.

I didn't know anything about Darwin, I knew nothing about the evolution of the human eye. I thought that's obviously the wrong way round, isn't it? But around me, no one seemed to be stirring. I thought, ok, I'll file that for now. I was a vindictive eight, nine-year-old. I've never heard a case for religion made better than by Mrs. Watts, since.

I'm quite glad that she stated the essential problem with creationism so perfectly for me at that age. She spared me a lot of trouble. I've since then debated with Bishop Montefiore, the leading intellectual in the Church of England, and all kinds of other characters. No one has come up to the standard of Mrs. Watts in stating what it is to believe.

But that was it in a nutshell. I noticed, also, that the less good schoolmasters and the less nice headmasters and the less intelligent people, generally in school and society, when up against it or when defeated by their own innumerable shortcomings, would often take refuge in the idea of religion as a way of keeping order. Just as a means of rule, trying to show who's boss. That was an easy thing to guess at, too. The guy who holds the Bible on Sunday is the guy who has authority, and he doesn't want it spiritually, I promise you. He wants it right here, and he needs it right now. That was easy to see, too. But I don't have the functionless critique of religion. I don't think religion is a racket. I don't think it's just invented to fool people or to deceive or exploit them. It has often served that function, but that isn't the origin of it.

III.

The 4 New Commandments

I'd like to dedicate this to the memory of the great Thomas Paine. Thomas Paine, as well as having originated the American Revolution, and trying to make it more radical by calling for the abolition of slavery, also played a good part in the French Revolution and tried to make it less absolutist by opposing, for example, the application of capital punishment to members of the former regime. He said rather beautifully that to have had a part in two revolutions was to have lived to some purpose. He also is the originator, at least in the popular mind, of biblical criticism. His Age of Reason was the first attempt to bring within the purview of those who were just learning to read — the newly literate, the artisan class — the idea that the one book that they all knew, the holy text, might not be holy writ, after all.

I was xeroxing a couple of pages of Deuteronomy yesterday in my hotel. Of course, as you start to do that, it runs out of paper and malfunctions. I had to summon one of the very nice clerks at the hotel, who said, as he laid the holy Bible flat and ran off some Deuteronomy and Leviticus for me, "What, are you preparing a sermon?" I said to myself, and to him, "Yeah," and because I can't tell a lie, I said, "You might say that."

Now, a word of preparation. Gore Vidal was once sitting with Sir Noel Coward and said to him, as one massive old darling to another, "Are you telling me you've absolutely never, ever had any sexual contact at all of any kind with any woman?" Noel Coward said, "Certainly not." Gore said, "You mean not even with Gertrude Lawrence?" Noel Coward said, "Particularly not with Ms. Lawrence."

I'm a critic of all religions and of all faiths, but the one with which I particularly don't agree, is the one in which I was raised and the one which I loved, love still. That's to say, the Anglican Communion, the Cranmer prayer book, the English Hymnal, and the King James Bible. When I make any references in direct quotation or speech, it will be to that, and not some terrible 'Good News text' from heaven knows where.

Those of you who have that tradition in common with me will remember, I hope, Arthur Hugh Clough, Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth. His Decalogue is a very fine piece of mid-Victorian work.

"Adultery, do not commit/Advantage rarely comes of it.

Thou shalt not kill; but need's not strive/Officiously to keep alive."

So it goes on. It's almost a Swiftian thing. Given that it's written by the man who wrote Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth, I think it's rather impressive.

I mention it before I move on to my own rereading and recasting of the Ten Commandments. I want briefly just to say why it is the subject is such a compelling and such an essential one. All the great questions that divide theology from philosophy are finally, I think, reducible to two questions.

First, is it true, as it is definitively stated in Genesis chapter 1, verse 27, that at one time one God created man or mankind in His own image? Or, is it rather the case that many men at several times and in many places created many, many gods, and continue to create many gods in their own images? As you'll see, a lot more hangs on that, than just the very important shift from the singular to the plural.

The second question is this. Is our sense of right and wrong, our knowledge of right and wrong, if you prefer, "good and evil" — is it proper to ourselves, is it innate to us? Is it our pride, our property, or does it come to us as a gift from revelation? Is it part of a covenant with a supernatural authority?

You'll please to bear in mind as I go on that those two central questions underlie every word of this text and every examination of it.

Now, it's not as easy as many people, including Clough, may have thought to isolate and identify Ten Commandments, and then just do your own version of the Decalogue.

To begin with, the commandments appear three times at least in the Old Testament, and they are (in their several and discrepant appearances) embedded in great slabs of prose that also mainly consist of orders, commands, other forms of edict or ukase, often very minutely spelled out, and very highly codified and specified.

For example, not to get too far ahead of myself, the first iteration of the Ten Commandments in Exodus chapter 20, is almost immediately followed by an obsessively detailed spelling out of the codes governing ox-goring.

A code which incorporates the famous equivalencies of an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, depending famously on whose ox is being gored, and which just as the goring is starting to get boring, perhaps even boring to its almighty author, swerves off very abruptly at a complete tangent and says, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," which also has the force of divine law.

All of this has this status of commandment, and all of it was used by Christians and Jews, as a direct mandate until the incineration of the last witch. This is a process that's still going on in some parts of the world, most notably in Africa. And it was an event in our history, that we have good and sad reason to know is still quite distressingly recent.

It's quite difficult to know where the 10, the Decalogue of commandments, leaves off and the other instructions, ukase, and edicts kick in.

The first and the best known version, the one we think we're talking about, appears in Exodus Chapter 20. There's then a sulfurous interlude after which Moses smashes the original tablets; smashes the tablets inscribed by the finger of God.

After that, there's a reprise of the commandments in Exodus 34, but by no means an identical one. Then after many wanderings and many sufferings on the part of Moses and his followers, the entire business, the whole Decalogue is again redone and restated in Deuteronomy Chapter 5.

A lot of people surprised to hear this, but they shouldn't be. The Pentateuch called the Torah has within its five books two different accounts of the creation story, two separate genealogies of the seed of Adam, and two completely discrepant stories of Noah's flood.

Bear this in mind, because we're coming back to it. Without forgetting these impending revisions that are coming to us, let's anyway take the original version of the commandments in their due order, and see where they lead us.

The first thing you'll notice, is that the business takes 16 verses, not 10. The first injunction has very little to do with morality, if anything, and a lot to do with the animal prop of the law giver himself. Nor is it self-evident that the various declensions of this throat clearing of the first commandment are the same.

No graven images are to be made of any living thing on heaven or Earth, or in the water. Is that one commandment? Possibly. No prostrations are to be made before any such image, which is not quite the same as the prohibition upon their manufacture.

The punishment here, which isn't cited for any other of the transgressions, is specified. It is that the fourth generation of the offender's children will be penalized for his sins. Some might say that the idea of punishing successive generations is a repulsive one, or at least, not necessarily a moral one. It's more a frightening one than a moral injunction.

Therefore, it's not a surprise to find stipulated by the Lord, that he's a jealous God, as the King James version has it, the authorized version, and will not allow other deities to be put on equal footing with him.

Again, a little dependency on which translation one's employing, but it's permissible to speculate that Yahweh knows there are other gods, or at least suspects that there may be other gods, and resents them, or anyone turning their affections in that direction.

In other words, it's odd that this should be considered the foundational document of monotheism. It appears to be by someone who is uneasily, not to say uncomfortably, aware of the polytheistic possibilities of reality.

After all, it's not so surprising (I address myself here to people who like to rest their case on miracles), earlier in Egypt, the pharaonic priests had agreed to a duel with Aaron about miracles, which both of them could produce. So the ability to produce a miracle testifies to the validity of no particular faith. Egyptian conjury could produce great wonders also. What we appear to be looking at is an angry competition for monopoly affection among an oligopoly of potential deities, somewhat more like the cruelty and caprice of Olympus. And the story is told by the already terrified fans of the apparent winner.

If you like, you can call all of that one commandment, but it seems to me to be multiple ones, and multiple injunctions. With all the jealousy and the vanity and the caprice, you still have a separate commandment on not taking the Lord's name in vain. Once again, it's all backed up with the specific threat that offenses will not be soon forgiven.

As it occurs in the King James version, both of these multiple commandments:

"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them, for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children onto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, and showing mercy onto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments."

So you might think that someone who keeps the commandments won't have their children persecuted unto the next generation, so that if the next generation of children didn't keep the commandments, they'd still be protected by the fact that their parents had kept the commandments, but no.

"Though shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain."

You see where I'm going with that. All of this suggesting a great insecurity and unease. Then comes the requirement, again tediously repeated, for the observance of the Sabbath day.

"Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days shalt thy labor and do all thy work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God. In it, though shalt not do any work, though nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates."

Uncontroversial in itself, a day off, but again having nothing to do in this case with ethics or morality, but only with the fear of the Lord. It is only obedience to that fear that is moral. It's interesting as marking, not for the first time or the last, those to whom it applies. Male bosses and employers are the ones addressed, and their manservants and maidservants nor their cattle are permitted to work on Sunday or the Shabbat. There's a confusion between people and chattel that is going to recur again very soon.

Indeed, if anything can show you that there's a good argument that the commandments are man-made and not God-ordained, it would be the general Exodus emphasis on agriculture, and sheep, and lamb, and goat products in general.

I had a debate on the BBC recently with Colin Slee, one of the deputies of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in which I said that one of the things I disliked about Christianity when I was quite small was having to think of myself as a member of a flock. In other words, as a sheep or lamb, and also having to reflect that shepherds don't look after sheep just because they like them, there are some shepherds that like them much too much. But in order that they can first fleece them, and then kill them.

