in 1992, [unintelligible] it seems to me that it is almost over. jobs went to mexico, and then from mexico to china, and then the sucking sound to buy chinese goods. the american dream has always been jobs and the future. you told us about all these benefits that we were going to recruit from these trade agreements. where are they? guest: we have a 9.8% unemployment rate at a time when washington has never spend like it has and yet it is not affecting jobs at all. washington cannot solve all the problems. i know you want people to come on the air and say that happy days are here again. when i look at debt, that giant sucking sound of finances, it is

tragic that we have record unemployment at a time when we also have a record deficit and a record debt. we are a global economy and that will not change. we will continue to buy from china and india if they can sell to us for less. items are going to be cheaper across the globe. how do you make america more competitive? one of the projects i have enjoyed the most is education. i think the focal point, to me, in 2011, a plan to do a lot of work on education issues. if we can hold educators accountable, if we can demand discipline among students, if we can reward those who do better and still help those at the bottom come up, we can make such a difference. if our school system continues to fail our kids, i cannot find

students to work for me because they cannot write well enough. it may not even be their fault, but something went wrong. i think the whole focus, almost every question i will be asked in the next half hour, goes back to education. if we improve the quality of schools, which can make a difference -- we can make a difference. it was a start in the right direction. you have a democratic mayor in newark. the two of them are working hadn in hand to make a difference and new york city schools. both of them are investing time and effort and they are changing the way schools work. and that is how we should be

working together. in the end, more than being a republican and democrat, we are mothers and fathers, and we care more about our kids. we need to give them an education that we can be proud of it. i feel it did not go far enough because in the end you have to challenge the system itself. if teachers say they will not teach the extra hour or they cannot get disciplined in the classroom or kids are not being taught basic subjects, then something is wrong in the education system. and there is a reason why some schools do better than others, because you have a principal who is so dedicated and involved. you have students who are excited and energized to be there. that kind of environment, whether you are in the inner city or in a rural area, we can make these schools work.

host: on our republican line, go ahead. caller: hello, frank luntz. a few years ago, i got hit by a drunk driver coming home from work. i had to stay home. i got very political. and i believe if people would listen to the words of politicians, they would get the truth out. america -- i believe america is the greatest land and the greatest united states. i would not want to live anywhere else. we take our freedom for granted. people have to come back and see what is good of america. the greed and the fighting

amongst republicans and democrats for power, that is not helping anything. and i love what you have been saying. i believe in it. i watch you on other channels. hey, you are right on. guest: i appreciate that. i like doing these focus groups. i like this interaction, even if people are angry at me. i do pay attention to the words. branson is so american. i used to be a collector of this snow globes. i could go there and get so many. looking at the people there, it makes me appreciate this country. if i could give you an amount of money for you to never stepped foot in the 50 states, and the amount of money you could keep

forever, you could live in toronto or vancouver, but you could never come back to america, was that i'm not be $1 million, $10 million, $100 million? no amount. host: you are asking me if you paid me a not the money to never step back in the country again. guest: correct. a 40% of americans say no amount. i don't care how much you could give me. i went to school in britain for three years, and i could not wait to come home. there is a different openness here. i appreciate what the caller had to say about this country. host: talk a little bit about the last couple of weeks. the president had to get republicans and democrats on

board for the tax bill. what do you see as a personal opinion for him going into 2011? guest: he had some of the best weeks of his presidency. no matter what party you are, if you are willing to compromise with the other side, you can move things forward. i know republicans and conservatives are mad as heck because they felt if you installed you could've gotten better legislation from their perspective. yet this is what the american people expect from our elected officials. don't go for 100% or 90%. move the country forward, even if it is small steps. the way that obama held himself and the way the republicans worked with him was a success.

democrats or agitated that the president compromise on taxes, but they supported "don't ask, don't tell," the continuation of the start treaty, and they approved most of the legislation that passed. they were very mad at the tax bill. you can't please all the people all the time. host: buttner, pa., the democrats' line. caller: merry christmas. my question is if you are so concerned about the american public and the direction we are headed, why do you spend all of your time working for republicans? you do not seem to do any bipartisan work. guest: once again, i have presented to the democratic governors' association on many occasions. because of a lot of my work

being public, it is all open and is all available to anybody. do they seek it out and extend invitations? the truth is, i am involved. a lot of my work now is a corporate so there is no public component of its. i have my own philosophy and convictions. one of the most important objectives in 2011 is the objective of the civility and the objective of engagement such as this. we are both more informed as a result of the process. i have reached out and have talked to a lot of people across the country. i have probably done now over 1000 of these focus groups, probably over 1 million people i

have talked to. i am tired. host: the next call, on our republican line. caller: merry christmas to everyone that is out there. i think the reason that the country is now sounding a more pessimistic tone it is because of a couple of things, really, the first of which is this the galloping socialism which obama and the current party is trying to lead the country into, which i think will be the end of us if allowed to happen. secondly, is an effective surrender of our national sovereignty as made manifest largely by this tremendous load of illegal immigration. i think we have arrived at a very sad point in the country where the moochers are now the

majority. you can bet they will vote to keep it that way. have a good day, merry christmas. guest: i want to see if i can find a way to bridge the gap between parties. i will give you a summary. what the american people want are tall fences and wide gates. what most americans also want is to ensure that illegal immigration -- legal immigration is done in an effective fashion. i know many companies who are dying to hire the best talent from all across the country, from across the globe, yet they can do it because the immigration rules are so tight and outdated. there is genuine and legitimate concern about the illegal population and what it is doing

on social services, the demand on hospitals and schools. what we need to do is find a way to address the illegals. it is a matter of national security. quite you are going to find 80% of americans who agree with that boy. you send in the national guard, the troops, and you just say no. if we can't control our borders, we cannot control our future because we are a global economy, the brain drain. this was 20 years ago. i was trading with a student. he wanted my walkman, my genes, all the stuff that i had which was american. i just wanted to talk about politics. i thought -- i want america to

be the home of the best and brightest of the globe. of what the europeans, the agent, the africans, and south americans to come to this country. unlike the culture. unlike the brain power. i want us to have the best doctors and scientists, and that is not going to happen unless we change our legal immigration policy. we have to do both. let's open up the gates to come here the right way to contribute to all that is great about america, but let's build that wall or whatever it takes to ensure that illegal immigration stops. host: "don't ask, don't tell" was influenced heavily by polls. guest: it was split 50/50. what is interesting is that the

american pit be -- the american people believe in the defense of marriage and are opposed to any kind of discrimination whatsoever. that makes this so tough. right now, it is about 45% in favor -- in terms of the phrase gay marriage, is almost two to one opposed. this is agreed example of a words making a difference. if you talk about discrimination, several union, the public wants to make sure everyone is protected from discrimination. host: you: the phrase -- guest: i had a conversation with a reporter -- host: the lie of the year.

guest: i coined that phrase back in 2010. it took them a year to get to it. they claimed they reached out to me. i never got a phone call. these guys is put it out. and i will give you the information. number one, there is now a mandate that everyone has to have health insurance. that did not exist before. based on the bulls are regulations, corporations are limited in what they can do and what they can do in changing policy, and they can face serious financial consequences. there is a definition of what that care would be when the government steps in and when it doesn't. because of those aspects, a

government that was not involved in health care is now involved in health care of every single american. that defines a government takeover. the last point is the american people clearly voted in november. i am sure the person that wrote that e-mail, and david from tampon, feels that it isn't, but the rest of america apparently feels like it does because florida elected a center that supports appeal by 20 points. florida kicked out three incumbent democrats. " of the republicans have more seats in the legislature than any time since 1928. if that is not a repudiation of the takeover of health care, i don't know what is. host: we have a few more calls.

caller: opinions and calls are based on public opinion. the public should be well informed to get a complete section of the facts. the regular public that is polled do not do that. they gather information from the immediate media. if it is not correct, there is no retraction. if a newspaper makes a mistake, they have to print a retraction. just recently, the sunday times in london had to print a retraction on the front page of the repudiation of global warming. there is no repudiation from the media. when it is also by the public, they take it as a fact. guest: that is a fair point and an important one, one of the reasons why the public has so

little faith in politics right now. we don't trust the media. c-span is an independent arbiter. we don't trust the courts because we regard lawyers as having polluted the system. we don't trust hollywood because we think it creates entertainment that is not good for our kids or the culture. i think we have even lost faith in the catholic church. all of these institutions, there is one institution that is still trusted. we still believe our american military, even if they make mistakes, that this still operate in a humane fashion, that they are still appreciated for all that they do for us, but almost every other institution has lost significant credibility. who do we turn to? i think the answer is we have to

turn ourselves -- i think we have to turn to ourselves. american citizenship is a right or irresponsibility? fortunately, 55% think it is a responsibility. there are things you are required to do to be in form, to vote, and to participate. that gives me hope for the future. host: bruce is on our democrat'' line. caller: i watch you on fox, msnbc, and you do a great job. can i just make a suggestion? you have access to a lot of powerful people in washington. during world war two, we went from nothing with the manhattan

project to ending the war by developing the atomic bomb. i would like to see you do something with your access to people in washington. i think the president should propose a project where in the next three years we are going to build a high-speed monorail system all around the country to supplement the airlines. we developed 21 nuclear power plants around america, all identical, and build a national monorail system, put millions of people to work. we have interstate 95. we have huge access to land where it is not being utilized. we could put construction, trained builders, computer people. we could establish a model for the entire war world in three

years, and the republicans in congress and in the senate and president obama, everybody would end up looking like a hero. we could create tens of millions of jobs and have the respect of the world and create something marvelous and magnificent for this country. guest: i do take it seriously. it was explained to me before the 2008 campaign, that the people that i know and what i can do have an impact. i was trying to figure out what i wanted to do. i appreciate the caller's point. i do believe our transportation system needs to be fixed in this country. our highway system needs to be upgraded. i got fired from a speech in las vegas from what i am about to tell you. they hired these crews and as you are driving past, they will

take up miles of space with cones and traffic. there are too many construction workers standing around and not doing anything. we have to hold these people much more accountable for how they build. we are paying too much because of the rules of this administration that said that if you have a government contract you have to be unionized. why? if they are charging more money and you are not getting better service, why require unions? why not go to the most efficient builder? i want us to do something bond incurable diseases. what mike milken is doing on cancer is incredible, and he is doing its separate from the

government. i have been involved with alzheimer's. i want us to focus on those diseases because if we can make this country more healthy, that in itself will save billions of dollars and improve quality of life and make it worth living for millions and millions of people. host: one more call from north carolina caller: thank you for taking my call. i have two points, one point and one question. here we sit in our country with the un implement rate, and yet we are spending $2 billion a week over in afghanistan doing what i have no idea. the other question i have -- you'd say you speak with corporate people. what are their thoughts on rebuilding our very, very badly

eroded industrial base in this country? guest: i think that is a great way to go out. in 2011, the number of the job postings on line had increased considerably over the last few weeks. in addition to higher consumption and more purchases, we are seeing more job opportunities. we are just starting, i think, to see the light at the end of the tunnel in terms of the recession we have been in. what i appreciate the most about corporate america is a new sense of commitment to the community, a sense that profit is not the be-all, end-all. i love the idea that over the past two years, with town hall meetings, there have been get together recessions.

-- get-together sessions. i have interviewed some of the top ceos in america. they are engaged. you can e-mail them, calls them, challenge them. this did not exist 10 years ago. the more accountable we are and the more there is a give-and- take, the healthier the society is and the healthier the business relationship. i think that will rebuild what was destroyed over the past couple of years. i am a pessimist. i work 16 hours a day in the hope that i can change that. i think we have learned a lot over the past few years, and i think we are ready to change the direction. i just hope that on shows and organizations like c-span, which

next, a debate about the role of religion in society with tony blair and christopher hitchens. the public radio host talks about the role of humor in politics. that is followed by the queen's annual christmas message. then, a white house reception for the recipients of the kennedy center honors. "washingtonow's journal," roger hickey on the president's relationship with political progressives. lynn stanton on net neutrality rules. brian stann on job prospects for returning veterans. >> listen to historic supreme court cases on c-span radio.

today, the constitutionality of displaying christmas decorations. >> with the possible exception of the cross, the nativity scene is one of the most powerful religious symbols in the country. it is most certainly one of the most powerful christian symbols in the country. >> listen to the argument on c- span radio. >> the closing speech has an inevitable aspect of stature. an extraordinary experience for me is coming to an end. my dominant feeling is pride in the great privilege to be a part of this very unique body. >> you can search for farewell speeches from retiring senators in the c-span library of every

program since 1987. more than 160 hours on line and free. -- more than 160,000 hours on line and free. >> tony blair and christopher hitchens discuss the social effects of religion. this was held in toronto and is just under two hours. >> i want to begin by welcoming the world wide audience of the british broadcasting corporation. 240 million people will have access to this debate for the bbc world service, bbc online news, and bbc world news. it is a fabulous opportunity to bring this debate to to a truly global audience.

i also want to welcome the thousands of people watching this debate live and archived on munkdebate.com i want to turn our attention to this spectacular hall. there are 2700 people here in the flesh to listen to this debate tonight. let it be said that on this day, thanks to the generosity of peter and melanie munk, canada and its largest city of toronto is truly at the heart of the global conversation. [applause] now, the moment we have all been waiting for. we have our motion before us. be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world. all we need is our debaters here

on center stage. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome mr. tony blair and mr. christopher hitchens. [applause] >> tony blair was prime minister of the united kingdom until 2007. among his international roles today, he is the quartet representative in the middle east, working with the u.n., the u.s., russia, and the e.u. to

try to secure a lasting peace in the region. after leaving politics, mr. blair converted to catholicism. he launched the tony blair faced foundation, a global initiative to promote respect and understanding among the world's major religions. many of us in this room have read his recent best-selling memoir, "a journeycolon my political life." christopher hitchens is a british born american author, journalist, and atheist. his regular "vanity fair" column, his prolific speeches, and essays are central reading for anyone and everyone concerned about global affairs. christopher has a number of best-selling books. obviously, "god is not great" and his recently published memoir "hitch 22."

