The Michael Knowles Show - Michael Knowles DEBUNKS Christopher Hitchens Viral Moments

Episode Date: May 20, 2023

Use code "KNOWLESYT" at checkout for additional savings on your entire purchase! https://genucel.com/knowlesyt Of all the faces of the new atheist movement Christopher Hitchens was Michael's favorte. Hitchens debate clips still get millions of views each year so Michael Knowles will debunk some of the most viral Christopher Hitchens moments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Anyone who doesn't know this doesn't know anything about it. Is it not written that I come not to bring a piece but a sword? Surely it is. I'm saying there are specific biblical scriptural injunctions to do evil. I'll give you all the miracles and you'll still be left exactly where you are now, holding an empty sack. You know I was an atheist for 10 years and one of the reasons that I was an atheist is the very unfortunate timing that I was a 13-year-old boy when Christopher Hitchens got. really, really popular for being an atheist. And I remember at the time, there were all those new

atheists, the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. And those first three were not all that interesting, at least not to a 13-year-old boy. But Chris Hitchens really was, who's so clever, he seemed so witty, he was so drunken and sweaty and British. He just seemed really, really great at the time. And I can't even imagine how many poor souls. He is led away from God and to eternal perdition. Really sad. Now I find I go back and I read a Hitchens essay or I look at a Hitchens video and it just doesn't hit the same. And so Hitchens still has some funny bits. He has bits about how women aren't funny and he's got some great bits on scotch and tea and things like that. But his stuff on God, in retrospect, seems like weak sauce.

So the producers have picked the creme de la creme of Christopher Hitchens' atheist videos. I have not seen these videos, or at the very least I haven't seen them in probably 20 years. And we're going to take a look back. Decades after this man helped lead me down the dark road. Take it away. If you meet someone in the street who you yesterday saw executed, you can say either that an extraordinary miracle has occurred or that you are under a very grave misapprehendent.

And David Hume's logic on this, I think, is quite irrefutable. He says, what is more likely that the laws of nature have been suspended in your favor and in a way that you approve or that you've made a mistake, especially if you didn't see it yourself and you're hearing it from someone who says that they did? After all, Lazarus was raised, never said a word about it, the daughter of Gyrus was raised, didn't say a thing about what she'd been through. And the Gospels tell us that at the time of the crucifixion all the graves in Jerusalem open and their occupants wandered around the streets to greet. So it seems the resurrection was something of a banality at the time. Not all of those people clearly were divinely conceived. I'll give you all the miracles, and you'll still be left exactly where you are now, holding an empty sack.

Christopher Hitchens is saying, well, what's more likely that you, the individual, were deceived, or that the laws of nature were suspended? But when we're talking about the resurrection, we're not talking about you individually being deceived. We're talking about 500 eyewitnesses to the resurrection being deceived. were talking about all of the apostles being deceived. The earliest Gospels were written within three or four decades of the resurrection. That would be like me right now writing about Tupac Shakur. And I say, actually, Tupac rose from the dead.

Well, if I said that, and if that story was spreading around, people would contradict me if it didn't really happen. You see the New Testament accounts, it's referring to people who would have still been alive and whose relatives would have still been alive at the time those gospel accounts were circulating. And then you have four accounts, all of which basically agree with one another, and where they would seem to disagree on certain details, they do so in the way that newspapers disagree about news events. In fact, the fact that they seem to disagree about certain details or seem to approach events from different vantage points actually would be a mark in their favor. Because if they were all exactly completely in lockstep on vantage point and every single line, you would say, oh, this was just contrived. The fact that this was all circulated. The fact that we see this in non-Christian sources, the fact that this event changed the entire world and has withstood debunking for 2,000 years.

And the best that Christopher Hitchens can offer is some stupid line from David Hume. We saw us. What's the next one? I never said that I attacked bad behavior that was undertaken, were involved upon in the name of, as you put it, religion. I do insist that this kind of bad behavior is innate in religion, is part of religion itself. It's not an abuse of it or something undertaken in the name of. It's a direct consequence of the willingness to believe in the supernatural and the willingness to believe in a supernatural dictatorship in particular.

Is it not written that I come not to bring a peace but a sword? Surely it is. Is it not written that those who won't follow me shall be departing, must depart and be cast into everlasting fire? Not a very gentle or pacific remark. Is it not said that if you don't give up your family, if you don't give up frift, if you don't give up everyone who loves you and everything you love to sacrifice yourself for me, you're not worthy? These are strongly coercive and implicitly authoritarian or even totalitarian. Oh my goodness gracious.

