There are would-be murderers all round the world
who want to kill you and me and themselves,
because they are motivated by what they think is the highest ideal.
Of course politics are important,
lraq, Palestine, even social deprivation in Bradford,
but as we wake up to this huge challenge to our civilised values
don't lets forget the elephant in the room, an elephant called religion.
The suicide bomber is convinced that in killing for his God,
he will be fast-tracked to a special martyrs' heaven.
This isn't just a problem of lslam.
In this program I want to examine that dangerous thing
that is common to Judaism and Christianity as well
the process of nonthinking called faith.
I am a scientist, and I believe there is a profound contradiction between science and religious belief.
There is no well-demonstrated reason to believe in god
and I think that the idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe.
The 21st century should be an age of reason, yet irrational, militant faith is back on the march.
Religious extremism is implicated in the world's most bitter and unending conflicts.
"We want the non-Muslims off the lands of Mohammad. We want the kafir out of it."
America, too, has its own fundamentalists.
"The Issue for the next generation is going to be the islamification of Europe."
And in Britain, even as we live in the shadow of holy terror,
our government wants to restrict our freedom to criticise religion.
Science, we are told, should not tread on the toes of theology.
But why should scientists tiptoe respectfully away?
The time has come for the people of reason to say enough is enough.
Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's divisive and it's dangerous.
Root of All Evil?
The God Delusion
lt looks lovely doesn't it? Inoffensive and gentle.
But isn't this the beginning of that slippery slope
that leads to young men with rucksack bombs on the Tube?
If you want to experience the mediaeval rituals of faith,
the candle light, incense, music, important-sounding dead languages,
nobody does it better than the Catholics.
At Lourdes in southern France, the assault on the senses appeals to us not to think,
not to doubt, not to probe.
And if we can retain our faith against the evidence, in the teeth of reality, the more virtuous we are.
Pretty impressive sight isn't it? I could imagine finding it very seductive,
partly because of the tremendous feeling of group solidarity that there must be.
If you have the delusion that you're Napoleon,
it must be fairly a lonely feeling because nobody else agrees with you.
Your faith that you are Napoleon needs a lot of shoring up.
But these people here, thousands of people all have exactly the same delusion,
and that must give wonderful reinforcement to their faith.
I used to think reason had won the war against superstition
but it's quite shaking to witness the faithful droves trooping through Lourdes.
This is a benign herd but it supports a backward belief system
that I believe reason must challenge.
Daylight reveals more of this shrine,
where a myth is perpetuated that a virgin who gave birth, Christ's mother Mary,
appeared here once to an impressionable, and I do mean impressionable, young girl.
The faithful make the pilgrimage here because they believe
that terrible afflictions can be cured by dragging their poor bodies up to a pool of water
where the Virgin Mary made her miraculous appearance.
In reality, they're probably more likely to catch something from thousands of other pilgrims
who've wallowed in the same water.
Is it something that Catholics feel they ought to do in their life,
rather like Muslims going on the Hajj to Mecca?
Well no, but you don't have to be a Catholic to do it you see,
I know a lot of people that are not Catholics at all and they've been here.
And what are you hoping to get out of it?
Well I've got a lot out of it: I've got faith, I've got trust and a belief that
there is a person out there who is stronger than any medical person.
Right. What about a cure though?
It may seem tough to question these poor desperate peoples' faith,
but isn't bracing truth better than false hope?
What is the evidence for any miracles?
There are actually 66 declared miracles, there are about 2000 unexplained cures here,
but then we would say there are millions of people who have been healed in different ways.
healed in some sort of mental way?
Healed in spiritual ways where people who have come to terms with their own particular situation,
people who have rediscovered God in their lives again,
people who have received a new grace here in Lourdes.
So you tend to get about 80,000 people per year?
About 80,000 sick pilgrims who come here every year.
That's been going for more than a century now? About a century and half? - Yes.
So, 80,000 per year, and of those 66 have been cured. I just want to ...
...you see the way I'm thinking. - Yep.
So the hard fact is that over the years,
with their millions of pilgrims, there have been 66 supposed miracles.
Statistically, it adds up to no evidence at all.
