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Moderator: Timekeeper are you ready?
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Begin.
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Well that was all very interesting.
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Ask yourselves, what is wrong
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with spending eternity in hell.
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Well I'm told
it's rather hot there, for one.
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Doctor Craig is not offering an
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alternative view of morality.
The whole point of Christianity
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or so it is imagined, is to safeguard
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the eternal well being of human souls.
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Now happily there's absolutely no
evidence that the Christian hell exists.
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I think we should look
at the consequences of believing
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in this framework,
this theistic framework, in this world,
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and what these moral underpinnings
actually would be.
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9 million children
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die every year
before they reach the age of 5.
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Picture an Asian tsunami
of the sort we saw in 2004 that killed
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a quarter of a million people.
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One of those every ten days
killing children only under 5.
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That's 24,000 children a day,
1,000 an hour, 17 or so a minute.
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That means before I can get
to the end of this sentence,
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some few children, very likely,
will have died in terror and agony.
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Think of the parents of these children.
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Think of the fact that most
of these men and women believe in god,
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and are praying at this moment
for their children to be spared.
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And their prayers will not be answered.
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But according to Dr Craig
this is all part of god's plan.
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Any god who would allow children
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by the millions to suffer
and die in this way,
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and their parents to grieve in this way,
either can do nothing to help them,
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or doesn't care to.
He is therefore either impotent or evil.
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And worse than that,
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on Dr Craig's view, most of these people,
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many of these people certainly,
will be going to hell
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because they are praying
to the wrong god.
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Just think about that.
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Through no fault of their own
they were born
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into the wrong culture
where they got the wrong theology
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and they missed the revelation.
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There are 1.2 billion people
in India at this moment.
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Most of them are Hindus,
most of them are therefore polytheists.
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In Dr Craig's universe,
no matter how good
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these people are, they are doomed.
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If you are praying to the monkey god
Hanuman, you are doomed.
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You'll be tortured in hell for eternity.
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Now is there the slightest evidence
for this?
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No.
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It just says so in Mark 9 and Matthew 13
and Revelation 14.
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Perhaps you'll remember from the Lord
of the Rings it says when the elves die
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they go to Valinor
but they can be reborn in Middle Earth.
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I say that just as a point of comparison.
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So god created
the cultural isolation of the Hindus.
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He engineered the circumstance of
their deaths in ignorance of revelation,
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and then he created
the penalty for this ignorance,
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which is an eternity
of conscious torment in fire.
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On the other hand,
on Dr Craig's account,
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your run of the mill
serial killer in America,
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who spent his life
raping and torturing children,
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need only come to god,
come to Jesus on death row,
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and after a final meal of fried chicken,
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he's going to spend
an eternity in heaven after death.
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One thing should be crystal clear to you.
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This vision of life has absolutely
nothing to do with moral accountability.
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Please notice the double standard
that people like Dr Craig
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use to exonerate god from all this evil.
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We're told that god is loving and kind
and just and intrinsically good,
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but when someone like myself points out
the rather obvious
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and compelling evidence
that god is cruel and unjust,
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because he visits suffering
on innocent people of a scope and scale
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that would embarrass
the most ambitious psychopath,
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we're told that god is mysterious.
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Who can understand god's will?
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Yet this is precisely,
this merely human understanding
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of god's will, is precisely
what believers use
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to establish his goodness
in the first place.
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If something good happens to a Christian,
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he feels some bliss while praying say,
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or he sees some positive change
in his life,
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and we're told that god is good.
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But when children
by the tens of thousands
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are torn from their parents arms
and drowned,
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we're told that god is mysterious.
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This is how you play tennis
without the net.
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I want to suggest to you
that it is not only tiresome
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when otherwise intelligent people
speak this way,
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it is morally reprehensible.
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This kind of faith really
is the perfection of narcissism.
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God loves me, don't you know?
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He cured me of my eczema.
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He makes me feel so good
while singing in church.
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And just when we had given up hope,
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he found a banker who was willing
to reduce my mother's mortgage.
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Given all this god of yours does not
accomplish in the lives of others,
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given the misery that's being imposed
on some helpless child at this instant,
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this kind of faith is obscene.
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To think in this way
is to fail to reason honestly,
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or to care sufficiently about
the suffering of other human beings.
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And if god is good
and loving and just and kind,
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and he wanted to guide us
morally with a book,
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why give us a book that supports slavery?
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Why give us a book
that admonishes us to kill people
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for imaginary crimes like witchcraft?
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Now of course there's a way
of not taking these questions to heart.
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According to Dr Craig's
divine command theory,
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god is not bound by moral duties.
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God doesn't have to be good.
Whatever he commands is good.
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So when he commands that
the Israelites slaughter the Malachites,
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that behaviour becomes intrinsically good
because he commanded it.
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Well here we're being offered, I'm glad
he raised the issue of psychopathy,
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we're being offered a psychopathic
and psychotic moral attitude.
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It's psychotic because
this is completely delusional.
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There's no reason to believe
that we live in a universe ruled
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by an invisible monster, Yaweh.
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But it is...
it is psychopathic
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because this is a total detachment
from the well being of human beings.
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This so easily rationalises
the slaughter of children.
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Just think about the Muslims,
at this moment,
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who are blowing themselves up,
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convinced that
they are agents of god's will.
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There is absolutely nothing that Dr Craig
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can say against their behavior,
in moral terms,
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apart from his own faith based claim
that they're praying to the wrong god.
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If they had the right god,
what they were doing would be good,
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on divine command theory.
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Now I'm obviously not saying that all,
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that Dr Craig or all religious people
are psychopaths and psychotics,
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but this to me
the true horror of religion.
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It allows perfectly decent
and sane people to believe
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by the billions what only lunatics
could believe on their own.
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If you wake up tomorrow morning
thinking that saying a few latin words
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over your pancakes is going to turn
them into the body of Elvis Presley,
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you have lost your mind.
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(Laughter)
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But if you think more or less the same thing
about a cracker and the body of Jesus,
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you're just a Catholic.
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(Laughter)
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And I'm not the first person to notice that
it's a very strange sort of loving god
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who would make salvation depend
on believing in him on bad evidence.
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It's..
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If you lived 2,000 years ago
there was evidence galore.
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He was just performing miracles
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but apparently he got tired
of being so helpful.
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And so now we all inherit
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this very heavy burden
of the doctrine's implausibility.
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And the effort to square it with
what we now know about the cosmos,
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and what we know about
the all too human origins of Scripture,
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becomes more and more difficult.
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And it's not just the generic god
that Dr Craig is recommending,
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it is god the father and Jesus the son.
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OK, Christianity on Dr Craig's account
is the true moral wealth of the world.
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I hate to break it to you
here at Notre Dame,
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but Christianity
is a cult of human sacrifice.
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Christianity is not a religion
that repudiates human sacrifice,
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it is a religion that celebrates a single
human sacrifice as though it were effective.
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God so loved the world
that he gave his only son. John 3:16.
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The idea is that Jesus suffered
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the crucifixion so that
none need suffer hell...
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except for those billions in India,
and billions like them throughout history.
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This is a stride,
this doctrine is a stride...
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A contemptible history
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of scientific ignorance
and religious barbarism.
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We come from people
who used to bury children
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under the foundations of new buildings
as offerings to their imaginary gods.
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I mean just think about that.
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In vast numbers of societies
people would bury children in post holes.
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People like ourselves thinking that
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this would prevent an invisible being
from knocking down their buildings.
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These are the sorts of people
who wrote the bible.
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If there is a less moral, moral framework
than the one Dr Craig is proposing,
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I haven't heard of it.
