And this has now spread very, very strongly.  I mean, I’ve challenged the Reverend Sharpton to a debate on my book.  He has so far said yes.  I have a feeling he’s not going to show up; he’s a clerical hooligan.  But if I get to say what I think about him in public, people will say, But you know, the black community’s very consoled by its preachers.  I said, Well, that’s the more fool them, in that case.  They’ll fall for an obvious thug, an obvious demagogue, an obvious corrupt shithead like Sharpton; then they deserve what they get.

Now, how does that sound on MSNBC?  And what grade?  That’s why I have to challenge him at the New York Public Library.  Because you couldn’t have this debate otherwise.

What if I say, Everyone in the country knows that female genital mutilation is a horror show?  And it should rightly be a federal crime?  But male genital mutilation is a filthy Jewish practice.  Doesn’t sound good, does it, to say that?  You know how sensitive we can be.  But what else --

And that happens to be my view.  And I am damned if I’ll become an American in order to be told I can’t express it.  Okay?

Peter Collier: It is true, of course, that genitally mutilated males have a six times lower, frequency of getting AIDS in Africa, for instance, right?

Christopher Hitchens: Well, there would be less AIDS if the Islamic and Catholic authorities didn’t say that AIDS may be bad but condoms are worse, which is the religious preachment.  And by the way -- I suppose we may as well get this out of the way -- the jolly old foreskin --

Peter Collier: The foreskin.

Christopher Hitchens: -- the foreskin itself --

Peter Collier: Oh, let’s get right to it.  Okay.

Christopher Hitchens: When in doubt -- as they always say -- when in doubt, talk dick.  The foreskin can be loosened.  The foreskin can be loosened, and even slightly snipped -- in order for cleansing purposes.  But it doesn’t have to be violently torn and excised, in the Maimonides recommendation, which is, by the way -- when Maimonides mandates it, he says, not to prevent you from getting a filthy disease; it’s so that you will feel the least sexual pleasure that’s consistent with making another Jew, through a hole in the sheet.  Okay?

This stuff is disgusting.  Religious propaganda is based upon sexual repression; there’s no getting around it.  What -- it’s good to know what they’re thinking about.  What do they think about all the time?  They’re thinking about dicks all the time.  And when they think about the birth canal, they go blind.  No, no --

Peter Collier: That’s not why they go blind.

Christopher Hitchens: -- we can’t have it.  We can’t -- we can’t have it going in -- we can’t have the birth canal.  We can’t have it going in, and we can’t have it coming out, either.  Virgin births all -- everything.  And even Buddha born through a slit in his mother’s side.  This is appalling.  I’m pro-birth canal in both directions; I don’t mind you knowing it.

And who would want to do that with a snipped dick?

It has to be done.  They make me do it.  They make me do it.  You made me do it.

Peter Collier: I did.  Devil made you do it.

Christopher Hitchens: No, it’s just something that -- well, let me put it like this.  If anything proves that religion is man-made, it would have to be the obsession on the ill-designed genitalia.  Okay?  The unhealthy focus on that.  It’s man made.  And it shows as manmade.  It shows it’s designed by a species that is one half chromosome away from being a chimpanzee.  It shows.  Get used to it.

Peter Collier:  One of the telling episodes in organizing the book -- right at the beginning, you talk about a kind of confrontation with Dennis Prager on a television show.  And he challenged you.  He said you had to answer yes or no, which is always a bad omen, he said who would you rather see coming down the street at you, of an evening in an ominous city -- men that were in a menacing little group; or men coming out of a church?  And you -- in the book, you make a pretty good response.  You start with the Bs, which is, you know, Beirut, Belgrade, Belfast and Baghdad, and say not those coming out of church—

Christopher Hitchens: just to stay in the Sesame Street range.

Peter Collier: Yeah.

Christopher Hitchens: Brought to you by the letter B.

