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DEBATE: Is Christianity The Air We Breathe? (James Croft vs Glen Scrivener) || SLP584 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_10: The moral air we breathe is not the result of any one religious or philosophical influence, but it's a complex mixture of many.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_10: So there are pre-Christian sources of contemporary value.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_07: What impact do you think they have on the year of our Lord 2025?
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_10: There are what we might call anti-Christian sources of contemporary values.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_10: Think of Thomas Paine, the Arch Infidel.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_07: As much as he was reacting against Christianity, he was reacting against it for some profoundly Christian-ish reasons.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_07: There are non-Christian sources of contemporary values.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_07: There are values that resonate hugely with a Christianized culture, and that we can applaud and that we ought to applaud wherever we find it.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_07: Where you really see the special place and dignity of humanity is God the human.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_07: You could not have a greater grounding for your humanism, James, than to become a Christian, right?
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_07: Because I can't wait.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_07: It can be arranged.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_10: If I became convinced that something that looked like a person actually had no interiority and was not a person, it would not be immoral to end their life.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_10: That does follow from my position.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_07: Weaknesses should not be exploited for the benefit of the powerful, but actually the weak should be helped and lifted up.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_07: That actually their weakness is a cause for pity.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_07: You believe in compassion, don't you?
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_10: And we truly say that the air we breathe is Christian.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_03: Well, hello and welcome back to the Speak Life Podcast.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_03: My name is Thomas Thurgood, media producer at Speak Life, and I'm very excited to bring you this episode today.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_03: It's slightly different.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_03: It's a debate that Glenn Scrivener had with a man called James Croft.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_03: James is the humanist chaplain at Sussex University.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_03: So he is an atheist, and he very kindly invited Glenn to debate him on the topic Is Christianity the air we breathe?
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_03: And that's obviously the title of one of Glenn's books.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_03: James Croft argues that Christianity has been influential in shaping our values, but it is one shaping influence among a whole mixture of different spiritualities and philosophies that have contributed to how we see the world, whereas Glenn argues that it is more significant than that.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_03: The debate happened in the Sussex University Meeting House, and if you go on our YouTube channel, you can watch the footage of it.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_03: It was a stunning building with all these rectangular stained glass windows, and James was telling us that they're very meticulously placed in terms of their colouration.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_03: So apparently as the sun rises in the east, the sunlight passes through windows that have a more kind of sunrise colour, and then as it moves across the sky, it moves to uh more sunset style colours.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_03: So that was kind of cool.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_03: And we had a live audience of probably at least 40, so it was a really great atmosphere, and some great conversations in the student bar afterwards.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_03: So a huge thank you to James for having us and for suggesting the topic for this debate.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_03: And a huge thank you to Daniel, who is a student at the university.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_03: He moderates the debate.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_03: So there are opening statements, an opening statement from Glenn, and then an opening statement from James.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_03: And then there's some open discussion between them, then some QA from the audience, and then some short closing statements from Glenn and James.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_03: Just a reminder that the 321 podcast is going out, so you can get it wherever you get your podcasts.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_03: Episode four dropped this week, so we're about halfway through.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_03: Well, exactly halfway through, actually.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know why I said about.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_03: And you can watch all eight episodes of the 321 podcast immediately if you go to 321course.com and create an account there if you haven't done so already.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_03: And it seems like the 321 podcast is proving to be a real blessing to people, this conversation between Glenn and Graham and Swazi, kind of talking about the deep questions of life in a very informal, conversational, personal way.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_03: We're really excited about that resource and we pray that it continues to be a blessing to you.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_03: So if you haven't checked out the 321 podcast, why not go and do that after listening to this debate?
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_03: But without further ado, I will hand straight over to Glenn, James, and Daniel.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_03: Enjoy.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_10: Yes! Hello, everybody! Can we get a big cheer for the crow the camera?
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_10: I feel so loved.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_10: Thank you, everyone.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_10: That was actually, I've never asked a crowd for that before, and it feels really good.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_10: Thank you.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_10: In case you don't know who on earth I am, I'm James Croft.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_10: I am the university chaplain and lead faith advisor here at the University of Sussex.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_10: I didn't choose the title.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_10: I'm aware it's very pompous.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_10: What it means is that my job is to support and facilitate the work of a team of about 15 chaplains representing different religious and philosophical traditions, from Orthodox Christianity to paganism to Buddhism to humanism, which is the tradition that I represent.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_10: One of the purposes of the chaplaincy here at Sussex is to improve our students' religious literacy and their understanding about religious worldviews, and to engage people in discussion across lines of religious difference.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_10: I don't know if you've noticed, but we live in a very polarized world right now.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_10: And a lot of our political and religious discourse is very, very unpleasant.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_10: And we hope that by getting people into a room who don't necessarily have all the same beliefs to talk with each other in a respectful way.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, that's what we're here for.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_10: Okay, good.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_10: Excellent.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_10: Then we can help moderate a little bit this climate in which we're living that is so polarized and difficult.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_10: And that's why I'm so delighted to have Glenn Scrivener with me tonight from yes, fans of Glenn, you can look at him.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_10: I came to know of Glenn's work through his YouTube channel, Speak Life.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_10: I have been watching it obsessively for like two years.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_10: I find it absolutely fascinating.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_10: And when I discovered that he was in Eastbourne just down the road, I thought, well, we have to have Glenn come here and do an event at the university.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_10: So I'm very grateful to you for accepting the invitation and to Thomas, who's done so much amazing work making us look so extraordinary.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_10: I had no idea they were doing any of this.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_10: So this is like, wow, this is amazing.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_10: And I'm particularly grateful because what I've seen in your other conversations with people is a really intense, focused, but respectful and generous dialogue.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_10: And that's what I really like, and that's why I'm really excited to have you here.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_10: I want to turn over now to Glenn to tell us a little bit about himself and who he is.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_10: And then after that, we'll hear from Daniel, who's one of our students studying international development here at the number one university for international development in the world.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_10: And he is going to be our moderator for this evening.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_10: Now, Daniel only knew that he was going to be our moderator for this evening.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_10: This evening.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_10: So he is done an amazing thing in stepping in to the shoes of someone who couldn't be here.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_10: And we are incredibly grateful to him.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_10: So can you also please welcome Glenn?
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_10: I think, I think that was a bigger cheer and a longer applause tale than either of us.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_10: Rude.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_07: Okay, so Glenn, please, uh, take it away.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_07: Great.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_07: I'm just gonna introduce myself.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_07: I am Glenn.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_07: I'm Emma's husband, I'm Ruby and JJ's dad.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_07: I live in Eastbourne, as James has said.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_07: I was the curate at All Souls Eastbourne, which in the Anglican setting, it's like you're a vicar with your L plates on.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_07: And I did that for about three years, and I've never left the place.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_07: So I've been in Eastbourne since 2007.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_07: Um, which is the longest I've ever lived anywhere.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_07: Grew up in Australia.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_07: Uh, my wife's from Northern Ireland, and so she thinks that Eastbourne is halfway.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_07: And uh I let her think that, and that is the secret to a good marriage.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_07: Um, so you'll hear lots more uh from me, but uh, why don't we hear a little bit more from Daniel Prince?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_07: A round of applause for Daniel Prince.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_09: Hiya, um, I'm Daniel.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_09: Uh I'm a student at Sussex, as James said.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_09: Um I study international development.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_09: I'm also a Christian myself.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_09: Um, and yeah, really excited for the discourse tonight.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_09: Um but yeah, so the way the evening will roughly run is we'll have both opening statements, first from Glenn, then James.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_09: Um, and then we'll have an uh 20 minutes of open discussion where they can debate each other openly uh and hopefully not get too rowdy.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_09: Um and then we will open it up over to the floor.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_09: And you guys, when you have questions, feel free to raise your hand during that time.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_09: Um, and then yeah, we'll just see the discourse.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_09: Uh so I'm really excited for this.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_09: Uh, and I'm gonna hand over to Glenn to start with his opening statement.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_07: Fantastic.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_07: Thank you.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_07: Uh so it's a real privilege to be here.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_07: Thank you so much, James, for opening up this beautiful space.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_07: Uh, I feel like this space is a little bit preaching to us about uh the message that we are to consider uh today in terms of is Christianity the air we breathe?
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_07: Uh here we are at a famously secular university, Sussex University, founded in the post-war years as a secular university.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_07: And uh and yet here we are in the meeting house.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_07: It's not the chapel, but it is the meeting house.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_07: Uh very much with a Quaker tradition behind it.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_07: And then uh it didn't have any of these sort of Christian accoutrements, did it, uh, when it when it began?
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_07: Um and then that's sort of been added in, and perhaps it's become more Christian, less Christian over the years.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_07: But it's interesting to me that even at a secular university, you need to have a meeting house, you need to have a space, you need to have a chaplaincy, and you need to have wonderful people like James to have pastoral care for uh the students that come here to Sussex University.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_07: And I want to say to you that uh that is very reminiscent of the Christianization of the West, I would say.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_07: Um my point this evening is that the West in particular has been Christianized in a certain way.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_07: Uh my point is not that uh Christianity depends on the West.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_07: It really doesn't.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_07: When you look at the places where the Church of Jesus Christ is growing all over the world, uh it tends to be in sub-Saharan Africa and some places in Southeast Asia and Iran and South America, but there might be signs of uh rebirth and renewal in North America and Europe, you never know, but it does tend to be those from non-Western places that are leading the way in terms of Christian witness in the world, and I think that's a wonderful thing.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_07: So my point uh this evening is not really that Christianity depends on the West, it really doesn't.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_07: Uh I do think the West depends on Christianity.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_07: Uh, and and I do think that the Christian tradition and 2,000 years of Christianization has shaped the West and has been the predominant shaper and influencer on the West.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_07: Not to deny that there have been other tributaries into Western civilization, uh, but Christianity has the greatest say among those tributaries.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_07: It also has tended to shape the way that we view those other influences on the West.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_07: Such that even as we reach for examples in other cultures of the ethics and the virtues, the values that we admire, we tend to do that through Christian spectacles.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_07: And I mean that, even if you've never set foot inside a church, even if you've never opened the Bible, I do think that we in the West tend to be a lot more Christian than we have ever imagined.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_07: I mentioned that I'm from Australia.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_07: Uh, I go back to Sydney quite often, and uh one of the first things that hits me as I come off the plane is the smell of the atmosphere.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_07: Uh, Australia is just mentholated by the eucalyptus trees, all these gum trees, billions and billions of gum trees.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_07: Uh uh, it's it's like a cough syrup kind of carried upon the breeze.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_07: Uh you feel incredibly alpine fresh when you go to Australia.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_07: It smells so sweet.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_07: And it was fascinating the first time I went back to Sydney and I smelt the air again, and I was like, oh, it smells so sweet.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_07: I never realized it smelt so sweet when I lived in Sydney.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_07: You have to kind of leave your atmosphere and then return to your atmosphere in order to notice uh the kind of culture, the kind of environment that you're in.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_07: I think it was Samuel Johnson who said, he knows not England who only England knows.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_07: Do you get the idea?
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_07: You might think you know England because you were born and bred in England, but actually, you might be at a disadvantage.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_07: There might be other immigrants like me coming to England who can spot things in your culture that were invisible to you because it was just the air that you breathe.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_07: So I think the air we breathe works at an atmospheric level.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_07: I think it works in terms of culture.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_07: I think it also works in terms of the morals, in terms of the intuitions, in terms of the virtues, the values that we tend to hold dear.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_07: We might not be aware of these invisible influences on us most of the time.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_07: It's like the air that we breathe.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_07: But then a religious teacher like me invites you to focus on your breathing.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_07: And you start to do it.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_07: Are you doing it now?
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_07: Focusing on, oh, it was utterly automatic before.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_07: And then all of a sudden, oh yeah, I did have to breathe in.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_07: Oh gosh, I hope I don't have to remember to breathe out again, right?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_07: I hope it returns back to this automatic behavior.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_07: And I think uh really tonight what I want you to do is to focus on your believing.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_07: To focus on those things that you take for granted in life.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_07: Those things that are as natural to you as the air that we breathe, things like equality.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_07: Every single member of the human race is the moral equal of every other member of the human race.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_07: And it doesn't matter your race, your ethnicity, your gender, your sexuality, your money, your power, your strength.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_07: It doesn't matter, right?
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_07: We're all equal.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_07: You believe that, don't you?
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_07: If you don't believe that, you get kicked off Facebook really quickly, okay?
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_07: You better believe that.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_07: And yet, can you prove that under laboratory conditions?
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_07: Is there a mathematical argument for this?
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_07: Is there a logical argument?
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_07: Premise one, premise two, conclusion, every single human being is the moral equal of every other?
