The Michael Knowles Show - May 20, 2023


Michael Knowles DEBUNKS Christopher Hitchens Viral Moments


Episode Stats


Length

18 minutes

Words per minute

170.6756

Word count

3,141

Sentence count

216

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Chris Hitchens has been a voice in the atheist movement for decades, but is he really as good at it as he seems to think he is? And why does he think God is a bad thing? Well, he's not.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Anyone who doesn't know this doesn't know anything about it.
00:00:02.860 Is it not written that I come not to bring a piece but a sword?
00:00:05.660 Surely it is.
00:00:06.340 I'm saying there are specific biblical scriptural injunctions to do evil.
00:00:11.300 I'll give you all the miracles and you'll still be left exactly where you are now,
00:00:15.320 holding an empty sack.
00:00:17.980 You know, I was an atheist for 10 years.
00:00:19.840 And one of the reasons that I was an atheist is the very unfortunate timing
00:00:25.860 that I was a 13-year-old boy when Christopher Hitchens got really, really popular for being an atheist.
00:00:32.300 And I remember at the time, there were all those new atheists,
00:00:37.080 the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse, 0.85
00:00:39.640 Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens.
00:00:43.840 And those first three were not all that interesting, at least not to a 13-year-old boy.
00:00:48.260 But Chris Hitchens really was so clever.
00:00:51.820 He seemed so witty.
00:00:52.700 He was so drunken and sweaty and British. 1.00
00:00:54.300 He just seemed really, really great at the time.
00:00:57.580 And I can't even imagine how many poor souls he has led away from God and to eternal perdition.
00:01:04.800 Really sad.
00:01:06.100 Now I find I go back and I read a Hitchens essay or I look at a Hitchens video
00:01:12.740 and it just doesn't hit the same.
00:01:15.060 And so Hitchens still has some funny bits.
00:01:17.060 He has bits about how women aren't funny. 0.74
00:01:19.500 And he's got some great bits on scotch and tea and things like that.
00:01:23.700 But his stuff on God, in retrospect, seems like weak sauce.
00:01:29.040 So the producers have picked the creme de la creme of Christopher Hitchens' atheist videos.
00:01:36.740 I have not seen these videos, or at the very least I haven't seen them in probably 20 years.
00:01:41.760 And we're going to take a look back decades after this man helped lead me down the dark road.
00:01:48.380 Take it away.
00:01:49.020 If you meet someone in the street who you yesterday saw executed,
00:01:53.300 you can say either that an extraordinary miracle has occurred
00:01:56.120 or that you are under a very grave misapprehension.
00:01:59.100 And David Hume's logic on this, I think, is quite irrefutable.
00:02:01.880 He says,
00:02:02.200 What is more likely, that the laws of nature have been suspended in your favor
00:02:06.420 and in a way that you approve, or that you've made a mistake?
00:02:08.980 Especially if you didn't see it yourself and you're hearing it from someone who says that they did.
00:02:13.320 After all, Lazarus was raised, never said a word about it.
00:02:16.200 The daughter of Jairus was raised, didn't say a thing about what she'd been through.
00:02:19.160 And the Gospels tell us that at the time of the crucifixion,
00:02:21.180 all the graves in Jerusalem opened and their occupants wandered around the streets to greet.
00:02:24.700 So it seems the resurrection was something of a banality at the time.
00:02:27.760 Not all of those people clearly were divinely conceived.
00:02:32.180 I'll give you all the miracles and you'll still be left exactly where you are now, holding an empty sack.
00:02:37.400 Christopher Hitchens is saying,
00:02:38.520 Well, what's more likely, that you, the individual, were deceived
00:02:42.020 or that the laws of nature were suspended?
00:02:44.740 But when we're talking about the resurrection,
00:02:46.660 we're not talking about you individually being deceived.
