Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Christopher Hitchens vs Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

"I don't need any sickly advice from Nazareth - from the man who after all the Old Testament horrors that we know about, none of them included the punishment of hell; there's no hell in the Old Testament. It's a credit to the Jewish people actually, when God and Moses are done with enjoining genocide on you, which by the way they do - according to those books. I don't know where, which books the Rabbi has been reading but he might want to tell you what happened to the Amalekites. Where are the Midianites? What happened to all these people? We know what we were told to do to them. So glad to think that those books are fictional, because if they were true we would all be bespattered with the blood of others to please a hideous authority. But no punishment once he's done with you. Once the earth has closed over you, that's it. There's no torture of the dead. Not until gentle Jesus meek and mild do you get that." Christopher Hitchens (39:17)

"If you want to saw off the end of your penis, you're welcome. You're not to do it to a child who hasn't asked for it. Same with the genitals of a little girl. If she thinks later on she would be better off without them, let her take or have taken to her a sharp instrument. ... It is not right, it is not moral, it is in fact wicked to submit children to mutilation of their genitalia, or to anyone without their consent. Do you understand that this elementary point only needs to be made because of wickedness enjoined by religion? The Rabbi (Shmuley Boteach) here is a fairly humane guy; he wouldn't, if he didn't think God was involved, ever consider mutilating the genitals of a child. But because it's a covenant with God, anything can be done!". Christopher Hitchens (42:18)


"There is every difference between being a Deist and a Theist. Science and reason cannot disprove the existence of a first cause or creator, we cannot do that. We can only say that everything works without that assumption, and there is no evidence on the other side of the case. This seems to us to license unbelief. To the Theistic argument of a God who actually is interested in answering prayers, cares who you marry, who you go to bed with, what you eat, which side wins in a war and so forth - we say this is human propaganda, self-evidently man-made and the so-called miraculous evidence to this point has been repeatedly and conclusively falsified and disproved."
Christopher Hitchens (72:00)



watch this video on YouTube.com (full screen capability)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnMYL8sF7bQ

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