The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved: Religion is a Force for Good in the World

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

This week we are airing a special edition of the Munk Debates Podcast—a rebroadcast of a classic debate that launched our series on the world stage. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair and the late Christopher Hitchens - an avowed atheist - debating the motion Be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world.     To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 15+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Kieran LynchBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I think it's time for this toxic binary zero-sum madness to stop. We're not an imperial power. We're a revolutionary power. We are no longer in a world where you can plot out moves statesmen to statesmen like a chessboard. You don't know anything about my background to where I came from. It doesn't matter to you because fundamentally I'm a mean white man. We can't do this to the next generation because America will cease to exist. Welcome to the Monk Debate Podcast. I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. Our mission every episode is to provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day.

Free of spin, focused on the facts, and animated by smart conversation. By the end of each debate, our hope is that you'll be armed with enough information to make up your own mind about any given issue. Today, a special edition of the podcast, a rebroadcast of a classic Monk debate that launched our series on the world stage. The motion, be it resolved. Religion is a force for good in the world. Religion forces nice people to do unkind things and also makes intelligent people say stupid things. When you look at the 20th century and you see the great scars of political ideology, fascism, the communism of Stalin, absolutely at their heart was the eradication of religion. The two debaters were two of Britain's most famous sons, former Prime Minister Tony Blair,

who had recently converted to Catholicism, arguing for the motion. His opponent, the late-great Christopher Hitchens, an avowed atheist and author of several bestsellers, including God is Not Great, argued, naturally, against the motion. Mr. Hitchens had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer not too long before this debate was recorded.

He died little over a year later. Needless to say, it was an unforgettable debate, two great minds wrestling with one of the biggest issues of our time. Do we need God to be good? Up first, you'll hear Christopher Hitchens. Enjoy. Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well. I'll repeat that. created sick and then ordered to be well. And over us to supervise this is installed a celestial

dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea, greedy, exigent, I would say more than exigent, greedy for uncritical praise from dawn till dusk, and swift to punish the original sins with which it so tenderly gifted us in the very first place. However, let no one say there's no cure. Salvation is offered. Redemption, indeed, is promised at the low price of the surrender of your critical faculties. We might begin by asking, and I'm asking my opponent as well as you, when you consider your voting, is it good for the world to appeal to our credulity and not to our skepticism. Is it good for the world to worship a deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs? To appeal to our fear and to our guilt is it good for the world? To our terror, our terror of death,

is it good to appeal? To preach guilt and shame about the sexual act and the sexual relationship, is this good for the world? To terrify children with the image of hell and eternal punishment, not just of themselves, but of their parents and those they love. Perhaps worst of all, to consider women an inferior creation is that good for the world? And can you name me a religion that has not done that, to insist that we are created and not evolved in the face of all the evidence?

Religion forces nice people to do unkind things, and also makes intelligent people say stupid things. Handed a small baby for the first time, is it your first reaction to think, beautiful, almost perfect. Now please hand me the sharp stone for its genitalia that I may do the work of the Lord. No. Everyone in the civilized world has roughly agreed,

including the majority of Arabs and Jews and the international community, that there should be enough room for two states, for two peoples in the same land. I think we have a rough agreement on that. Why can't we get it? The UN can't get it. The U.S. can't get it.

The Quartet can't get it. Why can't they get it? because the parties of God have a veto on it, and everybody knows that this is true. Because of the divine promises made about this territory, there will never be peace, they will never be compromised. They will instead be misery, shame, and tyranny, and people will kill each other's children for ancient books and caves and relics. And who is going to say that this is good for the world? And that's just the argument being example of nearest to hand. Have you looked lately at the teaching in Africa?

and the consequences of it of a church that says, AIDS may be wicked, but not as wicked as condoms. That's exactly no seconds left, ladies and gentlemen. I've done my best. Believe me, I have more. Christopher, thank you for starting our debate. Mr. Blair, your opening remarks, please. It is undoubtedly true that people commit horrific acts of evil

in the name of religion. It is also undoubtedly true that people do acts of extraordinary, good inspired by religion. Almost half of health care in Africa is delivered by faith-based organisations, saving millions of lives. A quarter of worldwide HIV-AIDS care is provided by Catholic organizations. There is the fantastic work of Muslim and Jewish relief organizations. There are in Canada thousands of religious organizations that care for the mentally or disabled or disadvantaged or destitute.