Peter Collier:  But he could have said well, then, what about Bed-Sty, Baltimore and Barstow, where a friend of mine got the hell kicked out of him by goons, you know.  But --

Christopher Hitchens: Bombay.

Peter Collier: You know, a corollary question occurred to me.  You kind of, with a sideswipe, lambaste, you know, faith-based initiatives; that sort of thing.

So let me just ask  -- since I’m pitching batting practice here -- let me ask you a question similar to Prager’s, which is this-- If you’re a black person who has small children, and you’re forced to put them in these filthy, vice-ridden, illiterate homicidal ghetto schools; and you have, on the other hand, an opportunity to get a voucher and send your kid to a Catholic school, where you would get, at best, these days, a pretty denatured theology on the extreme margins -- but otherwise what used to be called good common school education about -- you know, with stuff like real American history – along with a safe and decent environment which would you choose?

Christopher Hitchens: Well, first I should say that the whole exchange with Dennis Prager is thanks to you and David for inviting me to Colorado Springs the week before --

Unidentified Audience Member: -- louder, please?

Christopher Hitchens: Oh, I’m sorry -- so seldom am I told to speak louder that I got to feel really relaxed now.  This loud enough?  No.  Sometimes people say talk less -- no, no, talk more.

I owe the Dennis Prager moment to you and David for inviting me to Colorado Springs the week before 9/11, where he put this question to me and said it was a yes-no, which it isn’t, of course.  Because you can’t say yes-no -- would you feel better if you knew your strange males coming at you in the dark in Beirut from a prayer meeting or not?  You have to say a lot of other things before the yes-no.

But -- and of course, I added that the most faith-based group in American history was then just only a few days away from boarding a plane -- or two, that the most religious people in the country were -- perhaps in the history of the country -- at least since the Confederates decided to declare war on the basis of a Christian belief in slavery -- were just about to crash their planes into our cities.

That’s one side.  My daughter goes to a Quaker school in Washington, where there are -- they call it a meeting for worship.  And she learns about, essentially, a sort of soft-centered, herbivorous, civil rights-centered American history of this sort going back to -- and it’s -- though I don’t like that that’s the case, when she gets home, I insist that we spend a little time with the King James Bible, and the Cranmer Common Prayer Book, and so on.  Because she would be illiterate without knowing these things.  No school will teach that.  No school will teach it; they’re afraid of a lawsuit if they do.

So there’s a sort of nihilistic, banal secularism that runs many, many people’s lives and creates only religious illiteracy.  And that to me is extraordinarily alien.  Because people who have educated, or rather dis-educated in that way, will be -- they’re raising a sail that they don’t even know is there that will be filled by the first wind of superstition and astrology and New Age and liberation theology, and every other garbage that’s in the air, without a proper grounding in the real texts.  I don’t believe someone can claim to be educated at all.

So the fact that the American education system leaves it to me to do this is yet another reproach.

Peter Collier: So the answer is that you would -- as a black parent -- you would be inclined to take the voucher.

Christopher Hitchens: Oh, to be -- to answer your question specifically -- I’m not a black parent, so -- and all that.  But -- by the way, do you know that joke?

Peter Collier: Tell us.  It’s got -- is it --

Christopher Hitchens: -- may as well.  In for a penny, in for a pound.  Do you know who John Braine was?  Yes --

Peter Collier: Yeah.

Christopher Hitchens: -- You do.  Does everyone else -- author of “Room at the Top?”  Why is this microphone such a bitch?

Unidentified Audience Member: There you go.

Unidentified Audience Member: Yeah.

Christopher Hitchens: Okay.  How bad was it before?

Unidentified Audience Member: Horrible.

Christopher Hitchens:  John Braine was the author of “Room at the Top” -- later, very famous novel about meritocracy.  Old leftist of the ‘50s -- he came into collision with his old ideas after a visit to the United States, as a matter of fact -- and when back home was asked by the BBC to debate the leader of the Methodist Church in Britain and a very well-known socialist -- about why he was no longer one.