I cant help remarking that nobody has ever had a miraculous re-growing of a severed leg.
The cures are always things that might have got better anyway.
People lean on their faith as a crutch,
but I fear that the comfort it provides is a shallow pretence,
and I want to look at how the suspension of disbelief inherent in faith
can lead to far more dangerous ideas beyond.
People like to say that faith and science can live together side by side, but I don't think they can.
They're deeply opposed.
Science is a discipline of investigation and constructive doubt,
questing with logic, evidence and reason to draw conclusions.
Faith, by stark contrast, demands a positive suspension of critical faculties.
Science proceeds by setting up hypotheses, ideas or models, and then attempts to disprove them.
So a scientist is constantly asking questions, being sceptical.
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth,
through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
Let me give you an example of this with a story of the assumption of Mary.
Catholics believe that Jesus' mother Mary was so important she didn't physically die.
lnstead, her body shot off into heaven when her life came to a natural end.
Of course there is no evidence for this, even the Bible says nothing about how Mary died.
The belief that her body was lifted into heaven emerged about six centuries after Jesus' time.
Made up, like any tale, and spread by word of mouth.
But it became established tradition.
lt was handed down over centuries.
And the odd thing about tradition is that the longer it's been going,
the more people seem to take it seriously.
lt's as though sheer passage of time makes something that was to begin with just made up,
turns it into what people believe as a fact.
By 1950, the tradition was so strongly established that it became official truth.
It became authority.
The Vatican decreed that Roman Catholics must now believe
in the doctrine of the Assumption of the Virgin.
Now if you had asked Pope Pious XII how he knew it was the truth,
he would have said you had to take his word for it
because it had been ''revealed to him'' by God.
He shut himself away and thought about it.
He just thought, private thoughts inside his own head,
and convinced himself that,
no doubt on tortuous theological grounds, that it just had to be so.
None of this is particularly harmful
when it is limited to the Virgin Mary going to heaven.
But what about the Pope's personal convictions when it comes to,
say, discouraging the use of condoms in AIDS-ridden Africa?
Then, the power of the church through tradition, authority
and revelation comes with an appalling human cost.
It would be unfair to pick on the Catholics.
All religions are up to the same tricks.
It could be Muslim Imams issuing fatwahs, it's the same principle.
It's issued by the authority, it then passes down through the ranks to parents,
to children, and all without a shred of evidence.
Unlike science, which sees it as a challenge, religion thrives on unsolved mystery.
For early humanity, what was mysterious and unexplained was so vast
that only an equally vast higher being,
an Alpha male in the sky, could fill that gap.
How would our ancestors have responded to the sunrise?
There must be a fiery charioteer, a Sun God, to accept our sacrifices.
A supreme being who, on the first day of creation, announced ''let there be light''.
But scientific investigation has rolled back that mystery.
Today we know the sun is a giant nuclear reactor.
One of billions of stars pumping out electromagnetic radiation, heat and light.
How do scientists know the things that they know
about the world and the universe?
How do we know, for instance, that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old
and that it orbits the sun that nourishes it?
How do we know that these dinosaurs are hundreds of millions of years old?
The answer is evidence.
Tons and tons of mutually supporting evidence.
Science is about testing, comparing and corroborating this mass of evidence,
and using it to update old theories of how things work.
I do remember one formative influence in my undergraduate life.
There was an elderly professor in my department
who had been passionately keen on a particular theory for a number of years.
And one day an American visiting researcher came,
and he completely and utterly disproved our old man's hypothesis.
The old man strode to the front, shook his hand and said, ''My dear fellow,
I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these 15 years.''
And we all clapped our hands raw.
That was the scientific ideal
of somebody who had a lot invested,
a lifetime almost invested in a theory,
and he was rejoicing that he had been shown wrong,
and scientific truth had been advanced.
So what does the overwhelming evidence of all these fossils tell sceptical science?
How did we and every creature get here, in all our improbable diversity?
In past centuries, humanity had no choice but to resort to a supernatural hypothesis.
Among the many creation myths around the world,
the Book of Genesis imagined a designer God
who fashioned the world and life in just six days.
Finally, in the 19th century, science pieced together what had really happened.