he was recently diagnosed with esophageal cancer. we're doubly grateful that he and his family join us tonight. ladies and gentlemen, your debaters. [applause] >> let me briefly run down the next hour and half will unfold. each debater has been given seven minutes for their opening remarks for and against the motion. mr. hitchens and mr. blair will confront each other had on, so to speak, through two rounds of formal or bottles. we will then bring the audience into the debate through written questions. all of you received a written question card. fill that out and pass it down the aisle for collection. i will also be taking questions from audience members on the stage.

those questions will be asked directly to mr. blair and mr. hitchens. we will also bring in our online audience through a series of questions. the debate will conclude with short, five-minute closing statements and a second audience vote on the motion. before i call on our debaters for their opening statements, let's find out how the 2700 people in this audience voted as they came into the hall. we're going to get those numbers up on the screen now. 22% of you are in favor of the motion. 57% are opposed. 21% of you are undecided. we also asked you a second question tonight. we asked you if you are open to changing your vote. let's have those numbers.

wow. 75% of this audience could change their vote depending on what they hear in the next hour and half. ladies and gentlemen, we clearly have a debate on our hands. remember that we will pull the audience again at the end of the proceedings to find out which of these debaters was able to win by swaying as with the power of their arguments. the time has come for introductory remarks. christopher hitchens will begin with his opening statement. >> thank you, ladies and gentlemen. munk familyo the amou for making this possible.

i might have to seize a lat er chance of taking my esteemed opponent. 3.5 minutes for the material world will not be excessive. i have the text -- because i will not take attacks from a known religious extremist or fanatic. that prime minister blair's urging, he was recently canonized. his apologia made many people reconsider and join the roman catholic church. he is considered a great christian thinker. here is my text from the apologia. the catholic church said that it holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for the many millions on it to die in

extremist agony than that one soul should be lost or commit a cent, tell willful untruth. you will have to say it is beautifully phrased. but to me, it is my proposition. what we have here is a distillation of precisely what is twisted and immoral in the faith mentality. it is essential fanaticism. is consideration of the human being as raw material. it is the fantasy of purity. once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects in a cruel experiment where we are created sick and commanded to be well. we are created sick and then ordered to be well. over us to supervise this is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine

north korea. [laughter] greedy, exigent on critical praise from dawn until dusk and swift to punish the original sinjs with which it originally gifted us in the first place. [laughter] however, salvation is offered. redemption is promised at the low price of the surrender of your critical faculties. [laughter] religion, it might be said, must be said, would have to make extraordinary claims. i would maintain net extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. we might begin by asking whether

it is good for the world to appeal to our credulity and not our skepticism. is it good for the world to worship the deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs? it appeals to our fear and guilt. is that good for the world? to add to our terror of death, is it good to appeal? to preach killed and shame about the sexual relationship -- guilt and shame about the sexual relationship, is this good? is a religious responsibility to terrorize children with the image of hell and eternal punishment for themselves and those they love? perhaps worst of all, to consider women and inferior creation. is that good for the world? can you name me a religion that has not done that? to insist that we are created and not involved in the face of all the evidence, to say that

certain books of legend and myth, man-made and primitive, [inaudible] religion forces nice people to do unkind things. it also makes intelligent people say stupid things. handed a small baby for the first time, why reach for a sharp stone to do the work of the lord? [laughter] as it has been aptly put, the good will do the good they -- the best they can. if you want to have good people do wicked things, you will need religion. i have one minute and 57 seconds to say why i think this is self evident in our material world. let me ask tony again, because

he is here, and because the place where he is seeking peace is the birthplace of monotheism. you may think it is unusually filled with love and peace. everyone in the civilized world roughly agrees that there should be enough room for two states 4 two peoples in the same land. i think we have a rough agreement on that. the u.s. cannot get it. the israeli parliament cannot get it. they cannot get it because the parties of god and the veto on it. everyone knows this is true. because of the divine promises made about this territory, there will never be peace or compromise. there will instead be misery, shame, and tyranny. people will kill each other's children for ancient books, caves, and relics. who is going to say that this is good for the world? have you looked lately at the

possibility that we used to discuss as children in fear, what will happen when messianic fanatics get hold of an apocalyptic weapon? we are about to find out as we watch the islamic republic of iran and its party of god allies make for this. have you looked at the revival of zionism in russia with the black coated leadership of russian orthodoxy is raked over an increasingly xenophobic, tyrannical, expansionists, and aggressive regime? have you looked lately at the teaching in africa of the church that says aids may be wicked but not as wicked as condoms? i have done my best. believe me, i have more. [laughter] [applause]

>> it is a real pleasure to be with you all this evening, to be back in toronto is a particular privilege and honor to do with christopher in this debate. i do not regard the leader of north korea as a religious icon. you will be delighted to know. i am going to make seven points. the first is this. it is undoubtedly true that people commit a horrific acts in the name of religion. it is also undoubtedly true that people do act on an extraordinary common good in spite of our religion. almost half of health care in africa is delivered by face based organization -- faith-

bases organizations. almost 1/4 of aids care is provided by catholic organizations. there is the fantastic work of muslim and jewish relief organizations. in canada, there are thousands of religious organizations that care for the mentally ill or disabled or disadvantaged or destitute. here in toronto, there is a shelter run by christian charity for homeless youth in canada. the proposition that religion is unadulterated poison is unsustainable. it can be destructive it can also create a deep well of compassion and frequently done. people are inspired to do such good by what i would say is the true essence of faith. along with doctrine and ritual particular to each faith, there

is a basic belief common to all faiths in serving and loving god in serving and loving your fellow human beings. as witnessed by the life and teachings of jesus, one of selflessness and sacrifice, there is the torah. rabbi hillel have someone tell him that he would convert if he could stand on one leg and recite the tour. he said do unto others as you have done unto you. the hindus search after selflessness. the buddhist context subjugate selfish desires to care for others and to respect others of another faith. in my view, that is the true face of face.

the values derived from this ethnic offer many people a benign and progressive framework by which to live our lives, stimulating the impulse to do good, and disciplining the tendency to be selfish and bad. faith defined in this way is not merely solace in times of need nor a relic of unthinking tradition. still less, a superstition or explanation of biology. instead, it answers a profound spiritual yearning, something we feel and sense instinctively. this is a spiritual presence. it is bigger, more important, more meaningful than just us alone. it has its own power separate from our power. even as the world's marvels' multiplied, it makes us kneel in humility and swallow our pride. science and religion are not

incompatible and destined to fight each other until eventually the " recent of science extinguishes the fanatical flames of religion. science educates us as to how the physical world is and how it functions. faith educates us as to the purpose to which such knowledge is put. it guides the limits of what science and technology do not to make our lives maturely richer, but rather richer in spirit. imagine a world without religious faith. not just no place of worship, prayer, scripture, but no men or women who because of their faith dedicate their lives to others, showing forgiveness or otherwise they would not, a leading to their faith that even the weakest have a right and they have a duty to defend them. i agree in a world without

religion, the religious fanatics may be gone. but if fanaticism be gone, and then realize that such an imagined vision of a world without religion. the 20th century was scarred by visions that had precisely that imagining at their heart. it gave us hitler, stalin. in this vision, obedience to the will of god was for the week. it was the will of man that should dominate. i do not deny for a moment that religion can be a force for evil. but i claim that it is based on faith and that religion can also

be a force for good. i believe it is true to the essence of faith. i say to the world that without religious faith, we would be spiritually, morally, and emotionally diminished. i know very well that you can point like christopher does to examples where people have used religion to do things that are terrible and that have made the world a worse place. but i ask you not to judge all people of religious faith by those people any more than we would judge politics -- [laughter] -- by bad politicians. [laughter] -- or by bad journalists. [laughter] the question is, along with all

of the things that are wrong with religion, is there also something within its that helps the world to be better and people to do good? i would submit that there is. thank you. [applause] >> tony, your training in parliament had you perfectly lending that right on the seven- minute mark. we're moving into our rebuttal round. i would like the audience to get engaged, applaud when they hear something they like, and help reinforce our time limit. when you see the clock ticking down, start applauding. that will move us through this in an orderly fashion. christopher, is now your opportunity in our first of two were battlegrounds -- rebuttal

rounds to respond. there are two browns. you have four minutes within each of those rounds. >> i have four minutes. >> very good. [laughter] [applause] >> the hold your applause, for heaven's sake. no one was arguing that religion should or will die out in the world. all i am arguing is that it would be better there was more of an outbreak of secularism. logically, tony is right. i would be slightly better off being a wahabi muslim or a jehovah's witness than i am wallowing as i do in their secularism. i am arguing that we need a great deal more of one and a great deal less of the second. i knew that it would come up that we would be told about charity. i take this very seriously.

we are the first generation of people to do with the cure of poverty really is. a deluded people for a long time. it has a name. it is called -- it deluded people for a long time. it has a name. it is called the empowerment of women. [applause] if you give women some control over the rate at which they reproduce, give them some say, take them off the animal cycle of reproduction which nature and some religious doctrine condemns them, and you throw in a handful of seeds, education, health, and optimism will increase. it has been tried in bangladesh and bolivia. it works. name me one religion that stands for that or ever has. wherever you look in the world and try to remove the shackles of ignorance, disease, and stupidity from women, it is

inevitably the clergy that stands in the way. [applause] if you are going to grant this to catholic charities if i was a member of the church that preached that aids was not as bad as condoms, i would be putting some conscience money into africa as well. [applause] i am not trying to be funny. if i was trying to be funny, you misunderstood me. it will not bring back the millions of people who died wretched desk because of that. this is not done wrongly in the name of religion. it is a direct precept, practiced and enforceable discipline of religion. i think he will find it is so in this case.

if you are going to say we did the mormons will tell you the same. you may think it is cracked that joseph smith found another bible buried in upstate new york. i would rather have no mormons, no missionaries, notes joseph smith. do we grant to hamas and hezbollah, both of who will tell you and incessantly do, look at our charitable work. without us defending the poor, where would they be? they are right. they do a great deal of charitable work. it is nothing compared to the harm they do. but it is a great deal of work all the same. [applause] i am also familiar with the teachings of the great rabbi hillel. there is the injunction not to do to another what would be repulse of to yourself. that is found with confucius.

it is found in the heart of every person in this room. everybody knows that much. [applause] we do not require divine permission to know right from wrong. we do not need tablets administered to us, 10 at a time in tablet form, on pain of death, to be able to have a moral argument. no, -- [applause] we have the reasoning and the moral persuasion of socrates and our own abilities. we do not need dictatorship to give us right from wrong. thank you. [applause] >> mr. blair, and will give you an additional 25 seconds for your first rebuttal. >> first of all, i do not think we should think that because you

can point to examples of prejudiced in the name of religions that bigotry and prejudice are wholly owned subsidiaries of religion. there are plenty of examples of prejudice against women, gay people, against others that come from outside the world of religion. the claim that i make is not just everything that the church is done in africa is right. but let me tell you one thing it did do while i was prime minister. the churches together formed a campaign for the cancellation of debt. they came together. they succeeded. the first in a fisheries -- in a beneficiaries were the young girls able to go to

school. i do say except that there are people doing great work, day in day out, were genuinely not prejudiced or bigoted. they are working with people who are afflicted by famine, disease, and poverty. they're doing it inspired by their faith. of course, it is the case that not everybody -- [applause] of course it is the case that you do not have to be a person of faith in order to do good work. i have never claimed that. i know many people who are not people of faith at all to do fantastic and decent work for their community and the world. but there are people inspired by their faith to do good. i think the people i met some time ago in south africa. there were looking out for

children born with hiv/aids. these are people working and living alongside and caring for people, inspired by their faith. is it possible for them to do that without the religious faith? of course. but the fact is that is what motivated. we should not end up in a situation where we have six hospitals and one suicide bomber and how does it all equal out. that is not a productive way of arguing this. i thought one of the most interesting things that christopher said is that we're not going to drive religion out of the world. that is true. we are not. people of faith can have debates with secularists. it is good, and right, and what we should be doing. [applause]

