Author Christopher Hitchens discusses his book "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" as a part of the Authors@Google series. The author of Why Orwell Matters and Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens is a Vanity Fair contributing editor, a Slate columnist, and a regular contributor to The Atlantic Monthly. He has also written for The Nation, Granta, Harper's, The Washington Post, and is a frequent television and radio guest. Born in England, Hitchens was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics. He now lives in Washington, D.C., and he became a U.S. citizen in 2007.  This event took place on August 16, 2007 at Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA.

Welcome to today's Authors at Google event.

After the talk, we're going to have a Q&A session.

And I'd like to remind everyone to please use the microphone in the middle of the room if you have questions.

It's my pleasure to introduce Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchens was born in England and educated at Oxford.

In 1981, he migrated to the US and recently became a US citizen.

He is the author of a number of notable books, including Why Orwell Matters and Letters to a Young Contrarian.

As 1 of our most notable public intellectuals, he has been a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, The Nation, Slate, and Free Inquiry, and taught at the New School, UC Berkeley, and the University of Pittsburgh.

In his new book, God Is Not great, he lies out the case against religion, which he spent a lifetime developing with anger, humor, and the formidable style of argument that defines all of Mr.

About the book, Michael Kinsey wrote in the New York Times, Hitchens has outfoxed the Hitchens Watchers by writing a serious and deeply felt book totally consistent with his beliefs of a lifetime.

Unlike most of those clamoring for his attention, Hitchens treats him like an adult.

Ever contrarian and always eloquent, He's here today to discuss the book, take your questions, and take on anyone who dares to challenge him to a debate.

And with that, please join me in welcoming Chris Britain to Google.

Well, thank you so much for that suspiciously grudging introduction.

And thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, for coming.

I understand we've only got the balance or so of an hour together, so I'll try and break the rule of a lifetime and be terse.

It's true that publishers sometimes want to put a catchy or suggestive or challenging title, subtitle on a book.

And so, when we hit upon, or rather they hit upon, well, how religion poisons and why religion poisons everything, I knew what would happen.

People would come up to me, they say, you mean absolutely everything, you mean the whole thing.

1 of the things you have to do in life as an author is live up to your damn subtitle.

So I thought today I'd defend the subtitle because I think the title probably, when it came to me in the shower, I realized pretty much does speak for itself.

Unlike that sign outside Little Rock Airport, huge yellow and black sign that you see from the airport that says just Jesus.

A word I have used myself and a name I know, but put like that seems to say both too much and too little.

Well, here's how religion has this effect in my opinion.

It is derived from the childhood of our species, from the bawling, fearful period of infancy.

It comes from the time when we did not know that we lived on an orb.

And we did not know that we went round the sun or that the sky was not a dome when we didn't know that there was a germ theory to explain disease and innumerable theories for the explanation of things like famine.

It comes from a time when we had no good answers.

But because we are pattern-seeking animals, a good thing about us, and because we will prefer even a conspiracy theory or a junk theory to no theory at all, a bad thing about us, This is and was our first attempt at philosophy just as in some ways it was our first attempt at science.

And it was all founded on and remains founded on a complete misapprehension about the origins first of the universe and second about human nature.

We now know a great deal about the origins of the universe and a great deal about our own nature.

I've just had my DNA sequenced by National Geographic.

You should all, by the way, get this done.

It's incredibly important to find out how racism and creationism have been abolished by this extraordinary scientific breakthrough, how you can find out your kinship with all your fellow creatures originating in Africa, but also your kinship with other forms of life, including not just animal, but plant.

And you get an idea of how you are part of nature and how that's wonderful enough.

And we know from Stephen Hawking and from many others, Stephen Weinberg and many other great physicists, an enormous amount now about what Professor Weinberg's brilliant book calls the first 3 minutes, the concept of the Big Bang.

And we can be as sure as we could probably need be that neither this enormous explosion that set the universe in motion, which is still moving away from us at great rate, nor this amazingly complex billion-dollar, billion-year period of evolution.

We can be pretty certain it was not designed so that you and I could be meeting in this room.

We are not the objects of either of these plans.

Sorry to say, wouldn't know or care if we stopped being here.

We have to face this alone with the equipment, intellectual and moral, that we've been given or that we've acquired or that is innate to us.

And here's another way in which religion poisons matters.

It begins by saying, well, why don't we lie to ourselves instead?

Why don't we pretend that we're not going to die or that an exception can be made at least in our own case if we make the right propitiations or the right moves.

Why do we not pretend that the things like modern diseases which we can sequence now, the sequence of genes of, like AIDS, are the punishment for wickedness and fornication?

Why don't we keep fooling ourselves that there is a divine superintendent of all this because it would abolish the feeling of loneliness and possibly even of irrelevance that we might otherwise have?