Slee, to his credit, he took me up on it rather decently and said, "It was a problem for us with the church in New Guinea where I served for a considerable time because, as with a huge number of areas of the world, there are no sheep in New Guinea." Exodus is limited in that way too. Even the animals it describes aren't available everywhere. He said, "We had to work out what the locals in New Guinea valued as the Israelites would have valued sheep." He said, "It got to the point where one Easter, I saw my bishop get up into the pulpit, and address his congregation and say, in English, to them, 'Lord, behold these your swine.'"

You see how off the track you can get with agricultural metaphors, and how confining they can be. Of course, it would have to be a pig, the very one that Yahweh most eloquently condemns elsewhere. As I say, if this is God-made, it looks somewhat man-made all the same.

Furthermore, if one day, and only one day, is holy, it can suggest that others are profane, and that's led to a good deal of fetishism of Shabbat. I remember when I used to work in Northern Ireland, for a Sunday show at the time. The Reverend Ian Paisley wouldn't be interviewed by anyone whose show or newspaper came out on Sunday, so I tried to point out to him: Reverend, it's the Monday papers that are printed on the Sunday. I could see his piggy eyes narrow as he took this in. It took him a long time before he'd give an interview to The Observer, but in the end, reason prevailed. Why not just say that the worker deserves one day off in seven? Why say that it's necessary only because the Lord, who effortlessly made heaven and earth in six days, doing what came naturally, rested on the seventh?

Anyway, make a note of this stipulation, small though it may seem, because it's coming back. It's crucially varied in the Deuteronomy version. Moving right along.

The next five commandments are famously brisk and terse. With the slight exception of the order to honor one's parents, because that comes not with the threat of punishment, but with an inducement this time.

Obey it and, "thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." Once again, one's forced to notice, these rules are not being urged for their own sake, or because they're innately and self evidently moral. They're being urged either to avoid the punishment of four generations of one's children, or in order to be given land that until now had belonged to Canaanites and other lesser breeds.

They come to us not as precepts of morality, but as accompanied and body-guarded by a mixture of threats and promises. It's interesting to notice that parents are nowhere told that they must be good to their children, but there may be a good reason for that too, and I'm coming back to that also. You'll forgive this fan-dance of mine, promising you things down the road if you don't shuffle too much.

Then the celebrated commandments against murder, adultery, theft, and perjury follow without any adornment, or with any bribe or threat. The King James version famously says, "Thou shalt not kill," though the original Hebrew makes it very obvious that the meaning is, "Thou shalt do no murder."

These transliterations, by the way, can be very hazardous and very useful. The Hebrew word "almah," for example, means "young woman." That's all it means. When mistranslated by King James's committee as "virgin," it very much alters the idea that a young woman will one day conceive and bring forth a son, and a great deal of misunderstanding has resulted from that error in translation.

I'm reminded of the lady governor of Texas who, during a controversy about bilingualism in the State House in Austin, said if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it was plenty good enough for her.

Anthropologists have looked and so far haven't found any society in which the penal code approves of, or is neutral about murder, or theft, or perjury. Adultery is treated differently in different cultures, but murder, theft, and perjury are not.

One might argue that the Jewish people wouldn't have made it as far as they did to Mount Sinai, assuming that they did make the trip, if they had been under the impression that murder, theft, perjury and adultery were okay until they got there.

The Analects of Confucius mention the golden rule, or they have a version of it. They say don't do to another person what would be repulsive to you if done to yourself. The Babylonian rabbi, Hillel, more or less states the same thing. When asked if he can summarize the whole of the Torah while standing on one foot, he says, "Yes, I can. Don't do to another what would be repellent if done to you. There is the law. All else is commentary."

Moses was supposed to have been, according to the story, a prince in Egypt. He would have had to know Egyptian law if he was a real person, and if the story has any actual factual basis. He would have had to know that someone would have to testify on the Book of the Dead that they had or hadn't done something. He would have had to know the quite sophisticated Egyptian court system, of which we have reasonably good records.

At least a thousand years before Exodus was written down (that's to say at least a thousand years before 1400 BC), Hammurabi promulgates the code of law in Babylon, not far away. That becomes pretty celebrated, particularly for its emphasis on the Lex Talionis, so-called. In other words, the concept of direct symbolic retribution: eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.

Even if we had any reason to believe that the story of the enslavement in Egypt was true, or the wandering of the desert was true, or the conquests of the Promised Land was true, or that there was ever such a place as Mount Sinai, (and Israeli archaeologists have made it increasingly impossible to regard any such view as tenable) — but even if we took it as read, there'd be still nothing morally unique, or special, or first time in any of the three versions of the Old Testament Decalogue. Or perhaps there would be. Perhaps there might be.

The tenth Commandment prohibits all matter of covetousness and envy. It repeats the usual lumping in of a neighbor's womenfolk with his beasts of burden.

You can't covet your neighbor's ass, you can't covet your neighbor's wife, or his ox, repeating earlier injunctions about the Sabbath, which make cattle and chattel much the same thing, including human chattel.

You note that in the tenth commandment, unlike the others, there's no specific action that's being either condemned or recommended. Neither enjoined, nor exhorted, or forbidden, or prohibited. Instead we've got the first recorded instance that I know of, of thought crime. It's not you're not supposed to do it. It's your not even supposed to think about it.

This is why those of us who maintain a critique of religion make the charge that it is implicitly totalitarian. It can convict you for things that are only in your head, for thoughts that are have hardly begun to form.

There's another reason, I think, why this commandment is somewhat sinister. It appears to forbid the poor from resenting the rich, if you wanted to make a Left critique of it. Or, if you want to approach matters from a free market point of view, it seems to crush the spirit of emulation and competition that's involved in wishing you had a better life.

Some Jewish authors have argued that the prohibition only extends to actual neighbors, in the sense of those who dwell in the immediate vicinity. Some have said it only applies to covetousness of that sort. But it would surely be a fairly paltry commandment that excused this exact same attitude if it was directed at people further away.

Only then do you notice (when that thought has occurred to you in the mind that you have that's always alive with subversive thinking), that the children of Israel are precisely, and all the time being ordered to covet. Being enjoined to covet. Being told they must envy and hope to annex the lands, the flocks, the herds, and the women of neighboring tribes. They're kept going by greed, by the thought that soon all these people's property will be yours, and that you'll be licensed to take it by force, and kill them, and have the land, and not the people. This ambition is perhaps why there are no prohibitions against, say, slavery, or rape, or genocide, or child abuse in the Ten Commandments. It's not a matter of leaving these out or applying situational ethics to a time that was not ours. It's not that. I don't think so. Such things have always been known of, and usually deplored. It's more, I fear, that such terrible things as rape, enslavement, genocide, and child abuse are just about to be mandatory. They're just about to be forced on people as things that they not just must not do, but must do if the conquest is to continue.

The remainder of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy (the Pentateuch), is largely taken up with exact codification of the different kinds of enslavement of Jewish servants and non-Jewish serfs, the conditions of mass murder and despoilment of other neighboring tribes. "Neighboring" tribes.

There are also incidental and "so to say, by the way," commandments; such as the one to stone to death any child that disrespects its parents, and the prohibition on seething a baby goat in its mother's milk. One of those random commandments on which the whole laborious edifice of kosher and kashrut has since been raised.

Let's trace again to be sure where we are, amid this blizzard of conflicting hysterical orders, the evolutions of a Decalogue.

After the commandments specified in Exodus Chapter 20 comes Exodus 21, a chapter of so-called judgments, which gives the verdict and sentence in advance, for any number of crimes from smiting to slave rebellion, and from ox goring to witchcraft. These, too, have the forces of commandment, and the penalty in all cases is death.

Moses then returns from his audience with God to discover his people have lapsed into calf worship and other frivolities. As I mentioned earlier, he thereupon smashes the two tablets, which would surely at that time have been the most precious artifact that could possibly have been known to man, as having been conceived and made wholly by God. Moses smashes them and summons the Levites of his contingent to inflict exemplary punishment. I quote now from Exodus 32: 27-28: "Thus sayeth the Lord, God of Israel," so this, too, is a divine commandment, by the way:

"Thus sayeth the Lord, God of Israel, put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor. The children to Levi did according to the word of Moses, and a third of the people that day, about 3,000 men."

That's a terrific slaughter under orders. And you may note the small inconsistency, which may perhaps, I sometimes think, betray the prickings of a poor conscience. In the first verse the order for the indiscriminate slaughter is from God, "Thus sayeth the Lord, God of Israel."

In the second it's from Moses, "The children of Levi did according to the word of Moses." There's a bit of displacement going on here. We don't know.

In either case it orders the killing of brothers, of companions, and, in that significant term, as we've seen from the tenth commandment, neighbors. Specified, they must die, without pity, without discrimination.

That's not excessive, perhaps, after the infanticide of the firstborn of Egypt that's already taken place for them to get this far. It pales beside the anger of Moses in the later book of Numbers where he speaks to his generals after the battle against the Amalekites, and rages at them for sparing so many of the civilians.

"Now, therefore," he says, "kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman that has known a man by lying with him. But all those women children that hath not know a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves."

In The Age of Reason Thomas Paine drew attention to this passage saying, "That it constituted an order to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers, and to debauch the daughters." A fairly good summary of what I've just read.

This earned him a hurt and high-minded rejoinder from the Bishop of Llandaff, a blithering Welshman who tried to debate Paine on these questions. He didn't contest the butchery of the boys, or the massacre of the mothers, but he did say very plaintively that it wasn't actually stipulated, that the daughters were being kept alive for immoral purposes. In other words, the bishop left open the possibility they were being kept as, I suppose, pets.

After the Levite massacre has showed the Jews who's boss, new tablets are inscribed and presented. In Exodus 34:38 these are for the first time, and the only time actually, directly referred to as the Ten Commandments. But they're almost entirely different from the first version. They are preceded by a ban on intermarriage between Jews and Canaanites, Jews and Hittites, Jew and Amorites, Jews and Jebusites, etc., lest mixing of blood should mar the covenant, so there's an early racist injunction.