[applause] i'm not claiming that everyone should congregate on my space, i'm simply claiming one very simple thing, that if we can't drive religion out of the world because many people of faith believe it and believe it very deeply, let's at least see how we do make religion a force for good, how we do encourage those people of faith who are trying to do good, and how we unite those against those who want to pervert religion and turn it into a badge of identity used in opposition to others. [applause] so i would simply finish by saying this: there are many situations where faith has done wrong, but there are many situations in which wrong has

been done, without religion playing any part in it at all, so let us not condemn all people of religious faith because of the bigotry or prejudice shown by some, and let us at least acknowledge that some good has come out of religion, and that we should celebrate. [applause] >> christopher, your second rebuttal, please. >> do i have a second one? what an amazing test of audience tolerance. all right, how splendidly you notice we progress, ladies and gentlemen. religiouskay, some people are sort of all right. i think i seem to be bargaining one of the greater statesmen of the recent past down a bit. not necessarily opposed to that. just to finish on the charity

point, i once did a lot of work with a man called sebastian selgado, some of you will know him, great photographer, the unicef ambassador on polio questions, i went to calcutta with him and elsewhere. nearly got rid of polio, nearly made it join smallpox as a disease, a thing of the past a filthy memory, except for so many religious groups in bengal, afghanistan, don't go and take the drops, it's a conspiracy, it's against god and his design. by the way, that argument isn't terribly new, when smallpox was a scourge, timothy dwight, head of yale, said taking dr jenner's injection was an interference with god's design as well. that's sort of by the way, you need something like unicef to get major work done if you want

to alleviate poverty, misery and disease, and for me, my money will always go to organisations like medicins sans frontiers, like oxfam, and many others, who strangely enough go out into the world, do good for their fellow creatures, for its own sake. they don't take the bible along, as people do to haiti all the time, we keep catching them doing it. their money is being spent flat out on proselytisation. it is a function of the old thing hand in hand with imperialism. it's the missionary tradition. they can call it charity if they will, but it doesn't stand a second look. so much on the business of doing good, except perhaps to add, since i have you for some extra minutes, mr blair and i at different times gave quite a lot of our years to the labour movement, and if the promise of religion had been true, right up until the late 19th century in, say, britain, or north america or canada, if good works

should be enough, and those who give charity should be honoured, those who receive it should be grateful, two rather revolting ideas in one, i have to say, there would be no need for human, social and political action, we could rely on being innately good, which we know we can't rely upon, and i never suggested we could or should. religiongued now, so could be a good thing after all, sometimes, we think, is now the proposition. what would religion have to do to get that far? i think it would have to give up all supernatural claims. [applause] it would have to say no, you are not to do this under the threat of reward, heaven, or the terror of punishment, hell. no, we can't offer you miracles; find me the church that will say forget all that. faith healing, no, it would have to give that up. it would have to give up the

idea of an eternal, unalterable authority figure who is judge, jury and executioner, against whom there could be no appeal and who wasn't finished with you even when you died. that is quite a lot for religion to give up, don't you think? but who would say it would be ... like it to be, an aspect of humanism, an aspect of compassion, an aspect of the realisations of human solidarity, the knowledge we are all in fact bound up with one another, that we have responsibilities one to another, and as i do when i give blood, partly because i don't lose the pint forever, i always get it back, but there's a sense of pleasure to be had in helping your fellow creature. i think that should be enough, thank you. [applause]

>> tony, it must feel like the house of commons all over again. [laughter] >> i don't know, so far they're a little politer actually! [laughter] >> your final rebuttal, please. >> it all depends, i guess, what your experience of religious people is. my experience of the people i was with last week in africa, that include deeply religious people; not actually that they're doing what they're doing because of heaven and hell, they're doing it for love of their fellow human beings, and that's, i think, something very fine. what's more, that they believe that this love of their fellow human beings is bound up with their faith, so it's not something, you know, yes, of course, it is absolutely true, they might decide to do this, irrespective of the fact that they have religious faith, but their faith, they feel, is an

impulse to do that good. and you know, i don't recognise the description of the work that they do in what christopher has said. in sierra leone, where i was, you have christians and muslims working together to deliver healthcare in that country. that's religion playing a positive role. they're working across the faith divide and doing it, because they again believe that their faith impels them to do that. when we look back in history, yes of course you can see plenty of examples of where religion has played a negative role. you can see great example, for example in the abolition of slavery, where religious reformers joined with secular reformers in order to bring about the abolition of slavery. [applause] let's get away from this idea that religion created poverty. there are bad things that have happened in the world outside of religion. and when you look at the 20th

century and you see the great scars of political ideology, around views that had absolutely dramatically at their heart fascism, the communism of stalin, absolutely at their heart was the eradication of religion, and what i would say to you is, get rid of religion, but you're not going to get rid of fanaticism or the wrong in the world. [applause] the question is, how then do we make sense of religion having this vital part in the world today, since it is growing and not diminishing, how do we make sense of this? this is where yes, there is an obligation on the people of faith to try and join across the faith divide with those of other faiths, that's reason for my foundation. we have people of different religious faiths, we have a programme where young people team up with each other of different faiths and work

together in africa on malaria, back in their own faith communities, and here in canada, we have a schools programme that allows schools to link up using the technology so that kids of different faiths can talk to each other across the world. here's the thing, when they start to talk about their faith they don't actually talk in terms of heaven and hell, and a god that's an executioner of those that do wrong, they talk in terms of their basic feeling that love of god can be expressed best through love of neighbour and actions in furtherance of the compassion and help needed by others. [applause] in 2007, religious organisations in the us gave one and a half times the amount of aid that usaid did, not insignificant. my point is very simple, you can list all the faults of religion, just as you can list

the faults of politicians, journalists and any other profession, but for people of faith, the reason why they try to do good, and when they do it, is because their faiths motivates them to do so and that is genuinely the proper face of faith. [applause] >> gentlemen, thank you for a terrific start to this debate, the time has now come to involve you the audience here at roy thomson hall, those written questions have been coming in and some have been passed on to me, and our folks in the control room. also, we're going to bring on our online audience through questions that have been debated on our discussion boards and i'm going to take some live questions from some younger audience members here on the stage. in that regard, christopher, we're going to start with a

question for you, a young woman like here who would like to address you personally, tell the audience your name and question, please. >> my name is mega, i'm a recent graduate from the university of toronto, my question is in regards to globalisation. this century, globalisation will bring together as never before nations and peoples divided by wealth, geography, politics and race. so my question is: instead of fearing faith, why not embrace the shared values of the world's major religious as a way of uniting humankind? >> great question. christopher? unity out of faith or disunity? >> perfectly good question, but seemed to be phrased as a call for common humanism. i didn't hear anyone say, wouldn't it be better if everyone at least joined some church or other, not a bit of

it. common humanism is, i think, not made particularly easier by the practice of religion, and i'll tell you why, there's something about religion that is very often, at any rate, in its original monotheistic and judaistic form, is ab initio an expression of exclusivism. this is our god, the god who has made a covenant with our tribe. you find it all over the place. it isn't always as sectarian as ... sometimes still is but it's not unknown. it's always struck me as slightly absurd that there would be a special church for english people, although i can sort of see the point. [laughter] it strikes me as positively sinister that pope benedict should want to restore the catholic church to the claim it used to make, which is it is the one true church, and all other forms of christianity are, as he still puts it, defective

and inadequate. how this helps to build your future world of co-operation and understanding is not known to me. if you tell me in the balkans what your religion is, i can tell you what your nationality is. you're not a catholic, you know less about loyola than i do. but i know you're a croat, and a croat nationalist. religion and in fact any form of faith, because it is a surrender of reason, it's a surrender of reason in favour of faith, is a fantastic force multiplier, a tremendous intensifier, i was trying to say, of all things that are in fact divisive rather than inclusive and that's why its history is so stained with blood, not just of crimes against humanity, womanhood, reason and science, attacks upon medicine and enlightenment, all these appalling things that tony kept defending himself from and i didn't even have time to bring up.

no, but if you would just look at the way the christians love each other in the wars of religion in lebanon, or in former yugoslavia, you will see that there is no conceivable way that by calling on the supernatural, you will achieve anything like your objective of a common humanism which is, i think you're quite right to say, our only chance of -- i won't call it salvation, thank you. [applause] >> tony, what i'd like you to do, there's another question on the stage, someone in a sense that's an inverse question for you, and it would be a great opportunity for to respond to hitchens at the same time. so let me go to a scholar at oxford university, who has a question for you, mr blair. >> thank you very much. my research is in armed conflict in sub-saharan africa so the question is: how do you argue that religion is a force for good in the world when the same faiths that bind peoples

and groups also deepen divisions and exacerbate conflict? >> great question. [applause] >> to which my answer is they can do, and there are very many examples of that, but there are also examples, let me give you one from the northern ireland peace process, where people from protestant and catholic churches got together and the religious leaders tried to bring about a situation where people reached out across the faith divide. what i would say to you is this exclusivism is not -- you know, this type of excluding other people because they're different, let's just nail the myth that this is solely the prerogative of religion. i'm afraid this happens in many, many different walks of life. it's not what true religion is about. true religion is not about excluding somebody because they're different, true religion is actually about embracing someone who is

different. that is why, you know, in every major religion, this concept of love of neighbour, and christopher is absolutely right, confucius did indeed say exactly something similar to rabbi hilel, of course jesus said love your neighbour as yourself, if you look at hinduism, buddhism, the religion of islam, after the death of the prophet mohammed, islam was actually at the forefront of science, and introducing proper rights for women, for the first time, in that part of the world. so the point is this, and this is really where the debate comes to, christopher says, well, humanism is enough, and what i say to that is: but for some people of faith, it isn't enough. they actually believe that there is indeed a different and higher power simply than humanity, and that is not about them thinking of heaven and hell in some sort of old-fashioned sense of trying to terrorise people into submission to

religion, they actually think of it as about how you fulfil your purpose as a human being, in the service of others. so when we say, well, that could be done by humanism, yes, it could, but the fact is for many people, it's driven by faith, and so yes, it's true, you can find examples of where religion has deepened the divide in countries in sub-saharan africa. you can also find examples of where religion has tried to overcome those divides by preaching what is the true message of religion, one of human compassion and love. [applause] >> hitchens, let's have you come back on that, not just northern ireland but iraq, a war you supported, religion played an important role arguably in the success of putting together post invasion iraq. >> i only think we should do this because the two questions were in effect the same, both very well phrased, and because

i never like to miss out a chance to congratulate someone on being humorous, if only unintentionally, it's very touching for tony to say that he recently went to a meeting that bridged a religious divide in northern ireland; where does the religious divide come from? 400 -- [applause] 400 years and more, in my own country of birth, of people killing each others' children, depending on what kind of christian they were, and sending each others' children in rhetoric to hell, and making northern ireland the place, the most remarkable in northern europe for unemployment, for ignorance, for poverty and for, i would say, stupidity too. and for them now to say, maybe we might consider bridging this gap; well, i should bloody well think so. [applause] but i don't see how.

if they had listened to the atheist community in northern ireland, which is a real thing, and if they had listened to the secular movement in northern ireland, which is a real thing and i know many people who have suffered dreadfully from membership in it, not excluding being pulled out of a car by a man in a balaclava and being asked, are you ... are you a protestant jewish atheist or a catholic jewish atheist? you laugh, but it's not -- [laughter] so funny when the party of god has a gun in your ear at the same time. and that was in britain, and still is, to some extent, until recently. rwanda, do i say that there would be no quarrel between hutu and tutsi, people in rwanda. belgian colonialism made it worse, but there are no doubt innate ethnic differences ... most christian country in africa.

in fact, by one account -- that's to say, numbers of people in relation to numbers of churches, it's the most christian country in the world, and the hutu power genocide at any rate was preached from the pulpits, actually the pulpit of the catholic church, as many of the people we are looking for wanted in that genocide are hiding in the vatican, along with a number of other people who should be given up to international justice, by the way, quite a number of people. [applause] so since tony seems to like religious people best when they are largely nonpractising, but just basically faithful, i will grant him that much. i will say it is not entirely the fault of religion that this happened in rwanda, but when it's preached from the pulpit as it was in northern ireland and rwanda, it does tend to make it very, very much worse. thank you. [applause] >> tony briefly come back on that, because you were

intimately involved in the search for peace in northern ireland and i presume you have a very different perspective of the role faith played in the resolution of that conflict. >> yes, and i now do work in rwanda. first of all, i think it really would be bizarre to say that the conflict in rwanda was a result of the catholic church. i mean, rwanda is a perfect indicator of what i'm saying, which is you can put aside religion, and still have the most terrible things happen. this was the worst genocide since the holocaust, it was committed on a tribal basis. yes it's true there were members of the catholic church who behaved badly in that context of rwanda, there were also, by the way, members of the catholic church and others of religious denomination who stood up and protected and died alongside people in rwanda. [applause] so you -- and as for northern ireland, yes, of course, protestant and catholic, absolutely right, but you

couldn't ignore the politics of the situation in northern ireland, it was to do with the relationship between britain and ireland going back over many, many centuries. so my point is very simple, of course religion has played a role and sometimes a very bad role in these situations, but not only religion. and what is at the heart of this is we wouldn't dream of condemning all of politics because politics had led to hitler, stalin or indeed what has happened in rwanda, so let us not condemn the whole of religion or say that religion, when you look at it as a whole, is a force for bad, because there are examples of where religion has had that impact. so my -- i think actually rwanda and northern ireland are classic examples, even the middle east peace process, i mean yes, i agree, you can look at all the religious issues there but let's not ignore the political issues either, and

frankly at the moment the reason -- and i can tell you this from first hand -- well, but i can tell you from first hand experience, the reason we don't have an agreement at the moment between palestinians and israelis is not to do with the religious leaders on either side, it's a lot more to do with the political leaders, so it's my branch that has to take the blame for that. [applause] therefore, what i would say is i actually think that yes of course a lot of these conflicts have religious roots, i actually think it's possible for religious leaders to play a positive part in trying to resolve those, but in the end, it's for politics and religion to try and work out a way in which religion, in a world of globalisation that is pushing people together, can play a positive rather than negative role, and if we concentrated on that, rather than trying to drive religion out, which is futile, to concentrate instead on how we actually get people of different faiths working

together, learning from each other and living with each other, i think it would be a more productive mission. thank you. [applause] thekay, let's -- we like applauding, so please continue that throughout the debate. let's take a written question, my producers are telling me we have a written question, we'll get that on the screen, christopher this is for you to start with, interesting one: america is both one of the most religious countries in the world and also one of the most democratic and pluralistic, both now and arguably through much of its history. how do you explain that seeming paradox? >> relatively simply, the united states has uniquely a constitution that forbids the government to take sides in any religious matter, or to sponsor the church, or to adopt any form of faith itself. as a result of which, anyone who wants to practise their religion in america has to do it as a volunteer.