Charles Darwin hit upon a truly brilliant idea
that elegantly explains all of life on earth,
without any need to invoke the supernatural or the divine.
Here's a helpful way to look at the problem Darwin faced.
Climbing a mountain. Let's call it Mount Improbable.
Let's say at the bottom we have the simple bacterial beginnings of lifeon earth.
At the top, man today, or any complicated piece of biology.
So how did we get to the top?
If it had happened by blind chance or by design,
lt would be equivalent to leaping up a sheer cliff in a single bound.
Utterly out of the question.
If we come round the other side of Mount Improbable,
we find something very different.
Here, there is no sudden precipitous cliff,
here there's a gentle slope, a gradient of evolution.
All we have to do is put one foot in front of the other and we'll get to the top.
Darwin's great insight was that life evolved steadily and slowly,
inching its way gradually over four billion years.
Natural selection, not a divine designer, was the sculptor of life.
So evolution, driven by Darwin's motor of natural selection,
gets us to the top of Mount Improbable.
From primeval simplicity to ultimate complexity.
The design hypothesis couldn't even begin to do that,
because it raises an even bigger problem than it solves:
who made the designer?
The abundance and variety of life on earth may seem improbable
but it's self-evidently futile to invent an improbable god
to explain that very improbability.
l thought that in my lifetime evolution would be accepted
and taught around the world as a scientific fact,
supported by overwhelming evidence.
But unfortunately, the whole point about faith
is that even massive and constantly accumulating physical evidence cuts no ice.
Evolution today is under threat.
ln the Bible Belt of middle America,
evangelical Christians are fighting back against science.
In the new world, religion is free enterprise.
Rival groups set up shop on every street corner,
competing to save people's souls and collect their money.
Fundamentalist Christianity is on the rise among the electorate
of the world's only super power.
Right up to and including the President (Bush).
If you believe the surveys, 45% of Americans,
that's about 135 million people,
believe the universe is less than 10,000 years old.
This is the New Life Church in Colorado Springs.
Where conservative Christians have built
an 18 million dollar worship center
as their new Jerusalem, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
Evangelical churches like this have become a powerful lobby,
exerting enormous influence on everything in America
from the teaching of science in schools, to foreign policy.
This place strains belief.
It isn't just a church but a ready-made social network.
The 12,000 strong congregation can also attend 1,300 organized programs
where they can meet to exchange Christian tips
on everything from marriage to dog walking.
It's all terribly exuberant and intense.
Much less tradition here than in Lourdes,
but plenty of swaggering authority.
The pastor is Ted Haggard. A powerful man.
Chairman of the National Association of Evangelicals
and the New Life is Ted's evangelical Vatican.
''Welcome to all of our friends!
Take a moment and say hello to the people behind you,
in front of you, to your right, to your left.''
''Hey we wanna welcome all of you that are visiting here with us today,
if you are here for the very first time,''
''we have a packet of information that we wanna give to you ...''
Sadly, the warmth of the welcome would prove short-lived
when I started talking to Pastor Haggard about the Bible and scientific fact.
You will find yourself wrong on some things, right on some other things.
But please, in the process of it. DonŽt be arogant.
We exalt you here this morning, Lord God.
Everything that's within us wants to give you praise and glory and honor,
'cos we are so grateful for ...
The New Life Church in Colorado Springs
is a bastion of American religious conservatism.
''Thank you for transforming our lives. Thank you, Lord God, for ...''
I've come to try to understand why what I see as irrational faith is thriving.
And why it's attacking science.
'' ... and in Jesus' name we pray. And everybody says Amen!''
''Amen!''
''Welcome to the United States!'' - Thank you very much.
Pastor Ted Haggard has a hotline to God and to George Bush.
A staunch Republican, he claims he has a weekly conference call with the President,
and has also rubbed shoulders with Tony Blair and Ariel Sharon.
Well that was really quite a show you gave us today.
A fair bit of money seems to have been spent here.
Yes. I wanted people to be able to worship and enjoy it,
and be in a setting where the speaker is close to them,
that's why it's in the round, and so they can be up close to me
and so l can look at them.
Well it's certainly very effective, what you do,
I mean, it seemed to me you have all the arts of ..