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_07: I would say, even if you make such arguments, the premises will be quite contested.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_07: But you don't mind about that.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_07: And you're not awaiting some symposium to tell you about the scientific data that's just in, about whether we should accord all people equal human dignity.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_07: You're not- you're not waiting for the data on that.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_07: You already believe in that profoundly.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_07: And actually, the kind of scientific experiments you would be able to do, even at Sussex University, would have an ethics committee all over it.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_07: And if your experiment violated human equality, you couldn't do the science.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_07: There is something that is above science, that is prior to science, that is beneath the empirical.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_07: There are these beliefs like equality.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_07: That's the first one that I uh look at in my book, uh, my book, The Air We Breathe.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_07: There we go.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_07: The Air We Breathe.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_07: James was very kind enough to make the title, Is Christianity the Air We Breathe?
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_07: It's it's based on this book that I wrote in 2022.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_07: Equality is the first value that I look at, and then I look at compassion.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_07: Uh you think that kindness is a superpower, right?
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_07: You've seen those t-shirts.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_07: Maybe you've used it as a hashtag or something.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_07: Like, kindness is a superpower.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_07: You think a society should be judged by the way it treats its weakest members, don't you?
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_07: We all believe that.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_07: We all believe that weaknesses should not be exploited for the benefit of the powerful, but actually the weak should be helped and lifted up.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_07: That actually their weakness is a cause for pity, for mercy, for compassion.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_07: You believe in compassion, don't you?
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_07: And uh what I argue in the book is that there are so many different values like that that are just the air that we breathe.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_07: Where did they come from?
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_07: Well, my contentious argument, and perhaps we'll we'll get into this with James, but my contentious argument is that Christianization over the last 20 centuries has shaped the moral intuitions of all of us, whether we go to church or not.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_07: And one of the ways you get to see that is that we now see things like compassion and equality and consent and enlightenment and science and freedom and progress as these natural, obvious, universal values in the world.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_07: And you know that those have a transcendent place in your hierarchy of value, because if anyone violates those seven, they are the worst, aren't they?
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_07: What would it be to be the opposite of equality, compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom, and progress?
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_07: I guess that would be you would be unequal, cruel, coercive, unenlightened, anti-science, restrictive, and regressive.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_07: Isn't that the worst?
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_07: Well, if that's the worst, it means that we have as best those kinds of seven values.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_07: My argument in the book is that we did not get those values from mere reason, from mere evidence, from mere secular humanism.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_07: We did not get those values from such secular sources, and I might even throw in an even more contentious uh claim that we could not get those values from a merely secular frame, from merely looking at the world as matter in motion.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_07: I don't think you get to something like human rights simply from the science, from the evidence, from reason.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_07: This is not a mathematically provable doctrine, and yet it is something that most of us probably in this room believe.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_07: But I think historically, the idea that inherent in every human being is this equal moral worth and dignity, such that you as an individual, your rights cannot be traded off against the greater good.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_07: But that if some tyrant wants to say, well, screw your rights, we're going to go in this direction, you have a claim.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_07: A claim to justice, a claim to your rights.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_07: Well, where did such things come from?
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_07: Uh you don't have a you don't have to be a Christian to say or to see that such rights come from Christianity.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_07: Someone like Yoval Noah Harari, um, not at all.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_07: Uh a Christian, a secular Jew, uh, an atheist.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_07: Uh he says that human rights, like God and heaven, is merely a story that we have told ourselves.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_07: After all, as Harari says, if you cut a human being open, you look inside, you don't find any rights.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_07: You find the heart and kidneys and neurons and those sorts of things, but you don't find any rights.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_07: The only place we find rights, says Yuval Noah Harari, is in the stories that we have told.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_07: And when he unpacks those stories in Sapiens, it's very clear that the story that got us to human rights was the biblical story.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_07: That we are made in God's image, that we have souls, each and every one of us, and that we stand before God with a God-given utility, a God-given value, a God-given dignity.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_07: So Harari, not a Christian, believes, yes, absolutely, the kinds of values we have gotten have not come to us via reason and evidence, but through the Bible.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_07: You might turn to somebody like Peter Singer, an Australian ethicist, philosopher.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_07: He says that universal human rights is again the fruit of Christianization.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_07: He's quite cagey about whether he would ever sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, because he's very clear that from biblical foundations, we have gotten to this quite secularized view of what theologians would call the image of God.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_07: On page one of Genesis, we have humanity, male and female, in God's image and put in a very privileged position in the creation.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_07: With God above and the world at their feet, humanity really do take center stage in the Bible, and they are granted inviolable worth and dignity as those who are in the image of God.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_07: That is the Christian vision or the biblical vision.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_07: And that has been secularized into the idea that we all possess.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_07: And inviolable worth and dignity.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_07: Let's say, in the eyes of the law, we are equals with equal rights.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_07: But even in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, John Humphreys, the Canadian who actually drafted up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he wrote in his journal after he said, What we have achieved is largely the Christian ethic without the Tommy Rot.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_07: For him, Tommy Rot just means the bunkum, the boulder dash, right, of religious Christian metaphysics.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_07: We've largely got the Christian ethics, but without any of the metaphysical nonsense that would require us to go to church on a Sunday morning.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_07: And so I think you look to somebody like a Yval Noah Harari, you look to somebody like a Peter Singer, you look back to somebody like a Frederick Nietzsche, who saw compassion as this poison, pity, thwarts the law of evolution, which is the law of selection.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_07: Selection is the survival of the fittest and therefore the sacrifice of the weakest.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_07: Nietzsche, a profoundly anti-Christian philosopher, said when you break off belief in God, you don't get to keep your humanist beliefs.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_07: You don't get to keep that belief in the inviolable dignity of and worth of humanity.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_07: On what basis do you get to keep that humanism?
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_07: Nietzsche said, well, you've got to go the whole hog.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_07: You can't just substitute good for God.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_07: You can't just erect capital G goodness up into the sky and call it humanism because all those things have actually derived from Christianity.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_07: There are lots of things I disagree with Friedrich Nietzsche on.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_07: This is one thing that I agree with him about.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_07: That the kind of values that we take for granted, the air that we breathe, has been a very Christianized air.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_07: Here we are at university.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_07: Where did universities come from?
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_07: Well, universities are a very distinctive development in medieval Christendom.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_07: They've now gone global.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_07: Universities have become universal.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_07: But the kind of liberal arts education that you are receiving is the sort of thing that actually the medieval monks and nuns wanted you to have.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_07: So the cathedral schools would uh begin with the the trivium, in which you would learn.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_07: You would learn things like uh arithmetic, geometry.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_07: Oh, sorry, you would learn grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_07: And then after mastering the trivium, it would be followed by arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_07: That was the quadrivium.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_07: And the cathedral schools eventually developed into universities like Oxford and Cambridge.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_07: By the 1200s, it wasn't just Oxford and Cambridge, and it wasn't just Paris and Bologna in the following century.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_07: Another 20 were added, and the other in the next century, another hundred were added.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_07: Like these universities, these places that are not purely vocational, and they're not simply the school of a philosopher, and they're not simply bolted on to a religious assembly, but they are a foundation in the liberal arts.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_07: That kind of rounded education has a very distinctively Christian heritage to you.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_07: And so, even if you don't want to thank Christianity for anything else, um, you might want to thank Christianity for the degree that you're doing, because I think we are in profoundly Christian waters.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_07: We are breathing profoundly Christianized air.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_07: Let me just finish with this.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_07: I have a friend called Sally from my university days.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_07: Uh she was a secular, is still a secular humanist.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_07: Um she once said to me via a letter, we actually wrote letters to each other back in the day.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_07: This was in the 1900s, so this is this is ancient.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_07: And she said to me in one letter, I hope you realize Glenn, I could never be a person of faith.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_07: And in the correspondence, we sort of went back and forth because I just thought to myself, Sally, you believe in so many things that you cannot prove, touch, taste, feel.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_07: She'd taken a gap year in Africa and given herself, she was she was the like a pillar of the student community.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_07: There's nothing she wouldn't do for you.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_07: She believed in compassion and equality and consent and enlightenment and science and freedom of progress.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_07: She believed in these things very, very strongly.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_07: But she also thought that it was a godless universe.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_07: And over the course of our correspondence, I wanted to convince her of a number of things.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_07: I just wanted to say to her, Sally, I think you are a believer.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_07: You believe in things like human rights.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_07: You believe in them very deeply.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_07: They shape your life from the ground up.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_07: But I also want to convince you that that is a very particular belief to hold.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_07: It's not natural.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_07: It's not obvious.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_07: It's not universal.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_07: And your stated belief in a godless universe is at odds in your very strong belief in human rights.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_07: And constantly with the Sally's of the world, what I'm trying to say is secular, humanist, pick one.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_07: I don't think you can have both.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_07: But I do think you can be Christian humanists.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_07: And I would absolutely recommend, if you're a Christian, be a humanist.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_07: And I'd recommend that if you're a humanist, be a Christian, right?
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_07: I think it's a match made in heaven.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_07: Very genuinely.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_07: That was a good one.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_07: Oh, thank you.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_07: Christian humanism goes back centuries.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_07: You might have heard of Martin Luther King.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_07: You might have heard of C.S.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_07: Lewis or J.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_07: R.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_07: R.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_07: Tolkien.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_07: You might have heard of G.K.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_07: Chesterton.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_07: You might have heard of Calvin or Erasmus or any number of Christians who are also very happy to own the term humanist.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_07: I am a Christian humanist.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_07: And I think that God the human, Jesus Christ, is the foundation, really, for believing that human value, human dignity is supreme in that way.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_07: So, to humanists, I invite you to become Christians.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_07: And to Christians, I invite you to be humanists.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_07: Thank you.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_09: Thank you very much, Glenn.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_09: We will now be moving over to the opening statement from James.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_09: So James.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_10: Thank you.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_10: And thank you, Glenn.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_10: That was really wonderful.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_10: And I can't wait for our discussion.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_10: I think it's going to be really fruitful.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_10: In June of 2014, I moved from Boston, Massachusetts, where I had been studying for my doctorate, to St.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_10: Louis, Missouri.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_10: And I moved there to help lead a humanist congregation.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_10: So think of a church with weekly meetings, small groups for fellowship, music, community, just without God or religion.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_10: And I was going to be their equivalent of a minister.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_10: Just two months after I arrived in the city on August 9th, Mike Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, just a 15-minute drive from the congregation I served.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_10: And the city exploded with activism.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_10: And I was immediately drawn into the interfaith protest movement that arose.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_10: I went to planning meetings, visited lots of churches, I sat in prayer circles, I learned from rabbis, priests, and imams.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_10: And despite some discomfort, I would soon be seen alongside all of those people at protests around town.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_10: My clergy friends and I marched together, held vigils together, spoke at rallies together, blocked streets together, shut down shopping malls together, and went to jail together.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_10: One evening after I had been arrested for attempting to stop the police beating up a young protester, I sat in a jail cell singing a medley of freedom songs I'd learned during my time in the movement, old Christian spirituals, Jewish social action songs, and secular protest music.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_10: And let me tell you, jail cells have the best acoustics.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_10: Even better than this room here.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_10: Our movement included people from all over the world, representing many different faiths, and in my case, non-religious philosophies like humanism.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_10: Yet we were all willing to risk our reputations, our liberty, our physical safety in pursuit of a common moral principle, black lives matter.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_10: Or to put it in a more universal way, black lives matter as much as white lives.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_10: Why?
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_10: How is it that people with such different national backgrounds, different religious beliefs, shared the same moral convictions?