it's what dick hotfield wrote about so well in his democracy in america, ever since thomas jefferson wrote to the baptists of connecticut during his tenure of president, you'll be familiar with the phrase i'm sure -- they had britain to him out of their fear of persecution in connecticut: rest assured there will ever be a wall of separation between the church and the state in this country, but the maintenance of that wall, which people like me have to defend every day, against those who want garbage taught in schools and pseudo science in the name of christ and other -- [applause] -- atrocities, the maintenance of that wall is the guarantee of the democracy. by the way, for a bonus, can anyone tell me who the baptists of dan bring connecticut thought was persecuting them? the congregationalists of danbury, connecticut, well done. [laughter]

that argues by the way for the existence of a very small but real fan base of mine somewhere here. [laughter] it doesn't seem to matter very much now but it mattered them, give those congregationalists enough power, as they had in connecticut, and just you see how unfurried they look. now we have disciplined them, thank you. >> tony, same question. is it a case of american exceptionalism, or is this balance between pluralism and faith being achieved in america either something that ... or a model that can be exported globally? >> i think what most people want to see is a situation where people of faith are able to speak in the public sphere but are not able to dictate, and that is a reasonable balance, and i think that most -- you know, most people would accept. but i think, you know, again what i would say about examples

of where you get religious people that are fanatical in the views that they want to press on others, fanaticism is not -- as i say, it's not a wholly owned subsidiary of religion, i'm afraid, it can happen outside of religion too. so the question is, how do people of, if you like, good faith, who believe in pluralist democracy, how do we ensure that people who hold faith deeply are able to participate in society, and have the same ability to do that as everyone else, without being kind of denigrated, but at the same time have to respect the fact that ultimately, democracy is about the will of the people and the will of the people as a whole. so i think that most people can get that balance right, and we are very lucky actually in our countries, because we are in a situation where people of different faiths are free to practise their faith as they

like, and that is in my view an absolutely fundamental part of democracy, and it's something that people of religious faith have to be very clear about and stand up and do. one of the reasons why for me i think it's -- it's actually important for people of religious faith to have people like christopher challenge us and say, okay, this is how we see religion, now you get out there and tell us how it's different, and where it isn't different, how you're going to make it so, and i think that's a positive and good thing. all i ask for is that where people of faith are speaking in the public sphere, and people accept that we have a right to do that, and sometimes we do that actually because we believe in the things that we're saying, and we're not trying to subvert or change democracy; on the contrary, we simply want to be part of it, and our voice is a voice that has a right to be heard alongside the voice of

others. [applause] >> i see christopher writing furiously so i'm going to ask him to come back on that point. >> well, i hadn't anything specially to add there, i think i would rather give another person a chance for a question. >> it's a question that was debated for you, christopher, on munk debates.com in the lead- up to this evening, on our discussion board, many people saying that religion provides a sense of community, in modern societies we're immersed in a consumer culture, more often than not living alongside fellow citizens who are more maybe self-directed than other- directed. what do you say about the pure community function of religion? isn't that a valid public good of religious belief? >> absolutely, i say good luck to it. the way i phrase it in my book, available at fine bookstores

everywhere, is that i propose a pact with the faith, the faithful, i'll take it again, quoting from the great thomas jefferson, i don't mind if my neighbour believes in 15 gods or in none, he neither by that breaks my leg or picks my pocket. i would echo that, and say that as long as you don't want your religion taught to my children in school, given a government subsidy, imposed on me by violence, any of these things, you are fine by me. i would prefer ... [applause] i would prefer not even to know what it is that you do in that church of yours, in fact, if you force it on my attention, i will consider it a breach of that pact. have your own bloody christmas, and so on. do your slaughtering, if

possible, in an abattoir. and don't mutilate the genitals of your children! because then i'm afraid it gets within the ambit of law. all right, don't you think that's reasonably pluralistic and communitarian of me? i think it is. why is it a vain hope on my part? has this pact ever been honoured by the other side? of course not. it's a mystery to me, and i'll share it with you. if i believed that there was a saviour who had been appointed or sent, or a prophet, appointed or sent by a god who bore me in mind, and loved me, and wanted the best for me, if i believed that, and that i possessed the means of grace and the hope of glory, to phrase it like that, i think, i don't know, i think i might be happy. they say it's the way to happiness. why doesn't it make them happy? don't you think it's a perfectly decent question? because they won't be happy

until you believe it too, because that's what their holy books tell them. [applause] now i'm sorry, it's enough with saying in the name of religion; do these texts say that until every knee bows in the name of jesus, there will be no happiness? of course it is what they say. it isn't just a private belief. it is rather, and i think always has been, and that's why i'm here, actually a threat to the idea of a peaceable community, and very often, as now, and frequently, a very palpable one. so i think that's the underlying energy that powers the friendly disagreement between tony and myself. [applause] >> tony, would you like to come back on that topic of religion and community or move on to another question?

let's move on. also on our website, big discussion around the topic of religion and its role in the invasion of iraq. mr blair, the question is for you, and it's about something that many people posted about something you said once about the interplay of religion and politics, and to quote you directly, you said: "what faith can do is not tell you what is right, but give you the strength to do it". the question being: what role did faith play in your most important decision as prime minister, the invasion of iraq? >> i think we can nail this one pretty easily. it was not about religious faith. you know, one of the things that i sometimes say to people is, look, the thing about religion and religious faith is if you are a person of faith, it's part of your character, it defines you in many ways as a human being. it doesn't do the policy answers, i am afraid.

so as i used to say to people, you don't go into church and look heaven ward and say to god, right, next year, the minimum wage, is it £6.50 or 7? unfortunately, he doesn't tell you the answer. and even on the major decisions that are to do with war and peace that i've taken, they were decisions based on policy, and so they should be, and you may disagree with those decisions, but they were taken because i genuinely believed them to be right. [applause] >> so christopher, the natural follow-on question to you is how did you square the circle, maybe you didn't, between your support for the iraq war and the current then president, george w bush, in his very public evocation of faith in terms of his rhetoric around the invasion. >> well, i don't remember, in fact i don't think you can point out to me any moment where george bush said he was under

divine order or had any divine warrant for the intervention in iraq. in fact, i'm perfectly certain -- he might not have mind at some points giving that impression, he wanted to give that impression about everything that he did. [laughter] george bush is someone who, as with his immediate predecessor, after various experiments in faith, ended up in his wife's church, most comfortable place for him to be, she's after all the one who said to him, if you take another drink, you scum bag, i'm leaving and taking the kids, which is his way of saying he found jesus and gave up the bottle. [laughter] [applause] we know this to be true. and like a good methodist, i was in methodist school for many years myself, he says the following ...

from now on, all is in god's hands. that's quite different, i think. it would have made him a perfectly good muslim, as a matter of fact. [laughter] a combination of fatalism with a slightly sinister feeling of being chosen. anyway. [laughter] surely what is strike most to the eye of those who ... agree to call the liberation of iraq is the unanimous opposition of the leadership of every single christian church to it, including the president's own and the prime minister's own, the methodist church of the united states adamantly opposed, the vatican adamantly opposed, as it had been to the liberation of kuwait in 1991, not the first time in the world that a sickly christian passivity has been preached in the faces fascist dictatorship, and of course i -- [applause]

-- was very surprised by the number of liberal jews who took the same about a regime that harboured genocidal thoughts towards them, and if it comes to that, although i'm not ... given the number of muslims put to the sword by saddam hussein's regime, quite extraordinary to see the extent to which muslim fundamentalists flocked to his defence, but i don't expect integrity or consistency from those quarters. [applause] but those of us who worked with people with -- with iraqi intellectuals, with the kurdish leadership, the secular left opposition of the popular -- excuse me, the patriotic union of kurdistan, the iraqi communist party, you have to give it credit for this ... very proud of our solidarity with those comrades, those brothers and sisters, we are still in touch with them, we have nothing to apologise for. it's those who would have kept a cannibal and a caligula and a

professional sadist in power who have the explaining to do. thank you. [applause] >> i want to be conscious of our time and go to our two final onstage questions. i believe the first one is for mr blair, a student at the munk school of global affairs, introduce yourself and ask your question of mr blair. >> good evening, my name is jonah, my question pertains to something that has come up earlier this evening. religion on both sides is often seen as an obstacle to peace in the middle east, and i was wondering what role you believe faith can play in a positive manner in helping to bring peace between israelis and palestinians. >> well, i remember a few months ago, i was in jericho and

when you go out from jericho, they took me up to -- we went to visit the mount of temptation, which is where i think they take all the politicians, and the guide that was showing us round, the palestinian guide, suddenly stopped at one point, and he said, this part of the world, he said, moses, jesus, mohammed, why did they all have to come here? [laughter] i sort of said, well, supposing they hadn't, would everyone be fine? he said, well, probably not. but you know, the religious leadership can play a part in this, for example, i don't think you will get a resolution of the issue of jerusalem, which is a sacred and holy city to all three abrahamic faiths, unless people of faith are prepared to try and find common ground, so they are entitled to worship in the way that they

wish. and the correct that in both israel and palestine, you see examples of religious fundamentalism and people espousing and doing extreme things as a result of their religion, but i can also tell you that there are rabbis and people of the muslim faith on the palestinian side who are desperately trying to find common ground and ways of working together, and i think part of the issue and the reason indeed for me starting my faith foundation is that we can argue forever the degree to which what is happening in the middle east is a result of religion or the result of politics, but one thing is absolutely clear, that without those of religious faith playing a positive and constructive role, it's going to be very difficult to reach peace, so my view again, and i think this is in a sense one of the debates

that underlies everything we have been saying this evening, that if it is correct that you're not going to simply eliminate religion, you're not going to drive religion out of the world, then let's work on how we make those people of different faiths, even though they believe that their own faith is the path, so they believe, to salvation, how they can work across the faith divide in order to produce respect and understanding and tolerance, because believe it or not, amongst all the examples of prejudice and bigotry that christopher quite rightly draws attention to, there are also examples of people of deep religious faith, jewish, muslim and christian, who are desperately trying to search for peace and with the right political will supporting that who would play a major part in achieving peace. so i agree, religion has to one degree created these problems,

but actually people of different religious faiths working together can also be an important part of resolving these problems, and that's what we should do, it's what we can do, and in respect of jerusalem, it is absolutely imperative that we do do. [applause] >> a visitor goes to the western wall -- anything he can do. a visitor goes to the western wall, sees a man tearing at his beard, banging his head on the wall, shoving messages in at a rate of knots, watching with fascination ... i couldn't help noticing you were being unusually devout in your address to the wall, to the divine, do you mind if i ask you what you're praying for? he was saying, i was praying for peace, that there should be mutual love and respect for peoples in this ...

-- in this area. ah, it's like talking to the wall. [laughter] but there are people who think talking to walls is actually a form of divine worship, and it's another instance, not that i didn't bring it up laboriously myself, but i don't mind it again, of the difference between tony and myself, when he uses his giveaway phrase "in the name of religion", rather than "as a direct consequence of scriptural authority", which is what i mean when i talk about this. no one is going to deny, are they, that there are awards of real estate made in the bible, by none other than jehovah himself. that land is promised to human primates over other human primates, in response to a divine covenant. do excuse me, sorry, this sometimes happens. no, that can't be denied.

when david ben-gurion was prime minister of what he still called a secular state he called in israeli archaeologists, professional guys, and said: go out into the desert and dig up the title deeds to our statement. you'll find our legitimate -- that was instruction to the department of archaeology. they went, after they conquered sinai and west bank, even further afield looking for some evidence moses had ever been there. they didn't find any, because there never has been and there never will be any, but you cannot say that the foundational cause, causus belli in this region, the idea that god intervenes in real estate and territorial disputes, isn't inscribed in the text itself. not only in the jewish text but thanks to a decision taken in the early christian centuries where it was decided not to dump the new testament, and start again just with the nazarene story, great christian theologians were in favour of

that, why do we want to bring the darkness, tyrrany, terror, death ... surely we should start again? no, we're saddling ourselves with all that. so this is a responsibility for the christian world too. need i add that there is no good muslim who does not say that allah tells us we can never give up an inch of muslim land and once our mosques are built, there can be no retreat, it would be a betrayal, it would lead you straight to hell. in other words, yes, yes, they gibber and jabber, all of them, the three religions, yes, god awards land, it's just you've got the wrong title. this is what i mean when i say religion is a real danger to the survival of civilisation, and it makes this banal regional and national dispute ... a nothingness, if it makes that, not just lethally insoluble, but is drawing in other contending parties, who

really wish, openly wish, for an apocalyptic conclusion to it, as also bodied forth in the same scriptural texts, in other words that it will be the death of us all, the death of humanity, the end of the world, end of the whole suffering veil of tears, which is the ... not something that happens because people misinterpret the texts, it is because they believe in them, that's the problem, thank you. [applause] >> tony, can i move on to the final question? great, we have the perfect final question, it's from another student at the munk school for global affairs, dana. >> a big part of this issue is

our inability to stand in another's shoes, with an open mind to understand a different world view. in this regard, can each of you tell us which of your opponent's arguments is the most convincing? thank you. [applause] [laughter] >> this definitely never happened in the house of commons! i think that the most convincing argument is -- and the argument that people of faith have got to deal with is actually the argument christopher has just made, which is that the bad that is done in the name of religion is intrinsically grounded in the scripture of religion. that is the single most difficult argument. since i've said it's a really difficult argument, i suppose i

had better give an answer to it. my answer to it is this: that there is, of course, that debate that goes on within religion, which is the degree to which, as it were, you look at scripture abstracted from its time, you pick out individual parts of it, you use those in order to justify whatever view you like, or whether, as i tried to do in my opening, you actually say, what is the essence of that faith, and what is the essence of scripture? of course, then what you realise is that yes of course if you believe, as a muslim that we should live our lives according to the 7th century, then you will end up with some very extreme positions, but actually there are masses of muslims who completely reject that as a view of islam, and instead say no, of course, the prophet back then was somebody who brought order and stability

