The Four Horsemen, episode 1

[CH] By the way, on that, a tiny point. I hope not a digression, it's useful bearing that in mind, too, when you get, as I did this morning on ABC News, the question "well, wouldn't you say religion did some good in the world, and there were good people?" You don't go that argument, and by the way, there's no reason why one shouldn't, you say "well, yes, I have indeed heard it said that Hamas provides social services in Gaza", And I've even heard it said that Farrakhan's group gets young, black men in prison off drugs. I don't know if it's true, I'm willing to accept it might be but it doesn't alter the fact that the one is a militarised, terrorist organisation with a fanatical anti-Semitic ideology, and the second is a racist, crackpot cult. And I have no doubt that Scientology gets people off drugs, too. But my insistence always with these people is if you will claim it for one, you must accept it for them all.

[SH] And the other move you can make there …

[CH] 'Cause if you don't it's flat-out dishonest.

[SH] You can invent an ideology, which by your mere invention in that moment, is obviously untrue, which would be quite useful if propagated, to billions. I mean, you can say this is my new religion: teach people to demand that your children study science and math and economics, and all of our terrestrial disciplines, to the best of their abilities, and if they don't persist in those efforts, they'll be tortured after death by seventeen demons (laughter). This would be extremely useful, and maybe far more useful than Islam, propagated to billions, and yet what are the chances that the seventeen demons exist? Zero.

[RD] There's a slipperiness too, isn't there, about one way of speaking to sophisticated intellectuals and theologians and another way of speaking to congregations and above all, children. And I think we've, all of us, been accused of going after the easy targets of the Jerry Falwells of this world and ignoring the sophisticated professors of theology and, I mean, I don't know what you feel about that but one of the things that I feel is that the sophisticated professors of theology will say one thing to each other and to intellectuals generally but will say something totally different to a congregation. They'll talk about miracles, they'll talk about …

[DD] Well they won't talk to a congregation …

[RD] Well, archbishops will …

[DD] Yes, but when sophisticated theologians try to talk to the preachers, the preachers wont have any of it.

[RD] Well that’s true of course.

[DD] I mean, you gotta realise that sophisticated theology is like stamp collecting. It’s a very specialised thing and only a few people do it.

[RD] They're of negligible influence.

[DD] They take in their own laundry and they get all excited about some very arcane details, and their own religions pay almost no attention to what they're saying. A little bit of it does, of course, filter in but it always gets beefed up again for general consumption, because what they say in their writings, at least from my experience, is eye-glazing, mind twisting, very subtle things which have no particular bearing on life.

[CH] Oh! No I must insist, I must say a good word here for Professor Allister McGrath who, in his attack on Richard, said it’s not true, as we've always been told and most people, most Christians believe that Tertullian said “credo quia absurdum”, I believe it because it’s ridiculous, no! It turns out, I've checked this now, though, I don't know this in McGrath that in fact Tertullian said the impossibility of it is the thing that makes it the most believable. That’s a well worth distinction, I think, and very useful for training one’s mind in the fine (inaudible).

[SH] If possibility is cause to absurdity …

[CH] It’s the likelihood, in other words, that it could’ve been made up.

[SH] Right

[CH] … is diminished by the incredibility of it. Who would try and invent something that was that unbelievable, that is so off the wall?

[SH] You make a very good point on those lines.

[CH] That actually is, I think, a debate perfectly well worth having.

[RD] That’s a good point.

[CH] What I say to these people is this, you’re sending your e-mail or your letter to the wrong address. Everyone says let's not judge religion by its fundamentalists. Alright. Take the church of England, two of whose senior leaders recently said that the floods in north Yorkshire were the result of homosexual behavior, not in north Yorkshire presumably, probably in London, I think they’re thinking …

[DD] God’s aim is a little off!