00:02:49.620 We're talking about 500 eyewitnesses to the resurrection being deceived.
00:02:54.040 We're talking about all of the apostles being deceived.
00:02:58.380 The earliest Gospels were written within three or four decades of the resurrection.
00:03:02.180 That would be like me right now, writing about Tupac Shakur.
00:03:05.400 And I say, actually, Tupac rose from the dead.
00:03:08.460 Well, if I said that, and if that story was spreading around,
00:03:11.700 people would contradict me if it didn't really happen.
00:03:14.160 When you see the New Testament accounts,
00:03:15.520 it's referring to people who would have still been alive
00:03:17.720 and whose relatives would have still been alive
00:03:19.140 at the time those Gospel accounts were circulating.
00:03:22.200 And you have four accounts, all of which basically agree with one another.
00:03:27.500 And where they would seem to disagree on certain details,
00:03:29.740 they do so in the way that newspapers disagree about news events.
00:03:33.920 In fact, the fact that they seem to disagree about certain details
00:03:37.840 or seem to approach events from different vantage points
00:03:40.000 actually would be a mark in their favor.
00:03:42.460 Because if they were all exactly, completely in lockstep on vantage point
00:03:45.540 and every single line, you would say,
00:03:48.020 Oh, this was just contrived.
00:03:49.300 The fact that this was all circulated.
00:03:50.460 The fact that we see this in non-Christian sources.
00:03:53.740 The fact that this event changed the entire world
00:03:58.200 and has withstood debunking for 2,000 years.
00:04:01.540 And the best that Christopher Hitchens can offer
00:04:03.120 is some stupid line from David Hume.
00:04:05.780 Weak sauce.
00:04:06.340 What's the next one?
00:04:07.180 I never said that I attacked bad behavior
00:04:09.300 that was undertaken or involved in the name of, as you put it, religion.
00:04:12.560 I do insist that this kind of bad behavior is innate in religion,
00:04:15.360 is part of religion itself.
00:04:16.440 It's not an abuse of it or something undertaken in the name of.
00:04:18.760 It's a direct consequence of the willingness to believe in the supernatural
00:04:21.480 and the willingness to believe in a supernatural dictatorship in particular.
00:04:24.420 Is it not written that I come not to bring a piece but a sword?
00:04:27.080 Surely it is.
00:04:29.220 Is it not written that those who won't follow me
00:04:31.500 shall be departed, must depart, and be cast into everlasting fire?
00:04:34.760 Not a very gentle or pacific remark.
00:04:36.680 Is it not said that if you don't give up your family,
00:04:39.420 if you don't give up thrift,
00:04:40.460 if you don't give up everyone who loves you and everything you love
00:04:42.440 to sacrifice yourself for me, you're not worthy.
00:04:44.260 These are strongly coercive and implicitly authoritarian or even totalitarian statements.
00:04:49.420 Oh my goodness gracious. 0.97
00:04:50.600 You know, it's funny going back to these now
00:04:52.900 because I still see how they appeal to a 13-year-old
00:04:56.620 because Christopher Hitchens, for all of his British charm,
00:05:02.080 he talks like an edgy 13-year-old online.
00:05:04.940 I mean, this is not sophisticated stuff at all.
00:05:08.360 By the end, he's really mis-paraphrasing the gospel accounts.
00:05:13.320 Christ doesn't tell you that you have to abandon your family in order to follow him,
00:05:18.340 though you should place him and God first in your life,
00:05:21.840 and then everything follows from that.
00:05:23.580 And then he says, Christianity is not a pacifist religion.
00:05:25.660 No, it's not a pacifist religion.
00:05:26.740 That's true.
00:05:27.700 But it's not a call to violence.
00:05:30.100 And he says it's a supernatural dictatorship.
00:05:32.720 And this gets back to something he said in the previous video, too.
00:05:35.440 He says, can you imagine how insane it would be
00:05:37.800 that the laws of nature could be suspended in the course of miracles?
00:05:42.060 You say, well, the natural has to be based on a foundation of the supernatural.