You know, it's funny going back to these now because I still see how they appeal to a 13-year-old because Christopher Hitchens, for all of his British charm, he talks like an edgy 13-year-old online. I mean, this is not sophisticated stuff at all. By the end, he's really mis-paraphrasing the gospel accounts. Christ doesn't tell you that you have to abandon your family in order to follow him, though you should.

should place him and God first in your life, and then everything follows from that. And then he says, Christianity is not a pacifist religion. No, it's not a pacifist religion. That's true. But it's not a call to violence. And he says it's a supernatural dictatorship. And this gets back to something he said in the previous video, too. He says, can you imagine how insane it would be that the laws of nature could be suspended in the course of miracles? You say, well, the natural has to be based on a foundation of the supernatural. This is necessary. The fact that we can speak, the fact that we're communicating ideas at all, which I can't touch, I can't smell them, I can't see them, but nevertheless they exist. The fact that mathematics exists, the fact that loves and dreams and hopes and desires and any intelligible thing at all exists shows you that there is a metaphysical layer to reality and it's more fundamental than the physical layer. Really shallow stuff. Fit for a 13-year-old. Next one. Some of your most strongly stated arguments are that violence, death, destruction, the motivation being religion, discredit those who would promote a belief in God.

However, I think there's an imbalance there in that the nuclear bomb was created by physicists and is the most demonstrable violence, perpetrated on mankind. So I wonder how you respond to that. Well, physics isn't an ideology. Physics isn't a belief system. It's a science. Well, I think that would be subject.

I mean, you could, I mean, any more than the Marie Curie discovering radium makes her practice morally different. I mean, it's not comparing like with like. What I'm talking about are specific religious injunctions. to do evil, to mutilate the genitalia of children, for example.

To take the pastor, Douglas Wilson, who Dr. Craig was just mentioning, with whom I crossed swords several times this year recently in Dallas, happened to be mentioning to him about the commandment to exterminate the Amalekites in one of our debates, and he said that commandment is still valid. If there were any Amalekites, it would be his job to make sure that they were all put to the sword. And some of the virgins left over for slavery, purposes better imagine, perhaps than than described. I think this is a very serious problem. I'm not taking refuge in the commonplace that

sometimes religious people behave badly. That would discredit religion. That would be a very soft option. I'm saying there are specific biblical scriptural injunctions to do evil. When we talk about human action, we're talking about political action, the decision to create a bomb, the decision to drop that bomb, the decision to talk to somebody about dropping the bomb. That would be a political action. It society. But at a higher level, what that involves is applied morality. So before you make that decision, you have to know something about applied morality. How do we come to those decisions and what does our morality say about those decisions? Above applied morality, you have morality broadly, more abstract morality. Above that, you have anthropology. What is man?

What is the nature of man such that we can even make these kinds of moral decisions and come to these moral conclusions and engage in these political actions. Above anthropology, have epistemology. How can we know anything at all? Know anything about human beings, but know anything about anything. How do we know? And then beyond epistemology, you have the question of theology. What is there to know?

What is reality? What is? Christopher Hitchin stops at, like, the first circle. As do all of these people? Well, that's just science. Okay, well, what's behind the science? What are the premises that go into that? They don't want to acknowledge that.

So, no, religion is all bad. Religion is a habit of virtue that renders to God what he deserves. That's it. People have different views on religion, some more correct, some less correct. But to have this childish atheism coming from Christopher Hitchens, who throws his hands up and says, la, la, la, religion bad, religion. Well, everybody engages in some kind of religion. Some people just are not conscious of what they're doing, unfortunately, like Hitchens,

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slash KnowlesYT. Join millions of happy customers who've already fallen in love with the results. Plus for limited time, get GenuCells probiotic extract moisturizer free with every most popular package. Go to genuicell.com slash KnowlesYT. Some people I know who are atheists will say they wish they could believe it. Some people I know who are former believers say they wish they could have their old faith back. They miss it. I don't understand this at all. I think it's an excellent thing that there's no reason to believe in the absurd problem.

propositions I just admittedly rather briefly rehearsed to you. The main reason for this I think is that it is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you a thought crime while you are asleep, who can subject you, who must indeed subject you, to a total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life, I say of your life before you're born, and even worse,

and where the real fun begins after your debt. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate? So Hitchin says it's slavery to serve God, is it now? because I'm more persuaded by what Christ says in the Gospels, which is the man who sins is a slave to sin. And anyone who's ever suffered from an addiction knows this. You begin using drugs, let's say, or booze or something.

