The Four Horsemen, episode 1

[CH] We're about to have the Christmas wars, again of course, and this being the last day of September, you can feel it all coming on, but whenever it comes up, when I go on any of these shows to discuss it, I say it was Oliver Cromwell who cut down the Christmas trees and forbade … It was the Puritan Protestants, the ancestors of the American Fundamentalists who said Christmas would be blasphemy. Do you at least respect your own traditions, 'cause I do. I think Cromwell was a great man, in many other ways as well. This is actually a pagan festival.

[SH] Well, we were all outed with our Christmas trees last year.

[RD] I have not the slightest problem with Christmas trees.

[DD] No, no, we had our Christmas card with our pictures of us.

[CH] It's a good old Norse booze-up. And why the hell not?

[SH] Right.

[DD] Well, but it's not just that, I mean, we …

[CH] I like solstices as much as the next person.

[DD] We have an annual Christmas carol party, where we sing the music and all the music with all the words, and not the secular Christmas stuff.

[RD] And why not? Yes.

[DD] And it's just glorious stuff. That part of the Christian story is fantastic. It's just a beautiful tale. And you can love every inch of it without believing.

[RD] I once at lunch was next to the lady who was our opponent at that debate in London.

[CH] Rabbi Neuberger.

[RD] Rabbi Neuberger. And she asked me whether I said grace in New College, when I happened to be a Senior Fellow. And I said of course I say grace, it's a matter of simple courtesy and she was furious.

[DD] Oh, really?

[RD] Yes. That I should somehow be so hypocritical as to say grace. And I had could only say well look, it may mean something to you but it means absolutely nothing to me. This is a Latin formula which has some history, and I appreciate history. Freddy Ayer, the philosopher, also used to say grace, and what he said was: "I won't utter falsehoods but I've no objection to uttering meaningless statements."

(general laughter)

[DD] Yes!

[CH] Oh that's very good. The Wykeham Professor?

[DD] Yes, with (inaudible)

[CH] (inaudible) was an old friend. Did we answer your question on Islam?

[SH] Ah, I don't know. Well, okay, I'll ask a related question. Do you feel there's any burden we have, as critics of religion, to be even-handed in our criticism of religion, or is it fair to notice that there's a spectrum of religious ideas and commitments and Islam is on one end of it, and the Amish and the Jains and others are on another, and there are real differences here that we have to take seriously?

[DD] Well, of course they have to take them seriously but we don't have to do the network balancing trick all the time. There are plenty of people taking care of pointing out the good stuff and the benign stuff and we can acknowledge that and then concentrate on the problems. That's what critics do, and again, if we were writing books about the pharmaceutical industry, would we have to spend equal time on all the good they do? Or could we specialise in the problems? I think it's very clear.

[RD] I think Sam's asking more about …

[SH] Well we could criticise Merck, if they were especially egregious, as opposed to some other company, I mean if we were focusing on the pharmaceutical industry, not all pharmaceutical businesses would be culpable in the same way.

[DD] Yeah right. Then the question is what? That should we … is there something wrong with …?

[RD] No I think you're talking cross-purposes, I think I think Sam's asking about whether we should be even-handed in criticising the different religions, and you're talking about evenhandedness about good versus bad.

[CH] Whether all religions are equally bad?

[RD] Yeah.

[DD] Right.

[RD] Whether Islam is worse than Christianity or …

[SH] It seems to me we fail to enlist the friends we have on this subject, when we balance this. I mean, it's a tactic, it's a media tactic, and in some sense it's almost an ontological commitment of atheism to say that all faith claims are in some sense equivalent. You know, the media says that Muslims have their extremists and we have our extremists. We have jihadists in the Middle-East and we have …

[RD] There's an imbalance there, yeah.