So the proposition that religion is unadulterated poison is unsustainable. It can be destructive. It can also create a deep well of compassion and frequently does. People are inspired to do such good by what I would say is the true essence of faith, which is along with doctrine and ritual particular to each faith, A basic belief common to all faith in serving and loving God through serving and loving your fellow human beings. As witnessed by the life and teaching of Jesus, one of love, selflessness and sacrifice, the meaning of the Torah. It was Rabbi Hillel, who was once famously challenged by someone who said they would convert to religion if he could recite the whole of the Torah standing on one leg.

He stood on one leg and said, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That is the Torah. The rest is commentary, now go and do it. The teaching of Prophet Muhammad, saving one life as if you're saving the whole of humanity. The Hindu searching after selflessness. The Buddhist concepts of Karuna,

Mudita, Meta, which all subjugate selfish desires to care for others, see consistent specifically on respect for others of another faith. That, in my view, is the true faith. of faith. And the values derived from this essence offer to many people, a benign, positive, and progressive framework by which to live our daily lives, stimulating the impulse to do good, disciplining the propensity to be selfish and bad. And yes, I agree in a world without religion, the religious fanatics may be gone. But I ask you, would fanaticism be gone? And then realize that such an imagined vision of a world without religion is not in fact new.

The 20th century was a century scarred by visions that had precisely that imagining in their vision and at their heart, and gave us Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot. In this vision, obedience to the will of God was for the weak. It was the will of man that should dominate. So, I do not deny, for example, a moment that religion can be a force for evil. But I claim that where it is it is based essentially on a perversion of faith. And I assert that at least religion can also be a force

for good. And I say that a world without religious faith would be spiritually, morally, and emotionally diminished. The question is, along with all the world, along with all, the things that are wrong with religion, is there also something within it that helps the world to be better and people to do good? And I would submit there is. Thank you. So Christopher, it's now your opportunity to respond to Mr. Blair. Well now, in fairness, no one was arguing that religion should or will die out of the world. And all I'm arguing is that it would be better if there's a great deal more by way of an outbreak of secularism.

Logically, if Tony's right, I would be slightly better off, not much, but slightly better of being a Wahhabi Muslim or a 12-a-Shia Muslim or a Jehovah's Witness than I am wallowing as I do in mere secularism. What I'm arguing, really seriously, is what we need is a great deal more of one and a great deal less of the second. And I knew it would come up that we'd be told about charity. and I take this very seriously because we know

ladies and gentlemen as it happens with the first generation of people who do really what the cure for poverty really is. It eluded people for long, long time. The cure for poverty has a name in fact. It's called the empowerment of women. If you

if you give women some control over the rate at which they reproduce, if you give them some say, take them off the animal cycle of reproduction to which nature and some doctrine, religious doctrine, condemns them. And then if you're throwing a handful of seeds, perhaps, and some crates, the floor, the floor of everything in that village, not just poverty, but education, health, and optimism,

will increase. It doesn't matter. Try it in Bangladesh. Tried in Bolivia. It works. Works all the time. Name me one religion that stands for that, or ever has. Wherever you look in the world and you try to remove the shackles of ignorance and disease and

stupidity from women, it is invariable. the cleracy that stands in the way. Now, furthermore, if you're going to grant this to Catholic charities, say, which I would hope are doing a lot of work in Africa, if I was a member of a church that I'd preached that AIDS was not as bad as condoms, I'd be putting some conscience money into Africa, too, I must say. But it won't bring, I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be funny. If I was trying to be funny, you mistook me. It won't bring back the millions of people who've died wretched. deaths because of that teaching, that still goes on.