Then the tablets repeat the commandments concerning the Sabbath, and concerning idol worship. Then everything becomes micromanagement of unleavened bread, first fruits of the harvest, etiquette to conduct around the Tabernacle, the observance of Passover, and the aforementioned separation of meat from dairy products in the glatt kosher kitchen.

Highly insipid when compared to the 10, 12, or 13 of twenty or so verses before, but nonetheless the only ones now remaining to the children of Israel that are written in stone, because the tablets are back. An inconsistency that so far no one's been able to explain.

Thus matters persist until the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy when Moses assembles the masses and gives them the first, that's the Exodus 20 version, all over again. That's the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy, four books later on, all over again.

It's very nearly an exact repeat, except this time the Sabbath day is to be kept as holy, not because God made heaven and earth in six days and then rested on the seventh, but because God brought his people out of the land of Egypt. It's still to be kept holy, but the reason why it's holy is entirely different.

Twenty-two chapters later, as the Jordan river draws nearer and as the Book of Deuteronomy draws to its close, there is yet a fourth set of commandments issued by Moses, who orders that they, too, be inscribed on stone. These take the form of 12 curses, you should look them up, forcefully interned by Levite priests.

"Cursed," for example, "is he that maketh the blind to wander out of the way. Cursed is he that lies with any manner of beast. Cursed is he that lieth with his father's wife." That's, by the way, for the intriguingly Oedipal reason that he "uncovereth his father's skirt."

One is compelled here to reexamine the authorship of Deuteronomy, which tells us that Moses by then had reached the age of 120, adding that his eye was not dimmed, nor his natural force abated. One begins to doubt it because it seems, like many elderly men, he'd begun to repeat his favorite stories to captive audiences who were naturally a touch shy about interrupting him, and not always remembering the stories precisely the same way. A bit the same as some of the incantations.

I'll try and pull my threads to a conclusion by returning to the questions I asked at the beginning, did God make man or did man make God, and does morality come from on high or not.

To the first question, the study of the so-called Ten Commandments allows us to return a pretty confident reply. The whole story is one of muddle, chaos, inconsistency, and revision as one goes along. Temper tantrums, lapses into rage, insanity, sadism, vengeance, and general losing of the thread.

This would argue either for a very muddled, irrational, forgetful, inconsistent God, or for no God at all. If we make the assumption that this mass of unresolved contradictions was the outcome of the ignorant struggles of a semiliterate, frightened, species of primates, then the mystery clears up all by itself.

Thus do I think Thomas Paine is vindicated when he writes in The Age of Reason, and writes about the Pentitude that these books are spurious, and that Moses is not the author of them, and still further that they were not written in the time of Moses. Not until several hundred years after.

That they are an attempted history of the life of Moses, and of the times in which he is said to have lived, and also of the times prior thereto. Written by some very ignorant and stupid pretenders, several hundred years after the death of Moses as men now write histories of things that happened or are supposed to have happened several hundred or several thousand years ago.

As to whether we need heaven's permission and revelation to be able to distinguish right from wrong, those who believe that this is so are on an uncomfortable or untenable ground, I think, if they take their stand on the Mosaic Decalogue, or rather on the various discrepant versions of the Decalogue.

The Decalogue is a record of callousness, and greed, and cruelty, in which one tribe seeks to claim a divine warrant for the crimes against humanity which it fully intends to commit in any case, and goes on to commit, this time out of the leadership of Joshua, with every sign of relish at its own propensity for genocide.

The 4 New Commandments

How could this wretched state of affairs be amended? I've been challenged and asked to update and extend the Decalogue. I think we might as well first have a standardized 10, which at present we don't. Out of a possible 10, as people say, a maximum of 4 have anything to do with morality. Those are all the "shalt not" type commandments. They're prohibitions.

If I'm permitted my own wish list, and if I'm allowed to update Arthur Hugh Clough and produce the latest Decalogue, I don't think I'll propose a New Testament-style update of the sort that orders us to love one another. Because, call me old fashioned if you will, the idea of mandatory compulsory love has always struck me as a rather sickly one, or even a sinister one, especially when it originates as an injunction, from a God-head of whom you're also supposed to be afraid. To be awed and to love someone of whom you have to be in dread is a form of sadomasochism. It's the essence of Orwell's big brother cult — it's not enough to obey, you have to love the obeisance as well. It's the seedbed of the totalitarian. Love cannot be exacted.

But one might argue in searching for a new code that at the very least we might enact some stern prohibitions. It's not just our modern sensibilities, or our consciousness of the fragility of our survival as a species that might incline us now, if we were drawing up a code, to:

1.) forbid slavery, to 2.) condemn genocide, 3.) condemn the rape and torture of children, and to 4.) condemn the despoliation of the natural order of the world.

I hope that these, in Benjamin Franklin's great words that contributed to Thomas Jefferson's great preamble, might be considered "self-evident."

Unfortunately though, we can't do this by amending this book, because slavery, genocide, and the rape and torture of children are merely not denounced in the first five books of the Old Testament. They are rather very enthusiastically recommended.

If we search for ways of doing the right thing, we're consulting the wrong book. And we're looking for morality in all the wrong places. Perhaps though there is still something to be salvaged, and if so, it might be found in the long, vainglorious, menacing throat clearings of the very first commandment.

We might give some real thought to the prohibition on the making of idols and of images. We might do well if we stopped forging manacles with our own minds, and setting up impressions and images of ourselves as if they were divine and rarefied and supernatural. We might cease to make whips for our own backs. We might stop making tyrants and despots in our own image.

We have rights as well as duties in respect of one another, and as one can intuit from Thomas Paine, "In order to safeguard and enjoy the rights of man, we shall require a new age of reason."

Q & A

Q: Northtrop Frye argued while we may not believe in God on intellectual grounds, religion should be preserved for aesthetic reasons. Comments?

A: It's a very important cultural question. What are we to do with the need we have for the numinous and the transcendent, when we've got rid of, or talked ourselves out of, or evolved beyond, or educated ourselves beyond the superstitious and the supernatural, that have we not left the numinous and the transcendent behind, when we've done that?

The need that people have for music, for love, for poetry, for landscape and so on isn't to be denied. The religious are not allowed to claim it unless they want to be pantheistic, which of course many of them do, all without realizing it.

I'll give you what is my favorite example. I wrote a book about the Parthenon, a building which I think I couldn't do without, I'm sure everyone will know what I mean. I could no more do without it than I could Hamlet, or the Ode to Joy, which I think of as one of the great achievements of civilization, and certainly one of the great achievements of religion.

I can go to the Parthenon and appreciate the fantastic symmetry, and beauty, and grace, and openness of it without caring at all for the cult of Pallas Athena, or the Eleusinian Mysteries. Or the Pan-Athenite procession, or the animal sacrifices and quite possibly the human sacrifices that were involved in those ancient Greek cults and religions.

The great cultural task facing post-religious society is precisely how to assimilate the insights of the religious part of humanity and the achievements of it without giving way to superstition or the supernatural. Or without making for ourselves further temples, where further sacrifices of humans will be exacted from us.

And I think a good person could give a life to the solution of that conundrum. Everyone has to give some part of their life to working out how that's done. How we keep Ely Cathedral, how we keep religious devotional music, and painting, and poetry like John Donne and George Herbert, for example, while appreciating that they were written under illusions that we don't need to share.

Q: Why do you interpret the Bible so literally?

A: I have to put myself in the care and safe-keeping of the audience, sir. If it's thought by everyone else that I didn't discuss the text as if it were in context, as if it were of its time, and of its society, and of its agricultural origins, and so forth; if everyone else is under the same impression as you are, then I have failed. I'm not going to ask for a show of hands.

Apparently, I don't need one, but if as you say it is not to be taken literally, but only at best metaphorically, then you've made the main concession yourself, and my argument would then be: is there anything of non-primeval morality that we owe to this? Something that without this, we wouldn't have?

My conclusion is, my argument is that the answer to that is no. There are many evil things recommended by this text to which we should close our ears. There are many excellent things to which we should be called, which are either not mentioned or are denied, negated in this text. So it isn't even a good metaphorical beginning.

Q: Where do the rights and wrongs that we live by come from, if not from God?

A: Socrates, another person for whose existence as a real person we don't have any conclusive evidence, he's only described in the work of other people, he didn't write or say anything himself that we know about or can prove, but it doesn't matter because if you're an atheist, no one human being is more divine than any other. But if what is reported of him is true, Socrates would refer to what he called a "daemon," to an inner voice, a constant companion to his thoughts that would warn him if in an argument he was making an unfair point, or stretching the evidence further than it would go, or taking advantage of a weak opponent. That it would, like a gyroscope, inwardly correct him.

He once paused apparently in the middle of an argument for about 20 minutes, while he worked out if his daemon was telling him that he'd gone too far or not, and when on trial for his life, he said in his closing speech that he knew one thing, that nothing he'd said at the trial had met with any inward opposition from his most stern critic.

The daemon is the best word for it that I think we have. Adam Smith refers to this as the unseen audience, the person who we're always trying to impress in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. American colloquialism says, "Morality is what we do when nobody is looking; what you think you can get away with; how you judge yourself when you're not going to be judged by anybody else."

We all know what we're talking about and C. S. Lewis makes a huge thing about calling it, "conscience," and saying therefore it must come from, or be the gift of someone else. I don't see why Lewis says that. Isn't it a lot less strenuous to postulate that this is innate to all people who are not psycho or sociopathic, that we want to think well ourselves, not just to be thought well of by other people.

And that's just as strong an incentive behavior as covetousness, lust, the will to power, and other things. And it predates all erections of altars, idols and gods. So that the probability is, it seems to me, that religion gets its morality from us, not the other way around.

Just to see if I can ram that home, I've formulated it as a challenge, and I've done this now in debates with quite senior rabbis of various congregations and bishops, and so forth. It's a simple question. I haven't yet had an answer to it, so I'll put it on the record again.