And John Braine said, “Well, reason I changed my mind” -- he was a Yorkshiran – he said, “Reason I changed my mind, my Lord, if I may say so -- even though I know you’re a socialist and a divine and a peer of the realm,” he says, “I went to the United States.  That’s what I did.  And say what you like, say what you like -- United States is a free society.  You’re free there, you take your chances.  And no one guarantees you anything, but you’re free.  And you got your opportunities there.  And that’s what I like about it.”

And Lord Soper, man of very carefully measured words, said, “Well, I suppose that that’s a very fair point, Mr. Braine.  But one might object that that wouldn’t be true if you were, say, black.”  And John Braine looked at him like this and said, “But I’m not black, you daft booger.”  That’s the Yorkshire sense of humor, in case you’re wondering.

I would -- I’d have to say that I’m a bit upset about an arrangement whereby a black parent can be asked to pick between the children going to a ghetto school or a voucher to go to somewhere where they teach the Baltimore Catechism.  That seems like restating the problem to me, rather than solving it.  But that’s just the way I am.

Peter Collier: I can sense --

Christopher Hitchens: But I’m not black, you daft booger.

Peter Collier: You’re not black.  That’s true.

I sense people probably ready to ask some questions of their own.  I’ve got one more.

Jack Miles wrote a review of your book in the L.A. Times on Sunday -- which you’ve seen, I’m sure – and as might be expected of somebody whose own best-known book is called, “God: A Biography,”  he concludes more or less that “God Is Not Great” is not great.  And I don’t think there were any palpable hits particularly in the piece, save for one.  Miles notes that you stipulate that religion is ineradicable -- something you’ve already said -- and won’t disappear until we -- and I’m quoting now -- “get over our fear of death, and the dark – of death, and the dark, and of the unknown and of each other.”

Now, since these things are probably likely to happen -- as we used to say in the ‘50s -- on the 12^th of Never, unless you believe that human nature is more malleable than I think you believe it is -- where does that leave us exactly?

Christopher Hitchens: Well first off, Miles is a sap.  Because he begins his review by saying, “Ha!  Like all these atheists, Hitchens thinks that religion should have died out by now, but feels he needs something to attack.”  He’s wrong from the very first sentence.  I was surprised by him, actually, given that he did write a quite good biography of God at one point, though on, I thought, insufficient evidence.

I exactly don’t say that.  I say no, we never expected it would die out; it’s impossible to imagine it -- I want the argument to go on forever.  I just want it to get better on both sides.

Peter Collier: But you do call for, you know, a new enlightenment, in which --

Christopher Hitchens: Yeah.

Peter Collier: -- religion plays no role, really.  I mean, it’s all -- it’s a secular world, it’s a secular utopia.  And religion is gone, in the last summary paragraphs of your book.

Christopher Hitchens: It’s gone in my mind, as it is in the minds of a lot of people.  But we know very well that -- as I said with Camus and his rats -- but I could put it more politely, in terms of Freud and the future of illusion.  We don’t expect people to give up their need for something numinous or transcendent.  That’s what poetry is for; that’s what literature is for.  That’s the need I think it supplies.  I don’t actually like devotional painting, but I could not possibly do without gothic architecture and devotional music.  It would be -- life would be quite empty without it.  Like not having the poems of Auden or Philip Larkin or, indeed, the Cranmer Prayer Book -- or the Book of Job, where it says -- why does this move me?  Why should it?  It says, Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.  Okay, if I live long enough, I’ll write something that people would remember like that.  But I’m not there yet.

But you don’t have to pay the supernatural and worshiping and prostrating price for this culture.  I would say that was my main point.  And those of us who believe that an ethical life can be lived without this are not without resources, you know.  We have Epicurus.  We have Spinoza.  We have Benjamin Franklin.  We have Thomas Payne; Thomas Jefferson.  So you know, you can -- morals do not derive from holy books.  The holy books steal their morals from us and make them into an object of worship, and demand sacrifice, which we don’t need.