and actually, for example, even though we today would want equality for women and many again, despite what people say, many muslims would agree with that as well, and many muslim women obviously, back then, actually what he did was extraordinary for that time, and also when you look at christianity, yes of course you can point to issues that of that time now seem very strange and outdated, but on the other hand, when you take christianity as a whole and ask what it means, what draws people to it, you know, what is it that made me as a student come to christianity, it wasn't to do with some of the things that christopher has just been describing, and you know, i

understand that's -- there are those traditions within religion, i understand that, i accept that, i see how people look at certain parts of scripture and draw those conclusions from it, but it's not what it means to me, it's not the essence of it. the essence of it is through the life of jesus christ, a life of love, selflessness and sacrifice and that's what it means to me. so i think the most difficult thing for people of faith is to be able to explain scripture in a way that makes sense to people in the modern world, and one of the things that we have actually begun recently is a dialogue called the common word, which is about muslims and christians trying to come together and through scripture find a common basis of co- operation and mutual respect, so, you know, yes, it is a difficult argument, that is the most difficult argument, i

agree, but i also think there is an answer to it, and i think one of the values actually of having a debate like this, and in a sense, having someone making that point as powerfully as christopher has made it, is that it does force people of faith to recognise that we have to deal with this argument, to take it on, and to make sure that not just in what we are trying to do, but in how we interpret our faith, we are making sure that what i describe as the essence of faith, which is serving god through the love of others, is indeed reflected not just in what we do but in the doctrines and the practice of our religion. [applause] >> admirable question, thank you for it. the remark tony made that i most agreed with this evening,

i'll just hope that doesn't sound too minimal, was when he said that if religion was to disappear, things would by no means, as it were, automatically be okay. i mean, he phrased it better than that. but it would be what i regard as a necessary condition would certainly not be a sufficient one, at any rate religion won't disappear, but the hold it has on people's minds can be substantially broken and domesticated. ... to have argued to the contrary, i come before you after all as a materialist. if we give up religion, we discover what actually we know already, whether we're religious or not, which is that we are somewhat imperfectly evolved primates, on a very small planet in a very unimportant suburb of a solar system that is itself a negligible part of a very rapidly expanding and blowing

apart cosmic phenomenon. these conclusions to me are a great deal more awe inspiring than what's contained in any burning bush or horse that flies overnight to jerusalem or any other of that -- a great deal more awe inspiring, as is any look through the hubble telescope at what our real nature and future really is. he was quite right to say that, and i would be entirely wrong if i implied otherwise. i think i could say a couple of things for religion ... the apotropaic, we all have it, the desire not to be found to be claiming all the credit, a certain kind of modesty, you could almost say humility. people will therefore say they will thank god when something happens they are grateful for. there is no need to make this a religious thing, the greeks had the concept of hubris as something to be avoided and criticised, but what the greeks would also have called the

apotropaic, the view that not all the glory can be claimed by primates like ourselves is a healthy reminder too. second, the sense that there is something beyond the material, or if not beyond it, not entirely consistent materially with it, is, i think, a very important matter. what you could call the numinous or the transcendent, or at its best, i suppose, the ecstatic. i wouldn't trust anyone in this hall who didn't know what i was talking about. we know what we mean by it, when we think about certain kinds of music perhaps, certainly the relationship or the coincidence but sometimes very powerful between music and love. landscape, certain kinds of artistic and creative work that appears not to have been done entirely by hand. without this, we really would merely be primates.

tohink it's very important appreciate the finesse of that, and i think religion has done a very good job of enshrining it in music and architecture, not so much in painting in my opinion, and i think it's actually very important that we learn to distinguish the numinous in this way, i wrote a book about the parthenon, i will mention it briefly. i couldn't live without the parthenon, i don't believe every civilised person could, if it ... much worse than the first temple had occurred, it seems to me. and we would have lost an enormous amount besides by way of our knowledge of symmetry, grace and harmony. i don't care about the cult of palace athena, it's gone, and as far as i know ... the sacrifices, some of them human, that were made to those gods, are regrettable but have been blotted out and forgotten, and athenian imperialism is also a thing of the past.

what remains is the fantastic beauty ... the question is how to keep what is of value of this sort in art in our own emotions ... i will go as far as the ecstatic, and to distinguish it precisely from superstition and the supernatural which are designed to make us fearful and afraid and servile and which, sometimes succeed only too well. thank you. [applause] >> it is now time for the final act in our debate, closing statements. we will do that in the reverse order of our opening remarks. christopher, i am going to call on you first to speak. your closing remarks, please.

>> i did not know it was coming. how about another question? >> let's take another question. [applause] get the idea that i have run out of stuff. i would rather be provoked. >> let's do that. we will give christopher a pause, a chance to drink. tony, the whole question of the rigidities or flexibility of religious doctrine. the catholic church has just made a reversal of sorts on its policy around the use of condoms, allowed explicitly to only for the prevention of hiv/aids infection. is that it positive? is that an expression of flexibility?

is it a critique of the decades of rigidity before this reversal? >> i welcome it. i am one of the billion catholics. i sank many, many catholics have different views on a whole range of issues. i just wanted to pick up something, if i might, that christopher said. i thought his discussion of the transcendent is very interesting, actually. for those of us of religious faith, we acknowledge and believe that there is a power, hire and separate, from human power. in a way, what christopher is saying is that i cannot accept

that but i accept there is something transcendent in the human experience, something even ecstatic. you see, for me, the belief in a higher power and the fact that we should be obedient to the will of that power, i don't regret that ashburn putting me in a position of civility. i would use the word "obligation." it is, of course, absolutely true that when i can point to any of the ax i say are inspired by religious faith, you can easily say they would have been inspired by humanism. i think that for those of us who are of faith and to believe that there is something actually more than simply human power, this

does give you, i think, humility. it is not all that can give you an humility, but it does. i have witnessed this myself. i remember when i met some of the people, the relatives who had died in the worst terrorist attack in the history of ireland. i went to visit their relatives of the victims. i remember a man saying to me, who had lost his loved one in the bombing, saying to me, "i have prayed about this and i want you to know that this terrible act should make you all the more determined to reach a

peace and to not stop your quest for peace." is completely true, that of course he could have come to a transcendent view of forgiveness and compassion with our religious faith. i think you can't ignore the fact that for many of us, actually, religious faith is shaped in this direction and not because we are servile or based religious faith on supervision or contrary to reason. which is why i have never seen a contradiction between darwin and someone other religious faith. but we do generally believe that it compels us in a way that is different and more imperative, in a sense, than anything else

in our lives. and the way that we would not be being true to ourselves unless we admitted that. that does not lead to say that someone of no religious faith could just be as good of the person, which i claim not even for an instant that someone of religious faith is a superior or better person than someone who is not. i do say that religion can and does in the lives of hundreds and millions and billions of people it gives them an impulse to be better people than otherwise they would be. [applause] . .

it implies all of these great thimmings can only be done if you place these things under an infallible decision. once you made the decision you are bound by it. you might conceivably notice where you are going.

and they left it for as high reasons of principles as they join in the first place. the best known is called the god that failed. a surrogate of -- but let no one say, when history is written new york city one will be able to say it didn't represent some high points in history. but i repeat it wasn't worth it at the sacrifice of mental inintellectual and moral freedom. that was the purpose of my original set of questions on the metaphysical side. are you consider yourselves and consider this carefree, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters s. comrades, friends, are you yourselves willing for the sake of certain elements, perhaps for a great record of good works as is proposed, are you willing to say that you give your liegeance to an ultimate

redeemer. it's not religious that you don't believe there's a divine supervision involved. if you don't believe, that you're already halfway out the door. you don't need me. are you willing to pay the price and sacrifice? are you willing to pay the price in believing in the supernatural, miracles, after lives, angels. are you willing to admit perhaps this most of all, are you willing to admit that human beings can be the interpreter of this divine figure because the religion means you will have to follow someone who is your religious leader. you can't -- try as you may follow jesus of nazareth, it can't be done. you can try to do it and it can't be done. will you have to follow his vicer on earth. pope benedict xxvi as presently, his own claim, not mine. the apostolics session, the vicer of christ on earth. you have to say this person has

divine thomplet -- authority. i maintain that is too much of a sacrifice of the mental and intellectual freedom that is essential to us, to be tolerated and you gave everything by repudiating that and standing up to your own full height and you gave much more than you will by pretending you're a member of the flock or in any other way any kind of sheep. thank you. >> it's just when chriser is talking there about the labor party together, i was just recalling after we suffered our fourth election defeat in a row

in the liberal party meeting a party member after the fourth defeat who said to me, the people have now voted against us four times. what is wrong with them? and i would -- i would say that an actual example of communism shows that want to suppress freedom and those who have a fanatical view of the way the world should work, those are not confined to religious faith, i believe. it is there in many, many different walks of life, so the question is for me this is not about how i -- a belief for me

as a christian with the belief in jesus christ, not how that makes me subject to oppression and servitude but on the contrary how that helps me find the best way of expressing the best of the human spirit. and it was actually einstein who was not an atheist. he believed in the supreme being. he did not necessarily subscribe to organized religion who said religion without science is blind. but he also went on to say science without religion is lame. and i will say faith is not about certainty, it is a power of inflection of my own awareness of my own ignorance. and that though life's processes can be explained by science and

nonetheless the meaning and purpose of life cannot be and in that space for me at least lies not certainty in the scientific sense but a belief that it is clear and insistent and i would say rationally, which is there is a higher power than the human power and that higher power causes us to lead better lives in accordance with the will more important than our own. not in order we should be imprisoned by that superior will but on the contrary so that we can discipline and use our own will in furtherance of the thing that's represent the best in human beings and the best in humanity. so i think this debate this evening has been fascinating and

i think deeply important debate about probably the single most important issue in the 21st century. i actually don't think the 21st century will be about fundamentalist political ideology. i accept it could be about fundamentalist religious or culture ideology. and the way that we avoid that is those people of faith for actually to be prepared to stand up and debate those people who are alone and for those people who believe in a world of peaceful coexistence where people do cooperate together, recognize that there are people with deeply held religious convictions and that those convictions impel them to be part of that world of peaceful coexistence even though it is true, there are those who in the name of religion and in need as

a consequence of religion will sometimes do things that are horrific and evil and in my view totally contrary to the true meaning of faith. so i don't stand for tonight and say that those of us of religious faith have always done right since that is plainly wrong. but i do say throughout human history there have been examples of people inspired by faith who have actually rather than contributed to the suppression of humanity, contributed to its liberation, spiritually, emotionally and even materially and it is those people that i stand up for here with you tonight. thank you.

>> well, ladies and gentlemen, let me reiterate something that peter monk said at the beginning of this evening's talk, it is one thing to get up and give a set piece speech on a subject you are intimately familiar with and something quite entirely different though to appear at a public event, a global event such as this to have your ideas contested and combated by someone who is every inch your peer and to do so with the eloquence and conviction of our two debaters. please join me in a round of appreciation.

>> stay here just one second. >> well, ladies and gentlemen, this debate is not over yet because of the huge size of this audience, it's going to take us some minutes to tally a second audience vote and to find out who won this debate. so i'm going to ask the audience member and our debaters to proceed to the post debate reception next door, where we will reveal the results shortly and let's just very briefly see where the state of public

opinion started in this room tonight with 22% of you in favor of the motion, 56 opposed and 21% undecided, a large number indicating that tchow change their vote also. you have your ballots with you. they were included with your program. simply hanged them to the usher and, again, we will announce those results in the public reception that follows. ladies and gentlemen, start voting. we'll see you in the reception.

monday is day one in the campaign management institute training students to work on political campaigns. topics include the general political environment and chicago mayor's race. we'll have coverage at 9:00 a.m. eastern on c-span 2. >> "q & a" continues tonight and tomorrow on interviews from london. tonight the labor party shadow minister for public health diane abbott, our government's plan for budget cuts as well as her experience as a minority in parliament and comparing the american and british forments of government as we talk about our guests about elections and impact of money in races, the power of prime minister, taxes, social issues and cost of living. "q & a," tonight and tomorrow night at 8:00 eastern on c-span. >> listen to historic supreme court cases on c-span radio. today the constitutionality of explaining christmas decorations

on town property. >> with the possible exception of the cross, and it is nationwide on xm channel 132. >> and now garrison keeler at the kennedy presidential library on the role of hume enin politics. this is an hour and a half. >> good afternoon, i'm tom put numb, director of the john f. kennedy museum and on behalf of david mccain, c.e.o. of the kennedy library foundation and all of my library and foundation colleagues i thank you for coming and welcome those watching this program on c-span. let me begin by acknowledging the generous underwriters to the kennedy library forum, boston

capital, loyola institute, the boston foundation, our media partners "the boston globe," wber and mecm and today's special sponsors powder milk biscuits be b-bop a rhubarb pie. there's a reason the kennedy museum would organize a museum in the role of human in american life. let's take a look. >> it's been known that big business is using the stock market slump as a means of determining you to come to terms with business. one reputable columnist after talking to businessmen reported this week their attitude is now we have you where they want you. i can't believe in way of big business.

>> you have said more than once that heads of government should not go to the summit to negotiate agreement but only to approve agreement negotiated at a lower level. now it's being said and written you're going to eat those words and go to the summit without any agreement at a lower level. has your position changed, sir? >> well, i'll going to have a dinner for all of the people who have written it and we'll see who eats what. >> your brother said recently on television said after seeing the cares of office on you he shouldn't sure he would ever be interested nbing the president. i wonder if you can tell us whether if you had to do over again, you would work for the presidency and whether you can recommend the job to others? >> well, the answer to the first is yes and the second is no, i don't recommend it to others. at least for a while. 1952 and i was thinking about running for the united states

senate, i went to the then senator and said what do you think? he said don't do it. can't win. bad year. in 1956 i was at the democratic convention insaid, i didn't know whether i would run for vice president or not, so i said, george, what do you think, this is it. they need a young man. so i ran and lost and in 1960 i was wondering whether i ought to run in the west virginia primary . don't do it. and actually the only time i really got nervous about the whole matter at los angeles was just before balloting george came up and said, i think it looks pretty good for you.

