I mentioned the novelist Kingsley Amis
a moment ago, his son Martin Amis
is an equally distinguished novelist.
And he made a very important point.
"Secularism contains no warrant for action.
One can afford to be crude about this.
When Islamists crash passenger planes
into buildings, or hack off the heads of
hostages, they shout "God is great!"
When secularists do that kind of thing,
what do they shout?"
A critic of Martin Amis's book remarked
upon- on this "That question is meant to
be rhetorical, but there's a simple answer.
They shout- secularists shout Heil Hitler"
Audience: (gasps and murmurs)
What a truly outrageous thing to say.
Whether or not Hitler was a Roman Catholic
the evidence is contradictory, he often
said he was, nobody could deny that
Hitler's soldiers were as Christian as
everybody else was in Europe at the time,
and that means most of them were
mostly either Roman Catholic or Lutheran.
But even if Hitler was an Atheist, so what?
Hitler was also a vegetarian.
Audience: (laughter)
Does that suggest that vegetarians
have a special tendency to be murderous,
bigoted, racists? The point is that there
is a logical pathway leading from religion
to the committing of atrocities.
It's perfectly logical. If you believe
that your religion is the right one,
you believe your god is the only god,
and you believe your god has ordered you,
through a priest or through a holy book,
to kill somebody, to blow somebody up,
to fly a plane into a skyscraper,
then you are doing a righteous act.
You're a good person.
You're following your religious morality.
There is no such logical pathway leading
from Atheism or Secularism to any such
atrocious act. It just doesn't follow.
Audience: (applause)
Now, it's sometimes said that humans
need religion, even if it isn't true.
They need the comfort of religion.
I think there's something rather patronizing
about that, rather condescending
about it, but that's what people say.
Often Atheists say it. "Of course, you and I
are too intelligent to need religion,
but what about all those poor people
Audience: (laughter)
out there, who need the comfort of religion?"
Audience: (laughter)
Humanity's need for comfort is, of course
real. But isn't there something childish,
something infantile, in the belief
that the universe owes us comfort,
in the sense that if something is comforting,
that must, kind of make it true?
Isaac Asimov's remark about the
infantilism of pseudoscience is just
as applicable to religion. He said,
"Inspect every piece of pseudoscience,
and you will find a security blanket,
a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold."
And it is astonishing how many people are
unable to understand that "X is comforting"
does not imply that "X is true".
A related plaint concerns the need for
a purpose in life. To quote one Canadian
critic: "The Atheists may be right about
god, who knows. But god or no god, it's
clear that something in the human soul
requires a belief that life has a purpose
that transcends the material plane."
"One would think that a more- rational-
than- thou empiricist such as Dawkins
would recognize this unchanging aspect of
human nature. Does Dawkins really think
that this world would be a more humane
place if we all looked at The God Delusion
instead of the Bible for truth and comfort?"
Actually yes!
Audience: (laughter and applause)
Since you mention humane, yes I do.
But I must repeat, yet again, that the
consolation content of a belief
does not raise its truth value.
I can't deny the need for emotional comfort,
and I can't claim that the worldview adopted
in my book offers any more than moderate
comfort. If you're afraid of death,
for example, you might superficially think
that a priest, who tells you that you're
not really going to die, would be more
comforting than a scientist who tells you
it is highly implausible that our
individuality could survive
the decay of our brains.
But I have heard-
Audience: (laughter)
I have heard experienced nurses
who've worked all their lives in old
people's homes, say that the ones
who are most terrified of death tend
to be the Roman Catholics.
Audience: (laughter)
All that guilt, fed from the cradle up,
and the terror of purgatory and hell.
As for eternal nothingness, is
it really all that frightening?
As Mark Twain said "I do not fear death.
I had been dead for billions and billions
of years before I was born, and had not
Audience: (laughter)
suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."
Audience: (laughter)
Audience: (laughter and applause)
In any case, I don't think I've ever met
anyone at a funeral who dissents from the
view, my view, that the nonreligious parts,
the eulogies, the deceased's favorite
poems or music, those nonreligious parts
are always more moving than the prayers.
I want to end by reading the opening lines
of a previous book of mine, Unweaving
The Rainbow. These are lines that I've long
earmarked for my own funeral.
"We are going to die, and that makes us
the lucky ones. Most people are never
going to die because they are never going
to be born. The potential people who
could've been here in my place, but who
will, in fact, never see the light of day
outnumber the sand grains of Sahara.
Certainly those unborn ghosts include
greater poets than Keats, scientists
greater than Newton. We know this because
the set of possible people allowed by our
DNA so massively outnumbers the set of
actual people. In the teeth of these
stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our
ordinariness, that are here.
We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth
against all odds, how dare we whine at our
inevitable return to that prior state from
which the vast majority have never stirred."
Thank you very much.
Audience: (applause and cheers)