In other words, why don't we surrender to wish-thinking?

That poisons everything, in my opinion, right away.

It attacks the very basic integrity that we need to conduct the scrupulous inquiries, investigations, experiments, interrogations of evidence that we need to survive and to prosper and to grow.

And it's no coincidence, no accident, that almost every scientific advance has been made in the teeth of religious opposition of 1 form or another that says we shouldn't be tampering with God's design.

I suppose the most recent and most dangerous 1 of these is the attempt to limit stem cell research.

But everyone could probably think of other forms of scientific research and inquiry, especially medical, that had led to religious persecution in reprisal.

Thirdly, it's an attack, I think, on what's also very important to us, our innate morality.

If there's 1 point that I get made more than another to me when I go and debate religious people, it's this.

They say, Where would your morals come from if there was no God?

It's actually, it's a question that's posed in Dostoevsky's wonderful novel, The Brothers Karamazov.

1 of the brothers says, Smirniakov actually, the wicked 1, says it, If God is dead, isn't everything permitted?

Where would our ethics be if there was no superintending deity?

This again seems to me a very profound insult to us in our very deepest nature and character.

It is not the case, I submit to you, that we do not set about butchering and raping and thieving from each other right now only because we're afraid of a divine punishment or because we're looking for a divine reward.

It's an extraordinarily base and insulting thing to say to people.

On my mother's side, some of my ancestry is Jewish.

I don't happen to believe the story of Moses in Egypt or the exile or the wandering in the Sinai.

And in fact, now even Israeli archaeology has shown that there isn't a word of truth to that story or really any of the others.

Am I expected to believe that my mother's ancestors got all the way to Mount Sinai, quite a trek, under the impression until they got there that rape, murder, perjury, and theft were okay, only to be told when they got to the foot of Mount Sinai, bad news, none of these things is kosher after all.

I think we can actually have a better explanation in every sense, superior as well as better, that no 1 would have been able to get as far as Mount Sinai or any other mountain in any other direction unless they had known that human solidarity demands that we look upon each other as brothers and sisters and that we forbid activities such as murder, rape, perjury, and theft, that this is innate in us.

Of those to whom it is not innate, the sociopaths who don't understand the needs of anyone but themselves and the psychopaths who positively take pleasure in breaking these rules, well, all we can say is that according to 1 theory, they're also made in the image of God, which makes the image of God question rather problematic, does it not?

Or that they can be explained by further and better research and have to be restrained and disciplined meanwhile.

But in no sense here is religion a help where it claims to help most which is to our morality, to ethics.

Finally, I would say, not finally because I'm finished here.

I hope everyone's got a drink, something to eat.

But of these, on the poison question, I think there's the real temptation of something very poisonous to human society and human relations, which is the fear of freedom, the wish to be slaves, the wish to be told what to do.

Now, just as we all like to think, and we live under written documents and proclamations that encourage us to think, that it is our birthright and our most precious need to be free, to be liberated, to be untrammeled.

So we also know that, unfortunately, the innate in people is the servile, is the wish to be told what to do, is the adoration for strong and brutal and cruel leaders.

This other baser element of the human makeup has to be accounted for and gives us a great deal of trouble around the world as we speak.

Religion, in my view, is a reification, a distillation of this wish to be a serf, to be a slave.

Ask yourself if you really wish it was true that there was a celestial dictatorship that watched over you from the moment you were born, actually the moment you were conceived, all through life, night and day, knew your thoughts, waking and sleeping, could in fact convict you of thought crime, the absolute definition of a dictatorship, can convict you for what you think and what you privately want, what you're talking about to yourself, that monitors you like this under permanent surveillance, control, and supervision, and doesn't even let go of you when you're dead because that's when the real fun begins.

Who wants to lead the life of a serf in a celestial North Korea?

I'm indeed the only writer who's been to all 3 axis of evil countries, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.

And I can tell you, North Korea is the most religious state I've ever been to.

I used to wonder when I was a kid, what would it be like praising God and thanking him all day and all night?

Well, now I know because North Korea is a completely worshipful state.

It's set up only to do that for adoration and it's only 1 short of a trinity.

They have a father and a son, as you know, the dear leader and the great leader.

The father is still the president of the country.

But Kim Jong-il, the little 1, is only the head of the party and the army.

His father is still the president, head of the state.

So you have in North Korea what you might call a necrocracy or what I also call a mausolocracy, a thanatocracy.

1, just 1 short of eternity, father, son, maybe no Holy Ghost, but they do say that when the birth of the younger 1 took place, the birds of Korea sang in Korean to mark the occasion.

And I suppose I should add that they don't threaten to follow you after you're dead.

You can get out of their hell and their paradise by dying.

Out of the Christian and Muslim 1, you cannot.

I mean, my view, it poisons human relations.