Our secular tradition is nothing to be ashamed of.  Whereas religion is never done apologizing for its crimes; never, never, never and never can be.  Just last week, His Holiness the Pope announces, You know what?  All those dead babies, un-baptized, that you bore in pain and died on childbirth -- they didn’t go to limbo after all.  Can you think of anything crueler than that?  I can -- telling them they were in limbo in the first place -- St. Augustin’s beautiful idea.

Centuries of torturing ignorant and uneducated people -- giving them vouchers, so they could go to schools where they would be told that their miscarried babes had gone to something very like hell, and were howling and crying without consolation.

Now they say there’s no such place.  Yes, there is.  Yes, there is such a place.  It’s the place all those people believe those babies have gone to, where they had to live themselves for it.  Now with a shrug, this fool in Rome says, Well, forget it.  How can they?

And by the way, having got all that wrong for all this long, we’ve cleared our conscience.  And we’re ready to be infallible all over again.  For shame.  For shame.  There is no secular thinker who’s ever had to make such an apology for saying anything either half as wicked or half as stupid as that.  Yet when a Pope dies, does our culture not grovel as if the President of the United States himself had gone?  For what?  For what?

Are we serfs?  Do we have no ideas, no morals, without this kind of authority?  No, no, it’s very important that we outgrow it.  It’s part of the -- the childhood of our race is one thing.  It’s -- could be charming.  But the infancy, the selfish, greedy, stupid, superstitious fearful infants -- we have to get over that.  We must grow up.  It’s a race.  Because otherwise, the ones who want to catch us up and make us subject to the holy books never sleep.  They never sleep. 

Peter Collier: It’s the audience’s turn.  There are people in the audience there with microphones --

Christopher Hitchens: Limbo indeed.  How dare they.

Peter Collier: -- people there in the audience with microphones.

Christopher Hitchens: Well, there’s someone there who must have a limbo explanation. [Sir]?

Unidentified Audience Member: I just wanted to suggest that, even though there are secular thinkers who haven’t apologized.  The religious people have apologized.  But it doesn’t mean that the secular people have nothing to apologize for; they just don’t bother doing it.

Christopher Hitchens: Well, I’m not sure quite which secularists you mean, though I think I can guess.  I mean --

Unidentified Audience Member: Engels]?

Christopher Hitchens: Oh, so it’s wonderful Engels.   When Joseph Stalin went to meet his mother down in Georgia after all those years -- hadn’t seen her for awhile -- and she said, “Naughty boy, where have you been?  Why do you never write?  What are you doing now?”  And he said, “Well, actually, Mama, I’m Chairman of the Central Committee of the Presidium of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union now.”  And she looked at him and said, “You stupid boy.  If you’d stayed in that seminary, you could have been a bishop by now.”

It would be idiotic of the Bolshevik Party not to take advantage of the fact that until 1917, the Czar, the head of the state, had been considered the head of the Church, and also semi-divine.  If you couldn’t replicate a credulity like that and take advantage of it, you would not be doing your job as a totalitarian -- save if you happened to inherit a Confucian China, or an Angkor Wat type Cambodia.  Take -- by all means, you have already the local superstitions.  That’s how Christianity converted the pagans -- by putting a cross around the head of the local deities.

It’s not a question of whether it’s secular or not, if you see what I mean.  It’s a matter of attacking our own beliefs -- not how bullying is the leader, but how willing are we to prostrate ourselves at his feet, or hers.  How willing are we to be citizens?

Now no society that we know of -- and I’ll challenge you directly on it -- has ever been accused of falling into totalitarian habits by following the examples of Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Payne, Epicurus, Spinoza -- the tradition of doubt and separation of church and state -- that I can think of.  And I’ve tried.  I don’t think you can find one, either.

So be sure you’re comparing like with like when you do this.