You have to name for me a moral action taken, or a moral sentiment uttered by a believer, that couldn't be taken or uttered by me as a nonbeliever. Something that only a believer, a person of faith cold do, I couldn't emulate, because I don't have any belief in God.

So far, no one's been able to suggest anything under that heading, but there's a corollary question, much briefer, and you don't have to stay for an answer. You have to think of a wicked thing said or evil thing done by someone only because they thought God was telling him to do it. Now, you've already thought of one, haven't you?

Of course you have, and now you've thought of another, and another. I rest my case.

Q: Do you think there is a trend towards a more objective view of morality?

A: The evidence is, from recent measurements of opinion — I'm very distrustful of opinion polls as a rule because they tend only to ask superficial questions — but the Pew Research Center in the United States has recently done a lot of work on religious allegiance. What's it's found is that the largest growing minority is those who check "none of the above," in the box marked "faith."

It's double what it was 10 years ago. I predict it will double again in the next 10 years. It's about 13 to 14 percent now. These are not atheists, I should say, but they're people who if you wanted to say what their common and unifying proposition was would be this: an ethical life can be lived without reference to the supernatural. Simple proposition.

That plus, I think, the desire to defend the Constitution and the idea of a secular republic and the separation of church and state from theocratic bullying both at home and abroad. People have had enough of being menaced, and threatened, and lectured, and terrified by those who claim to have God on their side, whether it's obviously the forces of jihad, or more insidiously and nearer home those who want to have stultifying nonsense taught to American school children with tax payers' money.

Let alone the idea that equal time should go to stultifying nonsense. In other words, "After biology class, we have the intelligent design moment." Don't call it "intelligent design," by the way. You've made a concession if you agree to call it that; call it "creationism." "Then we have the astronomy period, and then Mrs. Jenkins will take you for astrology after the break. Then tomorrow we'll have your alchemy papers all ready." It's enough to make a cat laugh, and people won't have it. Nobody wants to come from a state that gets laughed at for that kind of stupidity, and no one's going to hold their convention in the capital city of the state that does it, and it's being defeated in every court and school board in the land.

I'm proud to say that after battling it for a long time, I've lived to see these people defeated. Not just defeated but also humiliated, which is very nice.

Q: If people use religion for good, or for strength in times of adversity, how are their beliefs harmful?

A: I don't think the religious can have it all ways, you see. If intercessory prayer, for example, is valid, and if God can be called upon to save, let's take the most obvious example, the life of a sick child, and the child recovers, then if that happens and is attributable to the intercession, then God has just taken on the responsibility for all the children who don't recover.

The religious get very uneasy when you talk to them like this, because they both do want to say that help is available from on high, but if it's available sometimes, why isn't it available all the time? Why is it so mal-distributed? Why is it so random? Why is it so capricious?

It only replaces the argument about suffering and evil, to where it was in the very first place. Which is why the more intelligent religions are very sparing about claiming divine intervention, because they don't want to arouse too great a demand for it.

You may be asking the wrong person in that when I hear a lot of this stuff, it's white noise to me. If someone dear to me had died (this has happened to me as a matter of fact), and someone comes up to me and says, "At least they're in a better place now." I don't even remember to be insulted really, though I could take offense I think at such a fatuous thing being said to me uninvited. But what I can't understand is why I can't put myself in the position of someone who would be pleased and comforted to hear that. I just can't. I'm really sorry.

Nor can I imagine myself saying it, to someone who's suffered a real loss. I can't imagine the expression I'd have to put on my face to say such a thing. Maybe I'm not the ideal person to put this question to.

Q: What benefit do human beings derive from a belief in God or gods?

A: Daniel Dennett, a colleague of mine in this cause, he has written a wonderful book called Breaking the Spell, which I recommend to you. Possibly available at fine book stores everywhere, as mine is, by the way.

In it he says that "belief in belief," as he puts it, it may very well have salutary effects, or has had them. For example, this is not very controversial but it's a good example, in the days when there was no germ theory of disease, and when for example quite senior divines like Timothy Dwight, the founder of Yale, condemned smallpox vaccination because it was an interference with God's design, which presumably it is, if he designed the smallpox virus. If you were an ignorant fool, and you went to the witchdoctor ceremony to be lectured by another cynical ignorant fool, you still might have a better chance of recovery, because everybody knows that morale and optimism does play an x-factor role in good health. So there may well be benefits to, or have been benefits to belief.

But I think that we — if I can speak so conceitedly, Eurocentrically perhaps — but we have reached the point where that long ago hit diminishing returns. That really the emancipation of the mind requires us to put that sort of thing behind us.

Q: Is there such a thing as an intelligent believer?

A: The reason why there's a gulf fixed between me and a believer, and also why I have difficulty understanding quite why it is that believers do believe, it is this. If it was demonstrated to me that Jesus of Nazareth had never existed, that there's no truth to the story at all, my life would go on exactly as it had. All the dilemmas that face us would in my view be precisely as they always are. How do we live the good life? What are our responsibilities to one another? How can we improve on this? How can we build the just city? All of these questions would remain as they will for any generation.

To the believer, it would have to be a calamity to discover that this person never existed. They would have to say that their lives were pointless, were meaningless.

Now just think for a second what a confession that constitutes, what an abject confession that is. In that case, I don't care, they'd have to say. As Saint Paul says, if there was no resurrection, no bodily resurrection, then we are, of all people, the most miserable.

What is it to believe this kind of thing? If I say to a Muslim, you know that the Prophet Mohammad very probably didn't exist? Anyway, he certainly didn't take dictation from the archangel Gabriel. Don't be silly.

The guy acts as if I've said the most unbelievably horrible thing. As if life would be unlivable if what I've said was true, even if I was allowed to say it. What is this? What is this, I ask you? It belongs to the childhood of the race. It belongs to our bawling, spoiled infancy. We have to grow up and get over this. Now, why it is that people believe it, I think I can make a guess. I think people are afraid of dying, and I also think that they can be persuaded that an exception can be made in their own case. If they make the relevant propitiations and so on.

I'm not of that view. I'm really not. Just try standing in the airport or on the street, watching them come towards you. Ask first which species of primate they'd be. Is that a chimpanzee there? Is that a silver back gorilla there? Is that an orangutan there? You'll find everyone you know falls into one category or another. It passes the time at airports.

Then you say, now, look at that one. If that one had gone to church every day, and gone to confession every week, and tithed himself and so on, he'd be absolutely assured of eternal life. He'd have nothing to worry about.

See if you can make yourself believe it, then see if you can make yourself believe it about yourself. Obviously people can, and there are obviously people who know how to make a living out of this racket, but that's why when I'm told at least you must respect people of faith, I say, actually I don't. I don't think lying to children for a living is a respectable occupation.

Q: If you were asked to counsel lawmakers in a post-religious society, would you counsel them to defend freedom of religion or outlaw religion?

A: Oh no. I think The First Amendment to the Constitution which I keep mentioning is correctly the first amendment, because it has an establishment towards forbidding the Congress to make any law respecting an establishment or a support of any religion.

It also has a free exercise clause, forbidding Congress to make any law abridging the freedom to attend any church or practice any religion. I think that strikes exactly the right balance. It originates from the time when it was decided to disestablish the Anglican Church, because it had been the church of British imperialism in Virginia.

The motion of Patrick Henry in the Virginia house was, no we shouldn't go on subsidizing the Anglican Church. Instead, we should subsidize all churches. Jefferson and Madison said no, here's a revolutionary idea, let's not subsidize any. People who want a church of their own can go to it. But they'll have to pay for it out of their own subscription.

I would vary it only in two ways. I think I could plead the Constitution in both cases. First, I don't think churches should be exempt from taxation, because that constitutes a subsidy. Tax exempt churches shouldn't be allowed.

Second, I think if someone's found mutilating the genitals of their children, they should go straight to jail, and shouldn't be allowed to plead a religious right to do so. Same with honor killing, same with polygamy, same with bride price, same with child marriage. And I think if a Jehovah's Witness or a Christian Scientist lets a child die from neglecting to take them to the doctor, the same should apply. That should be the last thing they do on the outside.

Obviously, the common law has to be made to apply. And I think that Congress should hear and the Supreme Court should hear evidence that no American aid money should be allowed to go to Israel that is diverted to the building of messianic settlements on the West Bank. Because as well as theft, that's the establishment of religion using American taxpayer's money, and should be illegal.

If there's going to be equal time for the teaching of religion in schools, then every religion, every church that takes a faith-based initiative subsidy or a tax break, should be forced to spend half of its time teaching The Origin of Species. I think that's only fair.

IV.

An Exemplar: Thomas Paine

The pomp of courts and pride of kings I prize above all earthly things. I love my country, the king, above all men, his praise I sing. The royal banners are displayed, and may success the standard aid: I fain would banish far from hence the rights of man and common sense. Confusion to his odious reign, that foe to princes, Thomas Paine. Defeat and ruin seize the cause of France, its liberties and laws.

- Arthur O’Connor (1799)

Who here has read Thomas Flanagan's trilogy of novels about the liberation of Ireland? The first one is called The Year of the French. Well, you should. It describes the rebellion of the United Irishman in 1798, Theodore Wolf Tone, Lord Edwards FitzGerald. Some revolutions are revolutions manque, some revolution trahie. This Irish revolution was basically premature. It didn't much stand a chance, but it was the germinal moment for later, much broader and deeper movements.

One of its leaders was a man named Arthur O'Connor, who the British decided to put in custody. As he was being led away from his trial, he capitulated. He surrendered. He gave in. He said, "All right, you win. I give up," and he handed out this poem that you see, a more or less total sell out.

One of the mistakes made by the British establishment, historically, has been to consider the Irish people as stupid. We have paid a very high price for that stupidity. I think the second verse is much better, and also appropriate, because with Thomas Paine, we are confronted with a figure in the carpet. There's no real memorial to him in his country of birth. There's no day that honors him. He's not taught in the schools. There's no real memorial to him in his country of adoption, though he is really the unofficial founding father and, undoubtedly, the moral author of the Declaration of Independence.