I'd like to hear a word of apology from the religious about that, if it was on offer. After all, otherwise I'd be accused of judging them by the worst of them. And this isn't done, as Tony says so wrongly, in the name of religion. It's a direct precept, practice, and enforceable discipline of religion. Is it not, sir, in this case? I think you'll find that it is. Do we grant to Hamas and to Hezbollah, both of whom will tell you an incessantly do. Look at our charitable work. Without us, Effendi, the poor of Gaza, the poor of

Lebanon, where would they be? And they're right. They do a great deal of charitable work. It's nothing compared to the harm that they do, but it's a great deal of work all the same. I'm also familiar with the teachings of the great Rabbi Hillel. I even know where he plagiarized the story from, if he had access to the stuff. The injunction not to do to another what would be repulsive if done to yourself is found in the intellects of control. If you want to date it, but actually it's found in the heart of every person in this room. Everybody knows that much. We don't require divine permission to know right from wrong.

We have the reasoning and the moral suasion of Socrates and of our own abilities. We don't need dictatorship to give us right from wrong. And that's my lot. Thank you. First of all, I don't think we should think that because you can point to example, of prejudice in the name of religion, that bigotry and prejudice and wrongdoing are wholly owned subsidiaries of religion. There are plenty examples of prejudice

against women, against gay people, against others that come from outside the world of religion. And the claim that I make is not that everything the church has done in Africa is right, but let me tell you one thing it did do, and it did it whilst I was Prime Minister of the UK. The churches together formed a campaign for the cancellation of debt. They came together, they succeeded, and the first beneficiaries of the cancellation of debt were young girls going to

school in Africa because for the first time they had free primary education. So I agree that not everything the church or the religious communities have done around the world is right, but I do say at least accept that there are people doing great work day in, day out, who genuinely are not prejudice or bigoted, but are working with people who are afflicted by famine and disease and poverty, and they are doing it inspired by their faith. Is it possible for them to have done that without their religious faith? Of course.

It's possible for them to have done it. But the fact is, that's what motivated them. What we shouldn't do is end up in a situation where we say, right, we've got six hospices here and one suicide bomber there and how does it all equalize out. That's not a very productive way of arguing this. And actually, I thought one of the most interesting things that Christopher said is that we're not going to drive religion out of the world. And that's true, we're not. And actually, I think for people of faith to have debates with those who are secularists is actually good and right and healthy and it's what we should be doing.

There are many situations where faith has done wrong, but there are many situations in which wrong has been done without religion playing any part of at all. So let us not condemn all people of religious faith because of the bigotry or prejudice shown by some, and let us at least acknowledge that some good has come out of religion, and that we should celebrate. I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. The motion before us, be it resolved, religion, is a force for good in the world. Arguing in favor is former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

The late author and provocateur Christopher Hitchens is arguing against it. Christopher, your second rebuttal, please. All right, well, just to finish on the charity point, for me, my money will always go to organizations like May de Saint-Saint-Sont Frontier, like Oxfam and many others, who's strange enough, go out into the world, do good for their fellow creatures, for its own sake.

They don't take the Bible along, as people do to Haiti all the time. We keep catching them doing it. Their money is being spent flat out on proselytization. It's a function of the old thing that was hand in hand with imperialism. It's the missionary tradition. They can call it change. if they will, but it doesn't stand a second look.

So, religion could be a good thing after all. Sometimes we think, it's another proposition. What would a religion have to do to get that far? Well, I think it would have to give up all supernatural claims. It would have to say, please, it would have to say, no, you are not to do this under the threat of reward, heaven, or the terror of punishment, hell. No, we can't offer you miracles. Finally the church that will say forget all that, faith healing, no, would have to give that up.

It would have to give up the idea of an eternal, unalterable authority figure who was judged jury and executioner against whom there could be no appeal and who wasn't finished with you even when you died. That's quite a lot for religion to give up, don't you think? But who would not say it would be better off without you? If it was what Tony Blair would like it to be. aspect of humanism, an aspect of compassion, an aspect of the realizations of human solidarity, the knowledge that we are in fact all bound up one with another, that we have responsibilities

to one to another, and that as I do when I give blood, partly because I don't lose the pine forever, I always get it back, but that there's actually a sense of pleasure to be had in helping your fellow creature. I think that should be enough. Thank you. Tony, it must feel like the House of Commons all over again. I don't know, so far they're a little politer, actually. Your final rebuttal, please. It all depends, I guess, what your experience of religious people is. I mean, my experience of the people I was with last week in Africa

that include deeply religious people is not actually that they're doing what they're doing because of heaven and hell, they're doing it for love of their fellow human beings. and that's, I think, something very fine. What's more that they believe and that this love of their fellow human beings is bound up with their faith. So it's not something, you know, yes, of course it is absolutely true.

