Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Does Religion Poison Everything? Christian Debater Turns the Tables || SLP639

Transcript

Does Religion Poison Everything? Christian Debater Turns the Tables || SLP639 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: You should definitely be suspicious of religious people who say religion permits everything.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my goodness, you should be so suspicious of every religious person who says religion permits everything.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_02: As Blaise Pascal has said, men never do evil so cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: That is a deep evil.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_02: I think Jesus taught us that.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_02: But doubly suspect, anybody who wants to do away with the sacred.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_02: There are crusades within the church.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: There are also secular crusades in the name of liberty and equality and fraternity, in the name of nation, in the name of race, in the name of class.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: And they have killed far more than religion ever has.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: There is a poison going on.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: The name for that poison is not best called religion.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_02: It is a human problem.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: And what we really need is an antidote.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, last year someone met Jesus because of a four-pound Facebook ad, and we need your help to do it again in 2026.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: There is something strange happening right now.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: People are searching for Jesus again, but when they look, they often find stuff that is confusing or shallow or downright misleading.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_02: So we created 321 as a free online introduction to Christianity that meets seekers where they are.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_02: In just the past two years, more than 35,000 people have signed up online, and many more people have done the course in person.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_02: But the best part, lives are changing.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_02: Stories like Michael's get me every time.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_02: He'd just watched some really disturbing news online, the kind that makes you question everything.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: Having opened Facebook, just scrolling like we all do, and he saw an ad for 321, it felt like a sign from God.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: So he took the course.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_02: Now he's reading the Bible, he's growing in faith, his whole direction has changed.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: And here's the crazy part: it costs just four pounds to show him that ad.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: Four pounds.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: That's all it took to put the message that led him to Jesus right in front of him.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: Stories like Michael's are happening again and again because this generation is more open than we think.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: The soil is ready.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_02: But moments like this don't stay open forever.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: So this Easter, we're asking 100 people to step in and help us reach more seekers like Michael.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: It only costs four pounds to show Michael that ad that led him to Jesus.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_02: So just think what you could make possible with 20 pounds a month.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: More people could encounter Jesus through your generosity.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: And right now at Easter 2026, every gift is being doubled for the first year.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: So if this story moves you, this is your moment to help someone else find the hope they're already searching for.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: This is a moment to sow in faith and trust God for the harvest.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_02: Will you be one of the hundred?
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: Will you give for gospel growth?
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_02: If you give before Easter Monday, your donation will be doubled by a generous match funder for the first year.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: So your 20 pounds would be worth 40.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: Visit speaklife.org.uk slash growth to give now.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: That's speaklife.org.uk slash growth.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you and God bless.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: Does religion poison everything?
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_02: That was the title of the debate that I had with Stephen Woodford, aka Rationality Rules.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: It was on the Pangburn stage in London on the 28th of February before an audience of hundreds.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: And much of my opening statement was about my ambivalence about religion.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_02: Let's have a look.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much for coming, everybody.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_02: I am Glenn.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Emma's husband.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Ruby and JJ's dad.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_02: I belong to Jesus.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: And uh that might make you think that I'm going to be pro-religion.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I think a lot of what we talk about now will be uh what do we even mean when we say religion?
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I often think back to in the Bible, you've got uh Genesis chapter 11, one of the foundational texts in Scripture is the Tower of Babel, and there you've got humans who are trying to make a name for themselves, building towards heaven.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: And it is uh a very calamitous and poisonous vision of what religion actually is, and it's juxtaposed with Genesis chapter 12.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_02: Abraham is plucked from paganism and given the blessings of God that he might pass those blessings on to the nations.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's the difference between an up and in kind of religion and a down and out movement of blessing.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: And the rest of the Old Testament uh, I think, puts a question mark over the goodness of religion, in fact.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: So the king is kept out of the temple, and kings are not priests, and prophets come along to speak truth to power.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, there's a profound question mark put over religion in the abstract in the Old Testament, to the point where uh the temple is destroyed and God says, I did it.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_02: I did it because I hate your sacred assemblies.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: I did it because those who say I am holier than thou are a smoke in my nostrils, right?
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh if you've ever hated the holy and holier than thou crowd, uh you are very godly in that.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: And God actually destroys the temple, and Israel are in the wilderness for many, many years, and then, so the story goes, God shows up and he goes to the temple and he moves around the furniture, and he is such a threat to the religion of his day that he is declared to be a blasphemer and he is silenced, he is a victim of religious violence.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: And at the center of the Christian faith is a cross, the symbol of religious exclusion, the symbol of someone being executed as a blasphemer.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: That's a profound thing and a deep thing.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I think Christians have an interesting relationship to religion.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: I describe my relationship to religion a little bit like the woman who is always dead against the institution of marriage, and maybe she's got like a TikTok account and she's constantly like ranting at the screen, telling you why she hates this awful, outdated, outmoded thing called marriage, and then she posts pictures of her engagement, and then she gets married, and you start to ask the question well, why?