He was a very obscure person. We don't know much about his early life. He didn't write many letters or keep many diaries. He didn't have an official biographer. As he said, the world was his country, his mind was his church, and his religion was to do good.

He was made an honorary member of the United Irishman, a very rare privilege for an Englishman to be invited to do so. He was honored by this wonderful Protestant Republican organization because of the tremendous success and appeal of his book, the great bestseller, The Rights of Man, about which I'm to publish a little study.

Though he's obscure and occluded in the way that we normally consider great men, that theory of history, he's still alive in what Yeats used to call the book of the people. I would describe him, in a way, as a Promethean figure. The concept of "right," until he put pen to paper, was something that was discussed among theologians, and among the church of philosophers.

There was a long argument, as you know, between John Locke and Thomas Hobbes about whether there were such things as rights, where they came from, how they originated, how they were to be defined, and to whom they ought to apply. Paine broke open this private discussion, and decided to put it in front of a mass audience. And he emerges at a time when the shape of the common man is changing. There's and increasingly self-educated artisan class of people who can read, and there are people who have dimly heard of Sir Isaac Newton and his discoveries, of Benjamin Franklin and his discoveries about lightning. Popular, working men's clubs and coffee houses convened to discuss science, and reason, and political justice.

Paine emerges as the perfect spokesman of this kind of politics and decides to say if there are to be rights, and the ruling class can't very well say there are not, because it's only a very brief time since we claimed that there was a divine right of kingship. They can't say the concept is meaningless, as Marx and Bentham later do. They have to say there is such a thing. Paine says if there are rights, then they belong to all of us. They are inherent and innate. They come from a time before there were bishops, before there were kings, before there were predator governments. And they can and must always be asserted.

This is the first time that the word "rights," and the word "man," or properly, I think, "mankind," (what we would now call human rights) — the first time those two words had ever appeared together in the same sentence. A breathtaking idea, and instantly taken up by millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic, and both sides of the English Channel.

Up until then, popular rebellions had usually been commanded by noblemen. Llewellyn Griffith in the present case, Robert the Bruce, even Oliver Cromwell was a nobleman. Or by the agrarian types like Wat Tyler, or right up to the levelers and the diggers of the Cromwellian revolution about whom Paine had learned from his Quaker father in Suffolk.

The great tradition of English liberty before the Norman conquest — before the Norman yoke, as it was so often called. A great line of Milton's, which was Orwell's favorite line, incidentally, says that there's a justification by the known rules of ancient liberty. I think it's in Lusíadas. In other words, there's an understanding that this is only temporary, that the rule of the crown and the church can be transcended.

What are the achievements of Paine in this way? Well, he is the moral author of the American revolution as I said. He took ship with a letter from Benjamin Franklin, to escape the ground-down life he was living in England. He arrived in Philadelphia just on the cusp of the great conflict between the 13 colonies and the mother country around unfair taxation and political repression, and became the greatest pamphleteer not just of that but of any other time, by writing two short pamphlets. One called Common Sense, and later, one called The Crisis, which said that this dispute could not be solved within the bounds of the Hanoverian usurpation. That in order for any measure of justice to be available to the American people, they would have to break the connection with London, break the connection with the king, and set up a democratic republic.

Up until then, people like Washington, even Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton were landowners, country gentlemen, very loyal to the idea of England, to the replication of English stock on the eastern seaboard of North America. They were loyal to the crown, slave owners to boot, very vested in stability and property, and they didn't see the logic of independence at all. But by the time Paine had finished, and the mass audiences had heard him, and the British had acted so stupidly, there was an unstoppable consensus that this was a catalytic moment.

Paine failed, didn't manage, to get a clause into the Declaration of Independence that would have forbidden the slave trade, so the original stain of America is transformed again and rebuilt into the new Constitution, and the new set of arrangements. Though that's a tragic failure, there is, in the Declaration and later in the Constitution, the enshrinement for the first time of the concept of a secular state where the government and the church have nothing to do with each other, where the President is chosen by election, and so are both houses of the legislature. Unbelievably revolutionary for its time.

Considering his work to be done, Paine goes back across the Atlantic, becomes very involved with the Marquis de Lafayette and the early framers of the coming declaration of the rights of man, les droits de l'homme, in Paris, and takes part, very happily, in the early years of the French revolution. He believes it to be the consummation of the American idea, the New World coming back to redress the balance of the Old, and he's given the key to the Bastille by the Marquis de Lafayette. He takes it back across the Atlantic as a personal present to George Washington, to whom he dedicates The Rights of Man. You can still go to President Washington's home in Mount Vernon, Virginia, and see it hanging on the wall.

Then, what is his woe and sorrow? One of his best friends, a man he hugely admires, a man who's been a friend of the American Revolution, Edmund Burke, unmasks his batteries. Burke issues a most incredibly sulfurous diatribe against the French Revolution. It was almost like a lover's quarrel. It's always well worth reading up again, because from that debate, we get effectively all of our definitions of left and right, radical and liberal in Britain, and perhaps in the wider world, too.

The English Tories claimed Burke as one of their own, but he was neither English nor a Tory. He was an Irishman and a secret Catholic. He wasn't able to mention his religion during the time of the Penal Laws. He had declared marvelously for the oppressed people of Bengal, and elsewhere in India, against the East India Company. He had tried to get Warren Hastings impeached, and supported the American Revolution. He was hoping by indirection, to plead for Irish independence, but was utterly horrified by the overthrow of the church and the execution of the king in Paris.

As every schoolboy knows (as McCauley used to say), Mr. Burke produced a foamingly moist tribute to Marie Antoinette, imagining that to avenge even a look cast in her direction, the sword of every gentleman in Europe would spring from its scabbard just to defend her. With the failure to do this, the age of chivalry had died, was gone, and the age of sophists, calculators and economists was upon us. Paine commented on this lush and lachrymose description of the Austrian usurper, Marie Antoinette and said, "Mr. Burke mourns the plumage and forgets the dying bird." And the argument was off to the races.

Paine essentially wins it, because he says feudalism is over now. It wasn't just this king or this queen that was overthrown. It was the hereditary principle in France. They paid the price for the crimes of their ancestors, among other things, and from now on the word democracy will be a key word.

Up until then, the word "democrat" or "democracy" had always been used as an insult, rather as "Tory" used to be, or "suffragette," or "impressionist." The trick is to convert an attack word into a badge of pride, and call yourself a democrat. Paine was the first person ever to use the word democracy and democratic in that form. We owe him that much, too.

But Burke has some important points to make, as well, including a very alarmingly prescient foreshadowing of the likelihood that the French Revolution will go Bonapartist, will become a military dictatorship. Anyone who defends Thomas Paine, and defends democracy, still has to read that passage in Burke's book where he warns what would happen when the revolution goes on in this violent way.

The point I want to make in that connection about Paine is this: he was elected as a deputy to the French assembly, from Calais, and he took part in all the early discussions. He opposed the motion put forward by Marat for the execution of the King, on the grounds that France should start again without medieval forms of punishment. Particularly without the death penalty, which Paine abhorred. That it should be remembered that, for all his faults, the French king had helped the American Revolution; that they risked starting off too bloodily, in too authoritarian and dogmatic a way if they went on in this manner. He very nearly got enough votes, even though he mostly had to speak through an interpreter, to have the execution canceled, and commuted to either life imprisonment, or to deportation, exile on the model of the Stewarts.

He was very much attacked by Marat for this, and he never forgave him. He said he had no right to speak because he was a Quaker, which he actually was not by then. He was no longer a pacifist. As the wheel of the Terror turned, Thomas Paine was put in the Luxembourg prison, and very nearly died there, of illness and neglect, and also was very nearly executed.

While there he managed, because he knew the Bible by heart, to write the companion volume to The Rights of Man, which was The Age of Reason. I'll get to that in a minute, but for now what I want to say is this. Late in his life, he wrote, "To have had a part in two revolutions is to have lived to some purpose."

I think that's a noble thing to have said, and been able to say, but I think it's better than that. He had a hand in the revolutions within both those revolutions. In America, he was on the side of the common soldiers, and wanted them to have the vote. Any adult male should have the vote. I'm afraid it was only adult males, but it was better than nothing.

He wanted the filthy traffic in human beings to be stopped at once, and was, with Dr. Benjamin Rush and others, the founder of the American Antislavery Society. He wanted the American Revolution to be more complete, and more radical, and wanted the French Revolution to be less fanatical, less dogmatic, less fratricidal, violating one of its three cardinal precepts of fraternity, and to stop the killing and the vendettas.

He wasn't just lucky enough to be a supporter and an inspirer of two revolutions, but he was brave enough to take the opposition view within those revolutionary processes themselves. That, I've always thought was the test of a revolutionary and a radical. That they will do that, that they will fight for their principles among their comrades, which is often the most dangerous place in which to do it.

When I bring up all this, and the brilliant irony of Arthur Connell and others, there's obviously an element of the romantic here. It's almost like Che Guevara, going from one country to another, trying to spread the Promethean flame. And he does belong very much in the age of the early romantics. The other two people who wrote replies to Edmund Burke, also heavily censored and persecuted by the reactionary government of William Pitt, were William Godwin and Mary Walstoncraft.

It was probably William Blake that gave Paine the tip-off that he should flee England, and get across the channel as soon as he could, because he was about to be arrested for seditious libel, and had he been so, would certainly have been executed. Which I'm very sorry to have to tell you, Edmund Burke favored, for all his broad-mindedness.