I mean, I was almost reminded me,
if you'll forgive me, of a sort of Nuremberg rally. I mean ...
such incredibly ...
Doctor Goebbels would have been proud.
Well I don't know anything about the Nuremberg rallies,
but I know lots of Americans think of it as a rock concert.
When I prepare a presentation,
I don't prepare it to get a group of lunatics to come in
and just say ''oh yes Pastor Ted, you're just so wonderful,
I believe everything you say''.
I would be opposed to that.
Here the Bible says '...
who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God, the Father,
this is talking about us, we've been chosen for ...
what's that word there Betty?
''Obedience.'' - ''Say it out loud.''
''Obedience!'' - ''Okay, so we have been chosen ...''
Every person needs, at the center, some sense of meaning about existence.
It is life and death to us. It makes us who we are.
Yet most of us, as we grow up and become responsible adults,
accept that life is complex, that we live in a world of subtle shades,
not sharp black and white.
I worry that these born-agains
are being persuaded to return to childish certainties.
The only truth they need is God,
God as interpreted for them by their pastor.
You've been set free from sin!
Think about that!
Everybody knows that we believe the Bible's the word of God.
And today I talked about love your neighbor as yourself.
Now, I didn't have to produce evidence,
sociological evidence or psychological evidence ...
But you have a book,
How can you say they're asked to think for themselves...
...and they're told everything in this book is true?
Because they don't have to believe that.
The evidence that I presented you can go and read.
This book, it says one thing,
that book says another, that book says another,
that book contradicts the others ...
Well the evidence I can present is we've got a book,
written over 1500 years by 40 different authors,
on one subject, and it doesn't contradict itself.
It doesn't?
Where you cant give me two,
two experts in certain areas that are in the same generation,
in the same area of study, that don't contradict themselves.
That's the beauty of science.
We have lots of evidence, and the evidence is all the time coming in,
constantly changing our minds.
Whereas you have one book which you say it doesn't change ...
Exactly.
That's not getting them to think for themselves!
... and we've all decided as a group, to go to the holy place. True or false?
(Congregatlon) True!
True! Everybody say TRUE!
''TRUE!''
Alright then. That's the vote ...
But my biggest concern is that evangelicals like Haggard
are foisting evident falsehoods on their flock.
... are so wonderful, and so necessary, that I wanna ...
The evangelicals are denying scientific evidence
just to support Bronze Age myths.
... alive in our lives. And then of course, we need the power of the Holy Spirit.
We fully embrace the scientific method, as American evangelicals.
And we think, as time goes along, as we discover more and more facts
that we'll learn more and more about how God created the heavens and the Earth.
The scientific method clearly demonstrates
that the world is 4.5 billion years old. I mean, do you accept that?
Yeah, you know what you're doing is you are accepting some of the views
that are accepted in some portions of the scientific community, as fact.
Where in fact, your grandchildren might listen
to the tape of you saying that and laugh at you.
You want a bet?
Sometimes it's hard for human being to study the ear or study the eye,
and think that happened by accident.
I beg you pardon? Did you say by accident?
- Yeah. What do you mean, by accident?
That the eye just formed itself somehow.
- And who says it did? Well, some evolutionists say it did.
Not a single one that l've ever met.
Really? - Really.
You obviously know nothing about the subject of evolution.
Or maybe you haven't met the people I have.
But you see, you do understand, you do understand that this issue right here
of intellectual arrogance is the reason
why people like you have a difficult problem with people of faith.
I don't communicate an air of superiority over the people
because I know so much more,
and if you only read the books I know,
and if you only knew the scientists I knew,
then you would be great like me.
Well, sir, there could be many things that you know well.
There are other things that you don't know well.
As you age, you'll find yourself wrong on some things,
right on some other things.
But please, in the process, of it don't be arrogant.
We just had a rather disconcerting experience.
We were just packing up our stuff ready to go,
when he suddenly drove up in his pick up truck and said,
"Get of my land immediatelly", "IŽll have you thrown in jail" and "IŽll have seize your film".
And he then says a very curious thing, he said,
"You called my children animals."
Afterwards we worked out, that what he must have meant,
was that I talked about evolution.