You begin indulging in this vice because you think it's an expression of your freedom. I'm free. No one can tell me what to do, man. I'm just going to do what I want to do. But then the more you do it, the more you feel impelled to do, it, the harder it is to stop doing it. And then you become a slave. This is why Lord Acton points out that freedom is not the ability to do whatever we want whenever we want to do it, but freedom is the right to do what we ought to do. It's true. God asks you to submit yourself to him,

to conform your will to his will. But that isn't slavery, that's freedom. As Christ says, my yoke is easy and my burden is light. And what's the alternative? The alternative is a perverted, false form of freedom, a false form of liberty, which is really licensed, that makes you a slave. And a slave to a much harsher master than God who loves you. It makes you a slave to the devil, who wants to consume you, and who often does when we refuse God's grace. Okay, next one. It was the fate of many Jewish people in Europe to have to wonder to whom they could turn in their time of extremity. And I'll tell you the place they didn't turn, which was to the churches that had made the official concord out with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The churches that had told their parties to vote for him in the Reichstag, the church that had told, especially the Catholic Church, that had told its bishops to celebrate Adolf Hitler's birth day,

every year from the pulpit, which they did till April 1945. This is so profoundly dishonesty. The anti-Semitism on which the Nazi party based itself, which in many cases violated the seal of the confessional to turn over resistors, and in

all cases turned over the birth records of the parishes of Bavaria and the rest of Germany, so the Nuremberg laws could be enforced and everyone with even a particle of Jewish blood could be identified, set aside for deportation, and persecution. Anyone who doesn't know this doesn't know anything about it. Oh my goodness.

So, so profoundly dishonest. Was excommunicated or threatened with excommunication by the church for taking part in the final solution. Paul Johnson, a Roman Catholic historian, estimates that 40 to 50% of the Vauphin SS were confessing, communicating Roman Catholics. Not one of them was ever threatened with the smallest punishment for what they did or were doing. Wow, just amazingly dishonest on the history of the church and in the Second World War, amazingly dishonest. It's true, Pope Pius X-12th, to my knowledge, never excommunicated. Hitler was not a practicing Catholic. He did, however, try to kill Hitler. Pius X. 12th worked quite closely, actually, with the German resistance against Hitler.

He would give the Brits tips. He was a go between the German resistance and the Allies. He had a spy trying to kill Hitler, Joseph Mueller, a Catholic priest. Pope Bias the 12th personally saved at least 15,000 Jews, worked around Rome. But elsewhere as well, Castel Gandalfa, which is the papal retreat, housed thousands of Jews during World War II to protect them from the Nazis. The church used so many means at her disposal to keep Jews away from the Nazi persecution. Jewish historians estimate some 860,000. thousand Jews were saved by the actions of the Catholic Church during World War II, the Catholic

Church, which was a victim of Hitler and saw herself as a victim of Hitler. The chief rabbi of Jerusalem thanked Pius the 12th for his effort. So it's just, this is just a complete fable coming from Hitchens. Or what he does, I guess this would be the way that he tries to be not a total liar about this. He'll say, well, you know, there was some priest who was really bad or oh, there was some bishop who was really, really bad. Okay, but look at the actions of the church all the way up to the head of the church and the vicar of Christ. 860,000 Jews saved. Goodness gracious me. I mean, at least in the other arguments that Christopher Hitchens makes, they're extremely shallow, but they're trying in some way to grapple with some question of morality.

But there, Hitchens just has to totally ignore history. Whether it's through ignorance or whether it's just through his deep hatred of God, his apparent hatred of God. I'm not sure exactly what it is. So revisiting these things, it makes me ashamed of myself that I fell for these arguments. The proof of the pudding is in the tasting on a lot of these questions as well. And so you can see that the arguments aren't very good. And you can go back and read theological sources or philosophical sources or questions, you know, texts on ethics and history, I guess in the case of his last video. But ultimately the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. Does Chris Hitchens look like a guy who was flourishing, looked like a guy who was happy, who was at peace,

who was comfortable in virtue? Is that the sort of behavior you would want to model your life after? Is that the kind of guy where you say, this guy has figured it out? I don't think so. Caused 10 years of confusion for me, but glad I got out. Not everybody's quite so lucky to escape

from the misery-inducing delusions of atheism. Okay, I'm Michael Knowles. We'll see you next time.