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_10: Well, Glenn has just given you one type of answer, and he gives it in his book, The Air We Breathe.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_10: Our modern belief in values such as freedom, kindness, progress, equality, at least in the West, comes at root from Christianity.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_10: These Christian values, he writes, are now so all pervasive that we consider them to be universal, obvious, and natural.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_10: The air we breathe.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_10: Tonight I'm gonna tell a slightly different story.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_10: I'm gonna suggest that the moral air we breathe is not the result of any one religious or philosophical influence, but it's a complex mixture of many.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_10: Just like the literal air we breathe is made up of nitrogen and oxygen and argon.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_10: The cultural air we breathe is composed of many elements too.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_10: And recognizing that is important not just to understand our history correctly, but also because the mixture of elements itself is what gives our moral background the particular character that it has.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_10: The problem with Glenn's argument from my perspective is not precisely that it is wrong about Christianity's profound influence on our culture, but that it's incomplete.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_10: It overstates the role of Christianity.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_10: It understates the influence of other non-Christian traditions.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_10: And tonight I'm going to try and give voice to some of those other traditions through a series of three very short vignettes, which help illustrate my central case.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_10: That values such as equality, compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom, and progress, which Glenn attributes to the influence of Christianity, at least primarily, in fact take the distinctive forms they hold for us today because of a variety of different influences.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_10: So it's time to tell a new story.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_10: We begin in the ancient past, 2,500 years ago on the Greek island of Kos.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_10: We're here to learn from a genius, a man now called the father of medicine.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_10: Watch him there working on a patient.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_10: Someone literally turned round.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_10: He is not actually there.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_10: But thank you.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_10: I'm glad that I'm really engaging you.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_10: Watch him there working on a patient.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_10: He has a wise, wrinkled brow and a full curly beard, such a magnificent beard, a beard to envy.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_10: His name is Hippocrates, one of the first people to take a systematic approach to medical science.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_10: And his example gave rise to a whole genre of ancient Greek writings known as the Hippocratic Corpus and the related medical texts, which record the thoughts of the leading medics of the ancient Greek world.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_10: He's perhaps most well known today for formulating, probably only in legend though, the Hippocratic Oath, a vow which medics at the time were asked to take and which informs our medical ethics to this day.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_10: One scholar of ancient Greece, H.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_10: C.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_10: Baldry, observes that the Hippocratic Oath promised proper treatment of all patients, female and male, free and slave.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_10: And medical notes from the time confirm this, at least according to some of the writers of the medical texts, treatment was offered to everyone, regardless of their identity or place in society.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_10: Audrey goes on to say: nowhere in the Hippocratic collection is it stated or implied that humankind's basic nature differs according to whether he is of noble or humble birth, rich or poor, free or slave, Greek or barbarian.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_10: We might say, to paraphrase one Christian, that when it came to Greek medical writers at least, there was neither Greek nor barbarian, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for all were one in common humanity.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_10: Now that might seem surprising, given what we all know about the deep stratification of ancient Greek society.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_10: But it fits with some of the ideas that were emerging at that time about the fundamental unity of humankind.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_10: Similar themes can be found in the writings of the Greek playwrights like Sophocles.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_10: In his play Tereus, he wrote, There is one human race.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_10: No one is born superior to another.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_10: It is of course true that this universal humanitarian ethic did not suffuse all of ancient Greek society.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_10: In fact, it seems to have been a peculiarity of Hippocrates and some small groups of philosophers and their followers.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_10: And nor were those ancient thinkers' ideas the same, exactly, as our modern notions of human dignity and equality.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_10: They are, in a sense, glimmers of a universal humanism, but imperfectly realized.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_10: But I don't give these examples to show that ancient Greece was some sort of moral paradise.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_10: It wasn't.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_10: Rather, I offer them to show that the idea of a universal human nature and a set of moral considerations that follow from that existed hundreds of years before the birth of Christ.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_10: Christians were not the first people to argue for some sort of fundamental human equality.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_10: They were not the first people to teach we should treat people based on their common humanity.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_10: And they were not the first to allow that philosophical conviction to shape their moral conduct.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_10: There are pre-Christian sources of universal ethics.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_10: Back into our time machine.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_10: Now we're much closer to home temporally and physically because we're traveling to the late 18th century and to Lewis, a charming town not five miles from here.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_10: And we're here to observe a meeting of the Headstrong Club.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_10: A debating society might have hosted debates like this.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_10: And it made its home in an upstairs room of the Whiteheart pub.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_10: And yes, you can still visit the pub today, I can see you're nodding.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_10: You've probably been there.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_10: And we're here, not because you look like a person who hangs around in pubs, I'm not making a personal comment about you particularly.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_10: You just seem enthusiastic about it.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_10: We're here because one of the members of the Headstrong Club was one of the most influential intellectual figures in history.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_10: Thomas Paine.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_10: Now, Payne was known for his fiery quill.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_10: He was an author, sounds a bit wrong now, I say it.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_10: He was an author, a magazine editor, an essayist.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_10: He most likely penned an anonymous essay decrying the execrable commerce of slavery and calling for its abolition.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_10: But it was his pamphlets, especially one called Common Sense, that cemented him as one of the most influential figures of the modern age.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_10: He was staunchly anti-monarchist, pro-democracy.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_10: He advocated that men who were not property owners should still be able to vote, which was radical at the time and fiercely abolitionist.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_10: Paine wrote reams of arguments against arbitrary authority and in favor of a people's right to govern themselves, becoming one of the early heroes and inspirations for the American Revolution.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_10: Paine was also a staunch deist, meaning that he did not believe in a personal God, and he was deeply critical of all religious institutions, including Christianity.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_10: In the Age of Reason, he wrote, and I absolutely love this quote, I do not believe in the creed professed by any church that I know of.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_10: My own mind is my own church.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_10: Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelented vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_10: For my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_10: And you thought Richard Dawkins was tough on God.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_10: For his critiques of Christianity, Payne became despised by the leading Christian figures in his time.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_10: In pulpits across America and the United Kingdom, he was called the arch infidel and corrupter of youth, both titles I aspire to myself.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_10: But he was also reviled for his moral ideas.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_10: Revolutionary era Americans were disturbed by his rejection of divine authority, his belief that non-Christians can be as moral as Christians, and, and this is really important, for his advocacy on behalf of human equality.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_10: You might think, given what Glenn has just said, that Christians would have applauded Paine's insistence on the political equality of all people.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_10: If Glenn's correct, after all, that is where our belief in equality comes from.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_10: But when Paine presented his most staunch defenses of these positions, the church did not praise but persecuted him.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_10: Remember, we are talking about a time when a majority of Western countries were monarchies.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_10: Many of them claimed that the monarch had a divine right to rule, so Paine's ideas were viewed as destabilizing and dangerous by the leading Christian figures of the day, and they routinely demonized him for his pro-equality beliefs.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_10: But we recognize now that Paine was an extraordinary moral visionary, one of the few people who can genuinely be called one of the fathers of the American Revolution.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_10: His ideas powerfully shaped American moral discourse, influencing both the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_10: And that document, when it was finally published, was entirely unique in its time.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_10: It was resolutely secular in an age of mighty theocracies.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_10: It was radical in the rights it afforded citizens, though not radical enough for Paine's liking.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_10: And it does not once mention God.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_10: It went on to influence constitutions all over the world, and therefore had a profound impact on how we think about politics and human rights today.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_10: As historian Jack Green put it, in a fundamental sense, we are today all Payne's children.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_10: Children, that is, of a resolutely anti-Christian thinker.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_10: Our final vignette.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_10: It's the 10th of December 1948, and Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady of the United States, has just secured the crowning achievement of her life.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_10: The United Nations has almost unanimously adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_10: As chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights, she had overseen the drafting of the Declaration and had expertly navigated treacherous political waters to ensure its adoption.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_10: Not one country voted against, although a few abstained.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_10: Moral document ever created by humankind, though I understand that Glenn might propose the Bible for that slot.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_10: Since we're asking today about the sources of our contemporary values, we should probably ask who and what ideas were most influential on the content of that declaration.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_10: And if Glenn's thesis is correct, we might expect Christian ideas to have been the primary influence.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_10: Is this what we find?
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_10: Not exactly.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_10: Historians and scholars of human rights accept that there were numerous figures who influenced what became the final draft of the Declaration, but for the sake of time this evening, I'm going to focus just on two people, the most important, Charles Malik and P.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_10: C.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_10: Chang.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_10: Now, Malik was a Greek Orthodox Christian born in Lebanon, a diplomat and philosopher with a view of human rights firmly grounded in a Christian metaphysical set of assumptions, including the idea that our rights are a matter of natural law grounded by God.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_10: So he was sort of Glenn's guy, right?
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_10: Chiang was born in Tianjin, China, and was a quintessential Renaissance man, a playwright, a philosopher, an activist, super snappy dresser.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_10: Look up his young headshot on Google.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_10: He looks fine.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_10: He's amazing looking.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_10: And Chang thought that human rights could be grounded in a variety of metaphysical systems and stem from a range of cultural sources.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_10: And he defended a pluralistic, broadly secular approach to human rights.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_10: So you had a strict orthodox Christian natural law theorist in Charles Malik, you had a pragmatist, pluralist Confucian in P.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_10: C.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_10: Chang on the other, and they fought.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_10: If you read the accounts of the debates they had when drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they sometimes seem like a two-person play with just Malik and Chang going at it at each other, each advocating their own philosophical view.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_10: But who won?
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_10: It's a simplistic question.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_10: It's not a fair one.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_10: They both had a profound influence.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_10: But if we were forced to pick a winner, it would have to be Chang.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_10: In the end, rather than the metaphysically specific, explicitly religious, Christian-informed document Malik wanted, we got a universal declaration which is secular, pluralist, and capable of endorsement from a variety of religious and non-religious perspectives.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_10: The UDHR did not include any reference to an explicit metaphysical grounding of rights.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_10: It was not grounded in Christian ideas of natural law, at least explicitly.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_10: It did not once mention God.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_10: And the reward was that it was almost unanimously adopted by every member of the United Nations.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_10: Here's the really cool thing, for my argument.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_10: After growing up in China, Chang went to Columbia University in New York, where he studied under probably the world's most famous philosopher at the time, John Dewey.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_10: Dewey, one of the most influential and eloquent defenders of contemporary humanism ever.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_10: So the Universal Declaration of Human Rights we benefit from today was informed primarily by philosophical insights not of a Western Christian, but of a Chinese Confucian humanist.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_10: We've seen through our tour of history three things.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_10: First, Christianity did not originate the sorts of values Glenn attributes to it.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_10: There were pre-Christian cultures and groups, like the medical writers of ancient Greece, starting to develop a more universal understanding of humankind, asserting that all people were not by nature different, but fundamentally equal.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_10: So there are pre-Christian sources of contemporary values.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_10: Second, there have been throughout history profoundly influential moral thinkers who not only grounded their moral thinking outside of Christianity, but who were seen by the Christians of their day as dangerous unchristian radicals for espousing precisely the sorts of moral positions that we now almost universally endorse.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_10: Think of Thomas Paine, the arch infidel and corrupter of youth, hated by the church for actually trying to universalize moral principles.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_10: So there are what we might call anti-Christian sources of contemporary values.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_10: And third, we've seen how people who grew up outside the West, who grounded their thinking in non-Western assumptions, nonetheless profoundly shaped moral discourse of P.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_10: C.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_10: Chang and his central role in crafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_10: So there are non-Christian sources of contemporary values.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_10: All that leaves me with a question.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_10: If it is informed by pre-Christian, anti-Christian, and non-Christian values and ideas, can we truly say that the air we breathe is Christian?
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_10: I don't think so.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_10: How about you?
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_10: Now we get to fight.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_09: Thank you very much, James and Glenn, for your opening statements.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_09: We're now going to go over to some open discussion.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_09: So over to you two.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_09: Do you have just uh do you have questions?
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_09: Do you have counter-arguments?
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_09: Uh who wants to go first?
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_10: It brought up so many questions in me.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_07: I love those three vignettes.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_07: Should we talk about them?
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, let's talk about them.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_07: Okay.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_07: So pre-Christian, you've got Hippocrates saying some stuff that we all kind of like in the room.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_07: Free at the point of access.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_07: Okay.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_07: Um, a national health service for slave and free.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_07: Um and as you say, that was a peculiar, not the majority, report within that culture.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_07: You've got Plato, you know, calling human beings there's gold and there's silver and there's bronze and there's iron, and saying there are some people who are human tools, and does not nature teach you that slaves are born to be human tools and all that kind of stuff?
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_07: So we we look back through the filter of two two and a half thousand years, and we like Hippocrates, or at least what's come to us from Hippocrates.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_07: We don't know how widespread it was implemented, but we like the Hippocratic oath.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_07: We don't like Plato when he says that.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_07: What is adjudicating uh our appreciation for that history?
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, that's a good question.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_10: So I guess the question is we're looking back from a contemporary perspective on ideas that are thousands of years away from us in the case of ancient Greece, and we're, as you say, approving of some of them, we're not approving of others, and that means that we have some sort of value set that we're judging those beliefs against, and where does that come from?
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_10: And I guess what I've tried to argue tonight is that it comes from a lot of different places, actually.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_10: That it's very difficult in doing a sort of intellectual history of the cultural ideas that many of us share today to assign any one or even a set of those ideas to any particular tradition.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_10: But actually what you've got is a range of different voices in a cultural conversation that has been happening for a long time.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_10: Some of them, many of them important ones, Christian, and many of them also not Christian.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_10: And whatever mix that we've ended up with, that's what we're using to judge it.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_10: But I guess, yeah, I don't know if that makes sense.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_07: And and so there is a mix, you know, there's whatever it is, 80% nitrogen and 20% oxygen, and you know, fractions of of a percent with carbon dioxide and things like that.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_07: So what percentage um I knew you were gonna ask me this.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_10: The moment I decided to use that metaphor, extend that metaphor, I was like, he's gonna ask what percentage is each bit.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_07: Because I I don't mind at all that there's there's very um there are values that resonate hugely with a Christianized culture, and that we can applaud and that we ought to applaud wherever we find it, no matter what the source is.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_07: But I I'm just not sure when when you raise those who are uh a peculiar sect within a greater culture from two and a half thousand years ago, what impact do you think they have on the year of our Lord 2025?
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_10: It's it's a great question.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_10: So one thing we might pose is well, what did any of that stuff, that sort of nascent sort of broad humanitarianism that seemed to be in some pockets of ancient Greek society, how much of an influence does that have on us today?