They might decide to do this, irrespective of the fact that they have religious faith, but their faith, they feel, is an impulse to do that good. And, you know, I don't recognize the description of the work that they do in what Christopher said. In Sierra Leone, where I was, you have Christians and Muslims working together to deliver health care in that country.

That's religion playing a positive role. They're working across the faith divide and doing it because they, again, believe that their faith impels them to do that. When we look back in history, yes, of course you can see plenty of examples of where religion has played a negative role. You can see great examples.

for example in the abolition of slavery, where religious reformers joined with secular reformers in order to bring about the abolition of slavery. And let's get away from this idea that religion created poverty. There are bad things that have happened in the world outside of religion. And when you look at the 20th century and you see the great scars of political ideology, fascism, the communism of Stalin,

absolutely at their heart was the eradication of religion. And what I would say to you is, get rid of religion, but you're not getting rid of fanaticism, and you're not going to get rid of the wrong in the world. And here's the thing. When they start to talk about their faith, they don't actually talk in terms of heaven and hell and a God that's an executioner of those that do wrong.

They talk in terms of their basic feeling that love of God can be expressed best through love of neighbor and actions in furtherance of the compassion and help needed by others. And this is, in 2007, religious organizations in the US gave one and a half times the amount of aid that US AID did. Not insignificant.

So my point is very, very simple. You can list all the faults of religion, just as you can list the faults of the politicians the journalists and any other profession. But for people of faith, the reason why they try to do good, and when they do it, is because their faith motivates them to do so.

And that is genuinely the proper face of faith. Well, gentlemen, thank you for a terrific start to this debate. I'm going to take some live questions from some younger audience members here on the stage. And in that regard, we're going to start with a question from a student at the monk school, global affairs. Danna Wagner, where are you, Dana? Here you are. A big part of this issue is our inability to stand in another's shoes with an open

mind to understand a different worldview. In this regard, can each of you tell us whichever your opponent's arguments is the most convincing? Thank you. Hmm, right. Now this definitely never happened in the House of Commons. I think that the most convincing argument is, and the argument that people of faith have got to deal with, is that the bad that is done in the name of religion is intrinsically grounded in the scripture of religion. That is the single most difficult argument. And since I've said it's a really difficult argument, I suppose I better give an answer to it. My answer to it is this, that there is, of course, that debate that goes on,

religion, which is the degree to which, as it were, you look at scripture, abstracted from its time, you pick out individual parts of it, you use those in order to justify whatever view you like, or whether, as I tried to do in my opening, you actually say, well, what is the essence of that faith? And what is the essence of Scripture? And of course, then what you realize is that, yes, of course, if you believe as a Muslim that we should live our lives according to the 7th century, then you will end up with some very extreme positions. And also when you look at Christianity,

yes, of course you can point to issues that of that time now seem very strange and outdated. But on the other hand, when you take Christianity as a whole and ask what it means to those, do what draws people to it? You know, what is it that made me as a student come to Christianity? It wasn't to do with some of the things that Christopher has just been describing. And, you know, I understand that's, there are those traditions within religion.