00:05:48.140 This is necessary.
00:05:49.060 The fact that we can speak, the fact that we are communicating ideas at all,
00:05:53.500 which I can't touch, I can't smell them, I can't see them,
00:05:56.560 but nevertheless they exist.
00:05:58.260 The fact that mathematics exists,
00:06:00.300 the fact that loves and dreams and hopes and desires
00:06:02.840 and any intelligible thing at all exists
00:06:06.100 shows you that there is a metaphysical layer to reality,
00:06:10.940 and it's more fundamental than the physical layer.
00:06:13.380 Really shallow stuff.
00:06:14.580 Fit for a 13-year-old.
00:06:15.660 Next one.
00:06:15.960 Some of your most strongly stated arguments are that violence, death, destruction,
00:06:23.420 the motivation being religion discredit those who would promote a belief in God.
00:06:33.040 However, I think there's an imbalance there in that the nuclear bomb was created by physicists
00:06:40.180 and is the most demonstrable violence perpetrated on mankind.
00:06:47.180 So I wonder how you respond to that.
00:06:50.700 Well, physics isn't an ideology.
00:06:52.680 Physics isn't a belief system.
00:06:54.240 It's a science.
00:06:55.800 Well, I think that would be subjective.
00:06:57.180 I mean, you could, any more than the Marie Curie discovering radium makes her practice morally different.
00:07:08.640 I mean, it's not comparing like with like.
00:07:11.880 What I'm talking about are specific religious injunctions to do evil,
00:07:16.220 to mutilate the genitalia of children, for example.
00:07:18.760 To take the pastor, Douglas Wilson, who Dr. Craig was just mentioning,
00:07:23.440 with whom I crossed swords several times this year, recently in Dallas,
00:07:26.280 happened to be mentioning to him about the commandment to exterminate the Amalekites in one of our debates.
00:07:31.760 He said that commandment is still valid.
00:07:34.480 If there were any Amalekites, it would be his job to make sure that they were all put to the sword. 1.00
00:07:39.380 And some of the virgins left over for slavery purposes better imagined perhaps than described.
00:07:46.080 I think this is a very serious problem.
00:07:47.500 I'm not taking refuge in the commonplace that sometimes people, religious people behave badly.
00:07:54.160 That would discredit religion. 0.96
00:07:55.320 That would be a very soft option.
00:07:56.980 I'm saying there are specific biblical scriptural injunctions to do evil.
00:08:02.140 When we talk about human action, we're talking about political action, the decision to create a bomb,
00:08:08.700 the decision to drop that bomb, the decision to talk to somebody about dropping the bomb.
00:08:12.840 That would be a political action that involves society.
00:08:15.300 But at a higher level, what that involves is applied morality.
00:08:21.240 So before you make that decision, you have to know something about applied morality.
00:08:25.260 How do we come to those decisions and what does our morality say about those decisions?
00:08:29.960 Above applied morality, you have morality broadly, more abstract morality.
00:08:34.520 Above that, you have anthropology.
00:08:37.000 What is man?
00:08:37.700 What is the nature of man such that we can even make these kinds of moral decisions and come to these moral conclusions and engage in these political actions?
00:08:45.300 Above anthropology, you have epistemology.
00:08:47.380 How can we know anything at all?
00:08:48.920 Know anything about human beings, but know anything about anything.
00:08:52.000 How do we know?
00:08:53.420 And then beyond epistemology, you have the question of theology.
00:08:57.600 What is there to know?
00:08:59.100 What is reality?
00:09:00.460 What is?
00:09:01.480 Christopher Hitchens stops at the first circle.
00:09:04.080 Well, as do all of these people.
00:09:05.940 Well, that's just science.
00:09:06.980 Okay, well, what's behind the science?
00:09:09.900 What are the premises that go into that?
00:09:12.400 They don't want to acknowledge that.
00:09:14.620 They say, no, religion is all bad.