He thought that I was saying, that his flock were animals.
Which of course in some sense I was, because all humans are all animals.
Haggard's approach is to say
let's teach evolution as just another theory
alongside the Bible's creation story.
Or so-called Intelligent Design, which claims God helped evolution along.
It sounds so reasonable, doesn't it?
But of course it's nothing of the sort.
These are not equal theories.
Evolution by natural selection is supported by mountains of evidence.
While creation contradicts the evidence
and is only backed by some ancient scribblings.
With Haggard and his followers on their doorstep,
the rational atheist minority here feel so browbeaten,
that they've organized themselves into what they call ''a freethinkers group'',
which meets furtively, perhaps to fantasise about moving to Canada!
How nice to meet you!
Hey Richard! lt's wonderful! Welcome, welcome, it's so good ...
Do freethinkers in America feel pretty beleaguered at the moment?
I've had my fair share of vitriolic letters and messages from parents
saying that I'm Satan's incarnate for teaching evolution,
and there are ministries here in Colorado Springs that indoctrinate
students in summer programs to challenge biologists,
biology teachers, in the classroom. And I've ...
So it's an organised campaign to challenge biology teachers?
Oh they're organised campaigns, absolutely. I do not tolerate it, because I ...
But they have this mindset that they are right.
If a person comes out in this country as an atheist,
they're likely to suffer career damage,
they might lose a job, they might not get a job,
they might lose an opportunity for an apartment.
Waking up, as most Americans do,
very late on this, coming to a realisation,
as we did during the McCarthy era, and even during ...
It's very similar to the McCarthy era ...
Yes, it is. We do begin now to see the dangers of this extremism.
Christian fascism isn't it?
Yeah. And whatever mantle you want to give it, which I've heard lately
is ''domination theology'', ''dominion Christianity'' ...
(Christian radio advertisements)
Fundamentalist American Christianity is attacking science.
But what is it offering instead?
A mirror-image of islamic extremism, an American Taliban.
We live in a time of lethal polarisation.
When the great religions are pushing their conflict to a point where
it is difficult to see how they can ever been reconciled.
In New York, Madrid and London we've witnessed the religious insanities
of the Middle East penetrate the heart of the secular west.
(George W Bush voiceover)
To understand the likes of Osama Bin Laden, you have to realise
that the religious terrorism they inspire
is the logical outcome of deeply-held faith.
Even so-called moderate believers
are part of the same religious fabric.
They encourage unreason as a positive virtue.
What's really scary is that religious warriors think
of what they are doing as the ultimate good.
Those of us brought up in Christianity can soon get the message:
'Onward Christian soldiers', 'fight the good fight',
'stand up! stand up for Jesus, ye soldiers of the cross!'
But as far as I'm concerned,
the war between good and evil,
is really just the war between two evils.
This is the holy land,
where the terrible certainties of faith began and still rage.
I've come here because it's a microcosm of the religious conflicts
which threaten rational values and civilisation.
The dreadful combination of politics and extreme faith has caused the
death of almost 4000 people here, in shootings,
suicide bombings and reprisals in the last five years.
Despite the troubles,
tourists still flock to Jerusalem,
to places that their particular brand of religion taught them to revere as a child.
The Via Dolorosa, where Jesus was allegedly whipped
and beaten during the last hours of his life.
Or the Muslim Dome of the Rock.
Or the Western Wall, Judaism's, and the world's, most holy ruin.
On the surface, it looks like a place of harmless myth.
Because here is the hill of Calvary,
where Jesus was crucified, and the tomb of Jesus.
And here, what we are facing,
to the stone of anointment, where the body of
Jesus was taken down from the cross,
so this is the slab where Christ's body was anointed with oil.
How do we know that? Is there any evidence that it was here?
You see, this is by telling from person to person.
It's tradition.
Traditional, from generation to the next.
We can see the hole where the cross was stood,
Where they put(ing) the cross inside the hole,
and this is the place where, the place of the crucifixion,
where Jesus died on the cross.
You don't really believe that, do you?
Ah, this is the Christians, as I explained to you that they believe,
this is the place where the crucifixion took place.
lf we come in closer to my side please, thank you.