>> humor is one of the founding pillars of religious institutions. dave powers, who worked closely with president kenkay throughout his career and treasured by him in large measure because of his irish wit. on the day this building opened, mr. powers described the scene this way, never in the history of the massachusetts democratic party have so many gathered on such a beautiful day with so few under indictment. it is this appreciation with the importance of humor we are glad to have with us today one of the finest storytellers and humorist gary keilor. best known as the host of priorry's ail manic and author of "home grown democrat," in

which he explains how hiss lifelong political affiliation is informed by the scandinavian wisdom of his youth. in the book he also writes about attending a rally as a freshman featuring john f. kennedy in minneapolis 50 years ago this fall during the 1960 campaign. his girlfriend at the time had supported minnesota senator hubert humphrey in the spring primaries. but as he noted, the local folks got a kick out of hubert. he just didn't travel well. in minnesota he seemed lively and effusive but on the road he sounded sherrill, slightly hysterical, compared to kennedy who according to mr. keilor was the coolest politician ever, a man who not only quoted dante but looked great just saying good morning. a short word on our slightly altered format. having failed in our attempt to lure mr. waur to serve aznar

rater, he will speak unfiltered and when the spirit moves we will transition to the portion of the program as "the new yorker" said features long speeches from the audience disguised as questions. although many of us will be meeting garrison keilor for the first time, it may seem like catching up with an old friend whose familiar voice we invited into our living room, kitschens and cars and whose stories, poems and songs often touched choirds in our hearts. ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming garrison keilor to the kennedy library. >> this you so very much. i don't remember the president

having that pronounced an accent when i heard him back in minneapolis in the fall of 1960. he sounded more like one of us, but memory can be deceiving. i come here and i can't help but think of a talk i gave in detroit for a fund-raiser for the united fund. this was a couple of years ago. and it was at the henry ford museum. there were about 50 enormously wealthy people sitting at round tables and we were out there on the museum floor and there were circulating around and having drinks and i walked around and got the lay of the land and here behind me was the -- was the bus

from montgomery alabama that rosa parks had ridden on, which led to dr. marten luther king jr. and the -- and the busboy colin montgomery, which led to so much else in the south. and here were all of these various cars. and i realized when i stood up in front of these people that black lincoln, long limousine was the car mr. and mrs. kennedy was riding in on dallas november 22, 1963. and indeed it was. i knew it somehow and it was sitting there just behind this group of people having drinks and waiting for me to talk about the lake in minnesota. it was an enormous disconnect to

stand there and attempt to be a humorist and look out at this monster, this monster of history, this dragon, this -- this car which you and i have seen how many hundreds and maybe thousand times in news reel footage over and over making that turn in dealey plaza and coming up under the elm trees. i just couldn't get it out of my mind and yet i was not there to talk about this, you see. i was to tell stories, but it was there, this car which was the scene of a great change in the history of our country. we can talk about that for years to come but it was.

at that moment people feel a disconnect at that moment from government conspiracy theories abounded that the government itself had killed the president so much darkness followed from that very moment and how many times have we gone back and rewound that film, wanting it to come out a different way t seemed to be monstrous that we were sitting here around tables and having drinks therein that car was parked just be beyond us. and yet this is the challenge of humor that somehow must comprehend darkness and death. it must take this into cog that sans -- cognizance and i stood up in front of them and i sort of switched directions and i started to tell stories about

death not what the united fund people were hoping for. but you feel this disconnect and your mind is going one direction and your voice is trying to take you someplace else. and in the end you have to follow your head. oh, i told them a story about -- about mr. tollivson of the grain elevator who had an affair with the english teacher, though each of them were married to other people. and he went down to visit her and her classroom and to -- and to recite love poems to her. he worked up in the grain elevator. he was an unprepossessing man. he was wiry and his hair stuck up and he was dealing with hair loss and he wore black horn rim

glasses repaired with masking tape. and he had soybean dust on him and corn meal in the cuffs of his jeans. but he went up there to recite -- to recite a poem to her. let me not to the marriage of true minds add mid-impediments. love is not love which alters what an alteration finds. and before long they went down to the moonlight bay supper club and they sat on the back booth around a little red cut glass decanter with a candle inside and they ordered bombardiers, a drink that is powerful that you would not order if you meant to keep your good judgment. and they went off and they parked in his little pickup truck, just on the gravel road,

just over the hill from where the state highway curves off to the west towards the dakotas. they parked just over the hill and they steamed up the windows for a while. never imagining that -- that lumber truck would take that turn too fast and miss it and then go over that rise and go fishtailing down the gravel and sideswipe the pickup truck and roll it over eight, nine times. and she who had fastened her seat belt which orderly you would not do while you were steaming up the windows, she suffered cuts and contusions and -- and his naked body, because a man who is steaming up the windows has to retain some element of mobility.

and he -- his naked body was thrown out on to the gravel where it laid there and the sheriff's headlights when he came, he inspected the body and he saw what they had been doing now inside the pickup truck. that's what that was in his body. the man had put that on himself for safety and in his case it had not worked. and they brought the body up to the mortuary and put him in his suit and he was taken into the lutheran church for the funeral at which pastor tomerdoll preached a very stiff sermern on -- on the verse be sure your sin will find you out. god sees and the rest of us will find out about it inevitably. be sure your sin will find you

out. men love darkness rather than light because the deeds are eve many but your sin will be found out. whereupon pastor tormedoll's old church secretary gene in the third row burst into tears and sat there sobbing. her bosom heathing. and so that story came out. and pastor tomerdoll had to be dismissed and the chairman of the church council who voted for dismissal eugene was involved with a woman in minneapolis named maureen but he destroyed her letters to him to cover his tracks but there was one that he -- that he could not bear to lose. it was a letter from maureen telling him what i wonderful lover he was and how strong and

how imaginative and how generous and enduring. this -- this letter of recommendation, he -- he held on to and put it for safe keeping in a book in the library, which was a book nobody would ever read, a book of statistics of american agriculture in 1929, 1930, the chapter on flax, which we don't grow around there. and it was safe for years until -- in the librarian grace was weaving out unread books and pulled this out and the letter came fluttering down to the floor. and she read it and she thought surely this cannot be my brother-in-law eugene. is he the chairman of the church council. she showed the letter to her

sister, who read it and thought nothing of it. the person described in the letter bore no resemblance to her husband. but she asked him about it and he dropped a whole arm load of china so he had to be sent off to think about his sins. he was sent off to live with his brother roger, who himself three weeks later was caught in the same way, had gone into town to play pinochle with his friends, he said and then came back at 1:00 in the morning, which was much too late for bee knockle. -- pinochle. it's a game of old men and it always ends up at 10:00. here he ends up at 1:00 in the morning with a big gash over his left eyebrow and because he just don't think of a good story, he was forced to fall back on the truth, which was not to his advantage.

he had been struck by a mirror that fell off the ceiling of a motel room. where he and the young woman named amber, who he had met at the cocktail lounge, were lying in the jacuzzi admiring each other in the mirror on the ceiling and he opened a bottle of cheap french champagne and the cork bounced off the mirror and suddenly their reflection started to get bigger and bigger and bigger. i told this story to -- to the united -- to the united fund people. i think they were expecting something else. something about neighborliness and something about generosity and coming to the aid of those less fortunate.

but who can be less fortunate than -- than those who have been struck by a mirror falling off a ceiling. my uncle jack was a less fortunate man. he was a man who endured his marriage to my aunt everybody len for a number of years and then he took to jim beam bourbon for solace. and he developed alcohol as a major hobby and had to be sent away. he was sent off to live in hunting shack out by the muskeg on the other side of the lake. and there he lived. i loved him. he was a dear man. he loved songs, not the right kind of songs but he loves songs. he knew annabelle lee by heart. he knew all kinds of poems.

he died. they all die, you know. i don't kill them off deliberately in my stories but my uncle did die. he died there in the lake. he came into the sidetrack trap to medicate himself and he was on his way. it was a bitterly cold day in january in minnesota. it was 40 below zero. may have been colder than that. our outdoor thermometers only go down to 40 below. we don't want to know about anything colder. he was on his way towards the sidetrack tap, this heavyset man with a little fringe of red hair and a brushy red mustache making his way and rein into his nemesis mr. bergy, who was working towards him and with whom he had a lifelong argument

about the authenticity of the kenington roof stone, which is a stone that was found in a cornfield in western minnesota in the late 1870's and with runik writings, old norris writings on this stone which translated said something like 14 of us have come down with the red disease and are on our way back to the boats to sail back to finland. which some people, mr. bergy being one, felt was authentic. and proof the vikings were amazing navigators to be able to find their way to the middle of north america just by the stars and other people, including my uncle jack, felt it was such an obvious hoax that anybody with the i.q. of a potted plant would know that this was the work of

some soybean farmer with time on his hands. if you were sick and dyeing why would you take a week to carve into a stone a meaningless message in a language that nobody around here understands? they had an argument about this. they had an argument about this in the streets and they were shrieking at each other in norwegian, which is a language which is rich and invective. and then my uncle felt the elephant step on his chest and reached for the parking meter. there's only one in my town. they just put up one as an experiment back in the early '50's. they got one for cheap. and it just never worked out so they didn't put up anymore. he grabbed ahold of it for support and his last words on this earth, though he couldn't

have intended this, were you got shit for brains and then he fell . mr. bergy said, you go to hell he said then, and then he saw this might be the case and he went in and called up the constables and called the sheriff, sheriff called the ambulance, ambulance called the coroner. fire department got involved somehow and so before long you had this scene of an emergency and walkie-talkies going off. and you had -- and you had red and blue flashing lights and yellow tape around the man lying there. this whole scene of crisis and emergency, which my uncle loved more than anything else in this world. such a shame that he should miss it.

and to miss it by just ten minutes. humor has to include all of these things and comprehend them. we can't -- we can't close it off. humor is not silliness. humor embraces our -- our life and there's a connection between humor and politics more than just politicians telling jokes. we talk about humor we mean -- first of all, we mean -- we mean good humor, a sort of aimability, kind of general good humor among people, a biased towards trusting each other. sort of a communal spirit, such as we feel around christmas. even if you don't believe in any

of it, you still cannot be impervious to this -- to this feeling of amyability, which is at the heart of christmas. christmas doesn't require a big outlay of cash. especially as you get older, greed is less and less a part of it. christmas -- christmas requires cookies and -- and christmas carols and candles, you need -- it's good if it's cold. i can't imagine christmas in florida. i guess other people can but i can't. you just require a few special things and lights and candles and saffron cookies are the best. bay berry candle but your choice really. and this feeling of aimability,

of goodwill which is -- which is everywhere you look around you at christmas time. some people are offended by the manger scene. some people are -- feel marginalized by it. we live in an age of complaint. i say to them, get over it. get a grip. you're in america. that's where you are. if you were in france, you wouldn't expect buttermilk pancakes for breakfast. i mean, you would be in france. you're with the french now. you're in a catholic country and it's france. don't expect that lomond is going to publish box scores in their morning. if you want those, you have to go elsewhere for them. there's this feeling of aim eeability, even on people who do

not believe that jesus was the son of god and who appeared in human form in a cradle on december the 24th back in bethlehem. there's a feeling of aimability of people coming together. good humor. this is crucial and if we lose this, if we lose this in our society we've also lost something in politics. we are living in this intensely partisan era. it's not the first time in our country's history god knows but still it's worrisome when you read a harris poem that says 57% of republicans in our country believe that barack obama is muslim. that 48% believe that he was not

born in this country when 38% believe that he is doing many of the same things that adolf hitler did. that 24% believe he may be the anti-christ. we're talking about a kid from hawaii who is the son of a single mother and who -- and who strove in classic american style getting to the best schools he could get into, winning the prizes and moving off and replanting himself on the south side of chicago and going through the swamp of chicago politics somehow unscathed. how did that happen? and marrying the first woman that he was really in love with and -- and making his way up the ladder in a sort of a classic

dekeynesian story, this striver, this earnest striver to have him so misread by such a large minority of people. pure racism, pure racism in my opinion. but still disquieting if you believe that the bedrock of politics is some sort of common goodwill among the american people. it was very disquieting. when we talk about humor, we are also talking about jokes, which are a crucial part of american culture and american literature. we pride ourselves on this, on being a people who appreciate jokes.