00:09:15.920 Religion is a habit of virtue that renders to God what he deserves. 0.90
00:09:19.180 That's it.
00:09:19.880 People have different views on religion.
00:09:21.840 Some more correct, some less correct.
00:09:24.300 But to have this childish atheism coming from Christopher Hitchens who throws his hands up and says,
00:09:30.420 la, la, la, religion bad, religion, well, everybody engages in some kind of religion.
00:09:36.080 Some people just are not conscious of what they're doing, unfortunately, like Hitchens,
00:09:39.920 who speaks very well, but who doesn't have very deep things to say.
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00:10:49.580 Some people I know who are atheists will say they wish they could believe it.
00:10:56.160 Some people I know who are former believers say they wish they could have their old faith back.
00:11:00.120 They miss it.
00:11:00.940 I don't understand this at all.
00:11:03.220 I think it's an excellent thing that there's no reason to believe in the absurd propositions I just admittedly rather briefly rehearsed to you.
00:11:13.040 The main reason for this, I think, is that it is a totalitarian belief.
00:11:19.340 It is the wish to be a slave.
00:11:21.500 It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep.
00:11:31.840 Who can subject you, who must indeed subject you, to a total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life.
00:11:42.460 I say of your life before you are born and even worse than where the real fun begins after your death.
00:11:48.480 A celestial North Korea. 0.74
00:11:56.060 Who wants this to be true?
00:11:59.640 Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate?
00:12:04.880 So Hitchens says it's slavery to serve God.
00:12:07.220 Is it now?
00:12:08.860 Because I'm more persuaded by what Christ says in the Gospels, which is the man who sins is a slave to sin.
00:12:16.960 And anyone who's ever suffered from an addiction knows this.
00:12:21.860 You begin using drugs, let's say, or booze or something.
00:12:25.680 You begin indulging in this vice because you think it's an expression of your freedom.
00:12:30.700 I'm free.
00:12:31.060 No one can tell me what to do, man.
00:12:32.300 I'm just going to do what I want to do.
00:12:33.940 But then the more you do it, the more you feel impelled to do it, the harder it is to stop doing it.
00:12:40.800 And then you become a slave.
00:12:42.120 This is why Lord Acton points out that freedom is not the ability to do whatever we want whenever we want to do it.
00:12:48.940 But freedom is the right to do what we ought to do.
00:12:51.660 It's true.
00:12:52.260 God asks you to submit yourself to him, to conform your will to his will.
00:12:59.800 But that isn't slavery.
00:13:01.080 That's freedom.
00:13:02.640 As Christ says, my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
00:13:06.600 And what's the alternative?
00:13:09.600 The alternative is a perverted, false form of freedom.
00:13:14.480 A false form of liberty, which is really license, that makes you a slave.
00:13:19.020 And a slave to a much harsher master than God, who loves you.
00:13:24.020 It makes you a slave to the devil, who wants to consume you.
00:13:26.860 And who often does when we refuse God's grace.
00:13:30.540 Okay.
00:13:31.320 Next one.
00:13:31.600 It was the fate of many, many Jewish people in Europe to have to wonder to whom they could turn in their time of extremity.
00:13:40.700 And I'll tell you the place they didn't turn, which was to the churches that had made the official concordat with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
00:13:48.540 The churches that had told their parties to vote for him in the Reichstag, the church that had told, especially the Catholic church, that had told its bishops to celebrate Adolf Hitler's birthday every year from the pulpit, which they did until April 1945.
00:14:05.860 This is so profoundly dishonest.