[The] guard of the tomb is a Greek priest. Guarding of tomb of Jesus.
This is left from big part of the stone which closed the tomb,
What we call the rolling of angels.
Watch your head please, thank you very much.
This is where he stayed, and rose from death,
we call it Sepulchre, is empty tomb.
God bless you, you can touch[ing] the tomb,
you can make your prayer.
I get four days off! You come here tomorrow...
This holy city has to be one of the least enlightened places in the world.
And it is also a place of barely suppressed religious hatreds.
There will come the day and that day is now.
When you are on our lands, spreading these ideas,
that the soldiers of Allah will not put up with this.
We live at a time when religious belief is fighting back
against reason and scientific truth.
This is a problem for all of us,
because religion's irrational roots nourish intolerance
to the point of murder.
I'm in Jerusalem's old city,
trying to understand the role deeply-held faith plays in the bitter conflict here.
One of the first things you notice is the edgy watchfulness,
the different ethnic and religious communities live cheek-by-jowl,
but there are security checkpoints throughout the old city,
and one section above all is under heavy guard.
For the Muslims, the compound enclosing the Dome of the Rock and
Al-Aqsa mosque is, after Mecca and Medina, the third holiest site in lslam.
It was from here, they believe,
that the prophet Mohammad flew up to heaven.
As bad luck would have it, the Jews believe the same place
is the site of the long-destroyed first and second temples,
the holiest shrine in Judaism.
Jews are not allowed to worship inside the compound,
their prayers are restricted to the ruined western, or wailing, wall.
''When Jesus came here to overturn the tables,
there was no mosque in view.''
''When the Arabs conquered this part of the world,
they established the Al-Aqsa mosque.''
And then they put over where we think is the main temple compound,
where the altar was, where the holy of holy was,
they put another building called the Dome of the Rock,
it was not properly a mosque, and we at the present moment are
simply not allowed in there, inside the compound, identifiably as Jews.
The Muslims reject these Jewish claims.
And when Ariel Sharon entered the Temple Mount area in the Year 2000:
''I came here with a message of peace.''
His visit sparked the second, or Al-Aqsa Intifada,
a Palestinian uprising that has cost 4000 lives so far.
And if the Jews sincerely want peace with the Arabs and Muslims,
then they should stand away, keep away from the Al-Aqsa mosque.
''In the Muslim religion, there is no possibility anyway of sharing the territory.''
If l come in there, in some far corner, far away from a mosque,
in an open area, under a tree somewhere, if a Muslim will catch me
murmuring psalms or some other prayer,
he will call the police to have me 'egressed', shall I say.
As far as the Al-Aqsa mosque is considered,
there are no negotiations, absolutely no negotiations about it.
Because no Muslim has the right, worldwide, to negotiate over the Al-Aqsa mosque.
Again and again my conversations come back to the solid walls
that religion puts up. Back to implacable faiths.
''My holy book is true" , " I am right" ," He is wrong''.
So I went to meet someone who, in my naivete,
I thought might be able to see both sides of the story.
Yusuf Al-Khattab used to be called Joseph Coen,
born and brought up as a secular Jew in New York.
In 1998 he moved to Gaza as a Jewish settler,
but there he discovered a different God, Allah.
What I notice coming to this centre of world religions,
is what a lot hatred religion fosters.
I mean, I'm an atheist, and I am rather gentle, I don't hate people.
But it seems to me that I'm hearing hate on all sides,
and it seems to me is all to do with religion.
I hate atheists because atheists don't care
if somebody fornicates in the middle of the street,
they don't care if their women go bouncing around on TV topless,
it makes no difference, they don't believe in anything.
If you don't believe in a set rule,
and you believe that a constitution can change,
and you can amend the rules as they go along,
and if you don't believe in God's rule,
then what law do you have? You just have man-made laws.
I realized I was in the company of someone
who has willingly bought into fundamentalist dogma.
What do you think about the September 11 attacks on New York,
and the July 7 attacks in London?
Okay, since you like to speak about evolution, I'd like to start before
- what do you think about the Jews that have
destroyed over 417 Arab villages, including all mosques and majids,
which wouldn't affect you, 'cause you're an atheist.
