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Making Sense with Sam Harris

How to talk to a Christian

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.629.1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2013

⏱️ 8 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This is an edited excerpt from remarks that Sam Harris made in a debate with a Christian apologist at Notre Dame University in 2011. The full debate can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqaHXKLRKzg

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

9 million children die every year before they reach the age of five.

0:07.0

Picture an Asian tsunami of the sort we saw in 2004 that killed a quarter of a million people.

0:13.0

One of those every 10 days killing children only under five.

0:18.0

24,000 children a day, a thousand an hour, 17 or so a minute.

0:23.0

That means before I can get to the end of this sentence, some few children very likely

0:29.0

will have died in terror and agony.

0:33.0

Think of the parents of these children.

0:36.0

Think of the fact that most of these men and women believe in God

0:41.0

and are praying at this moment for their children to be spared.

0:46.0

And their prayers will not be answered.

0:50.0

Any God who would allow children by the millions to suffer and die in this way

0:55.0

and their parents to grieve in this way, either can do nothing to help them

1:00.0

or doesn't care to.

1:02.0

He is therefore either impotent or evil.

1:05.0

And worse than that, most of these people, many of these people certainly,

1:09.0

will be going to hell because they're praying to the wrong God.

1:14.0

Think about that.

1:16.0

Through no fault of their own, they were born into the wrong culture

1:19.0

where they got the wrong theology and they missed the revelation.

1:24.0

There are 1.2 billion people in India at this moment.

1:28.0

Most of them are Hindus.

1:30.0

Most of them therefore polytheists.

...

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