Transcript

But briefly, so as many of you know, I have spent the last ten years worrying out loud about the effects of religion in our world in the way in which it's shattered our world into competing tribes, and I've really made it just three arguments on that front: I've argued that our competing religious doctrines can't possibly be true because of everything we've learned in the last two thousand years, and they’re mutually incompatible as well.

So this was Bertrand Russell's brilliant insight that even if we knew we were faced with God's multiple-choice exam, and we knew that one of the answers Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam--was correct, still, most people should expect damnation, because these are mutually incompatible ideas, and there's just no way they're all true. The other thing I've argued is that these beliefs are, on balance, harmful because they just divide humanity from itself in ways that generate conflict.