I understand that. I accept that. I see how people look at certain parts of scripture and draw those conclusions from it. But it's not what it means to me. It's not the essence of it. The essence of it is through the life of Jesus Christ, is a life of love and selflessness and sacrifice. And that's what it means to me. Yes, it is a difficult argument. That is the most difficult argument. I agree. But I also think there is an answer to it. And I think one of the values, actually, of having a debate like this, and in a sense having someone making that point as powerfully as Christopher has made it, is that it does force. people of faith, to recognize that we have to deal with this argument, to take it on, and to make sure that not just in what we are trying to do, but in how we interpret our faith, we are making sure that what I describe as the essence of faith, which is serving God through the love of others, is indeed reflected, not just in what we do, but in the doctrines and the practice of

our religion. Admiral, question, thank you for it. The remark Tony made that I most agreed with this evening,

I'll just hope that doesn't sound too minimal, was when he said that if religion was to disappear, things would by no

means, as it were, automatically be okay. I mean, he phrased it better than that. He's quite right about that,

of course. I hope I didn't seem at any point to have argued to the contrary. I come before you after all, as a materialist. If we give up religion, we discover what actually we know already, whether

we're religious or not, which is that we are somewhat imperfectly evolved primates on a very small planet in a very unimportant suburb of a solar system that is itself a negligible part of a very rapidly expanding and blowing apart cosmic phenomena. I think I could say a couple of things for religion myself would in fact. First is what I call the apotropaic. We all have it, the desire not to be found claiming all the credit. A certain kind of modesty. You could almost say humility.

People will therefore say they'll thank God when something happens that they are grateful for. There's no need to make this a religious thing. The Greeks had the concept of hubris as something to be avoided and criticized. but what the Greeks would also have called the Apotropag, the view that not all the glory can be claimed by a load of primates like ourselves is a healthy reminder too.

Second, the sense that there's something beyond the material, or if not beyond it, not entirely consistent materially with it, is, I think, a very important matter, what you could call the numinous or the transcendent, or at its best I suppose the ecstatic I wouldn't trust anyone in this hall

who didn't know what I was talking about we know what we mean by it when we think about certain kinds of music perhaps certainly the relationship or the coincidence but sometimes very powerful between music and love without this we really would merely

be primates and I think it's actually very important that we learn to distinguish the numinous the question is how to keep what is of value of this sort in art and in our own emotions and in our finer feelings the numinists, the transcendent, I'll go as far as the ecstatic, and to distinguish it precisely from superstition and the supernatural, which are designed to make us fearful and afraid and servile, and which sometimes succeed only too well. Thank you.

You're listening to the Monk Debates podcast. I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. The motion before us, be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world. Arguing in favor is former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. The late author and provocateur Christopher Hitchens is arguing against it. If you're enjoying this debate, check out our website, monkdebates.com, for dozens of debates on the big issues of the day. Watch Fried Zakaria and Neil Ferguson go head to head on the future of geopolitics. read Stephen Fry and Jordan Peterson's debate on political correctness. All these debates free to listen, watch, and read at monkdebates.com.

If you're enjoying this podcast, please share it on social media and write a review. We welcome your ideas for debates and debaters that we can feature on future shows. Please send us an email to a podcast at monkdebates.com. Thanks for your help in bringing back the art of public debate one conversation at a time. Now, back to our episode. Well, it's now time for the final act in our debate, closing statements. So Christopher, I'm going to call on you again to speak. Your closing remarks, please.

I mentioned earlier our attachment to the Labour and Socialist Movement in our lifetimes. For a very long time, we had in that movement a challenger, apparently from the left, the Communist Movement, which has only been dead a very short time now. actually hasn't died everywhere yet, and which said it had a much more comprehensive and courageous and thoroughgoing answer than we did to the problems created by capitalism and imperialism and other things,

and really proposed a fighting solution. And if I was to point to you the number of heroic people who believed in that, and the number of wonderful works of, especially of fiction, novels and essays written by people who believed in it, You could probably all of you mention one of your own. If you were a Canadian, I hope they still teach about him in school, the great example of Norman Berthune,

heroic doctor who went to volunteer in China during the Civil War on the communist side, did amazing work, invented a form of battlefield blood transfusion. Just one among many examples. It was the communists in many parts of Europe who barred the road to fascism in Spain and felt kept Madrid for many years from falling to Franco and Hitler and Mussolini. Gandhi may take credit for the Indian independence movement, too much in my view, but no one would deny the tremendous role played by the Indian communists in doing this, in helping to break the hold of Great Britain on their country.

