to have a Q and 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. Mr. Hitchens was born in England, and educated at Oxford. In 1981, he migrated

to the US, and recently, became a US citizen. He's the author of a number of notable books

including “Why Orwell Matters” and “Letters to a Young Contrarian.” As one 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

lines up the case against religion which he spent a lifetime developing with anger, humor

and a formidable style of argument that defines all of Mr. Hitchens's work. About the book,

Michael Kinsley wrote in the New York Times, “Hitchens has outfoxed the Hitchens watchers

by writing a serious and deeply-thought book, totally consistent with his beliefs of the

lifetime. And God should be flattered; 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. He'll be signing books afterwards. And, with that, please join me in welcoming

Christopher Hitchens to Google. >> HITCHENS: Thank you, darling. Sweet. 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 of an hour together so,

I'll try and break the rule of a lifetime and be terse. I think I'll put it like this.

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 they hit upon, well, how religion

poisons and why religion poisons everything, I knew what would happen, people would come

up to me, they'd say, you mean absolutely everything, you mean the whole thing? They'd

take me literally. I thought, well, all right. One of the things you have to do in life as

an author is live up to your damn subtitle. So, today, I'd defend the subtitle because

I think the title probably, when it came to me in the shower, I realized, it pretty much

does speak for itself. Unlike that sign outside Little Rock airport, huge--we had a black

sign that you see from the airport that says, just "Jesus," a word I have used myself, and

a name I know but putting it like that seems to say both too much and too little, you know

what I mean? 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. We thought we lived on a

disc. And we did not know that we went around 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 junk theory to no theory at all, a bad thing about us.

This is and was our first attempt of 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 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 would be 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 any others,

Steven Weinberg and many other great physicists, an enormous amount now about what Professor

Weinberg's brilliant book calls The First Three Minutes, the concept of the Big Bang.

And we can be assured as we could probably need be that neither this enormous explosion

that set the universe in motion, which is still moving away from us in a 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. These plans don't know we're here. I'm 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 to 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, sequence the 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 irrelevance that we might otherwise--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 one form or another that says we shouldn't

be tampering with God's design. I suppose the most recent and most dangerous one of

these is the attempt to limit stem cell research. But everyone could probably think of all 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 one 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 Dostoyevsky's

wonderful novel, The Brothers Karamazov, one of the brothers says--Snelyakov, actually,

the wicked one, says it. If God is dead, isn't everything permitted, isn't everything permissible?

Where would our ethics be if there was no superintending duty? 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 and Egypt or the exile or the wandering and 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; but take it to be true. Am I expected to believe 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 are kosher at all. They're all forbidden.

I don't think so. I think, I think we can--actually, I have a better explanation ever since--superior

as well as better--that no one would have been able to get as far as Mount Sinai or

any other mountain or 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. This is innate in us. If those activities

are 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, according to one theory, they are 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 a further

and better research and have to be restrained and disciplined meanwhile, but in no sense

here is religion a help where it came to help most which is to our morality, to our ethics.

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

Don't relax. Everyone has got to drink, something to eat, but 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 birth right and our most precious need to

be free, to be liberated, to be untrammeled. So we also knew 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, that this other baser element of the human makeup has to be

accounted for and it 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--the absolute definition of a dictatorship, can

convict you for what you think or what you privately want, what you're talking about

to yourself, that admonishes 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. Now, my question is this--my question is this, who wishes that that were

true? Who wants to live the life of a serf in a celestial North Korea? I've been to

North Korea. I'm one of the very few writers who has. I'm indeed the only writer who's

been to all three 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 one short of a trinity. They have a father

and the son, as you know, the Dear Leader and the Great Leader. The father is still

the president of the country. He's been dead for 15 years, but Kim Jong-il, the little

one, 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--I

called them mausolocracy, thanatocracy. One--just one short of a trinity; father, son, maybe

no holy ghost, but they do say that when the birth of the younger one took place, the birds

of Korea sang in Korean to mark the occasion. This I've checked. It did not happen. Take

my word for it. It didn't occur and I suppose I should add they don't threaten to follow

you after you're dead. You can leave North Korea. You can get out of their hell and their

paradise by dying. To the Christian and Muslim one, you cannot. This is the wish to be a

slave. And in my point of view, it's poisonous of human relations. Now, I've really babbled

for nearly twenty minutes. I'll be quick. 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. Two quick things on that: First, he was it's true a minister.

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 on their way and

take their land and their property, enslave their women or kill their children, and commit

genocide, rape, ethnic cleansing and forcible theft of land. That's what Exodus described

as happening--the full destruction of the tribes. It's very fortunate that Dr. King

only the 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 his audience has ever already read. That's the first

thing. The second is, during his lifetime, he was attacked all the time for having too

many secular and leftist non-believing friends, the people like famous black secularists like

Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph. These are the men that did organize the march on Washington;

which leads me to my third observation which is this: It's a challenge I made now in

debates with rabbis, with priests of all Christian stripes, with imams. Once--I know this sounds

like an opening of a joke about some bar, but once also with a Buddhist nun in Miami.

I asked them all. Here is my--here is my challenge. 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 non--a person

not of faith, a person of no faith. You have to do that. Not so far and I've dealt at

quite a high level with the religious, no takers. No one has been able to find me that.

That being the case, we're entitled to say, I think, that religious faith serve as the