And fascism, of course, was essentially a Catholic racket, everywhere from Croatia to Portugal.  In Slovakia, the head of the Nazi puppet state was actually a priest in holy orders.  The Concordat between the Vatican and Hitler and Mussolini was agreed by all to be essentially the guarantee of their taking and holding power.

In the other side of the axis, the head of Japanese National Socialism -- the Emperor was actually not just a religious figure, but himself a god.  Do not confuse the idea that totalitarianism and secularism are in that way confusable.

Unidentified Audience Member: Hi.  Thanks for being here.  I have a question, or I guess kind of observation.  I came across a Vaclav Hovel quote, so I hope I don’t butcher it too much.  But he basically said as soon as man began considering himself the source of all meaning in the world, and the measure of everything, he lost control of himself, and he lost his humanity.  And I -- you know, for me, I think that sort of set me off on a spiritual, you know, quest; whatever you want to call it.  But I -- so I wanted to know your thoughts on that sort of idea.

And also, it was kind of ironic you brought up the AIDS in Africa.  Because actually, from what I understand, actually the reason that AIDS is so predominant is because the female does this practice of becoming virgin-like, because that’s what the men enjoy.  It has nothing to do with condoms; it has everything to do with being able to please the male.  And so because she --

Christopher Hitchens: Works for me.

Unidentified Audience Member: -- dries out her canal, using various processes to create this pleasure for the man, it has, in fact, infected the heterosexuality of the country.  So I just -- I kind of wonder what you think of putting those two things together -- that man measuring himself against it -- and I don’t mean the masculine male -- but I’m just talking about human beings and their condition against -- relating it to their own selves?  Is that -- am I clear?

Peter Collier: Could you repeat the question, please?

Christopher Hitchens: Peter loves it when you talk like that.

Look, on the second, I’ll have to take it under advisement, in a way.  I mean, the likelihood, though, that this is because of women’s eagerness to please men in Africa rather than the urgent feeling by men that sex can be more enjoyable without a condom, and the equivalent myth that circulates now quite a lot even in South Africa, that the way to cure AIDS is to have sex with a virgin, for example -- I doubt is a result of excess secularism.

As to the -- whether it’s a result of excess female masochism or not, I’m not going to say.  But I know that women will go to a lot of trouble.  I’ve often wondered sometimes why they will.  Okay?  Or do.  I don’t think I want to be pushed any further than this.

Peter Collier: One more question.

Christopher Hitchens: No, well, wait -- but that was only the second part.

Peter Collier: Oh.  Sorry.

Christopher Hitchens: On the Havel point, if man is the measure of man, then everything is possible, and men will -- humans will become tyrannical -- it’s very interesting.  It’s also said by Dostoevsky -- well, not by Dostoevsky, but actually by Smerdyakov, the moron of the Brothers Karamazov.  If no God, than anything is forgivable or pardonable.

Well, we’ve all had to think about it.  But two things -- I think the insuperable contradiction of religion is -- first, it tells people, You are nothing but a clot of blood out of which God fashioned you in a fit of absence of mind.  You’re dust.  You are less than nothing.  You’re guilty from the moment you’re born, and you’re filth, and you owe an apology.  You are, in the opening words of my book -- available at fine stores everywhere -- created sick and commanded to be well.  In other words, your relationship with your creator is essentially sadomasochistic.  I don’t think that’s a good start.

But as if to make up for this grovel, this fawning, this -- you are dust, you’re a blood clot -- they say, Ah, but we have some good news.  The entire cosmos was created for your inhabitation.  The whole constellation is with you in mind.  And God has a plan for you personally.  So once you’ve done groveling and fawning and sprawling, we have the most wonderful plan that could be imagined, where you are the center of the universe.

