Audience: (applause)
Another example. In 1915, the British
member of Parliament, Horatio Bottomley,
recommended that after the War, "If by
chance you should discover one day
in a restaurant you are being served by a
German waiter, you will throw the soup
in his foul face. If you find yourself
sitting at the side of a German clerk,
you will spill the inkpot over his foul head."
Now that's strident and intolerant. Audience: (laughter)
And I should've thought, ridiculous and
ineffective as rhetoric even in its own time.
The British literary critic Terry Eagleton
described the late Kingsley Amis, an extremely
distinguished novelist, as "a racist,
anti- Semitic boor, a drink- sodden,
self-hating reviler of women gays and liberals."
Well, I think that compares fairly well with
my own beginning of chapter two of
"The God Delusion,"
which is the passage most often
quoted as strident or shrill.
"The God of the Old Testament is arguably
the most unpleasant character in all fiction.
Jealous and proud of it, a petty, unjust,
unforgiving control- freak, a vindictive,
bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic,
homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal,
filicidal, pestilential, megalomanical,
sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
Audience: (applause)
Now, Audience: (applause)
Audience: (applause)
that's the passage most often quoted as
strident or shrill. It's not for me to say
whether I succeeded, but my intention was
closer to robust humor.
Audience: (laughter)
A humorous broadside, rather than
shrill polemic. I don't think words like
misogynistic, infanticidal, genocidal,
megalomaniacal - that does't sound shrill to me.
Something about those long words suggest that...
Audience: (laughter)
My wife Lalla and I do a, sort of, double act,
reading from my books when they're published.
And one of the things you have to do in
order to, warm an audience up is to get
them laughing early. And, so with each book
we try to pick a humorous passage
near the beginning, and we always
pick that passage for the God Delusion.
It sort of gets a laugh. As this one is
another one which, at least it was my intention
to be humorous, about Our Lady of Fatima.
There you see some typical examples of Catholic kitsch.
Audience: (laughter)
This is a quote from the God Delusion now.
"Pope John Paul the Second created more
saints than all his predecessors of
the past several centuries put together,
and he had a special affinity with the
Virgin Mary. His polytheistic hankerings
were dramatically demonstrated in 1981
when he suffered an assassination attempt
in Rome, and attributed his survival to
intervention by Our Lady of Fatima.
'A maternal hand guided the bullet.'
One cannot help wondering why she
didn't guide it to miss him all together."
Audience: (laughter)
"Others might think the team of surgeons
who operated on him for six hours
deserved at least a share of the credit; Audience: (laughter)
But perhaps their hands, too, were
maternally guided. The relevant point is
that it wasn't just Our Lady who, in the Pope's
opinion, guided the bullet, but specifically
Our Lady of Fatima.
Presumably, Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady
of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Medjugorje, Our
Lady of Akita, Our Lady of Zeitoun, Our Lady
of Garabandal, and Our Lady of Knock,
were busy on other errands at the time."
Audience: (laughter)
I think that's quite funny too. Pure Monty Python.
Audience: (laughter)
Nevertheless, it's quite true that many
people do feel very strongly about their
faith and very offended if you insult it.
We've come to expect never to be offended.
"What you say is offensive to me!"
[mouths] What the --
Audience: (laughter)
The novelist Douglas Adams, to whom the
God Delusion is dedicated, picked out
exactly what is going on here, in a
wonderful speech, an impromptu speech
that he made in Cambridge not long
before he died, and I was privileged to
be there. Fortunately, somebody had
the blessed good sense to switch on
a tape recorder, and so this priceless
hour or so of Douglas just holding forth,
impromptu, is preserved.
And I'm going to read a passage from it,
because he put his finger exactly on
what's going on with all this offense.
"Religion...has certain ideas at the heart
of it which we call sacred or holy
or whatever. What it means is, 'Here is
an idea or a notion that you're not allowed
to say anything bad about; You're just not.
Why not? Because you're not!' "
"If someone votes for a party that you don't
agree with, you're free to argue about it
as much as you like. Everybody will have
an argument, but no one feels aggrieved
by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go
up or down, you're free to have an
argument about it. But on the other hand,
if someone says 'I mustn't move a light
switch on a Saturday,' you say 'I respect that.' "
Audience: (laughter)
"Why should it be that it's perfectly
legitimate to support the Labour Party or
the Conservative party, Republicans or
Democrats, this model of economics versus
that, macintosh instead of windows, Audience: (laughter)
but to have an opinion about how the
universe began, about who created the
universe, no. That's holy. We are used to
not challenging religious ideas, but it's
very interesting how much of a furore
Richard creates when he does it."
"Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it
because you're not allowed to say these things."
"Yet when you look at it rationally
there is no reason why those ideas
shouldn't be as open to debate as
any other, except we've agreed somehow
between us that they shouldn't be."
And that agreement seems to extend to the
non- religious as well as the religious.
Let's raise our consciousness. What's so
special about religious arguments that
they should be immune to exactly the
same kind of rational discussion as
political or any other kind of arguments?
Audience: (applause)
I'm offended by some things.
I'm offended by chewing gum. I'm offended
by backwards-pointing baseball hats. Audience: (laughter)
But I don't try to get a version of the
blasphemy law passed to prevent people
chewing gum or reversing their cap.
So what if I'm offended? So what if my
feelings are hurt? Does that give me the
right to prevent others from expressing their opinions?
However, is there a time when it is right
to be offended? I think so, yes.
We should be offended when children
are denied a proper education.
Audience: (applause)
We should be offended when children are
told they will spend eternity in hell.
Audience: (applause)
We should be offended when medical
science, for example stem cell research,
is compromised by-
Audience: (applause)
compromised, I should say, by the
bigoted opinions of powerful and above
all, well financed ignoramuses.
Audience: (laughter and applause)
We should be offended when voodoo, of
all kinds, is given equal weight to science.
We should be offended by hymen reconstruction surgery.
Audience: (applause)
We should be offended by female circumcision,
a euphemism for genital mutilation. Audience: (applause)
This picture was taken in Africa, but it
happens in Britain. I had a long conversation
with a schools inspector from London
and she told me it's common. Girls are
typically sent away to stay with
an uncle in Bradford.
We should be offended by stoning.
This young Kurdish woman was stoned
to death in a so-called "honor killing"
because she wanted to marry a
young man of the wrong religion.