So he is part of that bliss within that dawn element in our history, in our culture and our literature, but he was also an eminently practical person. He had been a stay maker, a corset maker. After that, he had been a customs and excise official, having that in common with Robert Burns, oddly enough. He had also been a bit of a piss artist, having that in common with Robert Burns as well. Strange that there should be two drunken customs officials so much involved in our national romance with liberty, but he was also, as I say, a practical person. In part two of The Rights of Man, there's no more talk about how stupid the hereditary principle is. He deals with all that in part one.

He says to have a hereditary monarch is as absurd as having a hereditary mathematician, or hereditary poet. It's absurd on its face. He describes the injustices of the wars that are created by kings for their own vanity, and so forth.

Part two is charts, statistical tables. It's the design of a welfare state. The first time anybody had ever thought of it. He said why is it that so many people in England work on the land where so much food is produced, and they don't have enough to eat? Why is it that when they're too old to work and their muscles are gone, they're thrown out on the parish to die? Why is it that people live like beasts in the city? How can this be?

He designs a welfare system whereby anyone at the age of the majority would receive a lump sum, on which to get married and to start their own business. That would be more or less up to them to deal with. He doesn't mention healthcare, he's not that advanced, quite. But when they get too old to work, there is provision made for the elderly, and for widows, and for orphans. It's minutely costed, it goes through William Pitt's appallingly reactionary budget, and it turns it upside down. It's a very absorbing document to read.

I went to talk about Paine last week at the Institute for Public Policy Research. It's one of those rather suave Blair-project think tanks, a nice office in Covent Garden, that kind of thing. To my surprise, I found that they were readying a document about a streamlined welfare state, which would include the idea of giving people, at the age of their majority, a lump sum that would come out of an investment made for them when they were born. And the whole glossy pamphlet begins with a long extract from Thomas Paine on agrarian justice. So I felt I didn't have to make my point about his continuing relevance in these circumstances.

My mission statement, by the way, is that I don't leave if there's anyone around who can possibly say that I didn't answer a question. The other mission statement is that I presume that people come here to talk, as well as to listen, so I'll condense my remarks a bit, if I may. I should say perhaps a little, I want to say a lot, but I'll say a little about The Age of Reason.

In his early pamphlets, Paine was a bit of an opportunist, he who would sometimes say monarchy is condemned in the Old Testament. Which as you know, sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't. He knew that his audience all knew the Bible, and probably knew no other book.

He was very good at doing biblical allusions for propaganda purposes, and a bit tricky about it sometimes, so there was a considerable shock when he published The Age of Reason, in which he maintained that the Bible is a tissue of lies, from the beginning to the end, and full of evil, and full of instructions that, if followed, would be disastrous and wicked. That it's a plagiarism, based upon a hearsay based on a hearsay. He goes through it from all the things that we village atheists like. Where did Cain get his wife? Do you know how many other children the Virgin Mary had? By the way, do you know? It's four. It's all in there.

Wonderful stuff, we're also seeing how there can't really be any revelation of truth, because those who report it can't be trusted. We cannot believe someone who says they've talked directly to God on their own unsupported word. Common sense, if you like, but very, very devastating. Once again, there have been many philosophers, Hobbes was probably one of them, of the ones I've mentioned, who were privately atheist. David Hume, I think it's almost certain, was. Some people think Francis Bacon was too. But you kept quiet about it. You did not say, except to philosophical friends.

Paine is the first one to go to a printer, and produce a cheap book anyone can read saying what the priests have been telling you is wrong. It's lies, and it's evil, and it's false. This is absolutely devastating. Quite a number of his radical friends won't talk to him after that, but I think he's got there the main point, which is that you can't really have the rights of man asserted without an age of reason that denies an interventionist God.

If the promises of religion are true, in any respect, then there's no need for social reform. There's no need for democracy. The promise can be fulfilled in some other way — by prayer, for example, or by good works, or by faith — none of which work.

For Paine to make this connection means that he's really the founding father, not just of the American Revolution and in part of the French one, but of what we call the Enlightenment. The realization that, precisely because we are alone, we must turn to one another.

Now, I can't say that Paine was an atheist, as I am. He actually wrote The Age of Reason to vindicate God. He was a deist. In other words, he believed there must have been a creator, because of the order in nature of the universe, though this creator took no further interest in his creation. Didn't intervene, didn't answer prayers.

He said that it was essential to defend the benevolent idea of the creator from the appalling accretions of the religious and of the faithful. It's a very interesting book. It's written just before Darwinism becomes available to anybody. It's as far as anyone can then see. People like Jefferson, and Paine, and many others used to look at the rocks, and look at the rock formations in Virginia. They would think how did the sea shells get so far up the mountains? They had no idea. They weren't to know. As far as could be known in their time, deism was a logical and defensible proposition. There you have it, if you like, the twinning of the two ideas.

In my opinion, if he'd done only these two things, and not just led the exemplary and creative life that he did manage to do, he would still deserve to be remembered as "The most useful Englishman there ever was," as Kenneth Griffith, that great Welshman once put it in a wonderful drama-documentary he did about Paine.

The most useful Englishman there ever was. I give him to you, ladies and gentlemen, Thomas Paine. Thank you.

Q & A

Q: I like the notion of democracy being changed from a pejorative word to one which is a badge that we wear with honor. Do you think now that it's going the other way? That now we're perhaps not happy to be associated with those who use the word democracy.

A: No. First, I agree with you that it's nice when that happens. I mean, it was clever of the Tories to take on this charge; and impressionist, also was the reviewist taunt; suffragette and so forth. We've had extensions of this, people recently resuming the word "queer," for example, if they're homosexual; and even adopting a word that actually, I do not use, if they're black. I don't think it should be used, but alright. You can see what the effort is being made there.

What we have done with democracy, I think, is to assume that it's only measurement of public opinion. That's another problem altogether. When I was young, there was quite an argument about whether or not newspapers should even publish opinion polls, because they were thought to be unscientific, and probably too easy to skew.

Now, newspapers commission expensive opinion polls, usually in concert with a television or broadcasting organization. They commission their own polls, and then print their own findings as news on the front page, when they've got nothing else to do.

This is a parody of democracy. It's not even populism, really. It's pseudoscience, for one thing, and it's anti-democratic for another. I fear people have got so attached to it that they've forgotten what it means, this word now, so it could possibly be that a new word is due. I'll brood on that. Popular sovereignty? No, it doesn't work.

Q:  Why do you think we don't honor Paine? If we were to redress that, what would be a fitting memorial?

A: The reason, initially, he wasn't honored, was because he fled the country. He would've been hanged if he stayed. He'd incited mutiny among the American colonists, and he took the French side fairly consistently during the Napoleonic Wars.

In fact, I cut a bit, I was going to say something about a couple of his downsides. One of them being that though he saw through Napoleon right away, he was still so wedded to the idea of France and its defense that he was willing to tolerate extreme measures of repression being employed, and he had always hoped that the French army would invade Great Britain and set up a republic there, as it had in other countries.

I think he'd been too long away from home, because… who here's read Patrick O'Brien's sea-faring novels? Nothing like enough! So you've got Flanagan now, and that's only a trilogy. With O'Brien, it's 20, I think, but they're quite short. They're brilliant.

But anyway, I'll tell you quickly, these are the new type of Britons, Linda Cully wrote so well about in her history a few years ago — who had drawn from all parts of the country, thinking of themselves as British for the first time. Singing the national anthem, which has only just been more or less promulgated, but they're very subversive below decks. They're all kinds of Cromwellian-type cult organizations and little splinter groups operating among the crews, and millennial leftovers, some of them from the 1650s and '60s. Very, very fascinating, and very democratical, as they would've said. Very radical, but absolutely no quarter given to the French.

Because what has Napoleon gone and done? He's had himself proclaimed emperor by the Pope. He's restored Papistry to France, and made himself an emperor, so they had no trouble at all, however radical they are, however hostile they are to the excise man, the press gang, the king and the rest of it — they're fighting against France.

I don't think Paine realized this at all, so there was an obvious sense in which it was easy for the Tories to indict him as a traitor. I think that explains some of it. Then there's the atheism, the public contempt for the church. You don't get a plaque in Westminster after that. You shouldn't, of course, want one.

I'm never sure whether I should complain in Washington or not, that there isn't a plaque for him. Maybe it's best that there isn't, and he can be found in decoding poems like that. Probably that's best.

Q:  You mentioned that Thomas Paine wanted the abolition of slavery. I saw some drafts of the Constitution in the New York public library some years back. There, in one of the drafts, was the call for the abolition of slavery. I was looking at this draft to the Constitution, and there was the line. I was thinking, why was it taken out? Because if it had stayed in, the impact on American history thereafter would've been gigantic. I was blown away, looking at this line in the early draft, and I just wondered what happened.

A: It makes you weep. Well, there are two reasons why. One, very obviously, is the delegations from Georgia and the two Carolinas would not have signed the Declaration of Independence if it included that concept, the clause that Jefferson wrote in.

The other thing, as Jefferson pointed out, is that many people who didn't own slaves but were very much involved in the trade of carrying them, either up and down the coast or across the Atlantic, usually from New York and Philadelphia. So there were quite a lot of people with an interest, in other words, even in the more enlightened states, that didn't want to tamper with the trade, so they lost.

Much worse, I think, is the sequel, which is that as a result of the revolution in Haiti… I'm going to try this once more… who here has read Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James? Excellent, more than I thought. Get it read, though, the rest of you. Unbelievable history by a Trinidadian historian of the first black republic ever proclaimed. Inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution, led by a genius general called Toussaint Louverture in what was then called Santo Domingo, what is now Haiti, around the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. We owe a lot to this slave army because it completely destroyed, along with yellow jack, and cholera, and a few other things, a French fleet and a French army. And it forced Napoleon and Talleyrand to put the Louisiana territories up for sale.

Jefferson was clever enough to buy them, thus doubling the size of the United States overnight, for 10 cents an acre, the best land deal in history. The idea came to him from Paine. Paine said, I think the French would give us the land, and we could start again.

