Name: クリストファー・ヒッチェンス｜Googleで講演 (Christopher Hitchens | Talks at Google)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T08:02:29.000Z
Duration: 1 h 7 min 42 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

>> Hi, everyone. Welcome to today's Authors at Google event. After the talk, we're going

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

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クリストファー・ヒッチェンス｜Googleで講演 (Christopher Hitchens | Talks at Google)

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