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_10: Because it could have been there, it could have had no influence on us today at all, it could have just died out.
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_10: And I think the answer is it probably had more influence than we think because of the way that ancient Greek philosophical ideas were folded into early Christianity.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_10: And I think that it's really underappreciated how much early Christian thinkers like John and Paul used pre-Christian Greek philosophical ideas, both explicitly and implicitly, in their own philosophical systems.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_10: I mean, at heart of it, you may disagree with this, but this is the way I see it.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_10: I think Jesus' life as an exemplar is very praiseworthy, and the things he is reported to have said are very provocative and morally interesting and very valuable in many cases, but they don't, on their own, constitute a full theology, like just the life and teachings of Jesus.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_10: And other Christian authors took on the job of fleshing out the philosophical framework that became something that looks like contemporary Christianity.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_10: And I think that when they did that, they imported a lot of Greek philosophical ideas.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_10: I mean, the obvious one is the idea of the Logos, which is a Greek philosophical idea.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_10: So they're explaining their whole Christian idea of God using Greek philosophical tools.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_10: But it's not just that.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_10: I mean, we see ideas in the letters of Paul, for instance, and it's not just me who's saying this.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_10: You've got, you know, Christian professors who recognize the influence of Greek thought on um Christianity.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_10: Like I've got a list of them here.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_10: Professor Bad Burtzer, who is a history professor at Hillsdale College, which is a conservative private Christian university in the UK, who has written a lot about the influence of Greek philosophical thought on early Christian thinking.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_10: So I actually think that Greek thought did influence early Christianity quite a lot.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_10: And so if it's the case that then Christianity later influenced a lot of other things, well, it's partly also carrying forward that Greek influence.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_10: So I and I think that's kind of how it works.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_10: It all mixes together, and it's very difficult to tease apart who owns any of these ideas, which is why I want to kind of reject any narrative that says we own it.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_10: You'll notice I didn't say, oh, humanists own human rights.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_10: What I actually said was it's multiple and it's pluralistic, and that's the sort of account I'd like to give.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_07: I think probably the history that I would tell is that you you have a diaspora of Jewish communities that go in multiple different directions down to Egypt and and um across to Babylon and those sorts of places.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_07: But the Alexandrian Jews, for instance, in the intertestamental times, the times BC, um, were absolutely they were Hellenistic, they were Greek speaking, and they absolutely were interacting with these Greek ideas and the idea of the Logos and that sort of thing.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_07: But I think what you get in both the intertestamental literature that uses the word logos, and then obviously John's gospel begins in the beginning was the Logos, John chapter 1, the great Christmas reading.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_07: In the beginning was the Logos, the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God, and then the Logos becomes flesh and dwells among us, and we've seen his glory.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_07: And that is a radical transmutation of the idea of an impersonal force in the Platonic idea, not a personal force.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_07: The logos is not personal in his philosophy.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_07: Um, to imagine that the logos from which we get the idea of logic, from uh you know, the the reason, um, the operating system of the cosmos in Platonic thought is impersonal, in Christian thought is deeply personal.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_07: And I think you as a humanist should be should be glad of that, that at the at the heart of reality is personhood rather than a mere abstraction.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_07: And I think in in one sense, you know, Plato had his realm of the good, um, but that realm of the good was not itself personal, was not itself therefore capable of goodness, um, but was an abstract realm of ideas.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_07: And Christians and Jews were always saying to the Greeks, and you're right that there was all sorts of interplay between biblical believers and and the Greeks, but they were able to say to the Platonists, hey, you know how you believe in this thing called the good?
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_07: Let me fill you in.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_07: Let me let me tell you, let me tell you who he really is.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_07: And and there is there is a personal logos at the heart of creation.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_07: Now, you're right to say that uh you don't develop your theology simply from the the words of Jesus in the Gospels.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_07: But I would say that you do develop your theology from an account of the personhood of Christ.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_07: That there is a personal reality behind this world, and therefore the invention of persons with their inviolable worth and dignity, that that starts to become a possibility in a way that I don't think is possible if you merely stay with Platonism.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_07: And that logos takes flesh, becomes human, and enters into humanity, and as man, he takes the nature of man for all men, and I'm using men in the universal sense, and that's really important, that actually men and women are redeemed in the one man Jesus Christ, which means that we must have a single human nature.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_07: Right?
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_07: If if the man Christ Jesus, in assuming our humanity, has assumed the humanity of male and female, well, I guess there is a single human nature.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_07: For all our differences between men and women, there is this single human nature.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_07: And you start to have the building blocks for I think what we come to see as a kind of a humanism that develops over time.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_07: But you you asked, you know, did we just get the source of Platonism and did we just leave the source of Platonism and have it as, you know, one gas among many in the air that we breathe?
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_07: And actually, what I would say is that becomes transmuted and transformed, and I would say, from a Christian point of view, redeemed in Christ and in the gospel in in a quite new way.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_10: I guess the big picture question that we're sort of talking about here, at least it feels to me, is the relationship between some sort of metaphysical ideas and moral ideas.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_10: And I think what you're saying is that the metaphysical innovation that Christianity brought to some of these earlier Greek ideas was making God personal, right?
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_10: That's one of the plots.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_10: Right.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_10: And that that has important moral implications because you can do things, as it were, with a personal God, morally speaking, that it doesn't make sense to sort of do with an impersonal God within your philosophical system.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_10: And I I don't necessarily think that's wrong in the sense that I've worked alongside many Christian ministers in my time as a activist and an interfaith person.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_10: That's a weird thing to say, but I don't know what to say.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_10: Someone who spends a lot of time in interfaith spaces, and I have seen how belief in the personhood of God in not just Christians, but also Jews, Muslims, and other, well, not so much Muslims because they have a different conception of God, but it certainly Jews and Christians has informed their moral behavior because they can say things like, well, they they they see other people as reflections of or, you know, inhabited by or something, whatever language you want to use by God, right?
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_10: And that is a very powerful moral idea.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_10: I don't doubt that for a second, and I've seen it inspire people to acts of great moral courage.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_10: What I want to say is it's not the only way to get to that sort of moral commitment.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_10: Because I've also seen people inspired to acts of great moral courage who don't share those beliefs, but who get to those places through different sets of reasoning.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_10: And that's one of the reasons I started with Hippocrates, because they didn't have this idea of a personal God.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_10: What they had was their direct experience of working on people's bodies, right?
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_10: What seems to have got them to a more universalistic way of thinking about humankind was looking inside people's bodies and seeing they were all the same.
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_10: Now you may think that that's not as good a philosophical basis for their moral behavior as the Christian story.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_10: You probably do think that.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_10: But actually it worked for them.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_10: It had the outcome we want, which is that they practiced their medicine in a more universal way, at least as far as we can tell, than we might have expected given the very stratified society in which they lived.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_10: And so I think what I'm trying to give is a sort of more PC Chang-ish message, which is you keep that metaphysical commitment if it works for you and if it drives you to a good moral place.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_10: But other people do not share those commitments, are going to get to the same place.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_10: Because actually, you can get there by reflecting on common human experience or by you know taking a different view of God at all.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_10: And I think, yeah, that's I think I want to say broaden out.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_10: Like there are other ways to get to where you want to go.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_07: To get to where you want to go, but I are there wrong ways you can go?
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_07: So so if if you know the Greek doctor operates on this person, and they weren't able to do this, you know, two and a half thousand years ago, but let's just take the organs from a healthy person and give them to the king because the king is perishing or whatever.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_07: Like, would that would that be wrong with a capital W?
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_07: Like, yeah.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_10: Yes, but before I answer that, it's important to note that Glenn is absolutely right.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_10: They could not do that.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_10: Hippocrates' medicine was rubbish.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah, right.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_10: Like today we re we recognize his sort of philosophical approach to medicine, but his actual medical practice is appalling.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_10: When you read what they did, it was a disaster.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_10: Don't actually definitely couldn't do that.
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_10: So I would say that yes, there is such a thing as an objective of objective morality, and that it is wrong with a capital W to take the organs of a pauper and give them to a king, right?
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_10: I think that that's wrong with a capital D.
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_10: Because?
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_10: Because I think that we can reason from common shared human experience and capacities to common moral worth.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_10: Why ought we?
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_10: Why ought we?
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, sure.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_10: I I understand the question.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_10: But that's what that's what morality is.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_10: You're trying to get from an is to an ought, right?
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_07: And I'm and I'm saying it's all aught.
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_10: I agree.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_10: Okay, so that's a great place to get to.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_10: So so let's the let's take a couple of steps back.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_10: Because the question you're asking is one of the most profound and difficult philosophical questions that plagues anyone of any metaphysical view, which is why should we be good?
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_10: Like, why should we do the things that we think are good, or what are the reasons for thinking that things are good?
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_10: And in my honest opinion, I don't think any philosophical perspective, including any religious perspective, has enormously convincing answers to this question, which may be one reason why there are so many different perspectives on it, because no one is convinced by one single set of answers.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_10: I think it's a genuinely difficult philosophical question.
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_10: And yes, it's difficult for humanists, but honestly, I think Christian answers to this question are pretty bad as well.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_10: And we can talk about them too.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_10: But if I was to give you my least bad account of it, I think that we have to start from where we are and accept that our experience is infused with valence, right?
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_10: We experience some things positively and we experience some things negatively.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_10: We don't have a neutral sensory, purely sensory experience of the world.
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_10: We like looking at some colors and not others, or some brightnesses and not others.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_10: We enjoy some physical sensations and not others, we like certain social interactions and not others.
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_10: All parts of our experience come with a valence attached to it, like a filter through which we see the world.
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_10: And that is not, we can't understand what it means to be human absent of that.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_10: And once we accept that reality of ourselves, we can start to ask: well, is that true of other people?
• 1:05:21
  SPEAKER_10: And when I observe you and I look how you behave and how you respond to these questions and how it seems like your mind is working given the behaviors that you're displaying, I come to, I think, a reasonable conclusion that the interior of your mind is at least something broadly like mine.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_10: And that's evidenced, right?
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_10: It's evidenced from how I see you act.
• 1:05:41
  SPEAKER_10: I don't make that same extrapolation to that chair or this camera, because I don't see it act in the ways like a person does.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_10: But I see you act in the ways like a person does, like an estimable person, Glenn.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_10: I think.
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_10: And so I make an extrapolation that your interiority is similar to mine, which means your interiority.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_10: Is also infused with valence, right?
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_10: It all you also have things you prefer and dislike.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_10: And you also have things.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_07: Why is that morally binding on you to act in any certain way?
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_10: That's a really difficult question, right?
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_10: And I think that what it comes down to is that that question presupposes a wrong understanding of what ethics is.
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_10: And I think that I'm taking what essentially Jewey's answer to this question and the pragmatist humanist answers to this question, which are, by the way, very popular.
• 1:06:27
  SPEAKER_10: Many, many professional philosophers take the view that I'm about to espouse.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_10: So it's not a weird view at all.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_10: It's very, very popular in the literature.
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_10: Why is it morally binding on me?
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_10: Because it is irrational, like fundamentally irrational, for me to act in a way to others that I would detest if they acted that way towards me.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_10: And the reason why it's irrational is because if I did that, I give implicit license for them to act that way towards me.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_10: Right?
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_10: So fundamentally it's a relational account of ethics.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_10: It's irrational for me to harm you when you don't want to be harmed, because if I do that, it gives you license to harm me back, basically.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_10: And that is irrational.
• 1:07:11
  SPEAKER_10: And that's it.
• 1:07:12
  SPEAKER_10: That's the basis of ethics.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_07: Well, that gets you to a kind of a game theory.
• 1:07:16
  SPEAKER_10: Um it does more than that.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, people worry that this is just purely kind of self-interested, or if you do this, I do that.
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_10: But I think that what that does is an articulate it articulates a fundamental rationality at the heart of a relational ethic.
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_10: And then you build on top of that fundamental insight a lot of other considerations.
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_10: But I I think that that is actually I mean, I mean, I could ask a question to you, right?
• 1:07:41
  SPEAKER_10: Presumably you think it's immoral to kill another person.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_10: But you don't think it's immoral to kill like a fly.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_07: I don't know.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_10: I assume why is that?
• 1:07:52
  SPEAKER_07: I'm a humanist.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_10: Well, why though?
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, because I believe in human exceptionalism, because I think I think humanity has a special dignity that there is there is a fringe to the circle of humanity, you know, uh, but that every member of that human family, to the very fringes of society, be they weak, poor, rich, whatever they are, uh are possessors of that image of God.
• 1:08:19
  SPEAKER_10: Why do you believe that?
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_10: Why why do you believe that humanity is special in that way?
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_07: In a sense, I think Jesus is the central answer to that question.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_07: You could start in Genesis 1 and have a look at humanity being made in God's image, but I I think where you really see the special place and dignity of humanity is God the human, right?
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_07: The logos, the rationality by which heaven and earth operate, is now and forever will be human.