Now, I've already babbled for nearly 20 minutes.

It is argued, well, some religious people have done great things and have been motivated to do so by their faith.

The most cited case in point I have found is that of Dr.

Martin Luther King, who I know I don't need to explain to you about.

He did preach the Book of Exodus, the exile of an enslaved and oppressed people as his metaphor.

But if he really meant it, he would have said that the oppressed people, as the Book of Exodus finds them doing, were entitled to kill anyone who stood in their way and take their land, their property, enslave their women, kill their children, and commit genocide, rape, ethnic cleansing, and forcible theft of land.

That's what the Book of Exodus describes happening, the full destruction of other tribes.

King only meant the Bible at the most to be used as a metaphor.

And after all, he was using the only book that he could be sure all of his audience had ever really read.

The second is, during his lifetime, He was attacked all the time for having too many secular and leftist and non-believing friends, the people like famous black secularists like Bayard Rustin, A.

Philip Randolph and others, the men who actually did organize the march on Washington, which leads me to my third observation, which is this.

It's a challenge I've made now in debates with rabbis, with priests of all Christian stripes, with the imams.

Once with a, I know this sounds like the opening of a joke about Sambar, but once also with a Buddhist nun in Miami.

You have to name me an ethical statement that was made or a moral action that was performed by a religious person in the name of faith that could not have been made as an action or uttered as a statement by a person not of faith, a person of no faith.

Not so far, I've done it at quite a high level with the religious, no takers.

That being the case, we're entitled to say, I think, that religious faith is surplus to requirements.

Whereas, if I was to ask anyone in this room, think of a wicked thing said or an evil thing done by a person of faith in the name of faith, no 1 would have a second of hesitation in thinking of what would they.

Interesting to realize how true that is and how much truer it's getting.

Does anyone ever listen to Dennis Prager's show?

He's a slightly loopy Christian broadcaster, religious broadcaster I should say.

He's not, he's more Jewish than Christian.

Judeo-Christian broadcaster who quite often rather generously has me on his show.

And he asked me a question the other day.

He said, you are to imagine that you're in a town late at night where you've never been before and you have no friends and it's getting dark and through the darkness you see coming towards you a group of men, let's say 10.

Do you feel better or worse if you know that they're just coming from a prayer meeting?" This is Mr.

Prager, without leaving you from just without quitting the letter B, I can tell you I've had that experience in Belfast, in Beirut, in Baghdad, in Bombay, in Bosnia, and in Bethlehem.

And if you see anyone coming from a religious gathering in any of those places, you know exactly how fast you need to run.

And I haven't had to waste any time telling you, have I, ladies and gentlemen?

So I submit to you that it is those who are people of faith who have the explaining to do, who have the justifying to do with if this is indeed the case.

If they can't account for anything about the origin of our cosmos or our species.

If they say that without them, we'd be without morals and make us seem as if we are merely animals without faith.

If further, everybody can name an instance where religion has made people actually behave worse to 1 another and act as a retardant upon the advances of knowledge and science and information.

I submit that the case to be made is theirs rather than mine.

We're not just arid secularists and materialists.

We can point to the through the Hubble telescope, the fantastic awe-inspiring majestic pictures that are being taken now of the outer limits of our universe.

And who's going to turn away from those pictures and start gaping again at the burning bush?

We have smaller microscopes that can examine for us the miracles of the interior and the double helix and the sheer beauty of that.

The natural world is wonderful enough, more wonderful than anything conjured by the fools who believe in astrology or the supernatural.

And we have a better tradition politically.

Against the popes and the imams and the witch doctors and the divine right of kings and the whole long tradition of civic repression combined with religion that's known as theocracy.

We have created in the United States the only country in the History of the World written on founding documents testable, organized, works in progress based on the theory of human liberation and the only constitution in the History of the World that says that there shall be a separation between the church and the state.

God is never mentioned in the United States Constitution except in order to limit religion and keep it out of politics and put it under legal control.

This achievement was described by President Jefferson, whose biographer I am in a small way, to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut in a letter after they'd written to him for fear of persecution.

By the way, who do you think Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut were afraid of being persecuted by?

The Congregationalists of Danbury, Connecticut.

See how the Christians loved each other, how they tried to repeat the European pattern of 1 religious sect repressing and torturing another 1.

And as you probably know, the President wrote back and said, no, you may be assured that there will ever be in this country a wall of separation between the church and the state.

So I have a new slogan, and I'm taking it on tour.

And I'll point to questioners if you'd like because I don't think anyone thinks that I've planted my immediate family in this hall.

I mean, you have explanations for everything.

And I agree with a lot of your arguments and you know like I lived in you know like a socialist country I mean I come from Croatia so I you know I empathize with a little bit of when you say the axis of evil, and especially North Korea being a perfect theocracy.

