Making Sense - Sam Harris - November 12, 2013


How to talk to a Christian


Episode Stats

Length

8 minutes

Words per Minute

144.92871

Word Count

1,186

Sentence Count

79

Hate Speech Sentences

8


Summary

Learn English with Bill Cosby. Bill Cosby is a comedian, actor, writer, and public speaker. He is a frequent guest host of Comedy Central's Cosby Show, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, CNN, and other media outlets. In this episode, Bill Cosby talks about the perils of believing in God, and why religion is a cancerous tumor, and how it s time to move on from religion and toward secular knowledge and reason. He also talks about why religion should not be allowed to teach us how to be a better human being, and what it really means to believe in a God who allows us to be cruel and unjust, and who does not care about the suffering of other human beings, but only about our own happiness and well-being. He also explains why God is not bound by moral duties, and that he doesn t have to be good, because whatever he commands us to do is good because he commands the Israelites to slaughter the Amalekites. But if you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that God is good, you are going to wake up thinking that saying a few words over your pancakes is going to turn your mind into the body of Elvis Presley, you have less than the same words you have lost your mind. If you could believe what only lunatics could believe, you could be less lost in your own mind, less lost on your own body of words, and more lost in the same body of your soul. - Bill Cosby and more free of shame and shame or at least, you would be a lunatic but if you believe in God s goodness, then you could have a better life . Bill Cosby's new book: The God Who Cares About You? is out there in this book by Bill Cosby s new book, and you could see the light at the end of the tunnel the truth about God s will by listening to his voice if you don t believe in Him? by clicking here by watching this video by going to this podcast by googling the words in your head by this podcast, you'll get a better idea of what God is really trying to tell you what He's good by checking out his voice in your mind by being a better version of you by the words he's really good at it by writing it out in your brain