So from being a total toad, you can become the greatest egomaniac in history.  Each one of you.  Who, who, who -- who could believe any of this, who has even looked through a telescope, or who’s thought about ethics?  Who can look on those who preach this without just contempt?  And who can’t see the trick they’re pulling?  And who can’t see the misery they’ve inflicted?  And who can’t see the ignorance and stupidity from which this begins and precedes?

That’s my answer.  And Havel, the great and humane man, doesn’t quite get it.

Unidentified Audience Member: You know, I just have something to say.  You know, I feel like I’m a bacteria here in this process.  But what I know is that, as much as I know, I know nothing about the process of God and what have you.  But I find your arrogance just overbearing.  And I think that --

Christopher Hitchens: I hear that all the time.

Unidentified Audience Member: -- I just -- I think someone needs to say that really, what we know is so little, and you pretend you know so much.  And I just find it offensive.

Christopher Hitchens: Well, no --

Unidentified Audience Member: Because I know so little.  You know, I’ve experienced things in study of Buddhism and what have you that have made me closer.  But yet, I don’t know anything.  And I know a lot more than I think perhaps you do.  And I really -- I’m just offended by you.  And excuse me for --

Christopher Hitchens: Please.  It takes a lot more than that to make my cry, or even turn over in bed, actually.

Unidentified Audience Member: You know what?  You know what?  I would say that -- I won’t say it.

Christopher Hitchens: Go on.

Peter Collier: Okay.

Unidentified Audience Member: I won’t say –

Christopher Hitchens: Do not be afraid of hurting my feelings, sir.

Unidentified Audience Member: No, I would just --

Christopher Hitchens: I promise you.

Unidentified Audience Member: I would just say you are probably the most offensive person that I have come across of any --

Christopher Hitchens: That’s better.  That’s much better.

Well, I couldn’t care less what you think, as you can obviously tell.  But there is a difference between me --

Unidentified Audience Member: But any [inaudible] --

Peter Collier: Hold on.  You’ve asked your question.  Okay.

Christopher Hitchens: No, you’re at least willing to [inaudible].  But there is actually a difference between us.  And I’ll try and put it politely.  I know that my cranial capacity is very small; can’t be more than two and a half pounds.

Unidentified Audience Member: I would agree with that.

Peter Collier: Hey.

Christopher Hitchens: Well spotted.

Unidentified Audience Member: [But then I would] place myself in the same condition.

Christopher Hitchens: Well spotted. And I doubt yours is very much greater.

Unidentified Audience Member: I would certainly agree with that.

Christopher Hitchens: Very well.

Christopher Hitchens:  But here is actually the great difference which you’ve identified, I think, without intending to do so.  And my own shortcomings as a personality shouldn’t let this obscure it for you.  I, with my cranial capacity, can -- I can just about peer through the Hubble telescope and make out this and that.  And I can just about read a page of Stephen Hawking, or a page of the Theory of Relativity, and hold about half of it in my head for a very short time.

And the consequences of my belief, which is the skeptical, non-believing one, are to you nothing.  I don’t ask you to do a thing for me.  Nothing.  But there are people who say not just that they know that there is a God who designed and arranged all this for you, but that they know better than that -- they know the mind of God, and they know what He wants you to do, and what he wants you to eat, and who he wants you to sleep with, and what he’ll allow you to think or read.  And the people who claim that are out of the argument to begin with.  The argument begins by excluding those who claim they do know.

And so even though you didn’t mean to do it, sir -- I understand --

Unidentified Audience Member: I don’t know.  I don’t know.

Christopher Hitchens: -- you illustrate the point, as you say -- leave out, then, those who claim that they do.  Leave out those who claim to know the mind of God.  Then we can get on with the serious business.  That’s my --

Peter Collier: One more question.

Christopher Hitchens: -- modest proposal to you.

Peter Collier: One more.

Unidentified Audience Member: [inaudible] wasn’t the Marxist dialectical materialism a form of religion?

Christopher Hitchens: I won’t have a word said against Marxist dialectical materialism.