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: Does she now believe in marriage?
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: And no, she doesn't believe in marriage now, she believes in him, right?
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_02: And he has converted her.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: She's met a guy.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: And for me, you know, I'm a Christian and I've met a guy.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: I don't warm to the idea of institutional religion.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know many Christians who do warm to the notion of institutional religion.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know many Christians who warm to merely the idea of some kind of God.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: But we've met a guy, right?
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: And he's converted us.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_02: And in alongside that union with Jesus comes an institution.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: And this institution, interestingly, in the early days was thought of as atheistic.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: So the early church, uh, what you would do in order to worship was not what the Romans would do.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: You would not go and burn incense to Jupiter, you would actually meet with one another around a table.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there's a table here.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_02: Do this in remembrance of me, says Jesus.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_02: And this is the community that Jesus kind of established after his death, in which there are no images of God except those people sitting around that table, right?
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_02: They are images of God.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: Page one of this Bible says that we are divine images.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: And therefore, in Jesus' frame, how do you serve God?
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you don't burn an incense, uh a piece of incense to uh Jupiter, right, or Mars.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_02: You don't you don't burn a a bit of incense, you serve the image of God in your neighbor, and out of that religious impulse, which is more the Genesis 12 Abraham kind of religious impulse than the Babel kind of impulse, out of that impulse was birthed the most incredible compassion revolution that the world has ever seen.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_02: They fed the hungry and they clothed the poor and they visited the stranger and they welcomed the outsider, and they did it in the name of Jesus because they were serving God by serving their neighbor.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_02: It birthed an incredible compassion revolution in which Christians stood against infanticide and instead took the exposed infants and raised them, pioneering a new way of orphan care.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's an extraordinary good that uniquely Christianity brought to the world.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: I think the the abolition of infanticide, the abolition of the gladiatorial games, the abolition of pederasty, adult child sexual contact, uh contact that was meant to mature young people, it was practiced pretty universally in the ancient world.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_02: It was thought of as child abuse by Christians and Jews.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_02: They stood against it, they legislated against it when they had the chance.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_02: They brought about these real senses of progress, and we could keep going in terms of Christian history.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_02: I do think that the Christian movement, whether you want to call it a religion or not, the Christian movement has been an extraordinary source of blessing in this world and has brought about the greatest amount of human flourishing.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_02: It is an extraordinary movement of down and out grace, but not of up and in religious posturing.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_02: The church has often been guilty of the up and in religious posturing.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_02: It has often been guilty of terrible crimes, sins, we would say, which are even worse than crimes on the Christian understanding.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_02: We can think of inquisitions, we can think of crusades, we can think of child sexual abuse scandals within the church that are egregious.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: But what I would say about all those things is let's have a problem with religious violence.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: Let's have a problem with child sexual abuse.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_02: And Christianity gives you a problem with these things.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_02: It is a stain on the conscience of the church.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_02: When these things happen outside the church, and they do all the time, is that a stain on their consciences?
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_02: Is there such a thing as conscience?
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_02: The church at least reserves the right to call those things evil.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: And then the anti-religious movements that have happened, the movements of people who then say religion poisons everything.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_02: I I want you to be very suspicious of those movements.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: You should definitely be suspicious of religious people who say religion permits everything.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my goodness, you should be so suspicious of every religious person who says religion permits everything.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_02: As Blaise Pascal has said, men never do evil so cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_02: That is a deep evil.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: Be very suspicious of people who say religion permits everything.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_02: Be even more suspicious of anybody who says religion poisons everything.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I think we've got the history behind us.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_02: In the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity, there was a reign of terror in which so many perished in executions, so many perished in that terror.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_02: 200,000 probably with 20,000 decapitated, in the name of liberty, inequality, and fraternity, in the name of a cult of reason.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_02: We could go to the Red Terror of Lenin and then of Stalin, tens of millions perish.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: We could go to Nazi Germany, bringing in the name not of religion, but in the name of race, a kind of terror that cost the lives again of tens of millions.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_02: We could go to Mao and in the name of class, a kind of religious terror that really killed 40 million, perhaps, in the great leap forward.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_02: Suspect anybody who tells you that religion permits everything, absolutely.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_02: I think Jesus taught us that.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_02: But doubly suspect anybody who wants to do away with the sacred, who wants to do away with a religious community that might have qualms with your religious project.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_02: There are crusades within the church, there are also secular crusades in the name of religion, in the name of liberty and equality and fraternity, in the name of race and class and nation.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_02: And they have killed far more than religion ever has.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_02: There is a poison going on, but the name for that poison is not best called religion.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_02: It is a human problem.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: And what we really need is an antidote.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: And I think the antidote is the one on that cross.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_02: He is the one who is the victim of religious violence, who rose up again to teach us a better way.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_02: Religion can be incredibly dangerous, and especially the person who says religion permits everything, you should run from them as fast as your little legs can carry you.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: But the person who says religion poisons everything, they are someone you should deeply mistrust as well.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: Because what are they trying to do?