• 1:08:50
  SPEAKER_07: You could not have a greater grounding for your humanism, James, than to become a Christian, right?
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_07: Because I can't wait.
• 1:08:57
  SPEAKER_07: It can be arranged.
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_10: Um we can I was just telling Glenn before this discussion that we had a chaplain here, two before me, who used to baptize students in the moat around this building.
• 1:09:08
  SPEAKER_10: So, I don't know, we could we could do it tonight.
• 1:09:11
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_10: The water looks kind of gross, though.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_10: So I'm not sure I want to get in it.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_07: And then it then you could be a true humanist, I would say.
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_07: Come to Christ.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_07: Christ is God the human, and so you you you could not have a more exalted vision of the human.
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_10: You could not have uh So you just to be really clear about it, you think that humans have a special moral place above like other animals because God became a human.
• 1:09:35
  SPEAKER_10: But why actually, why does that mean all other humans who God didn't become have an elevated moral place?
• 1:09:42
  SPEAKER_07: Right, because we are destined to participate in his humanity and therefore to participate in the life of God.
• 1:09:48
  SPEAKER_07: This is this is what the whole show is about.
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_10: That's something you say, right?
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_10: But you have to justify that as well, right?
• 1:09:53
  SPEAKER_10: And we can we can keep doing this and we can both keep saying why, why, why, why, why that, to the grounds of our moral convictions.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_10: And I don't think anyone is ultimately going to be satisfied by the answers that we get down to.
• 1:10:07
  SPEAKER_10: I really don't.
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_10: I don't think that you have a watertight logical argument to defend your position.
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_10: Okay.
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_10: And I mean, I accept that mine is a pragmatic ethical account.
• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_07: But I just preferences or the valence of somebody else's preferences obligates you to act in any certain way, especially when you're talking about the king and the pauper.
• 1:10:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:10:26
  SPEAKER_07: Why should why shouldn't the kid the kidney of the pauper go to the king to save the king's life?
• 1:10:31
  SPEAKER_07: The king is more valuable.
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_07: Why why is there an equality of moral value between the two?
• 1:10:35
  SPEAKER_10: Because of their capacity for morally valenced experience, right?
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_10: Because there's no evidence that the pauper is incapable of having the same sort of moral experiences as the king, basically.
• 1:10:46
  SPEAKER_07: But the the the king is differently valued in all sorts of ways.
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_07: He has more money, he has more political power, he has soldiers, he has all he has all sorts of things in which his value is greater.
• 1:10:59
  SPEAKER_07: But why is morality the one thing in which they're equal?
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_10: So you're right, there are lots of ways that we make distinctions between people, and there are many differences between people.
• 1:11:09
  SPEAKER_10: You know, we're definitely not all the same.
• 1:11:12
  SPEAKER_10: But I think, so I guess what I'm arguing is that we nonetheless all have a similar broad experience of the world, and we experience things through this kind of valence filter, which is not precisely the same for all people, but is roughly the same, such that we can observe them having great experiences and negative experiences and seeing what gives them those experiences.
• 1:11:36
  SPEAKER_10: And I just don't see the evidence that a you know, a poorer person in a kingdom, this is a very kind of medieval example, um, actually has a different type of experience to a king.
• 1:11:50
  SPEAKER_10: Now, my my moral position, and I'm causing myself problems here by explaining it more than I should, but I think you should learn from it, so it's good.
• 1:11:59
  SPEAKER_10: My my moral position is consistent in the sense that other non-human animals, I think we should give them moral consideration based on their capacity for experience as well.
• 1:12:09
  SPEAKER_10: And I think that that does mean that we shouldn't treat a microbe or some other tiny living thing that has no capacity for experience, similarly to the way we treat a cat or a dog, similarly to the way we treat an ape, similarly to the way we treat a human.
• 1:12:25
  SPEAKER_10: And it's precisely that capacity for different levels of experience, sort of the complex cognitive capacities that we have that enable us to make those moral judgments.
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_10: How are we for time?
• 1:12:36
  SPEAKER_10: I was gonna say, I don't want to interrupt.
• 1:12:38
  SPEAKER_10: Do interrupt.
• 1:12:39
  SPEAKER_10: That's what you're for.
• 1:12:41
  SPEAKER_09: Um we are running, I mean, pretty much on time.
• 1:12:44
  SPEAKER_09: Um we are gonna open up to questions.
• 1:12:47
  SPEAKER_09: Uh Thomas, I'm not sure.
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_09: Am I meant to run with the mic to find people with questions?
• 1:12:52
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah?
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_09: Cool.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_09: Um, what people are thinking of questions.
• 1:12:56
  SPEAKER_09: Can I ask you one just to get the conversation going?
• 1:12:58
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah.
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_09: Cool.
• 1:13:00
  SPEAKER_09: Um your discussion uh or your thought process on morality, it sounds like fundamentally comes down to the fact that ultimately, if you do something to somebody, that might happen to you later down the line and negatively impact your valence.
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_09: Is that correct?
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_10: Well, it's a bit, it's a little less like, oh, if I do that to you, they might do it to me.
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_10: It's not quite as um, I don't, I'm not quite getting the right word for that.
• 1:13:27
  SPEAKER_10: It's not, it's not quite as yeah, tit for tat as that.
• 1:13:30
  SPEAKER_10: It's more like it's irrational, it's fundamentally irrational for me to care about my own valence experience, which is inherent to my nature.
• 1:13:40
  SPEAKER_10: I can't not care about it, and deny consideration of others because that opens the possibility of them denying the value of my experience, and that is irrational.
• 1:13:51
  SPEAKER_10: It's not about the the doing a particular thing to them that they might do to you, it's more about undermining the rational appreciation of the mutuality of our experience.
• 1:14:02
  SPEAKER_10: That was a really w way to say that.
• 1:14:05
  SPEAKER_09: It's not does that does that mean that fundamentally, if you were in a forest with another human being and you knew guaranteed that there was absolutely no way that anybody would find out and ever pay back the fact that you're about to shoot him?
• 1:14:19
  SPEAKER_10: No, no, that's it.
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_10: Would that be moral?
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_10: Would that be immoral?
• 1:14:23
  SPEAKER_10: Right, because it would be irrational in the sense of it would essentially, it would undermine my own appreciation of my own experience, right?
• 1:14:31
  SPEAKER_10: The it it it is it would be irrational.
• 1:14:34
  SPEAKER_10: It's not about the effects to society of people doing this, it's not about what they might do back to you, it is about living consistently with one own experience of the world.
• 1:14:46
  SPEAKER_10: It does mean, and this is again me causing problems for myself by being a philosopher and actually trying to answer the question.
• 1:14:53
  SPEAKER_10: It does mean if I became convinced that something that looked like a person actually had no interiority and was not a person, it would not be immoral to end their life.
• 1:15:02
  SPEAKER_10: Right?
• 1:15:02
  SPEAKER_10: That does follow from my position.
• 1:15:04
  SPEAKER_10: But it doesn't follow from my position that if no one figured it out, I could just kill.
• 1:15:09
  SPEAKER_10: I don't know.
• 1:15:10
  SPEAKER_10: I'm trying to think of who my least favourite person is.
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_09: Or if it brings you more benefit than the damager might cause it.
• 1:15:17
  SPEAKER_10: It doesn't mean a strict utilitarianism, like personal utilitarianism like that.
• 1:15:20
  SPEAKER_10: Or any sort of utilitarianism.
• 1:15:22
  SPEAKER_09: Should we open it up?
• 1:15:23
  SPEAKER_09: Yes, I'm gonna That was the first handbag.
• 1:15:26
  SPEAKER_09: Go for it.
• 1:15:27
  SPEAKER_05: Alright, I have to write this out on a pizza plate so I get it right.
• 1:15:32
  SPEAKER_05: Plato's dilemma.
• 1:15:33
  SPEAKER_05: I wonder if you could comment on it.
• 1:15:35
  SPEAKER_05: So is something good because God says it's good?
• 1:15:40
  SPEAKER_05: Or does God say something is good because it is good?
• 1:15:44
  SPEAKER_05: If one, that means it's an arbitrary process, and we're subject to the caprice of a God who might decide at one point that child sacrifice is acceptable and another point that it isn't.
• 1:16:00
  SPEAKER_05: If two, uh if uh if something is good if something if sorry does God say something is good because it is good, then we don't need God.
• 1:16:12
  SPEAKER_07: Yep.
• 1:16:13
  SPEAKER_07: So that's the final dialogue um of Socrates and Euthyphro, and often known as the Euthyphro dilemma.
• 1:16:21
  SPEAKER_07: Um and I think it's a dilemma both for religious believers and for atheists and agnostics as well, and I'll say why in a second.
• 1:16:32
  SPEAKER_07: But uh so you're sort of on the horns of a dilemma, right?
• 1:16:35
  SPEAKER_07: If you say that something is good only because the gods say that it's good, um then it seems incredibly arbitrary, doesn't it?
• 1:16:44
  SPEAKER_07: Um uh or is it is it good in and of itself, and the gods can do nothing but recognize the inherent goodness in it, and then what's what's what's the purpose of that goodness?
• 1:16:58
  SPEAKER_07: Now Plato himself had um an answer to this own to this this kind of dilemma, which for for Plato was the good is itself goodness, and in in that sense, he he really kind of believed in you know the good with a capital G.
• 1:17:17
  SPEAKER_07: Um we we might say God is goodness, I think is is a Platonist's way of kind of refusing the dilemma.
• 1:17:26
  SPEAKER_07: God himself is goodness.
• 1:17:28
  SPEAKER_07: I don't know how satisfying people in this room find that.
• 1:17:31
  SPEAKER_07: I actually don't find that very satisfying until you do that move that I mentioned earlier that uh the Jews and the Christians uh around the dot were interacting with a lot of Platonists and Neoplatonists, and they were introducing people to the one who is goodness himself, who is a person who is himself capable of morally valent kind of behavior.
• 1:17:57
  SPEAKER_07: And in the Trinitarian frame of God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then the God who is goodness is love.
• 1:18:06
  SPEAKER_07: A father loving his son in the joy of the Holy Spirit, and that to me, I think, escapes the arbitrariness of Plato's answer, in which God simply is goodness.
• 1:18:19
  SPEAKER_07: There is something non-arbitrary about the fact of a father loving the son in the joy of the Holy Spirit is an ethical community.
• 1:18:27
  SPEAKER_07: Before the world began, there was an ethical community of love, which is the highest ethic you can possibly have.
• 1:18:34
  SPEAKER_07: And so I think God is goodness because God is love, and to the degree that we approximate a life of love, then that's what we call good.
• 1:18:43
  SPEAKER_07: And at that point, I don't find that arbitrary, which is what some people say when you reflect refuse the dilemma.
• 1:18:49
  SPEAKER_07: I don't I don't find that arbitrary.
• 1:18:50
  SPEAKER_07: I I actually find that quite beautiful, but I would say that the atheist also has to answer the euthyphro dilemma, because if our creator is natural selection, now is natural selection simply selecting for ethical goodness?
• 1:19:07
  SPEAKER_07: Or is whatever natural selection selects morally good?
• 1:19:15
  SPEAKER_07: Which way do you go on that one, James?
• 1:19:17
  SPEAKER_10: Well, firstly, I agree with you when you say that we won't find your answer to the dilemma convincing.
• 1:19:23
  SPEAKER_10: I don't find it convincing.
• 1:19:24
  SPEAKER_10: I I think that actually it's a well-posed dilemma, and I d I've never read a response to it that I found particularly convincing.
• 1:19:30
  SPEAKER_10: Um and I th I don't think I honestly don't think bringing I I think it's I think it's cute.
• 1:19:37
  SPEAKER_10: I don't mean to I genuinely think it's cute to answer though a uh an uh an evolutionary version of the dilemma, but I don't think it really works as a dilemma.
• 1:19:47
  SPEAKER_10: Um why not?
• 1:19:48
  SPEAKER_10: Uh because natural selection doesn't select for ethical goodness and it's not good.
• 1:19:54
  SPEAKER_10: I mean it it's just a natural process that's happening.
• 1:19:58
  SPEAKER_10: There is no ethical dimension to natural selection at all.
• 1:20:02
  SPEAKER_10: It has no, I mean it's just not an ethically involved process.
• 1:20:07
  SPEAKER_10: I don't know how to Okay.
• 1:20:08
  SPEAKER_07: So therefore, are you more platonic in terms of you think there is goodness outside of the natural realm?
• 1:20:14
  SPEAKER_10: No, no, I don't know.
• 1:20:15
  SPEAKER_10: So there's no goodness outside of the natural realm.
• 1:20:17
  SPEAKER_10: I don't think it has anything to do with natural selection.
• 1:20:19
  SPEAKER_10: I think that natural selection selects for the ability of organisms to survive and therefore reproduce.
• 1:20:26
  SPEAKER_10: That's all that natural selection wants.