He and Joel Barlow went to the President and said, there's a condition. We must start again without slavery. We mustn't have it in these new territories. We can begin again without the original sin. But just as the cotton interests had won the first time, the sugar interests in the Caribbean needed that crop brought in very quickly through Louisiana, and they continued to import slaves through New Orleans, so the chance was lost.

In fact, that makes the American Civil War inevitable, because new states are carved out of Louisiana, and by the time it's finished, there are as many slave states as there are free states. And there's only going to be one outcome. Reading back over that gives one the sense of the real lineaments of tragedy.

Tragedy is not when princesses are run over in Paris. The Greek tragedy is the fatal flaw in either the enterprise or the human being; and then there is the Hegelian tragedy, when two rights collide. That's when you get tragedy. This will meet both of those definitions.

Q:   Might "Capitalism" be the word that's usurped democracy? Second, are the rights of man compromised as a direct result of an expanding population?

A: Well, Milton Friedman's theory is that capitalism is the word for democracy. Just as you, as a consumer, have your way in the market by choosing how you'll spend your money, and on whom, or on which, as between any number of possibles. Let's say you do that with your vote. Your vote is like your dollar bill, or pound coin. Fatuous, I've always thought. Very, very simplistic, in that capitalism has shown itself more than able to coexist with extreme forms of dictatorship, from apartheid in South Africa to fascism and national socialism in Europe. There's nothing that seems innately, necessarily democratic about capitalism, with its persistent tendency to monopoly. That's the first point.

However, Paine, I think would be more likely to be with you. He was against government intervention where it could be avoided. He was for a welfare floor and ceiling safety net, but he was a small government man. He didn't trust the state at all, and wrote many safeguards against state power, and for separation of power, helped write them into the Constitution. And he was often quoted by Ronald Reagan, as a libertarian, for example, and as a foe of all tyranny. He is quite popular on the American libertarian right, if you're interested.

Your second question, is democracy compromised by an increase in population? No.

I mean, the population of Britain at the time Paine was writing was… I don't know, probably not more than 10 million. London was the biggest city in the world, and had 600,000 people. We have more of us with more rights now, as you can easily see. There were no rights, then, really at all. The concept wasn't known until Paine introduced it.

Q:  You suggest that Paine's way forward was to turn to one another. As a Christian, I believe that the basis of Christianity is just that. "Love thy neighbor" is a tenet that's observed by those who wish to turn to one another. What on earth, then, has happened to man's humanity to man? The world is full of man's inhumanity to man at the moment, so the opportunity that man has isn't strictly being taken up, is it?

A: The instruction to do right by your neighbor is actually from Rabbi Hillel, from the Babylonian captivity, who invented what's called the Golden Rule. You don't do anything to another person you wouldn't want them to do to you. Christianity is an inept plagiarism of that, as it is of Judaism in general. And it also asked you to do the impossible, it says you must love your neighbor as yourself. No one can be expected to do that, it's a ridiculous proposition. We're not so made as to do that.

We're also told to take no thought for the morrow, to care nothing for thrift or investment, or education, to give up everything. A doctrine which must be immoral, not just on its face, but because it can only be preached by someone who thought the world was about to come to an end, and was hoping that it would. Which is itself an immoral desire, yet is the eschatological pornography that underlies all religion.

You can go through the whole New Testament, as I have done, and as Paine did, and you'll find that people are constantly being commanded to commit genocide, and to impose slavery. Ordered, mandated to do that, and to have their children stoned if they're disobedient, and to do unbelievably awful other things, burn witches. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," all of that.

The document is of revolting evil, it's really a relief to know that there isn't a word of truth in the story, as Israeli archaeology has now conclusively proved. There was no exodus, there was no wandering in Sinai, all of that's all made up.

Good thing, too, but there's no mention of hell. No one's condemned to hell in the Old Testament, at all. Not until gentle Jesus, meek and mild, are you condemned to burn forever if you don't agree with his preposterous offering.

Making war on the dead, punishing the dead for eternity. You're welcome to your Christianity, sir.

Q:  Chris, you have contextualized Paine for us, in terms of the American Revolution, and the French Revolution. If we were ever to have a revolution in Britain, which perhaps might start with a written constitution, how relevant would Paine be now, for us?

A: I'm a founding subscriber of an organization you may have heard of called Charter 88, which has campaigned with some success for the idea of a written Bill of Rights. And which I think would involve, inevitably, as the discussion went on, the transformation of the country into a republic, or perhaps a federation of republics within Europe.

We'd owe a huge amount to Paine, if that project was forwarded. In fact, we owe a huge amount to him that it was ever put on paper in the first place. It shows that it's not dreamt up by some group of chattering class people, that it's very deep in the grain and the grit of the English, and the British people.

It is part of our tradition. It is one that's buried, that's forgotten, but that is ineffaceable and ineradicable. No, there'd be no doubt that he'd be one of the founding fathers there. And Gerrard Winstanley, and Thomas Landsborough.

Q:  Can you be a bit more specific?

A: Can I be a bit more specific? Probably not. Not in the available time. But we could have a glass of refreshment.

Q:  It's clear that Thomas Paine was intellectually imaginative, but does that intellectual imagination actually reach to cultures where notions of liberty and democracy are not historically attractive, and are not currently attractive?

A: It's been my experience, and it was Paine's, I think, that even the most apparently unpromising societies are perfectly able to see the point that if there are to be rulers, they had better arise from the people. No one should find themselves living under a government that he hasn't chosen to put himself under, and no one should be denied the chance to change their government.

The great vice of Burke's book is that he says we did have one revolution in 1688, and retrospectively, even though it was an anti-Catholic revolution, he said that was all right. In fact, it was a glorious one, but he said that's once and for all time. It can never be changed anymore. The compact that it institutes is permanent and unalterable.

That's absurd on its face, even if the William and Mary settlement wasn't absurd in itself. People can get these points very easily, and that they want to be able to know what their rights are and to go to a court to assert them is something people are thirsty for in every place I've been.

I've never been anywhere where something like the American Constitution wouldn't be an improvement, in other words, because it's essentially simple. Paine was able to reach people who knew very little about books and ideas, but were learning to read, and they got the point right away.

If you can do it to a people as thick as the English, I think there's nowhere it couldn't take root. Thick and conservative, as the English.

Q:  Do you think that if Thomas Paine was alive today, he would speak out at peace rallies? Do you think he would be as critical of Islam as some have been of Christianity, or do you think he'd perhaps just be a newspaper columnist?

A: I don't know that he would've sunk as low as the latter. Thanks for asking, all the same.

Actually, I can't do this. I wrote a book about George Orwell once, and people said what would Orwell think about this or that? I said, it's not possible to tell, after a certain point. I'm not avoiding your question. Orwell died very young, but he'd written a great deal about the colonialism in Asia, and in the Middle East also, and had personal experience of it. I think it's possible to say, from knowing his work, and his mind, that he would've been opposed to the 1956 intervention at Suez, which we're having the 50th anniversary of this year. I think, without any doubt. It's also pardonable to say, plausible to say, that he would've been opposed to the French and American attempt to keep colonialism going in Indochina. I think one can do that. Anything much later than that, one just shouldn't try, I believe.

I do know what Paine's answer to Islam was, because it's in The Age of Reason. That's very plain. He didn't know that much about it, but he could see that it is what it is, which is an even more vulgar plagiarism of Judaism than Christianity, usually of the worst bits. It's nothing but a knock-off. But it makes the same mistake as Burke did in that it says it's the final revelation. There's no need for anymore after this. You now have all the information you need, in other words, an explicitly totalitarian ideology. You would've had no doubt as to what he would think about that.

As for peace rallies, no. He had a very, very strong quarrel with his Quaker brethren, because they not only abstained from the war against the British crown in America, but they actually, in the end, called for people to keep their oath of allegiance to the crown.

As so often with pacifists, they weren't really neutral. They were on the other side, just like today's anti-war movement is not anti-war at all. It's pro-Saddam Hussein, and pro so-called "insurgent."

It's led by people like George Galloway who are pimps for, and prostitutes of — an amazing double — fascists and a dictatorship.

Q:  That's not the case at all, because for instance, if Hans Blix had been allowed to carry on with his inquiry, we would've found out there were no weapons, and the whole thing was based on a spurious plan to go to war, that Bush and Blair hatched months and months before that. You don't have to be pro-Saddam to be anti-war, that's rubbish.

A: If you don't have to, why are you, then? I must say, I agree that you don't have to be, so why is your movement led by people who are?

Now, you do remind me to say something else, though. Paine definitely believed that the United States should be an imperial power for democracy, as did Jefferson.

He wanted it to be an empire for the export of revolution — to Haiti, to South America, up to Europe, to Ireland and beyond. He was very emphatic on that. And that's a problem for many people on the American left, because they have such a bad conscience about so many failed or criminal American foreign policies that they don't believe their country should be, or is, or even could be a vector for these ideas.

But here's the situation, comrades, brothers and sisters, friends. The Russian Revolution is gone. The Chinese Revolution has mutated into a sort of market Stalinism. The Cuban Revolution is moribund. I say nothing against the French Revolution, but its ideas are not really represented by France anymore, in any important way. The ideas, of course, of the Declaration of Rights of Man are still with us.

The American Revolution is the only one still standing. You have to take it or leave it, but in my view, it requires thought and not jokes about the president's IQ.

Q:  Do you think the rights of man, or particularly women, have been increased after the invasion of Iraq? If so, has it been worth the price? Thank you.

A: I don't doubt it for one second, that there's been a night and day difference in Iraq, as well as in Afghanistan. The flag that you can't see on my lapel is the flag of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party who's leader is now the President of Iraq.

Four years ago, Iraq was the private property of a psychopathic crime family. It was a mass grave underneath, and a concentration camp on top. It was mass graves, torture chambers, and every citizen was property of the state.