So what are are you saying? That we should sit back...
Not at all.
...and say 'oh, you know what? Let us progress and
let us sit down and drink tea, and talk about what to do.
I think that's the most ridiculous thing.
All I could say is if there was noquote-unquote "state of Israel",
there would have been no September 11 .
But if we've all got to live together,
it's not going to be helped if there are people of very, very strong faith
who simply ''know'' they're right,
and are not amenable to argument because ...
There's somebody out there who's just as faithful as you,
and has his faith just as strong as yours, which is opposite to yours.
You see the problem is, Richard, I think that you have fear.
You know that this party of occupying Muslim lands,
and polluting society with these evil ideas that are around,
it's not gonna last forever. There will always be the soldiers of Allah
there to give the response to this.
So we also want the same thing.
All we want is ... we want the non-Muslims at this point
off the lands of Mohammad,
sal-allahu-alleihi-wasallam.
All the lands of Mohammad, We want the kaffir out of it.
Dawkins: Do you want Islam to take over rest of the world?
- Of course I want it to, and it will.
So my advice is to clean up your show at home,
take your forces off our lands, correct yourselves,
fix your society, alright? Fix your women ...
Fix your women? That's not my business,
that my women's business. They're not my women...
No, it is your business. It is your business.
When you take the women and dress them like whores on the street ...
I don't dress women, they dress themselves!
But you allow it as a norm, to let the women go on the street dressed like this.
What's goin' on with your society?
But I'm interested in religion and the effect that it has on peoples' minds,
and I'm worried about it.
And we're very worried about you.
I mean, what's goin' on with the stealing?
With the theft? It's out of control...
Clearly, historic injustice towards the Palestinians
breeds hatred and anger.
But we must face up to the fact that in creating the death cults of
suicide bombers, it's unshakable,
unreasonable conviction in your own righteous faith that is the key.
If preachers then tell the faithful
that Paradise after martyrdom is better
than existence here in the real world, it's hardly surprising that some
crazed followers will actually swallow it,
leading to a terrible cycle of vendetta, war and suffering.
I'm here on the Mount of Olives,
looking out over this beautiful old city.
We've heard some pretty extreme statements,
some hatred, some bigotry,
such as I haven't really heard before.
I don't see what future the world has,
as long as people think like that,
and people are going to go on thinking like that, as long as they're
brought up from childhood, from the cradle,
to think that there's something good about faith.
To think that there's something good
about believing because you've been told to believe,
rather than believing because you've looked at the evidence.
I want to say that killing for God is not only hideous murder,
it is also utterly ridiculous.
Unlike religion, science doesn't pretend to know everything.
There are still deep questions about the origins of the universe
that have yet to be explained.
But just because science can't answer them right now,
doesn't mean faith, tradition, revelation or an ancient holy text, can.
Science can't disprove the existence of God,
but that does not mean that God exists.
There are a million things we can't disprove!
The philosopher Bertrand Russell had an analogy:
Imagine there's a china tea pot, in orbit around the Sun.
You cannot disprove the existence of the tea pot, because it's too small
to be spotted by our telescopes.
Nobody but a lunatic would say 'well,
I'm prepared to believe in the tea pot because I can't disprove it'.
Maybe we have to be technically and strictly agnostic,
but in practice we are all tea pot atheists.
But now, suppose that everybody in the society, the teachers,
the tribal elders, all had faith in the tea pot.
Stories of the tea pot had been handed down for generations,
it's part of the tradition of the society,
there are holy books about the tea pot.
Then, somebody who said they did not believe in the tea pot, might be
regarded as eccentric or even mad.
There's an infinite number of things like celestial tea pots that we can't disprove.
There are fairies, there are unicorns, hobgoblins.
We can't disprove any of those.
But we don't believe in them anymore than nowadays we believe
in Thor, Amen-Rah, or Aphrodite.
We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in.
Some of us just go one god further.
In the next program, how faith acts like a virus that strikes the young,
and how the good book, which people follow for moral instruction,
actually reveals a god
who is surely the most vindictive character in all fiction.
Corrections and timing:) wafpress@wildmail.com