• 1:20:29
  SPEAKER_10: And I hate using teleological language to talk about natural selection because it's not, in my view, a teleological process.
• 1:20:35
  SPEAKER_10: It doesn't want anything, it's just something that happens.
• 1:20:38
  SPEAKER_10: But it has no moral dimension, right?
• 1:20:40
  SPEAKER_10: And the reason why it has no moral dimension is because there's no agent making the choices, right?
• 1:20:44
  SPEAKER_10: No one is choosing, oh, this frog lives, this frog dies, from my perspective.
• 1:20:50
  SPEAKER_10: It's just what happens.
• 1:20:51
  SPEAKER_10: The whole point of the idea of natural selection is to remove the agent from the process.
• 1:20:56
  SPEAKER_10: And when you don't have an agent, you don't have morality, right?
• 1:20:59
  SPEAKER_10: There's no morality needs agents to exist.
• 1:21:02
  SPEAKER_10: So I don't think it's a moral process at all.
• 1:21:04
  SPEAKER_10: So I guess I don't I don't understand the question.
• 1:21:07
  SPEAKER_07: Well, therefore, where why should you not simply follow natural selection in a Nietzschean frame and just say pity thwarts the law of selection, which is the law of evolution.
• 1:21:16
  SPEAKER_10: But why should you?
• 1:21:17
  SPEAKER_10: Right?
• 1:21:18
  SPEAKER_10: Because it's your creator.
• 1:21:19
  SPEAKER_10: But well, Nietzsche, if he wants us to follow his normative prescriptions, has to argue for them just as everybody else.
• 1:21:25
  SPEAKER_10: He can't it's not a normatively convincing argument to say, well, nature does this, so we should do it.
• 1:21:32
  SPEAKER_10: I mean, everyone can see the flaw in that reasoning.
• 1:21:35
  SPEAKER_10: So I I don't find it a particularly challenging.
• 1:21:38
  SPEAKER_07: But there is no realm beyond nature.
• 1:21:40
  SPEAKER_10: No, that I think actually I'm a pr I'm a weird sort of humanist, and that I don't even like to call myself a naturalist because I don't think the concept of the supernatural makes it is sensible at all.
• 1:21:52
  SPEAKER_10: I don't think it makes any sense.
• 1:21:54
  SPEAKER_10: I think it is logically inconceivable.
• 1:21:57
  SPEAKER_10: I think that there can only be the natural.
• 1:21:59
  SPEAKER_10: Everything that is is natural.
• 1:22:00
  SPEAKER_10: Right.
• 1:22:01
  SPEAKER_10: And I think that that that that actually there's a conceptual incoherence in the idea of the supernatural.
• 1:22:06
  SPEAKER_07: But what nature selects for is not pity, it's not compassion, it's not the inviolable worth and dignity of people.
• 1:22:11
  SPEAKER_07: Correct.
• 1:22:12
  SPEAKER_07: And nature is all there is.
• 1:22:13
  SPEAKER_07: Yes.
• 1:22:14
  SPEAKER_07: So where where is this moral judgment?
• 1:22:16
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 1:22:17
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
• 1:22:17
  SPEAKER_10: So great question.
• 1:22:19
  SPEAKER_10: If all that had evolved on this planet had been like tadpoles, and that was the extent that life got to, it went from amoebas to something like tadpoles, there would be no ethics in the universe.
• 1:22:29
  SPEAKER_10: We would live in an ethics-free universe.
• 1:22:31
  SPEAKER_10: I think that's pretty obvious.
• 1:22:32
  SPEAKER_10: And I think if the globe was wiped out tomorrow by some horrible disaster, and there were no there was no life left on it, and there was no life in the universe, there would be no ethics in the universe.
• 1:22:44
  SPEAKER_10: Ethics is something that happens when organisms with the capacity for valenced experience are in community with each other.
• 1:22:53
  SPEAKER_10: I think that it's very doubtful that there would be any such thing as ethics if there was only one person living on the earth.
• 1:22:58
  SPEAKER_10: Some people disagree and they say people might have ethical responsibilities to themselves.
• 1:23:03
  SPEAKER_10: I'm not sure about that.
• 1:23:04
  SPEAKER_10: I I could go either way on that one, but I'm quite confident in saying there would be no ethics if there was nothing capable of thinking about their own behavior.
• 1:23:13
  SPEAKER_10: I mean, an essential prerequisite of any ethics is that something is able to reflect on whether it should do something or not.
• 1:23:20
  SPEAKER_10: If we were unable to do that, the whole discourse of ethics would be meaningless.
• 1:23:25
  SPEAKER_10: And this is something important about the argument I made earlier.
• 1:23:28
  SPEAKER_10: We start from there, right?
• 1:23:30
  SPEAKER_10: We're not adding something into the universe and we say, oh, ethics.
• 1:23:34
  SPEAKER_10: We come into the world as ethical creatures inherently.
• 1:23:36
  SPEAKER_10: We can't help but be.
• 1:23:38
  SPEAKER_10: And we and ethics, the philosophical ethics, is the intellectual task of trying to deal with the reality of our ethical existence that pre-existed.
• 1:23:47
  SPEAKER_10: Ethical theories are just like scientific theories in that regard.
• 1:23:50
  SPEAKER_10: Scientific theories try to understand physical reality, but physical reality already existed.
• 1:23:55
  SPEAKER_10: Well, ethical theories try and understand ethical reality, and ethical reality already exists because we live in community with each other.
• 1:24:02
  SPEAKER_10: So it's not some secret source that's added on top.
• 1:24:05
  SPEAKER_10: It's something that we are born into by members of the human community.
• 1:24:10
  SPEAKER_10: I don't know if that made any sense.
• 1:24:11
  SPEAKER_10: It sounded awesome though, to me at least.
• 1:24:14
  SPEAKER_04: Oh I was just gonna say, um, James, I like that you used uh Hippocrates as an example because a big fan of Hippocrates.
• 1:24:22
  SPEAKER_04: Um but I was just interested if you knew of a particular account.
• 1:24:24
  SPEAKER_04: I think uh Plutarch and Galen give an example, some of his early biographies as well, where he's invited to uh by the Persian king to treat him, and he actually refuses because he says that he wouldn't treat a barbarian.
• 1:24:39
  SPEAKER_04: Now, obviously that's really representative of sort of uh Greek thought where there are Greeks and barbarians.
• 1:24:46
  SPEAKER_04: So I was just wondering on your your kind of thoughts about that.
• 1:24:50
  SPEAKER_10: So the question is about the refusal to treat a barbarian and whether So, as I said when I introduced that little vignette, it is a very imperfect glimmer of a more universal humanistic appreciation of the worth of humankind.
• 1:25:04
  SPEAKER_10: And I tried to make this point really clearly too.
• 1:25:07
  SPEAKER_10: Ancient Greek society was hugely stratified by all those sorts of considerations, by sex, by um nationality, by citizen or not, slave or free.
• 1:25:20
  SPEAKER_10: Like all those distinctions were incredibly important.
• 1:25:23
  SPEAKER_10: It was a very unjust society from our perspective.
• 1:25:27
  SPEAKER_10: And so I I totally take your point that there would have been people who absolutely would have refused to treat a slave, or there would have been people who but the the important thing for my argument was there were some who didn't, and they wrote that they didn't, and they wrote why they didn't.
• 1:25:44
  SPEAKER_10: They were in a minority, certainly, but they had a philosophical framework that enabled them to appreciate something more like a universal humanism.
• 1:25:55
  SPEAKER_10: There were even some people in Aristotle's time who, for instance, advocated against slavery because they thought that everyone was born equal and no one should be morally superior to another.
• 1:26:08
  SPEAKER_10: They called slavery an offense against reason and against nature.
• 1:26:12
  SPEAKER_10: And we know that they existed because Aristotle wrote about how wrong they were and why slavery was really good, actually.
• 1:26:18
  SPEAKER_10: And he would only have done that if he was arguing against people who he writes about whose arguments he thinks were wrong.
• 1:26:25
  SPEAKER_10: So my point there was not to say this was a widespread practice or culturally accepted by everybody, but that there are other pre-Christian routes to getting to some of the sort of ethical positions that we have today, and we see glimmers of those, like little flecks of gold among what was truly a massive pile of in ancient Greece.
• 1:26:45
  SPEAKER_07: And I guess I would only say to that, why do we like um whoever Aristotle is arguing against versus Aristotle in that punch-up?
• 1:26:55
  SPEAKER_07: What is it up here?
• 1:26:56
  SPEAKER_07: And if it's this uh, you know, this this person testifies to a nascent humanism that's in the bud and it will come into full flower, again, that that seems metaphysically extravagant to have have this humanism that sort of hangs in the ether waiting to be developed into.
• 1:27:15
  SPEAKER_07: That actually that actually sounds to me a very theological vision of what what the world actually is, that the world is somehow aiming towards the kind of humanism of 1948.
• 1:27:25
  SPEAKER_10: Um but I'm not making the claim that it's going to necessarily happen, right?
• 1:27:31
  SPEAKER_10: That what that the place we've got to morally is either the ultimate place or the necessary place where culture must have developed to.
• 1:27:38
  SPEAKER_10: I'm not making any sort of teleological claim here.
• 1:27:40
  SPEAKER_10: I'm just saying that as a matter of fact, people reasoned from their pre Christian philosophical assumptions, using their experience of real human bodies, to a more universalistic ethic, and that suggests to me that it can be done without Christianity.
• 1:27:53
  SPEAKER_10: That's all I'm saying.
• 1:27:54
  SPEAKER_10: I'm not saying that it necessarily was about to happen or that it was destined to occur.
• 1:28:00
  SPEAKER_10: I don't think that's true.
• 1:28:01
  SPEAKER_10: In fact, I think we're living through a time of profound backsliding on humanistic values.
• 1:28:05
  SPEAKER_10: And that's perfectly in line with my philosophy, because I don't think that humanity has any sort of destiny.
• 1:28:11
  SPEAKER_10: And I don't think the universe has any sort of moral arc.
• 1:28:13
  SPEAKER_10: So the fact we're going backwards morally as a society is very consistent with my humanistic point of view.
• 1:28:18
  SPEAKER_10: How can it be going backwards if there's no moral arc?
• 1:28:21
  SPEAKER_10: Because what well, because forwards and backwards is a relative statement.
• 1:28:24
  SPEAKER_10: It's not necessarily absurd.
• 1:28:26
  SPEAKER_10: So is the moral arc.
• 1:28:27
  SPEAKER_10: Okay, well, I guess that if you see, I guess I was thinking of the moral arc in that statement as something akin to in the quote that Martin Luther King popularized about the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.
• 1:28:39
  SPEAKER_10: So humanists would say, no, it don't.
• 1:28:42
  SPEAKER_10: It bends towards justice if we bend it, but there's no like God with it with his finger on the arc to make sure that it happens.
• 1:28:50
  SPEAKER_10: And there is a fundamental difference in view, I think, between many theistic accounts of the development of ideas of justice and humanistic accounts.
• 1:29:00
  SPEAKER_10: I think it's not exactly an accident, but certainly contingent that moral progress happens and that it can stop.
• 1:29:06
  SPEAKER_10: But that doesn't mean I'm unable to recognize moral progress because I'm judging it against that bedrock of human experience that I talked about.
• 1:29:13
  SPEAKER_10: So that's what I'm judging it against.
• 1:29:15
  SPEAKER_10: But it's not it's not against the sort of plan of history.
• 1:29:19
  SPEAKER_10: All right, shall we move on?
• 1:29:20
  SPEAKER_10: I think there's a question in the We're doing really good, Glenn.
• 1:29:23
  SPEAKER_10: I'm really proud of us.
• 1:29:26
  SPEAKER_00: Hi.
• 1:29:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um hi.
• 1:29:29
  SPEAKER_00: So my question is since um since all the mystical traditions and religions around the world teach us about divine love and experiencing oneness with God, so why should moral values and principles solely come from Christianity?
• 1:29:50
  SPEAKER_00: And um and isn't the idea of good and bad um relative, something relative, depending on someone's culture and perspective?
• 1:30:00
  SPEAKER_00: And if it is true there is a God and it's divinely intelligent and loving, why does God let these things happen?
• 1:30:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like bad things happen, like what's happening in Gaza?
• 1:30:14
  SPEAKER_00: So um, and would you say that ethics is directly connected to one's capacity to love um themselves and others?
• 1:30:26
  SPEAKER_07: Wow.
• 1:30:29
  SPEAKER_07: Those are the four best questions you could possibly ask.
• 1:30:33
  SPEAKER_07: Um so I I think all sorts of religious traditions get all sorts of things right at all sorts of junctures, but I do think the idea of um persons in communion, the the idea that God is love, I think um is something that Christians are uniquely able to say because of the very peculiar doctrine that Christians uh hold about who God is.
• 1:30:58
  SPEAKER_07: God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit bound together persons in community, persons in love, such that we have come from love, we're shaped by love, we're determined for love, and our destiny is to find our place in that love of God.