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_02: And what will they do with the power they now have?
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_02: Divorced from the sacred, divorced from a moral community, divorced from the prying eyes of heaven and of earth.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_02: What does such a person want to do now?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: Now that they have delegitimated religion?
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we know the answer from history.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: The answer from history is that they will have a reign of terror, as with the French Revolution, in which 20,000 people are decapitated and a quarter of a million people die in the revolutionary strife, or you will have a Russian revolution, in which the Red Terror kills 200,000 and 10 million other civilians die in the Revolutionary War.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes the religion is poison crowd, run to liberty, equality, and fraternity for their bloodbath.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes they run to a classless utopia for their bloodbath.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes, as with Adolf Hitler, they run towards racial supremacy for their bloodbath.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_02: And World War II claimed 70 million lives.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_02: Mao killed 40 million with his Great Leap Forwards, so there's progress for you.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_02: And Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge murdered two million in the killing fields.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_02: Violence in the name of God is an egregious stain on the conscience of Christians.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_02: But at least there is a conscience to be stained.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_02: Greater evil and greater death tolls have occurred in the name of other things, not God, but the state or class or race or liberty or equality or fraternity or progress.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_02: The common denominator in violence and war is not God.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_02: It is humanity.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_02: And without God, humanity has killed more people in the wars of irreligion than the religious could ever dream in their most apocalyptic confabulations.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: The wars of religion are a stain on the conscience of the church, but at least there is a conscience to be stained.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_02: The wars of irreligion in the twentieth century killed a hundred million.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_02: Beware the person who says religion permits everything.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_02: Doubly beware the person who says religion poisons everything.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_02: And what should we do once we've recognized that the problem is not God, the problem is us?
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_02: We should cry out for the antidote.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_02: And it's Jesus who said it's not the healthy who needed the doctor, it's the sick.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_02: I've not come to call the righteous but sinners.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus has come to bring health to those who know that they are lost in toxicity.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_02: And he is the one who descends into religious violence, who suffers it at its worst.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: It's the most incredible thing.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: God dies as a blasphemer and takes on himself all our poison and then rises up.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_02: And instead of inflicting violence back, he says, peace, peace, peace, peace.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: Great evil can be done in the name of religion.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_02: Great evil can be done in the name of Jesus.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: And when that happens, the evil is multiplied.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_02: Because how dare we do something so poisonous in the name of the doctor who is so health-giving?
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_02: But that is why the doctor came.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: He came to we who are lost in toxicity and unhealth.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_02: He took out poison to give us his peace.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_02: Do you know Jesus?
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_02: Do you want to find out more about Jesus?
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: Why don't you go to 321course.com?
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_02: You can hear about life according to Jesus, about God's threeness, the world's two-ness, and your oneness.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_02: It's totally free.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: There are no fees.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_02: We won't spam you.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: But there's nothing more important than getting to know this Jesus.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's not God is the problem and we are the solution.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's we're the problem.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_02: But in Christ, God has a solution for us.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_02: Go to 321Course.com and do that.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: And why don't you give this channel a subscribe because we'd love to see you on the next video.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: Guys, guys, we've got some news.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um our YouTube channel, Glenn Scrivener, BrackettSpeak Life, has just hit 100,000 subscribers.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: 100,000! So for those of you who are listening to this rather than watching, we have balloons, we have party poppers, we are celebrating 100,000 people who want to see life through the lens of Jesus.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: That is so cool.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: Thomas, how many were there when you started with Speak Life?
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: When I started back in sort of 2020, I think we had about 7,000.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, it's gone up a bit.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: And some of those subscribers are our lovely podcast listeners.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for being with us on the journey, and here is to the next hundred thousand.