this is an age of celebrity and celebrity doesn't go with jokes. celebrities are precarious, fragile people who are properties and who are brands and they must defend their brands against humor, against satire. they must be very, very careful not to be caught off guard. it's a very precarious thing. especially in this day and age when there are so many celebrities. there used to be 45. and now there are 47,300 famous people in america, which means that most famous people in america are people who most americans have never heard of. but they are nonetheless celebrities and they travel

around in celebrity cars and they get beyond the velvet rope very easily and they -- and they -- they enjoy great privilege until one day humor comes after them and people start to make fun of them. it starts to fall apart. it can happen in so many ways. you get out of your black car and your publicist jennifer leads you on towards the book signing and there you are and you pass by the velvet rope. hours go by. you go for an interview on tv. you stop in the men's room on your way back and you look and there's this enormous greenish thing coming oust your left

nostril that is moving in and out as you breathe. and you look at this this horror. you're a famous person admired by literally thousands of people for your cable tv show but nobody, not one person walked up to you and said, hey, bud you need a hanky. so you fire your publicist jennifer and you go into hiding and you go to the betty ford center. and you hire a new publicist vivian and vivian puts out the word that you suffer from a rare condition which creates excess mucous. and you pick this up when you're

over in africa where you're going to adopt an orphan child and she does her best to damage control. but the damage is done. you have suffered this sharp blow and your image is forever -- forever cracked will never, ever recover, ever recover. people will always look at you and they'll be looking at your nostril. this is how it is. celebrity culture and humor jokes do not go with each other. i grew up in an yare of cruel humor, desperately cruel. the age of the practical joke. people don't do this anymore but they used to do it and they would send to -- for ads in the back pages of popular mechanics and they would buy itching

powder and they would buy dribble glasses so at thanksgiving you hand uncle louis a dribble glass and woe put it to his lips and liquid would run down his tie. and everybody got a big kick out of this. and he put salt in the sugar ball and all. i can barely remember when a group of boys put sheep in their friend's bedroom, put a sheep, led the sheep up the stairs and there the sheep was and the sheep was left in there for a long time, so -- so the sheep made a mark on that bedroom. these were country people but there was a real cruelty behind it. i'm the last person in america to remember the era of privy

tipping, which was a profound thing. people in my childhood did have indoor plumbing but not at the summer cabins. their summer cabins still had out houses and boys who were near a lake, as i was, occasionally did this out of extreme boredom you would hang around in the woods in the evening as the sun went down and in particular you were watching harold star's cabin. he was the publisher of the paper. he was a good republican. and he made a good target. he had an outhouse behind his cabin. and you knew that inevitably he would make that walk down that

path in the darkness. he knew that we were there. this was not a surprise. he knew that we were waiting out there and he knew what we had in mind because he had been young himself. so as he came out the cabin door, he yelled at us. i know you're out there. and he brandished a shotgun. thinking it would scare us off. it didn't. it was just a challenge, that's all. he went into the outhouse and when he closed the door, we came sneaking down through the tall grass until we were about 30 feet away and we could hear. when we heard the unmistakable sounds of him doing what he had come out there to do, we made a rush for the outhouse.

you had to do it quickly. you couldn't discuss this. you were there for one purpose and that was to push this over onto the door as fast as you could. he yelled and his kerosene lantern broke and there was a big poof of flame. he fired the gun but it went out through the roof of the outhouse, towards his own cabin. there were flames in there. we were running hell bent for ledger up -- leather up the hill. he came out the only exit that was available to him. he came leaking out and there was the hole right there waiting for him. he knew it was there but he slid right down into it. nobody woffer do this today.

they could discuss why. it's an interesting question. i don't know why. people aren't any nicer now. somehow, chris, there aren't so many outhouses now as there once were. he would yell at us and threaten us and tell us he was bog find us if it took him the rest of his life. of course, he had a pretty good idea who we were and he settled down and he realized this was simply part of a game and that we had come after him because of his high position. and so it was a tribute in a way . you don't pull practical jokes on weak or vulnerable people. it's not done. it's not funny. you go after the powerful and the mighty.

and so he was able to accept this. we don't do this anymore. we're in an age of political correctness which i don't mind. i just consider it to be a form of good manners, and i did grow up during the 1950's at a time when -- when men more or less ritually said deleap kating things about their wives to our men. this was guy humor. i don't miss it. it wasn't funny to me then. it is not funny to me now. what has really put the damper on humor is not so much political correctness as a tendency that we have to make any sort of human oddity into a syndrome and into a dysfunction, into a disorder.

we've made life clinical somehow. and we've taken human conditions that we used to just live with and be curious about and we've made them into problems to be solved, possibly with pharmaceuticals. so everybody has some sort of disorder and we each have a long list of problems which have some sort of clinical or therapeutic solution. this gets in the way of humor. humor requires a certain sort of fatalism and this denies us that, so that if you wake up in the morning unhave empty ice cream cartons in bed with you, there's a reason for this.

and you discover it. it comes from taking ambien sleep tablets. and one possible side effect is in the small print written on the little pamphlet inside the ambien box is -- is an eating disorder of late-night excessive eating disorder, new york turnl excess eating disorder, n.e.e.d., need. and -- -- and so you go to work solving this instead of making a joke out of it. you go to solve this. and you google nocturnal eating and you in one half second you come up with 36,749,000 hits and

-- websites and most of which have to do with owls, but here's one that identifies your problem shows you a way to a group meeting every week, always in the basement of a ue tarian church and -- unitarian church and always on tuesday nights and they're meeting and you sit there in a room in a circle of folding chairs with people with styrofoam cups of not very good coffee. and you talk. you talk in this circle about your life and about your needs and your disappointments and so forth. and other people are meeting in other rooms here in the basement. the basement is full of people in one circle or another. and a.a. is here and wounded

daughters of emotionally distant fathers and men coming to terms with his own bodies, men whose mothers told them to eat everything on their plate and they would grow up big and strong but they just grew up big, and so they have to talk about mother and their feelings about mother and they're disappointing her if they don't finish everything on their plate. and anger anonymous, the group of mostly parents, mostly parents who of adolescent children who have been so sweet and so -- so sweet tempered and then fell in among bad company and took a wrong turn and went to live in little basement rooms in the parents' house until they were in their mid-20's. and there they lived like trolls

in dark, smoky caverns, strange smoke coming out from under doorways and psychotic music playing down there and odd incense and the parents begging their children, please, it's christmas. .

he was going out over the frozen tundra and carrying 42 pounds of clothing on your back. you stay warm from the exertion of it. it kept you warm. off into the stormy march, when

you were a child. school was never canceled in minnesota ever, not for any reason whatsoever. when you start canceling school in minnesota, where would you stop? [laughter] you went off and caught the school bus. maybe a sleigh with come for you. you would go under the buffalo robes and the horses would pull you off across the wind crested snow. he would go down onto the ice of the mississippi river. up the river you would go, swerving sometimes suddenly off to one side to avoid these tattered men in gray who came from behind rocks and trees running towards us. those were the last remnants of the army of northern virginia trying to snatch little

children to hold us for ransom and get money to buy a gun powder from the british so the confederacy could rise again. it never did until the renaissance of the republican party. [laughter] anyway, another subject. but winter -- dealing with winter is a manly obligation in minnesota. you are not supposed to be defeated by this or even complain about it. everybody else is just as cold as you are. do not tell me how you feel. this is not a personal experience. [laughter] just keep it to yourself. you are supposed to get out there and shovel the snow. you are supposed to throw the snow upon to the bank. in february or march, you have

30 foot high canyons of snow coming into your little house. you throw the snow wake up there. but there it is an old cougar looking down on you, waiting for you to falter, look confused or lost. you have to not. you have to preserve life. that is what we do in the winter. my father and mother many years ago lived in a little house in lake wobegon with my older brother and sister. my father went out to shovel the snow off the roof. it was around twilight. the sun was just going down. he went out and put up the ladder against the house. he climbed up to shuffle off the snow. you have to do this. you have no idea how heavy the

snow is. if it is heavy enough, it could collapse the house. you would all die. that would be embarrassing. [laughter] a man past to do this. a man could hire somebody else to do this, but it is not a good thing. a man needs to shoveled his own roof. if he hires somebody else, this is one more step down the path which leads to people reaching for your elbow when you go down the stairs. [laughter] people say that you look good. they never said that when you did look good. [laughter] it leads to people suggesting that maybe you should not drive at night. then your children take the car keys away. you wind up in the good shepherd home.

you are hanging out with people you have been avoiding all of your life. finally, dementia settles down. and then they shovel you into the box in the suit you used to wear to other peoples' funerals. it is much too early. they haul you interchurch past year. -- they call you into church past your pew. it is all wrong. the things you did like privvy- touching, they do not mention. [laughter] they take you up the hill. the pallbearers carry you over the rough ground. they said you down over this frame over this whole in the ground. they sing two versus of "abide with me" and that is all. nobody is sobbing.

nobody is cold. nobody is throwing herself onto your coffin and saying that she cannot live without you. you are just lower down into the hole. the grave digger stands around waiting for everybody to leave. they're talking about drainage problems. that is the last thing you want to know about. [laughter] to prevent this from happening too soon, if you go and shovel snow off of your roof. he did. he was shoveling the snow. he got worn out. it was a heavy snow. the sun had gone down. he was going to rest for a moment. he laid back against the steep roof. he braced his heels in the gutters. he lay there date -- taking a deep breath. he fell asleep. he woke up about half an hour later. when he went to sit up. he realized that his jacket had

frozen to the roof. it had the skin out, the fleece in. it had frozen to the shingles. he tried to move his hips and legs. he could not move anything. he could kick against the roof. he could not move his hips. from the event over the kitchen, he could smell the tuna noodle casserole that my mother was making for supper. [laughter] the little children had gone to bed. she was making supper for him. here he was trapped on the roof. the cars were going by. he could not wait to them. he could only move a finger. he could not wave to them. he could only wave a finger. some honked.

[laughter] he tried to signal them with his index finger. he could not. it dawned on him that you could die at pier. you could die out here if nobody came by. it was very cold at 40 below zero. he rolled violently and heard a crunch in his back pocket. he realized as he felt the liquid going down his leg that he had busted the bottle of peppermint schnapps that he had brought to keep himself warm. he had broken it. now you can imagine that when he did die on the roof, this is what people would talk about. [laughter] he had a drinking problem. they would say he had a drinking problem. he had to go up on the roof to drink. [laughter] is how desperate he was. [laughter] he drank and then he passed his pants.

-- he drank and then he pissed his pants. he was resigned to this, line and a crucifix position. my mother. standing in the snow below. she asked if he was almost finished. he said that yes he was. [laughter] he said he was going to come in as soon as he got his jacket loose from the roof. she came up the ladder. this woman was afraid of heights. she came clamoring up. she was not warmly dressed. she came up the ladder and up this the fruit -- up the steep roof. she pulled herself up until she lay on him. she grabbed the zipper. she pulled as hard as she could. he came leaking out. he slid down the roof with her riding, straddling him, off of the roof and down into the snow bank.

nobody had seen them. nobody had seen this. they went into the house. she put away the tuna casserole. she got two stakes out. she was going to make a feast. they had defeated death. she had a little bit of wine that she used for cooking. she poured it into a glass for him. he sat there and drink it as she cooked. she baked potato with sour cream and butter, bacon bits, stallions, and a steak. then there was a knock at the door. they went to open it. if you do not open it, they will just come in. [laughter] she opened it. there were the constable's carrying will ride -- leroy. they wanted to check if everything was ok. they said they saw the jacket on the roof.

he said that he put the jacket up there. he said it was a cougar trap. [laughter] they asked what he used for bait. he said peppermint schnapps. [laughter] my parents, they defeated death. that was about nine months and 10 minutes before i was born. [laughter] so, we come through the other side. we survived. they had narrow escapes. somehow, here we are. a bunch of humorous people. what is humor about? really, it is about life. it is about the small, ordinary things of life. it is about what we have in common.

that is what politics is about as well. these are times when we have so much less in common than before. the world is split up into little pieces. the most successful tv shows have rather small audiences of maybe 5 million or 8 million people out of this vast country. there used to be elvis and frank sinatra. there were the beatles. there are not people like that anymore, people who everyone would recognize by their voice. we have become different and estranged from each other. but humor and politics can bring us back together. if politics cannot, and then i have my doubts. then i have my doubts about

humor, too. thank you. [applause] thank you very much. [applause] thank you so very much. there are a couple of microphones here. i see edging people -- i see people edging that way. a young woman has lept to one. >> i have had the joy of seeing you at tanglewood over the last seven years. >> where were you sitting? [laughter] >> when you do lake wobegon, you have no script. the show always comes out on time. how do you do that? >> when you are telling the truth, you do not need a script. [laughter]

[applause] you just remember things as best that you can. it is not really required that you have a script. the president has to have one. i understand that. there is the teleprompter and all of that. if this id -- sentence of his skids off into the wrong suborn because -- subordinate clauses, the markets in japan react. you and i do not need a script. we are americans. we know each other. >> you still managed to conclude the story in a logical, funny way. the show always spends on time. -- the show always ends on time.

>> i am an older person. [laughter] i have developed some skills. you lose a few and gain a couple. yes. >> i am curious as to how you got your start in humor. i am sure there was a wealth of characters to base your stories on. how could you develop this ability to go from one thing to something else and then come back to the beginning again? how does that happen? how did you start that? >> i had the need to do this as a child. my mother enjoyed having me around watching her as she worked. she had six children. she would wash and clean and cook and iron. she even ironed the sheets. i was her little boy who

memorized jokes out of reader's digest. i told her jokes. she was very charmed by this. then when i was 6, she did something i did not understand. she went and got pregnant. by my father. [laughter] she had twin boys. my younger brothers. when you are the charming third child in a family, which then adds twins, you disappear. you become invisible. people gathered around to watch these infants. it was like the deion quintuplets on a smaller scale. we did not charge admission. it was a source of wonder to people.

there i was, gasping for air because my brother's sucked it out of the room. out of a troubled childhood comes out the urge to entertain other people. your parents may have deprived you but given you a happy, satisfied, comfortable childhood. [laughter] shame on them. make sure that you give your children the gift that they deserve. [laughter] that is a little misery. and neglect. that is the secret there. you grow up the middle, invisible child in a family of colonists -- calvinists and you need nothing more. you have it all.