Unidentified Audience Member: Repeat the question, please?

Christopher Hitchens: The lady asked, Wasn’t Marxist dialectical materialism a form of religion?

Well, the answer to that is that yes, in a way, it was.  It was designed as it was to be the negation of faith.

Here’s the common misquotation in modern discourse.  Who here has not heard it said that Marx said that religion was the opium of the people?  Hands up who hasn’t heard that.  Good.  He said absolutely no such thing.  In his contribution to the -- his introduction, actually, to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right-- Karl Marx says the following about religion.  He says, “Religion is the heart of the heartless world, the spirit of the spiritless situation,” and adds that religion “has plucked the flowers from the chain, not so that we shall bear the chain without any consolation, but so that we shall break the chain and cull the living flower.”  It’s very important that you understand that difference.

And the lady asked me as a supplementary question, Isn’t it the case that he learned all this from, as it were, Western civilization?  It’s true to an extent.  I mean, he was the son of a rabbi, but he repudiated Judaism.  But it is the -- I think you’ll see it’s the absolute negation of the vulgar parody of what Marx is supposed to have believed.

And for this reason, of course, I would say, to declare oneself a Marxist in any sense at all is to say, No, it’s not a religion; it is defined as a non-belief in the supernatural and as a repudiation of anything could be called a faith.  Marxism’s great mistake was it believed it had found material evidence for a past, a present and a future; and that material means alone could install it.  You could say that that was a terrible idea, but you can’t call it a religion.

Unidentified Audience Member: You can call it faith, [though].

Christopher Hitchens: You can call it anything you -- I wouldn’t mind saying that I had a faith, I suppose.  I mean, there are things I believe as a matter of conviction or as a matter of principle that it would take a lot to make me stop believing.

Peter Collier: -- we’re lucky to have had Chris for tonight.  This has been a --

Christopher Hitchens: That’s what you say.

Peter Collier: -- remarkable performance.  This is -- we could -- we could go on all night, and he particularly could go on all night, you know.  But we’ve got books to sell.  This is a very good opportunity --

Unidentified Audience Member: I thought we had him here to challenge him.

Peter Collier: Wait a second.

Unidentified Audience Member: I thought we --

Peter Collier: Wait a second.

Unidentified Audience Member: I thought that most of us here were God-fearing, God-loving people.

I see God.  Everywhere I look, I see God.  Okay?  And that’s just as good as your -- what you see, okay?  I see God, and I know a lot of people here see God, and I know God.  And I even see him in you, in a very strange way.  But really, truly, you need to be challenged in this discussion.  I think most people are just totally shocked.  They’re so shocked, and so stunned, at some of the things that you said --

Unidentified Audience Member: I’d like to know, what do you think love is?  Do you agree that there are transcendent things that the human mind doesn’t understand; that the human mind is limited, and that we don’t understand everything, and there is transcendence?  What is love to you?  What is love?  What is a person throwing themselves in front of a truck to save someone else’s life, or, you know, a mother diving into the ocean and drowning to save her child?  What is that?  Where does that come from?  I’d like to know.

Christopher Hitchens: I would not trust anyone, myself, who couldn’t read -- and look this up for yourself if you wonder what I’m talking about -- Philip Larkin’s poem, “Church Going.”  I think you don’t know it.  It’s -- “Church Going” -- it’s by Philip Larkin -- I think, the greatest English poet of the last 30 years.  It’s about how he -- a determined conservative and pessimist, but nonbeliever -- reacts to the experience of entering an English church when there’s no one else there. If I met someone who couldn’t respond to this, or to Durham Cathedral perhaps, or to George Herbert’s poetry, I wouldn’t trust that person.  To be completely without a sense of the numinous, to be unable to appreciate, say, the work of Wordsworth, about the sunset, would to me be to be less than human.

To claim that you know this allows you to speak about the design and desire of the author of all things is not even a leap from that.  It’s a negation of that.  It’s not being modest in front of nature.  It’s not having a sense of wonder.  It’s having a sense of extreme -- as this lady has -- extreme arrogance.