00:14:08.240 ...Semitism on which the Nazi party based itself, which in many cases violated the seal of the confessional to turn over resistors, and in all cases turned over the birth records of the parishes of Bavaria and the rest of Germany, so that the Nuremberg laws could be enforced and everyone with even a particle of Jewish blood could be identified, set aside for deportation and persecution.
00:14:32.180 Anyone who doesn't know this doesn't know anything about it.
00:14:34.760 Oh my goodness.
00:14:35.380 So profoundly dishonest.
00:14:37.780 ...was excommunicated or threatened with excommunication by the church for taking part in the final solution.
00:14:43.420 Paul Johnson, a Roman Catholic historian, estimates that 40 to 50 percent of the Waffen-SS were confessing, communicating Roman Catholics.
00:14:52.020 Not one of them was ever threatened with the smallest punishment for what they did or were doing.
00:14:58.060 Wow, just amazingly dishonest on the history of the church and in the Second World War, amazingly dishonest.
00:15:04.840 It's true, Pope Pius XII, to my knowledge, never excommunicated Hitler. 0.93
00:15:09.520 Hitler was not a practicing Catholic.
00:15:11.760 He did, however, try to kill Hitler.
00:15:15.580 Pope Pius XII worked quite closely, actually, with the German resistance against Hitler.
00:15:21.240 He would give the Brits tips.
00:15:24.840 He was a go-between between the German resistance and the Allies.
00:15:28.580 He had a spy trying to kill Hitler, Joseph Mueller, a Catholic priest.
00:15:33.060 Pope Pius XII personally saved at least 15,000 Jews, worked around Rome.
00:15:38.720 But elsewhere as well, Castel Gandolfo, which is the papal retreat, housed thousands of Jews during World War II to protect them from the Nazis.
00:15:48.600 The church used so many means at her disposal to keep Jews away from the Nazi persecution.
00:15:55.060 Jewish historians estimate some 860,000 Jews were saved by the actions of the Catholic Church during World War II.
00:16:04.440 The Catholic Church, which was a victim of Hitler and saw herself as a victim of Hitler.
00:16:10.420 The chief rabbi of Jerusalem thanked Pius XII for his efforts.
00:16:15.340 So this is just a complete fable coming from Hitchens.
00:16:19.820 Or what he does, I guess this would be the way that he tries to be not a total liar about this.
00:16:26.600 He'll say, well, you know, there was some priest who was really bad.
00:16:28.800 Or, oh, there was some bishop who was really, really bad.
00:16:30.480 Okay, but look at the actions of the church all the way up to the head of the church and the vicar of Christ.
00:16:34.380 860,000 Jews saved.
00:16:35.780 Goodness gracious me.
00:16:36.720 I mean, at least in the other arguments that Christopher Hitchens makes, they're extremely shallow.
00:16:44.080 But they're trying in some way to grapple with some question of morality.
00:16:49.760 But there, Hitchens just has to totally ignore history.
00:16:53.200 Whether it's through ignorance or whether it's just through his deep hatred of God, his apparent hatred of God, I'm not sure exactly what it is.
00:16:59.840 So revisiting these things, it makes me ashamed of myself that I fell for these arguments.
00:17:05.200 The proof of the pudding is in the tasting on a lot of these questions as well.
00:17:08.840 And so you can see that the arguments aren't very good.
00:17:12.120 And you can go back and read theological sources or philosophical sources or question, you know, texts on ethics and history, I guess, in the case of his last video.
00:17:22.540 But ultimately, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting.
00:17:24.600 Does Chris Hitchens look like a guy who was flourishing?
00:17:28.400 Looked like a guy who was happy, who was at peace, who was comfortable in virtue?
00:17:34.500 Is that the sort of behavior you would want to model your life after?
00:17:37.480 Is that the kind of guy where you say, this guy has figured it out?
00:17:40.360 I don't think so.
00:17:41.540 Caused 10 years of confusion for me, but glad I got out.
00:17:44.780 Not everybody is quite so lucky to escape from the misery-inducing delusions of atheism.
00:17:52.140 Okay, I'm Michael Knowles.
00:17:53.540 We'll see you next time.
00:17:54.220 We'll see you next time.