There's no doubt about it. There was real heroism and dignity and humanism to those people, but we opposed it. We said, no, it won't work. Why won't it work? It's not worth the sacrifice of freedom that it implies. It implies that all these great things can only be done, if you'll place yourself under an infallible leadership.

One that once it's made a decision, has made that decision, and you are bound by it. You might conceivably notice where I'm going here. It's why many of the people, the brilliant intellectuals, who did leave it, left it very often for as high reasons of principle as they joined it in the first place, precisely because it was an attempt at a bogus form, a surrogate of religion.

But let no one say, and when the history comes to be written, No one will be able to say that it didn't represent some high points in human history. But I repeat, it wasn't worth it at the sacrifice of mental and intellectual and moral freedom. Consider yourselves, and consider this carefully, ladies and gentlemen, brothers, sisters, comrades, friends. Are you, are you yourselves willing for the sake of certain elements of the Numinous, perhaps for a great record of good works, as it's proposed by Tony. Are you willing to say that you give your allegiance to an ultimate redeemer? Because they're not really religious if you don't believe that there is a divine supervision involved.

You don't have to believe it intervenes all the time. If you don't believe that, you're already halfway out the door. You don't need me. But are you willing to pay the price for a permanent supervisor? Are you willing to pay the price of believing in things that are supernatural? miracles, afterlives, angels. Are you willing to admit, perhaps this most of all, are you willing to admit that human beings can be the interpreter of this divine figure?

Because a religion means that you will have to follow someone who is your religious leader. You can't try as you may follow Jesus of Nazareth. It can't be done. You can try and do it. It can't be done. You'll have to follow his vicar on earth. You have to say this person has divine authority. I maintain that that and what goes with it is too much of a sacrifice

of the mental and intellectual freedom that is essential to us to be tolerated. And you gain everything by repudiating that and standing up to your own full height. And you gain much more than you will by pretending that you're a member of a flock or in any other way, any kind of sheep. Thank you.

I would say that actually the example of communism shows that those that want to suppress freedom, those who have a fanatical view of the way the world should work, those are not confined to the sphere of religious faith, I'm afraid. It is there in many, many different walks of life. And it was actually Einstein, who was not an atheist, in fact. he believed in the supreme being, although he did not necessarily subscribe to organized religion, who said religion without science is blind. But he also went on to say science without religion is lame.

And I would say that, you know, for me, faith is not about certainty. It is in part a reflection, indeed, of my own awareness of my own ignorance, of my own ignorance, And though life's processes can be explained by science, the meaning and purpose of life cannot be. And in that space, for me at least, lies not certainty in the scientific sense, but a belief that is clear and insistent, and I would say rational, which is that there is a higher power than human power, and that higher power causes to lead best. lives in accordance with a will more important than our own. I think this debate this evening has been a fascinating and I think deeply important debate about probably the single most important issue of the 21st century. I actually don't think the 21st century will be about fundamentalist political ideology.

I accept it could be about fundamentalist religious. or cultural ideology. And the way that we avoid that is for those people of faith actually to be prepared to stand up and to debate those people who are of none. And for those people who believe in a world of peaceful coexistence

where people do cooperate together recognize that there are people with deeply held religious convictions and that those convictions impel them to be part of that world of peaceful coexistence, even though it is true. There are those who in the name of religion, and indeed, as a consequence of religion, will sometimes do things that are horrific, bad, evil, and in my view, totally contrary to the true meaning of faith.

So I don't stand before you tonight and say that those of us of religious faith, have always done right since that is plainly wrong. But I do say that throughout human history, there have been examples of people inspired by faith that have actually, rather than contributed to the suppression of humanity, contributed to its liberation, spiritually, emotionally, and even materially. And it is those people that I stand up for here with you tonight.

Thank you. We hope you enjoyed our rebroadcast of the debate between former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the late Christopher Hitchens. The motion, be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world. To listen to more debates on everything from climate change to geopolitics to the future of human progress, visit our website, monkdebates.com. You can also find show notes on today's debate, along with a full transcript. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate. conversation at a time.

I'm Rudyard Griffiths. The Monk Debates are produced by Antica Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. The executive producer of Antica is Stuart Cox. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thanks again for listening.