She says she knows what God wants for me.  I’m sorry; she knows no such thing.  And it’s just as well that she’s so powerless.  Because she can’t tell me what to do.  And I wouldn’t have it if she did.  And the rest of what she said was complete white noise.  White noise.  White noise is not poetry, white noise is not music, white noise is not architecture or painting, white noise is not culture.  It’s the babble of the preacher who says, God had plan for you, and I know what it is.  I’m not listening to that garbage.  And nor should you.

It’s over, it’s over, it’s over.  The Pope doesn’t know, the snake-handlers don’t know.  They don’t know.  They’ve been found out, too.  They’ve been found out.

Unidentified Audience Member: You have some very wacky ideas --

Christopher Hitchens: And what did you say -- you were God-fearing?  God-fearing and God-loving?  What is this?

Unidentified Audience Member: This gentleman says --

Christopher Hitchens: Not -- no, I don’t consider all religions equal, no.  I mean, I consider all religions equally fallacious, because they all involve a surrender to faith.

Unidentified Audience Member: But in practice, aren’t there just --

Christopher Hitchens: A surrender to faith -- a surrender to faith -- in other words, we believe the most we can on the least evidence.  In other words, we know the mind of God.

Unidentified Audience Member: I want to step up and tell him [something].

Christopher Hitchens: We know what God wants of us.  And we can tell you what He wants, and we can ventriloquize God to tell you what to do.  That’s a big claim.  You think there would be a little more evidence for it.  And the claim is an inverse relation to the evidence.  That’s true of a Quaker, and it’s true of a Shia fanatic.  So they have that much in common.  But of course it’s not true that they all behave equally badly all the time.

But the same fallacy, the surrender of the mind, is involved in all, yes.

David Horowitz: Excuse me -- excuse me.  Not every --not every conversation has a conclusion.  I --

Christopher Hitchens: I’m not going to run.

David Horowitz: I said --

Unidentified Audience Member: [inaudible]

David Horowitz: Wait a second.

Christopher Hitchens: Gentleman has the floor.

Unidentified Audience Member: --Two things.  I have met saints.  You cannot explain the existence of saints without God.  I was nine years chaplain with Mother Teresa [inaudible].  You have called her a whore, a demagogue.  She’s in heaven that you don’t believe in, but she’s praying for you. If you do not believe in heaven, that’s why you drink.

Christopher Hitchens: Excuse me?

Unidentified Audience Member: That’s why you drink--- God has offered us happiness, all of us.  And you will either die a Catholic or a madman, and I’ll tell you the difference.

And secondly, I’m an officer with this club.  And this conversation has been beneath the dignity of this club.

Unidentified Audience Member: No, it hasn’t been --

Christopher Hitchens: Well, it is now.

David Horowitz: Okay.  I --

Christopher Hitchens: It is now.

Unidentified Audience Member: And I’d just say that --

Christopher Hitchens: Fine host you turn out to be.

Unidentified Audience Member: -- this club, we’ve had very open discussion. But we’ve never heard such vulgarity and bigotry.

Christopher Hitchens: Till now.

Unidentified Audience Member: And I am -- I don’t want to see this in this club again.  And I think I represent the officers of this noble –

David Horowitz: All right.

Christopher Hitchens: Your claim to know what [a saint is] or what heaven is is as absurd as your [inaudible] arrogance, your unkindness and your lack of hospitality.

David Horowitz: See?  Everybody –

Christopher Hitchens: You should be ashamed.

Unidentified Audience Member: [inaudible]

Christopher Hitchens: And you are supposed to represent a church of charity and kindness? 

David Horowitz: I said this evening was going to be interesting and unpredictable.

Christopher Hitchens: Especially [inaudible]

David Horowitz: And anyway, thank you all for coming.  And to all a good night.