• 1:31:13
  SPEAKER_07: And in the various traditions in the world, there is all sorts of yearning for that kind of communion.
• 1:31:20
  SPEAKER_07: There's all sorts of yearning for God, I think, in that sense.
• 1:31:25
  SPEAKER_07: Um, but metaphysically, ontologically, the grounding, I think, um, that the scriptures give to who this God is is a unique kind of a thing.
• 1:31:36
  SPEAKER_07: Um we we were thinking about um persons as quite distinctive beings in this world.
• 1:31:44
  SPEAKER_07: Persons are not the same thing as things.
• 1:31:46
  SPEAKER_07: Martin Buber, um informed by the Bible, said you you can have an it-it relationship, um, which is uh impersonal.
• 1:31:54
  SPEAKER_07: You can have an I-it relationship in which you're a person and the other thing.
• 1:32:00
  SPEAKER_07: Ah, and the great yeah, and the Christian vision is the great I am is him himself in the Christian tradition, the son of the Father filled with the Spirit, and you can have an I thou relationship with the God of the universe, and that's why I thou relationships, i.e.
• 1:32:16
  SPEAKER_07: love, is the greatest thing on the Christian understanding.
• 1:32:20
  SPEAKER_07: Why is there why is there evil and darkness and suffering in this world?
• 1:32:23
  SPEAKER_07: Well, if God is light and life and love, then we experience the world as darkness and death and disconnection, and the Bible says that we've turned from light, and when you turn from light, you get into darkness, and when you turn from love, you get into disconnection.
• 1:32:35
  SPEAKER_07: When you turn from life, you get into death.
• 1:32:38
  SPEAKER_07: But what has the God of the Bible done?
• 1:32:39
  SPEAKER_07: Well, the Son of the Father, full of the Holy Spirit, the Logos Jesus Christ, has come into our darkness and death and disconnection.
• 1:32:46
  SPEAKER_07: He took our darkness on the cross, took our death on the cross, took our disconnection on the cross, and then he rises up again and he says to us in the darkness, do you want my light?
• 1:32:55
  SPEAKER_07: If you are feeling disconnection, do you want my connection?
• 1:32:59
  SPEAKER_07: Do you want my love?
• 1:33:00
  SPEAKER_07: If if if you're living in death, do you want my life forever?
• 1:33:04
  SPEAKER_07: That's that's the kind of the Christian story.
• 1:33:07
  SPEAKER_07: And um, I can't claim to have looked into every single religious tradition in the world, but certainly when I hold that story up, I think it resonates with the deepest yearnings, certainly, of of my heart.
• 1:33:20
  SPEAKER_07: And I think it tells a kind of an unimprovable story in which the highest figure has descended to the lowest depth in order to have the biggest impact on the most number of people for all eternity.
• 1:33:31
  SPEAKER_07: So there are dimensions to this story that I I think uh uh unimprovable, and that that's why I shoot my mouth off about Jesus the whole time.
• 1:33:40
  SPEAKER_09: Great.
• 1:33:41
  SPEAKER_09: Thank you.
• 1:33:42
  SPEAKER_09: Next question.
• 1:33:45
  SPEAKER_08: Hiya.
• 1:33:46
  SPEAKER_08: Um I suppose this question's for Glenn, but um obviously open to both.
• 1:33:51
  SPEAKER_08: Um what I wanted to ask is would it undermine the claim that Christianity is the air we breathe if it turns out, as James has been saying, um, that through their conscience and imagination human beings can catch on to say truths of morality in the sense that and and away from Christ, in the sense that isn't the point instead that um well, this is the question, it's Christianity that sort of best sustains those ideas.
• 1:34:21
  SPEAKER_08: So if you look at the culture that's been brought about because it was largely Christian, you might think those moral ideas have been defended and still are, um, perhaps as the best example, say, around the world.
• 1:34:34
  SPEAKER_08: Um so yeah, that's the question.
• 1:34:36
  SPEAKER_08: Is it up to so much about whether we could have got here without Christianity, or is it rather about what best sustains these ideas that we all agree on?
• 1:34:44
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, really good question.
• 1:34:46
  SPEAKER_07: And and a lot of people tonight have used that language in in conversation before uh the debate and then in the debate, and now that that language of would we have gotten to human rights without Jesus?
• 1:34:58
  SPEAKER_07: And and my my thinking on that is is basically um to even say that you I could answer yes to that question.
• 1:35:06
  SPEAKER_07: Um let let okay, for the sake of argument, let me grant you, yeah, you can there there are all sorts of paths up the mountain called Mount Mount Rights.
• 1:35:15
  SPEAKER_07: Um let's just think about what Mount Rights is.
• 1:35:19
  SPEAKER_07: Apparently, there is a transcendent value to human beings that extends to the very fringes of the human family and and is exceptional such that it doesn't quite transfer beyond that circle, and yet it includes every kind of member within the human family.
• 1:35:36
  SPEAKER_07: There is this humanity that judges us such that we can commit crimes against humanity, even though we are humans.
• 1:35:42
  SPEAKER_07: Like, what is this?
• 1:35:43
  SPEAKER_07: Where is this transcendent humanity that exists above all the instantiations of humans and is apparently righteous, but that it apparently can include each one of us?
• 1:35:57
  SPEAKER_07: Like it is a peculiarly theological view, I think, of all reality to believe in human rights and to believe that various traditions can aim towards that summit.
• 1:36:08
  SPEAKER_07: So you're quite right to say um there is a contingency to Christian history the way that it's unfolded, and I'm happy to admit that.
• 1:36:16
  SPEAKER_07: But as soon as you say we would have gotten here anyway, I think you're admitting to living in the kind of universe in which humanity is transcendent.
• 1:36:26
  SPEAKER_07: Um in in in a in a sense that goes kind of beyond nature and beyond the vicissitudes of our kind of little squabbling animalistic warfare.
• 1:36:39
  SPEAKER_07: There is this humanity above that.
• 1:36:40
  SPEAKER_07: And as soon as you start saying that, you s it sounds to me like you're describing Christianity in lots of ways.
• 1:36:47
  SPEAKER_10: I I feel the need to respond to that because I think that it articulates an important difference of perspective that is quite subtle, that I think is is important to tease apart.
• 1:37:00
  SPEAKER_10: Because the picture that Glenn just offered about what human rights are, you know, mount rights, love the metaphor, is not actually, I think, an accurate description of how at least international human rights discourse actually describes human rights.
• 1:37:16
  SPEAKER_10: It is explicitly not how the Universal Declaration of Human Rights talks about rights, for instance.
• 1:37:22
  SPEAKER_10: It does not claim that human beings are transcendent and separate from the rest of reality.
• 1:37:30
  SPEAKER_10: That language was advocated for by people like Charles Malik, who felt, like Glenn, that it was essential to have a metaphysical grounding like that in order to advance the ideals of human rights.
• 1:37:41
  SPEAKER_10: But other people like Chang said, no, it's not.
• 1:37:44
  SPEAKER_10: We don't need that sort of language in this document.
• 1:37:46
  SPEAKER_10: And in fact, it would undermine the success of it as an international document because it would prevent people who have different metaphysical assumptions from signing on to it.
• 1:37:57
  SPEAKER_10: I think it's pretty clear who's correct about that.
• 1:38:00
  SPEAKER_10: The profound success of the idea of human rights is partly because it refused to engage in the sort of theological language that Glenn has just imposed upon it.
• 1:38:13
  SPEAKER_10: And I think that at a time when human rights are backsliding all over the world, it's incredibly important that we reinforce the pluralistic message that you can actually ground the idea of human rights, not just get to them, but ground them in a respectable way from many different religious and non-religious perspectives.
• 1:38:33
  SPEAKER_10: I am really scared at a time of rising Christian nationalism, which has profound influence over the US government, with the largest military force ever in the history of the world, saying that human rights is an explicitly Christian concept and owned by that religious community.
• 1:38:53
  SPEAKER_10: Because I don't like really what they're doing with that power that they have and the concepts that they're using to gain the support of the electorate there.
• 1:39:02
  SPEAKER_10: So I think actually it's it's quite important to protect what the actual language of things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is, which doesn't claim a transcendent metaphysical status for human beings.
• 1:39:13
  SPEAKER_10: It doesn't do that on purpose.
• 1:39:15
  SPEAKER_10: Because it's pragmatic.
• 1:39:16
  SPEAKER_07: You know, it's not post-war, it's post-war pragmatism.
• 1:39:19
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 1:39:20
  SPEAKER_07: You need a United Nations.
• 1:39:22
  SPEAKER_10: So I I think that that is what many Christians believe.
• 1:39:25
  SPEAKER_10: That secretly everybody knew that this was really a Western Christian document, the Universal Declaration.
• 1:39:33
  SPEAKER_10: But they couldn't possibly say that because they wanted other nations that weren't Christian nations to sign on.
• 1:39:39
  SPEAKER_10: I I have to admit, I find that a rather I'm trying to be polite.
• 1:39:46
  SPEAKER_10: I find it a rather condescending attitude to the peoples of the rest of the world who have their own rich religious and philosophical traditions, to tell them people like PC Chang was an expert in Confucian philosophy and thought.
• 1:39:59
  SPEAKER_07: And in Christianity.
• 1:40:00
  SPEAKER_07: So PC Chan is standing at at the fringes of things between Confucian and Christian theology.
• 1:40:06
  SPEAKER_07: He was not a Christian.
• 1:40:07
  SPEAKER_07: So I'm not saying he was a Christian.
• 1:40:09
  SPEAKER_10: I think you've got to be careful about this, because this is where I think it becomes a bit culturally colonialist, this argument.
• 1:40:15
  SPEAKER_10: Chang was a Chinese man.
• 1:40:17
  SPEAKER_10: He was born in China, he was raised in China, he described himself as a Confucian.
• 1:40:22
  SPEAKER_10: His writings are filled with references to Confucian texts.
• 1:40:25
  SPEAKER_10: He was very deeply committed to his own intellectual ideas that he himself did not understand as Christian.
• 1:40:33
  SPEAKER_10: To say that actually they were Christian, because he spent some of his time as an undergraduate and as a doctoral student in America, suggests to me a view of the world that kind of says, well, once you've come into contact with Christian ideas, they own you.
• 1:40:48
  SPEAKER_10: And everything else you might say about your ideas, about your identity, is not legitimate, that in fact we can we can claim that.
• 1:40:56
  SPEAKER_10: Yes, he was an internationalist, right?
• 1:40:59
  SPEAKER_10: Like, you know, like Charles Malik.
• 1:41:01
  SPEAKER_10: He was a Lebanese Christian who also traveled around.
• 1:41:04
  SPEAKER_10: Like Roosevelt, like Humphreys.
• 1:41:06
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, like all of them.
• 1:41:07
  SPEAKER_07: Like Jack Maritain.
• 1:41:08
  SPEAKER_10: Yes.
• 1:41:08
  SPEAKER_10: And that's exactly my point, which is that these people were bringing together the best of multiple intellectual and religious traditions and trying to craft something that articulated moral similarities that united them.
• 1:41:24
  SPEAKER_10: And that my perspective is we should be welcoming to that and generous.
• 1:41:32
  SPEAKER_10: Say, yes, actually your Confucianism does get you to where my humanism gets me, and your Christianity gets you to where, you know, this person's Islam gets them.
• 1:41:43
  SPEAKER_10: We don't actually, I don't know what's to be gained, and I think there's rather a lot to be lost by saying, well, no, but actually it's all Christian.
• 1:41:52
  SPEAKER_07: Well, there's different ways of being paternalistic, and one way of being paternalistic is basically to say all the different religious traditions of the world are kind of saying the same thing.
• 1:42:02
  SPEAKER_07: They're just wearing slightly different clothing, but they're they're basically all about the same thing.
• 1:42:06
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 1:42:06
  SPEAKER_07: I think that can be a paternalistic way.
• 1:42:08
  SPEAKER_07: I agree.
• 1:42:08
  SPEAKER_07: And I don't take that view.
• 1:42:10
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, I think that is very I think that's very paternalistic.
• 1:42:13
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, I agree with that.
• 1:42:14
  SPEAKER_10: We should they don't all have the same view.
• 1:42:16
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
• 1:42:19
  SPEAKER_06: Um, I was very pleased to hear you mention Thomas Paine.
• 1:42:22
  SPEAKER_06: This is a bit of influence of me.
• 1:42:24
  SPEAKER_06: But I have to admit, even as a fan of the guy, that he could be a bit of a pain in the posterior.
• 1:42:30
  SPEAKER_06: He was, let's face it, pretty useless as a husband, not much better as a father, a terrible employee, and an often rather faithless friend.
• 1:42:39
  SPEAKER_06: So how do the speakers get round this gap between the high moral principles that not just Thomas Paine but a great many other people have preached, and the relentless failure of their own and obviously everyone else's personal lives?
• 1:42:55
  SPEAKER_10: Who wants to go first?