Transcript

00:00:01.000 Nine million children die every year before they reach the age of five.
00:00:07.000 Picture an Asian tsunami of the sort we saw in 2004 that killed a quarter of a million people.
00:00:13.000 One of those every ten days killing children only under five.
00:00:18.000 Twenty-four thousand children a day, a thousand an hour, seventeen or so a minute.
00:00:24.000 That means before I can get to the end of this sentence,
00:00:27.000 some few children, very likely, will have died in terror and agony.
00:00:34.000 Think of the parents of these children.
00:00:36.000 Think of the fact that most of these men and women believe in God
00:00:41.000 and are praying at this moment for their children to be spared,
00:00:46.000 and their prayers will not be answered.
00:00:50.000 Any God who would allow children by the millions to suffer and die in this way,
00:00:55.000 and their parents to grieve in this way,
00:00:57.000 either can do nothing to help them or doesn't care to.
00:01:02.000 He is therefore either impotent or evil.
00:01:05.000 And worse than that, most of these people, many of these people certainly,
00:01:09.000 will be going to hell because they're praying to the wrong God.
00:01:14.000 Just think about that.
00:01:16.000 Through no fault of their own, they were born into the wrong culture,
00:01:19.000 where they got the wrong theology, and they missed the revelation.
00:01:25.000 There are 1.2 billion people in India at this moment.
00:01:28.000 Most of them are Hindus.
00:01:30.000 Most of them, therefore, polytheists.
00:01:33.000 No matter how good these people are, they are doomed.
00:01:37.000 If you are praying to the monkey god Hanuman, you are doomed.
00:01:42.000 You will be tortured in hell for eternity.
00:01:45.000 Now, is there the slightest evidence for this?
00:01:47.000 No.
00:01:48.000 It just says so in Mark 9 and Matthew 13 and Revelation 14.
00:01:54.000 Perhaps you'll remember from the Lord of the Rings,
00:01:56.000 it says when the elves die, they go to Valinor,
00:01:59.000 but they can be reborn in Middle-earth.
00:02:02.000 I say that just as a point of comparison.
00:02:07.000 So God created the cultural isolation of the Hindus.
00:02:12.000 He engineered the circumstance of their deaths in ignorance of Revelation.
00:02:17.000 And then he created the penalty for this ignorance,
00:02:20.000 which is an eternity of conscious torment in fire.
00:02:24.000 On the other hand, your run-of-the-mill serial killer in America,
00:02:29.000 who spent his life raping and torturing children,
00:02:33.000 need only come to Jesus on death row.
00:02:37.000 And after a final meal of fried chicken,
00:02:40.000 he's going to spend an eternity in heaven after death.
00:02:43.000 One thing should be crystal clear to you.
00:02:46.000 This vision of life has absolutely nothing to do with moral accountability.
00:02:52.000 We're told that God is loving and kind and just and intrinsically good.
00:02:57.000 But when someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence
00:03:01.000 that God is cruel and unjust
00:03:03.000 because he visits suffering on innocent people
00:03:07.000 of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath,
00:03:12.000 we're told that God is mysterious.
00:03:15.000 Who can understand God's will?
00:03:17.000 And yet, this is precisely, this merely human understanding of God's will
00:03:23.000 is precisely what believers use to establish his goodness in the first place.
00:03:28.000 You know, something good happens to a Christian.
00:03:30.000 He feels some bliss while praying, say,
00:03:33.000 or he sees some positive change in his life,
00:03:35.000 and we're told that God is good.
00:03:37.000 But when children by the tens of thousands
00:03:40.000 are torn from their parents' arms and drowned,
00:03:43.000 we're told that God is mysterious.
00:03:47.000 This is how you play tennis without the net.
00:03:50.000 And I want to suggest to you that it is not only tiresome
00:03:55.000 when otherwise intelligent people speak this way,
00:03:57.000 it is morally reprehensible.
00:04:00.000 This kind of faith really is the perfection of narcissism.
00:04:04.000 God loves me.
00:04:06.000 Don't you know?
00:04:08.000 He cured me of my eczema.
00:04:11.000 He makes me feel so good while singing in church.
00:04:14.000 And just when we had given up hope,
00:04:17.000 he found a banker who was willing to reduce my mother's mortgage.
00:04:20.000 Given all that this God of yours does not accomplish in the lives of others,
00:04:26.000 given the misery that's being imposed on some helpless child at this instant,
00:04:33.000 this kind of faith is obscene.
00:04:37.000 To think in this way is to fail to reason honestly
00:04:41.000 or to care sufficiently about the suffering of other human beings.
00:04:47.000 And if God is good and loving and just and kind,
00:04:50.000 and he wanted to guide us morally with a book,
00:04:53.000 why give us a book that supports slavery?
00:04:56.000 Why give us a book that admonishes us to kill people
00:05:00.000 for imaginary crimes like witchcraft?
00:05:05.000 Now, of course, there's a way of not taking these questions to heart.
00:05:08.000 God is not bound by moral duties.
00:05:11.000 God doesn't have to be good.
00:05:12.000 Whatever he commands is good.
00:05:13.000 So when he commands the Israelites to slaughter the Amalekites,
00:05:17.000 that behavior becomes intrinsically good because he commanded it.
00:05:21.000 This to me is the true horror of religion.
00:05:24.000 It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions
00:05:30.000 what only lunatics could believe on their own.
00:05:33.000 If you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few Latin words
00:05:37.000 over your pancakes is going to turn them into the body of Elvis Presley,
00:05:41.000 you have lost your mind.
00:05:43.000 But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker in the body of Jesus,
00:05:48.000 you're just a Catholic.
00:05:50.000 And I'm not the first person to notice that it's a very strange sort of loving God
00:06:01.000 who would make salvation depend on believing in him on bad evidence.
00:06:06.000 If you lived 2,000 years ago, there was evidence galore.
00:06:10.000 I mean, he was just performing miracles.
00:06:12.000 But apparently he got tired of being so helpful.
00:06:15.000 And so now we all inherit this very heavy burden of the doctrine's implausibility.
00:06:21.000 And the effort to square it with what we now know about the cosmos
00:06:26.000 and what we know about the all-too-human origins of Scripture
00:06:29.000 becomes more and more difficult.
00:06:32.000 I hate to break it to you here at Notre Dame,
00:06:35.000 but Christianity is a cult of human sacrifice.
00:06:40.000 Christianity is not a religion that repudiates human sacrifice.
00:06:45.000 It is a religion that celebrates a single human sacrifice as though it were effective.
00:06:51.000 God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, John 3.16.
00:06:55.000 The idea is that Jesus suffered the crucifixion so that none need suffer hell,
00:07:01.000 except those billions in India.
00:07:04.000 This doctrine is astride a contemptible history of scientific ignorance and religious barbarism.
00:07:10.000 We come from people who used to bury children under the foundations of new buildings
00:07:16.000 as offerings to their imaginary gods.
00:07:19.000 Just think about that.
00:07:21.000 In vast numbers of societies, people would bury children in post holes,
00:07:28.000 people like ourselves thinking that this would prevent an invisible being
00:07:32.000 from knocking down their buildings.
00:07:34.000 These are the sorts of people who wrote the Bible.
00:07:40.000 If there is a less moral, moral framework, I haven't heard of it.
00:07:49.000 Another thing, I should soon have御ины in post hole,
00:07:51.000 that was the first person who would be asked,
00:07:52.000 super Natur Hatred.
00:07:53.000 All of that...
00:07:54.000 All of that...
00:07:55.000 Two homework...
00:07:56.000 Another one...
00:07:57.000 ...
00:07:59.000 This checkpoint...
00:08:00.000 Today is a great בj