Now, the elected President of Iraq is the leader of a Democratic Socialist party that is the corresponding member of the Socialist International, who's people as late as 15 years ago were being subjected to genocide with advanced industrialized weapons of mass murder.

There are some people who say they can't see the difference. I think they are blasé, to put it mildly. I think it's the most important fact, thank you.

Very muted applause for that proposition, I can see.

There are those who say they can't tell the difference, and well, they probably can't.

Q:  I'd just like to make a comment, as a member of the anti-war movement, that there were lots of us that were incredibly disappointed when George Galloway was held up as some figurehead for the movement, and also that you've just dismissed a vast movement full of all sorts of people, with all sorts of beliefs, and not all of us agree with George Galloway.

A: I didn't dismiss it. I said if you think that, why don't you have your own demonstrations that are not led and spoken to by people like Ramsey Clark, in the United States, who's the organizer there; or George Galloway, or Charlie Donahue; take the other side in the war.

It's not anti-war to say, as Michael Moore does, that the fascist killers in Iraq are the moral equivalent of the Minutemen fighters who were led by Thomas Paine. I'm sorry. As well as being an objectively fascist position, that's also a revolting caricature, and also not an anti-war one. It's pro-war, but on the other side.

If you don't like these people, you don't want them to be a spokesman, then don't march like sheep behind their banners. Have your own show, for heaven's sake. Show a little pluck!

Mr. Galloway, I may as well say this, is just done. He gave an interview to a slime sheet called Gentlemen's Quarterly in America, where he was asked if only Blair was killed, would it be morally justifiable for a suicide bomber to take him out? Galloway said, yes, it would be. He said, though I'm not advocating it.

No, he's not, of course. He wouldn't be as brave as that. He's just pre-approving it. A little deniability suits him down to the ground. Then there's a row, as you can imagine. Then he digs up a statement, a rather vapid one made by Cherie Blair. Two nights ago he said, Cherie Blair once said that she sympathized with the despair of the Palestinian suicide bombers.

Thought, in fact, her statement didn't quite say that. It said that, as long as people feel they have no alternative, there won't be much progress. A pretty vacuous statement, but not as Galloway cites it. But look what's just happened. When he gets in trouble for his remark, approving the murder of a three times elected Prime Minister, when he gets in trouble, he hides behind the skirts of a woman who he's just called to become a widow.

Every time. The man has no shame, and every time I think you can't go any lower, he makes a fool of me. But I'm on his case. We're not done with George at all yet.

Q:  All that said, though, you have to agree don't you, that the price has been quite high, and the country is descending quite slowly into anarchy, and that indeed, the only part that could even possibly be credited with running itself is the part left well alone, i.e. the northern, Kurdish part of Iraq?

A: Well, left well alone in the sense that it's been taken out of the control of Saddam Hussein. I can't disagree with what you say, but my estimate of Iraq five years ago was that it was an imploding society already.

It was beggared and bankrupt. It was xeroxing its currency. It was completely privatized, everything in the state was owned by the crime family. They stayed in power through methods of divide and rule. By inciting, through different newspapers that they controlled, Sunni against Shia, Shia against Sunni, both against Kurds. If it had not been intervened in, had there not been intervention, there's every chance that Iraq could've become to the Gulf what Congo has become to Southwest Africa. A sort of vortex into which forces would certainly have been drawn.

Iraq would've been invaded all right, don't you worry about that, but it would've been invaded by Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Each with the most extreme client of their respective faction. We intervened far too late, it should've all been taken care of in 1991. Not my fault that it wasn't.

We may have intervened just before it went over the cliff. We don't know, but that it's a noble cause, and a just war, make no doubt. No doubt at all.

Q:  Christopher, perhaps we can come back to Thomas Paine.

A: By all means.

Q:  You were fairly quick in your apology that he didn't extend his definition of mankind to include womankind. Why do you, Christopher, think that the authors of the Declaration of Independence failed to see that self-evident fact?

A: It's really remarkable when you consider who some of their wives were, if only that. Abigail Adams, for example people of this kind. Not perhaps, Martha Jefferson, who was a bit of a mouse and recluse. It just didn't cross their minds at all.

Remember, Mary Wollstonecraft, who is Paine's emulator and writes her own very brilliant attack on Edmund Burke, publishes the Vindication of the Rights of Women when? To be absolutely honest with you, I don't know the exact date. After The Rights of Man I'm fairly sure, as the natural counterpart. And Paine would've accepted that. His relations with women were always very distraught, as it happens as well, very.

I don't know whether that has anything to do with it or not, but it's an extraordinary deafness among that whole revolutionary generation. If you could bring Jefferson back now, to play the game I said I wouldn't play, what would surprise him? The thing would surprise him most would be that Canada has still not been conquered.

He would think what have the young men of America been doing? Are they asleep?

The Union Jack still flies over a whole chunk of North America. This is outrageous. That would really upset him. Mixed marriage — as we call it, is not mixed because there are no such things as races, but you know what I mean — would amaze him. Including the number of his own descendants who can now be identified through DNA.

And American womanhood would absolutely shatter him. Shatter him. As it would have done Paine. All I can say for this lot is that when the Seneca Falls Conference is convened, just before the Civil War, and women start to attach themselves to the claims of right being made by slaves and others, Thomas Paine is always mentioned in their discussions. He is sort of revived, as he was in the birth of the labor movement and the Chartist movement in England.

He's always been part of that unspoken history. Unsung, I mean, but not quite unspoken. Not forgotten. Brilliantly evoked by Edward Thompson in The Making the English Working Class. He's part of the collective memory of the educated working man, and for that reason, imperishable.

Q: Looking at applying the source of principles that came out from The Rights of Man to the sort of issues we have today, not what Thomas Paine would've said, how can we learn to apply them, for example, about the way the individual human rights are often trodden over, and are given less weight than the sanctity of the state, the preservation of borders, whatever goes on in between them. About how do we sort out, for example, what goes on in the Congo, and the misery there? Or if we look alternatively now, we have a world fight between Islam, those who want Sharia law, those who don't, and we're all caught up in it. How do these principles you've spoken about today help us to understand those kinds of problems?

A: Well, on the matter of asserting civil liberty against the state, I would hope it was self-evident. I'm a very strong supporter of the regime change policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I hope tomorrow, soon in Syria and Iran. Not necessarily imposed from outside, but supported by the international community.

I'm also a plaintiff in the lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the Department of Justice and the national security association for warrantless wiretapping. I'm a named litigant in that suit, which will be heard in a federal court in Michigan, next week.

It's actually very important, especially in times of combat, when the state has all the excuses it thinks it needs to coerce people, and to silence them, and to say it's for their own good. Just like Christianity, the worst thing about a dictatorship is that it's benign. That's the horrible bit.

The benign stuff is the revolting stuff. That, I hope, one could take as read. The reason I'm doing this now is that obviously, the great question in the world is the battle between the secular and theocratic forces. It's going to be that way for a long time.

I've got a red light here now, but I'll just say this. If you take the best-known dispute, and the longest running one that goes back to the League of Nations, the Palestine question. I once heard the late Abba Eban, a rather charming Israeli liberal politician, a former ambassador to the UN, former prime minister, say, "When you look to this problem, the first thing that struck you about it is how easy it is to solve."

I remember thinking, okay I'll listen to the rest of what he says if he says that. You have approximately equally balanced peoples, Jewish and Arab. Roughly the same number of them, with historic claims to the same land, and long historic attachments to it, but are not, by any means, completely compatible. There is a way of doing it. You can partition the place, at least to begin with, so that everyone is part of it. You can't have one group living on top of the other, that's out of the question. They must be living side-by-side, which must mean some form of partitioning.

Easy, everybody wants it. The majority of Israeli Jews consistently say they want it. Prime Minister Abbas says he's sure in a referendum the Palestinians would vote for it, too, which whenever they've been tested on it they have.

PLO supports it. The UN supports it. The EEU supports it. The United States supports it. The Diaspora Jews support it. Why can't we get it? Because there's a faction of messianists among the Jews who say God gave them the West Bank in Gaza. Not Gaza, but the West Bank, so there's nothing to negotiate.

It's not difficult for them to find Muslim counterparts who say you're quite right about that, God did distribute the land. He does make property deals, but in our favor, sorry, not yours.

Then, just as if that wouldn't be bad enough, the Christians to the rescue. The American fundamentalist right comes to the aid of the extreme Zionists and says, not one inch can be given away because it must all be kept in trust for the Messiah who's coming soon. Who will only want, I think it's 99,000 Jews when it's all over, to convert. The rest are going straight to hell, but we leave that bit out.

So theocracy and religion poison everything. They make it impossible for reason, for rationality, for justice, even to be heard let alone enacted. That's in an area where we have quite a lot of purchase and quite a lot of influence. What is going to happen when Bin Laden's forces try again to take away Kashmir? It's Kashmir they care about, by the way, not Palestine. They occasionally use Palestine, and some fools believe that if Palestine was solved, the Al-Qaeda people would stop. How people can believe this in anti-war movement, I don't know.

Suppose Bin Laden's people have another try, and they really do smash up Kashmir and destroy its attachment to the Indian Union. The Indian Union will fall apart. The largest and most impressive multi-cultural, multi-ethnic democracy in the world will fall apart. The fighting and bloodshed that will be there will make 1947, 1948 completely forgettable.

That could happen. That's what they want. They're working at it night and day. This is a real struggle. They want to destroy everything we care about. They want to take away everything we have.

What is appalling is to see the capitulation of my profession, for example, which wouldn't coverage one of the Danish cartoons, which believes that the only problem in the world is avoiding the hurting of peoples' feelings. Well, I'm sorry. I didn't sign up for this to be inoffensive.

Now, there comes a time, which every speaker knows, when the audience stops looking at its watch and starts shaking it…

The Atheist Manifesto

Collected Talks by Christopher Hitchens

Copyright 2016, All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-1-944541-60-6