• 1:42:58
  SPEAKER_07: Well, I mean, in the age of reason, as much as he was reacting against Christianity, he was reacting against it for some profoundly Christian-ish reasons.
• 1:43:08
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, he looked back at uh medieval times as a vast sandy desert with no shrub on the horizon.
• 1:43:15
  SPEAKER_07: But we have come to the sunny uplands and to the um to the verdant kind of greenery of rationalism and enlightenment humanism.
• 1:43:25
  SPEAKER_07: Um, what's profoundly um fascinating to me about that is that that is a very biblical way of framing life.
• 1:43:33
  SPEAKER_07: Is he Moses, right?
• 1:43:34
  SPEAKER_07: Is he Moses going through the desert, coming into the Promised Land, and he hasn't left behind Egypt, he's left behind horrible medieval Christendom.
• 1:43:42
  SPEAKER_07: Um and he kind of got that from some Protestantism and some hyper-Protestantism of the Quakers that he kind of grew up within.
• 1:43:51
  SPEAKER_07: But even right at the end of his life, um he was asked what he believed.
• 1:43:56
  SPEAKER_07: He said, I believe in human equality, and I believe that we should act justly, love mercy, and treat all as equals, right?
• 1:44:06
  SPEAKER_07: And the Christians in the room, you'll be able to recognize how fundamentally Christian that is.
• 1:44:11
  SPEAKER_07: He says, I believe that we should act justly, love mercy, and the verse in Micah, chapter six, is and walk humbly with our God.
• 1:44:18
  SPEAKER_07: But he's doing the Nietzschean thing.
• 1:44:20
  SPEAKER_07: He's doing what Nietzsche says that we always do.
• 1:44:22
  SPEAKER_07: When we think we've gotten rid of God, the good kind of sneaks back in in a suspiciously Christian kind of frame.
• 1:44:30
  SPEAKER_07: Um and so Thomas Paine was he was very much anti-monarchist, and I and I think a lot of a lot of the Christians, certainly a lot of the Christians in the UK, um, in Britain, rather, uh, were uh were against him uh because of his uh republicanism.
• 1:44:48
  SPEAKER_07: Uh and those arguments about the equality of all people were was kind of infused with the political strife that was going on in the day.
• 1:44:55
  SPEAKER_07: But yeah, Thomas Paine was not you wouldn't have him to babysit your kids, I don't think.
• 1:45:01
  SPEAKER_10: I mean, I I'll just say briefly, I I just attribute it to the fact that we're evolved organisms and not very good at keeping ourselves to our own moral principles.
• 1:45:12
  SPEAKER_10: I recognize countless ways in which I do not live up to the principles I have expressed hopefully eloquently this evening.
• 1:45:18
  SPEAKER_10: And I'll just give you an example to keep myself honest.
• 1:45:20
  SPEAKER_10: I eat animals.
• 1:45:22
  SPEAKER_10: I think it's morally wrong to eat animals.
• 1:45:24
  SPEAKER_10: I'm totally convinced that we should not eat animals.
• 1:45:27
  SPEAKER_10: I do.
• 1:45:28
  SPEAKER_10: What can I say?
• 1:45:29
  SPEAKER_10: I suck.
• 1:45:30
  SPEAKER_10: I'm I'm a human being and I'm incapable of consistently living by my own values.
• 1:45:37
  SPEAKER_09: Right.
• 1:45:37
  SPEAKER_09: I think it's one more question.
• 1:45:38
  SPEAKER_09: We are wary of the time.
• 1:45:40
  SPEAKER_09: However, we will have a uh time afterwards where people can come and see.
• 1:45:44
  SPEAKER_10: If you're okay to go to the pub afterwards.
• 1:45:46
  SPEAKER_10: I'm going to the pub later.
• 1:45:47
  SPEAKER_10: The reason why I'm I'm I'm saying to take one question now is because it's almost nine when we said we'd end, and we want to give people social permission to leave if they need to leave.
• 1:45:55
  SPEAKER_10: So we'll take one more now.
• 1:45:57
  SPEAKER_10: But if you want to hang around and ask questions, we're both going to Falmabar afterwards and we're gonna close it out, it sounds like.
• 1:46:05
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, James, earlier you said that if you don't have an agent, you don't have morality, and you can use your own rationality and your personal life experiences to determine like the level of morality.
• 1:46:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I was gonna ask, so how if everyone has their own different personal and rational experiences as a world we live in, how can we all just determine our morality on our personal life experiences without offending someone else?
• 1:46:28
  SPEAKER_01: And you saying if you don't have an agent, you don't have morality, wouldn't that also suggest that there has to be something higher than ourselves that could lead to the overall judgment and the overall morality and conclude that?
• 1:46:41
  SPEAKER_10: Great questions.
• 1:46:42
  SPEAKER_10: Uh I'll I'll try and take the first one, the second one first.
• 1:46:46
  SPEAKER_10: Um I think no is the answer to the second question.
• 1:46:49
  SPEAKER_10: I think that what when I said without an agent we don't have any morality, what I mean is if there are no if there is nothing in the universe acting and able to reflect on whether it should do A over B, then I don't see how logically we can have any sort of discourse that looks like ethics there.
• 1:47:08
  SPEAKER_10: Because no one's making any choices about how to act, right?
• 1:47:12
  SPEAKER_10: And so uh it seems to me just inherent in the concept of morality that involves deciding whether or not to do something.
• 1:47:21
  SPEAKER_10: And I don't know that there's a coherent idea of morality that doesn't encode that.
• 1:47:25
  SPEAKER_10: But I don't think that implies that there needs to be an agent above us that we need to be making decisions about how to act in an environment where those actions might affect others who are also making decisions, and that mutuality seems to me enough to establish a moral community.
• 1:47:43
  SPEAKER_10: I don't think there needs to be anything above that.
• 1:47:46
  SPEAKER_10: I think there needs to be like two people, basically, and then you've got some sort of ethical considerations coming into play.
• 1:47:52
  SPEAKER_10: Remind me of your first question.
• 1:47:54
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry.
• 1:47:55
  SPEAKER_01: How can we depend our own rationality on our own personal life experiences?
• 1:48:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because if I you find something that's irrational, but I don't, who's now right?
• 1:48:04
  SPEAKER_01: And who can hold the ultimate judgment of that argument?
• 1:48:08
  SPEAKER_10: No one gets the ultimate judgment, right?
• 1:48:11
  SPEAKER_10: It is a process of discourse, a process of rational discourse.
• 1:48:14
  SPEAKER_10: Just like no one has the ultimate judgment of whether a scientific theory is right, or whether an interpretation of Hamlet is right.
• 1:48:22
  SPEAKER_10: No one has the authority to declare that any of these theories are ultimately correct.
• 1:48:28
  SPEAKER_10: What we do is we come together and we engage in discourse and we offer reasons for our view and evidence in support of our view, and we expect and hope that the other people will be responsive to those evidence and that reasons.
• 1:48:41
  SPEAKER_10: And hopefully the best argument prevails.
• 1:48:44
  SPEAKER_10: But it's not like anyone gets to decide what's correct in any of these cases.
• 1:48:50
  SPEAKER_10: It's just a matter of rational discourse.
• 1:48:54
  SPEAKER_09: Thank you.
• 1:48:55
  SPEAKER_09: Um we will now just have the final closing statements of each uh I hadn't prepared one for sure.
• 1:49:02
  SPEAKER_10: Oh is that okay?
• 1:49:05
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, go ahead.
• 1:49:06
  SPEAKER_09: Um Do you want to go first?
• 1:49:08
  SPEAKER_10: No, you go first.
• 1:49:09
  SPEAKER_10: Go on, you go first.
• 1:49:10
  SPEAKER_10: I'll just say thank you.
• 1:49:13
  SPEAKER_07: Um my argument is not that uh Christians alone can be good in the world.
• 1:49:25
  SPEAKER_07: My argument is not that there haven't been other uh sources of influence on the West.
• 1:49:32
  SPEAKER_07: But my argument is 20 centuries of Christianization has had a profound effect on our moral intuitions such that we even look to those other tributaries through Christian lenses.
• 1:49:47
  SPEAKER_07: We select not Aristotle, but the anti slavery guy.
• 1:49:52
  SPEAKER_07: You know, we we don't like the personal life of Thomas Paine, but we do like some of his very biblical.
• 1:50:00
  SPEAKER_07: Sounding philosophy.
• 1:50:02
  SPEAKER_07: And there are all sorts of tributaries into our modern experience of the world.
• 1:50:08
  SPEAKER_07: But we still, and I would include even James in this, we still look out at the world through some profoundly Christian spectacles.
• 1:50:16
  SPEAKER_07: And I do not find it convincing that simply being rational will get you to a belief in human rights or the kind of humanism that James actually prizes.
• 1:50:28
  SPEAKER_07: I still think that it's a post hoc rationalization of some pretty Christian intuitions.
• 1:50:33
  SPEAKER_07: He wants to get to those Christian intuitions via different routes.
• 1:50:37
  SPEAKER_07: I don't think we got to those Christian intuitions via secular methods, and I don't think we can get to those Christian intuitions via secular methods.
• 1:50:48
  SPEAKER_07: Thanks.
• 1:50:49
  SPEAKER_07: James, thank you, Glenn.
• 1:50:51
  SPEAKER_10: I I also want to say what my argument isn't, because it's easier for me to think about what to say if I just copy what Glenn has said, but kind of mix switch out the conclusions.
• 1:51:02
  SPEAKER_10: If what we're arguing tonight is whether Christianity has been profoundly influenced on how we all think about the world, on our culture today, on our institutions, even on our moral thinking, then I agree it has been profoundly influential.
• 1:51:18
  SPEAKER_10: Christianity has shaped so much about our modern lives, and I know that personally as someone who went to a secondary school founded by a dean of St.
• 1:51:28
  SPEAKER_10: Paul's Cathedral and then to a college that was designed initially to train dissenting Christian ministers.
• 1:51:33
  SPEAKER_10: So I would be the last person to say that Christianity hasn't had a profound impact on our lives today.
• 1:51:42
  SPEAKER_10: And some of it's even been good.
• 1:51:44
  SPEAKER_10: But I want to I want to embrace a generous pluralism.
• 1:51:50
  SPEAKER_10: I want Glenn to be able to honestly and full-throatedly say that his values are based on, grounded in, maybe even indistinguishable from, his Christianity.
• 1:52:02
  SPEAKER_10: And for me to accept that fully as a true statement about how he thinks and lives his life.
• 1:52:08
  SPEAKER_10: And I also want to say that my values, my beliefs, my way of living is grounded in my humanism.
• 1:52:17
  SPEAKER_10: And I want to believe my Muslim friends when they say that their beliefs come from their Muslim faith, and my Jewish friends when they say that it comes from their Judaism.
• 1:52:29
  SPEAKER_10: I think in a world which is increasingly polarized by differences in religion, political views, and many different things that divide us, it's critically important to accept that people will come to shared moral convictions about how we treat each other from very different positions, and maybe those positions are not even deficient, even though they're different to our own.
• 1:52:56
  SPEAKER_10: That is, in fact, why we host these sorts of discussions here at the chaplaincy of the University of Sussex, and why I'm so delighted that so many of you came to see it tonight.
• 1:53:09
  SPEAKER_10: Honestly, I've tried to host conversations like this over the past couple of years since I became the lead chaplain here, and uh most of them no one has come to.
• 1:53:17
  SPEAKER_10: So I was expecting really not many people to be here.
• 1:53:20
  SPEAKER_10: So I'm incredibly delighted that you are even interested in having this conversation and having it seriously with us this evening.
• 1:53:27
  SPEAKER_10: So I guess the most important thing I want to leave you with is a sense of gratitude.
• 1:53:32
  SPEAKER_10: I hope I'm speaking on behalf of everyone, that you're willing to come and engage in this discussion because I think it's important.
• 1:53:37
  SPEAKER_10: And whoever you agree with, I hope you'll keep thinking.
• 1:53:40
  SPEAKER_10: So thank you very much, and I hope to see you in the bar after we've cleaned up.
• 1:53:47
  SPEAKER_10: Thank you.
• 1:53:48
  SPEAKER_10: And well done to you.
• 1:54:00
  SPEAKER_09: Um as James said, uh they will be around, they'll be in Farmabomba, so feel free to ask lots of questions.
• 1:54:07
  SPEAKER_09: Um other than that, if you could help stack the chairs, that would be great.
• 1:54:11
  SPEAKER_09: If not, feel free to leave through the exits.
• 1:54:15
  SPEAKER_07: Thank you, everyone.
• 1:54:16
  SPEAKER_07: Glenn, that was so fun! Thank you, James.
• 1:54:18
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I appreciate it.
• 1:54:20
  SPEAKER_07: I love it, thank you.
• 1:54:20
  SPEAKER_07: You're really good at this.
• 1:54:22
  SPEAKER_07: Brilliant, you too.