'Look, Christopher. There is no God. S*** Happens.'


I've watched this clip a dozen times and still cannot for the life of me figure out the context in which Douglas said this. He is, one moment, condemning Christopher for writing as though he has the answers to moral questions, and then all of a sudden, the grainy filter (of which the IMDb community seems to be so fond) subsides and Douglas says "Look, Christopher. There is no God. S*** Happens." Then a loud sound of thunder. (1:22:18) I have no idea what point he was making as it made no sense in the context. Did anyone catch something I missed? Maybe he was lying the whole time and really is an atheist... That hardly seems the most rational explanation.

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No, it makes perfect sense. Wilson's no atheist. He's just, for the sake of argument, momentarily granting Hitchens' premise: "There is no God." That said, he takes it to what he thinks is its logical conclusion: "Sh*t happens." In other words, stuff just happens, and there's no sense getting worked up over morals.

The whole time in that pub Douglas was trying to get Hitchens to account for his moral standards, which Douglas claims are baseless if God doesn't exist. And if God doesn't exist, he asks, then why should Hitchens go on and on about how morally bad things are in the world? To make his point, he's asking Hitchens to give up his very moral denunciations (remember earlier when Douglas said that Hitchens would've made a great Puritan?) and become a nihilist: "Sh*t happens," and that's the end of the story.

Does that help?

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Shame, too, because while one might expect an atheist to have nihilistic tendencies, I don't see what makes that inevitable, any more than belief in Jesus makes it inevitable that one believes he reappeared in the US.

I expected more of one of Hitchens' key arguments, namely that he found morality in atheists more genuine than in believers-of-God precisely because it happens spontaneously, without the need for an arbitrary code of conduct foisted upon them. I happen to find that argument convincing, too.

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There are multiple problems with the whole you must have religion (especially Christian religion) to be a moral person:

1) Morals and ethics preceded religions by many thousands of years. People weren't lying, stealing, and murdering for centuries and then suddenly stopped when Judaism, Christianity and Islam were created.

2) There is no evidence that Christians make better moral decisions than atheists. In fact, there is plenty of evidence of the opposite; since atheists tend to be better educated and wealthier, they are less likely to be criminals. The nation's jails are not full of atheists.

3) There are tons of immoral actions being taken every day all around the world precisely *because* of religion. How many atheist suicide bombers have their been in the last 20 years?

PS: I am well aware that Mao and Stalin were atheists. So what? They were also men, does that mean their gender caused them to be bloodthirsty tyrants?

It's spelled Raymond Luxury Yacht, but it's pronounced 'Throat-Warbler Mangrove'

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