But I don't understand why do you say that these people really want to be enslaved?

I mean, I think there's really a system, you know, like set up by a minority which is really a brutal system.

And I don't understand that part of, you know, like this is something that these people want.

Well, then you, then I would be upset if you thought I meant that these man-made regimes were there because people wanted them to be.

That's not what I meant at all about North Korea, particularly.

I mean, North Korea is a hermetic place, unfortunately, in that it has ocean on either side of it, The demilitarized zone, which is several miles wide on the south and Russia and China on the north.

So, you have a place where you can horribly conduct an experiment on human beings, essentially.

The North Korean state was set up in the same year that Orwell published

And you almost think that somebody gave Kim Il-sung a copy of 1984 in Korean and said, do you think we could make this fly?

And he said, well, I can't be sure, but we sure can give it the old college try.

I went there, I thought, I've had this experience, I'll just digress for a second.

I've had this experience twice in my life.

I know it doesn't always seem like that when you read the papers, but we try and avoid them.

I went to Prague once under the old days of the communist regime.

I thought, whatever happens to me here, I'm not going to mention Franz Kafka in my essay.

I'm going to be the first journalist not to do it.

I went to a meeting of the opposition underground.

Somebody betrayed us because the secret police came in suddenly, wham, like this, broke down the door, dogs, torches, rubber truncheons, they're like, slam me against the wall.

I demand to see the British ambassador, blah, blah.

I thought, fuck, I've got to mention Kafka after all.

Well, I, I, that's actually what a cliche is.

I thought, I don't want to mention Orwell.

There's no, There's no other standard of comparison.

No, what I meant about the fear of freedom was this.

Many, many people don't, of course, want to live under a hellish starvation regime of gulag type like that.

But they quite like being told what to do.

And they don't want to be told that life doesn't

the world doesn't owe them a living and that they're on their own and they quite like it and repeatedly vote for parties and sometimes leaders who promise to provide everything as long as they'll give up just a little bit of freedom, just a little bit.

The trade-off, you'll get more security, more welfare.

And I'm very impressed by how often when I debate with religious people, they will tell me that they gravitate towards faith because they want someone to, if you like, look after them.

The whole idea of a heavenly father, for example, is built up in this.

The old joke says, some say God is dead, some say God is dad.

Then there are people who, well, Islam, for example, the word means, the word Islam means surrender, prostration.

But I think it's innate in most people is the feeling that they quite like someone to take care of them all the time.

So it can be hard to argue with them that there is no such person.

So is there a possibility there to say that then some people are more freedom loving than others and is this some sort of, you know, like of, I wouldn't call it racism or anything, but you know, like differentiating people by their love towards freedom.

No, I'm certain that the same feelings are innate in all people.

And that 1 day there will be a North Korean edition of 1984 and it'll be a huge bestseller.

I'm as sure of that as I can be of anything.

Though at the moment, it's hard to imagine that there's anyone in North Korea who's even allowed to consider the concept of political liberty.

To follow up on this fear of freedom and this innate idea, sorry to beat a dead horse, but What do you think would possibly replace this?

I also think that there's some, I mean it's obviously much easier to say my life is out of my control or these events are out of my control, so I'm gonna thank God for the good things and hate the devil for the bad things, whatever.

So from Plato to Nietzsche to Sartre have said, it's difficult to choose the life where you're actually deciding and making choices for yourself and taking responsibility and appreciating the fact that the world doesn't care about your existence and doing what you need to do with that.

How could we possibly imagine a world where everybody buys into that idea and how do we, where would we go like, where would that structure that some people feel they can't do without, where would they get that from?

I guess what would, what would religion be replaced by to fulfill this natural need, if anything.

Well, I would say that emancipating oneself from religion and from the combined sort of solipsism and masochism, which is what I was trying to say to the comrade here a moment ago, religion says to you, remember, the monotheistic ones, you're a miserable sinner, your sin is original, you can't escape it, you're born as a wretch, you're made out of dust or according to the Koran, a clot of blood, you're a worm, you're nothing, you know, but a piece of gunk basically.

But, and you've got to work really hard to get away from the terrible punishment that awaits you for that.

The universe is designed with you in mind.

So just when the person thinks they can't take any more abuse, it's like being inducted into a cult.

Just when the person thinks they can't take any more humiliation, they're told, ah, but Father loves you and he wants you to join our group.

So it's not a matter of what would we put in its place.

We'd be emancipated from that kind of sadomasochism.

Second, we have the wonders and beauties of science to study.

We have, instead of ancient texts that are full of lies and myths, we have increasingly a wonderful world literature that's available to anybody who can read even a little.

Most recently, I would just cite it because yesterday was the birthday of India.

Happy birthday, by the way, to all Indians here.

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God Is Not Great | Christopher Hitchens | Talks at Google