>> thank you so much for your stories which transport meet each week to such a wonderful symbol place -- civil and a luxurious place. president kennedy had a story that compelled us, as did president reagan. it seems all the great leaders do. what is the story that president obama should be saying to us? >> president obama has been given a truckload of trouble. he came into office on it. i was there in washington on january 20. i was there along with millions of other people. it was one of the great days of my life. it was a lot of trouble to get to washington.

i and millions of other people felt we had to be there. when we saw the obamas >> -- walking down pennsylvania avenue towards the white house, i had a beautiful feeling. it has been put slightly on the shelf. his first two years have been successful. if he or anybody else, he might have trumpeted this more than he has. i think he and the congress got a great deal done. i come from northern liberals, however. these are people who are dark people. [laughter] we are faults finders. we are dissatisfied with our own. i try not to listen to people

who believe as i do. they seem to be a poor guide to this administration. i have great hopes for it. out of trouble, which he has recently experienced a little bit of, i think great things will come. i think these cables, wikileaks released -- i have not read them all and neither have you. [laughter] these cables show the administration in a pretty good light. i have high hopes, high hopes for them. [applause] not the best answer i could have come up with. [laughter] but i do not have to revise this. >> my question is, you were in a

new york state of mind a few months back. i am curious about what drew you to the big apple. are there things that linger in it, they're part of you and part of where you are going? new york state. >> what drew me was the "new yorker" magazine. i started reading it when i was a kid. my cousin kate subscribe. she was two years older than i. i think she probably showed it to me when i was 13 or so. she was a very adventurous person in our family, a real bohemian growing up in an evangelical fundamentalist family. she smoked. she could smoke really well. [laughter] she could swear really well. . .

so i went and they were decent to me. they didn't buy my tryout piece but i sent them a piece a couple years later and they bought it

and that was just one of the great events. i was an english major. how can i say, if you were an english major and you were a writer, "the new yorker" was the gold standard. and so i wanted to write for them. then i moved to the city, years, years, later. i decided i didn't want to live there and be poor when i was 24. it just involved too much squalor. and you could be very poor in minnesota and live with a certain grandeur. and i preferred grandeur. you could rent a farmhouse when farms were being consolidated out in minnesota. you could rent a farm house and i did for $80 a month and live there in splendor with a vegetable garden and that -- that money in new york would

have bought you a couch in a studio apartment sharing it with two other people. there's no comparison between the two. i moved back there in '89, '90 and i got to work at the "new yorker" and write "talk of the town" piece. i love the city because it's a pedestrian city and there aren't that many of them in america. it's a city where everything is out on the street and you walk down the street and all of this humanity brushes by you. and when you come from out on the frozen tundra, this is a wonderful thing. it may not be wonderful if you group in queens but it's wonderful if you grew up on the prairie where you sit and look out across corn stubble and soybean fields and you can see for milds and nobody is coming

to see you and nobody ever will. and in new york all of this humanity passing you and it's just -- it's just amazing. you walk down the street and here comes somebody on "roller skates" with no pants. you glance at them and say what are you looking at? what are you looking at? just one sight after another. all of this life. i grew up in an earlier day, you see, before there were malls. and so when i walked down upper broadway, when i walked down lexington avenue past shop after shop after shop after shop, that's my childhood street you see. that's how a city is supposed to look. one shop after another and not

just chain stores and not big box stores. but shop, shop, shop, shop, shop, bloomingdale's. shop, shop. >> thank you. >> i could go on. >> bhife nancy and i lived for three winters in minnesota in the mid-70's and every morning we would wake up to your morning radio program response hered by jack's auto repair and human services. i have two preef questions, whatever happened to jack's auto repair and human services but also what can each of us do to help restore human and civility to american life? >> it's just something we do every day, isn't it? and we live in cities that we live in cities that millitate against this. they are cities in which we -- in which we move toe and fro from little -- to and fro in little steel boxes and we work in cubicles. but still there are ways for us

to touch other people, and that's all. that's all we can do. we can only deal with the people that we come in contact with. i don't -- i'm not trying to organize a campaign. i'm only -- i'm only being descriptive. i think that -- i think that the world has changed for humor, and for comedy and -- and i -- i regret that and i believe that it has a parallel in politics. and -- but i'll leave it to other people to develop that thesis and to -- and to come up with a -- come up with a prescription. anonymity is an enemy of civility. i'm sorry, but it is.

and this is shown oh, so clearly on the internet. no solution for it but at least, you know, we can be aware of the world that we -- that we live in. all of this formless anger that is drifting around in clouds. i wait for it to pass. >> thank you for touching on that. >> thank you so much. jack's auto repair is just one more disgruntled sponsor. that's all. didn't reach the right audience i guess. yes? >> hi. i am concerned with the amount of acrimony and partisanship in our legislative branch. i'm wondering if you think perhaps surrounding the buildings by privy and out houses would help at all? how else do we get back goodwill? it's scary to me.

>> smarter people than i have -- have written about this. but the point is one that people in politics are not able to make to the voters. and it is the simple point for all of the trouble of the great recession, high unemployment. this is not that bad. this is the rock bottom truth. there are people who thrive on dramatizing it. many of them on television. many of them highly paid pundits who thrive on creating a sense of -- of chaos and suffering and

deprivation. but if you want to see deprivation go to india. other countries. go to somalia if you want to see real trouble. go to the north of africa. you will find a reality we don't have in america. you will come loose from our sense of reality and we need to rediscover it somehow. i don't know how it's going to happen but it has to. we have to realize that in this world among our species, we are amongst most fortunate in the

history of the world. if we want to know what true suffering is, what abject suffering is, we don't have to look that far. the people who come to this country illegally are people we have to admire, people who are coming to this country illegally are coming on behalf of their children. they don't have that much hope for themselves but they have hope for their children. and i admire that. there's no sacrifice like the sacrifice of immigrants, be they legal or illegal. not much difference. they gave up their country. they gave up their language. they gave up their jokes, their music, their culture in order to struggle on in an alien country

and all on behalf of their children. this is reality and it's around us everywhere in every city in america. people who know what suffering is and who know -- who know what they want and it's here. we have it and they want it. [applause] >> on tomorrow's "washington journal" roger hickey of the campaign for america's future on the president's relationship with political progressives. reporter lynn stanton on the fcc's net neutrality rules for the internet. and brian stann of higher heroes u.s.a. on job prospects for returning veterans. "washington journal" begins live at 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span.

>> "q & a" continues tonight and tomorrow with interviews from london. tonight the labor party shadow mingster for public health, diane abbott, on her government's plans for budget cuts as well as her experiences as a minority in parliament. and tomorrow comparing the british and american forms of government as we talk with our guests about elections, the impact of money in races, the power of the prime minister, taxes, social issues and the cost of living. q & a tonight and tomorrow night at 8:00 eastern on c-span. >> a closing speech has an inevitable aspect of know stallia. an extraordinary experience for me is coming to an end. but my dominant feeling is pride in the great privilege to be a part of this very unique party. >> search for farewell speeches

and hear from retiring senators on the c-span video library with every c-span program since 1987. more than 160,000 hours, all online, all free. it's washington your way. now the christmas message from the president and first lady. after their remarks, we will also hear from republican congressman joe pits of pennsylvania. >> merry christmas, everybody. michelle and i just want to take a moment today to send greetings from our family to yours. >> this is one of our favorite times of the year and we're so fortunate to be able to celebrate it together in this wonderful home. this is the people's house so barack and i try to open it to as many people as we can, especially during the holiday season. this month more than 100,000 americans have passed through these halls. the idea behind this year's theme, simple gifts, is that the greatest blessings of all are

the ones that don't cost a thing. the comfort of spending time with loved ones, the freedoms we join as americans and the joy we feel upon giving something of ourselves. so in this time of family and friends and good cheer let's also be sure to look out for those who are less fortunate, who have hit a run of bad luck and are hungry and alone in the holiday season. >> because this is the season when we celebrate the simplest yet most profound gift of all, the birth of a child that devoted his life to a message of peace, love and redemption, a message that says no matter who we are, we are called to love one anotherment we are our brother's keeper. were our sister's keeper. our separate stories in this big and busy world are really one. today we're also thinking of those who can't be home for the holidays, especially all of our courageous countrymen serving overseas.

that's the message i delivered when i visited our troops in afghanistan a few weeks ago. while you may be serving far from home, every american supports you and your families. we are with you and i have no greater honor than serving as your commander in chief. today soldiers, sailors, airmen, marine and coast guardsman make up the finding forces in the history of the world. just like their predecessors they do extraordinary things in service for their country that makes it all the more remarkable is today's military is an all-volunteer force, a force of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives. >> that's right. and as first lady i had the honor to meets member of our military and their families on basis and in communities all across the country. i've gotten to know husbands and wives doing the parenting of two while their house is on another deployment. children trying their best in school but always wondering when mom and dad is coming home.

patriots putting their lives on hold to help with the loved one's recovery will carry on the memory of a fallen hero. when our men and women in uniform answer the call to serve, their families serve too and they're proud and glad to do it. but as long as that service keeps the rest of us safe, their sacrifice should also be our own. even heroes can use a hand. especially during the holidays. >> so we're ken urging americans to ask what you can do to support our troops and families in this holiday season. for some ideas how to get started, visit serve.governor. >> you will see you don't need to be an expert military life to give back to those who give so much to us. there are countless ways to contribute by harnessing your unique talent. if you live near a base, you can reach out to your local school or your church. if you don't, you can volunteer with organizations that support

military families. and anybody can send a care package or prepaid calling card to the front lines or give what sometimes the most important gift of all, simply saying thank you. >> america's brave service men and women represent a small fraction of our population but they and the families who await their safe return carry far more than their share of the burden. they do everything they've been asked to do. they've been everything we asked them to to be. even as we speak, many are fighting halfway around the globe in hopes that somebody our children and grandchildren won't have to. let's all remind them this holiday season that we're thinking of them and america will forever be here for them just as they have been there for us and on behalf of michelle, malia, sasha -- >> and bo -- >> and bo, have a very merry christmas. >> and an even happier new year. >> hello low, i'm joe pitts and

i have the great honor of serving the people of pennsylvania's 16th congressional district. as another year comes to a close, the american people rise to meet the challenges of our time. with resolve and determination. before tackling the challenges that lie ahead we join together to reflect on our blessings. behind the splendor of the christmas season lies a sim up and inspiring story of how a single birth spread a message of love and salvation throughout the world, one that continues to resonate across this and other lands. in this time of year when we gather to celebrate family and fellowship, we're reminded of the fulfillment that comes from humbly serving one another. we see spirit of the season in the simple acts of kindness to aid families less fortunate we see it in our service members

who raise their hands and volunteer for extraordinary tasks in the defense of freedom. many of these brave men and women are spending this holiday season far from our shores. as a vietnam veteran myself, i know the stress of being separated at this time of year. for those wearing the uniform in iraq and afghanistan and around the world at this hour, know that we are behind you and we join your loved ones for praying for your safe return home. for those standing close to honal all doctors and emergency responders working around the clock, we thank you as well. we don't always realize how much these tireless individuals give of themselves to patients and their families. the story of christmas also reminds us of the radiant glory of human life. scriptures tell us in him was life and that life was the light of all mankind.

the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. as we look ahead to the new year, let us resolve to do all that is within our power to share the light of life here and throughout the world because when we affirm the joy and dignity of life, we affirm our commitment to freedom and to those in dark corners who seek its protection. let us resolve to keep our pledge to honor families, marriage and the faith and values upon which this great nation was founded. let us strive to listen to one another to treat one another with dignity and respect and to do our part to see that the promise of the american dream is fully realized for our children and their children. may the peace and goodwill of this holiday season be with you and yours. thank you for listening.

merry christmas. >> in her annual christmas message, britain's queen elizabeth talked about developing community through sports. london is preparing to host the olympics in 2012. this year's message was recorded at the hampton court palace in london. it's just under ten minutes.

>> over 400 years ago kim jiangs vi of scotland inherited the kingdom at a time when the christian church was deeply divided. here at hampton court in 1604 he convened a conference of churchmen of all shades of opinion to discuss the future of christianity in this country. the king agreed to commission a new translation of the bible that was acceptable to all parties. this was to become the king james or authorized bible, which next year will be exactly four centuries old. acknowledge as a master piece of english prose and the most vivid translation of the scriptures, the glorious language of this bible survived the turbulence of history and given many of us the

most widely recognized and beautiful descriptions of the birth of jesus christ which we celebrate today. >> and there it was that they were there that they accomplished he should be delivered. >> and wrapped in swaddling clothes. >> and laid him in a manger because there was no room for him at the inn. >> and there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field keeping watch over their flock by night. >> and the glory of the lord shown about them and they were so afraid. suddenly there was a host of heavenly hosts saying glory to god in the highest, peace and goodwill towards men.

>> the king jamings bible was a major cooperative endeavor. it required the effort of dozens of the day's leading scholars. the enterprise was guarded by an interest in reaching agreement for the wider benefit of the christian church. and to bring harmony to the kingdoms of england and scotland. 400 years later it is as important as ever to build communities and create harmony. and one of the most powerful ways of doing this is through sport and games. during this past year of abundant sporting events, i've seen for myself just how important sport is in bringing people together for all background, from all walks of

life and from all age groups. in the parks of times and cities and on village greens up and down the country, countless thousands of people every week give up their time to participate in sport and exercise of all sorts or simply encourage others to do so. tchinds of activity are common throughout the world and play a part in providing a different perspective on life. apart from developing physical fitness, sport and games can also teach vital social skills. one can be enenjoyed without abiding by the rules. no team can hope to succeed without cooperation between the players. this sort of positive teen spirit can benefit communities, companies and enterprises of all kinds.

at the success of recent parliament bore witness, our love of sport also has the power to help rehabilitate. one only has to think of the injured men and women of the armed forces to see how interesting game and sport with speed recovery and renew a sense of purpose, enjoyment and comradeship. around the world people gather to compete under standard rules and in most cases in a spirit of friendly rivalry. competitors know to succeed they must respect their opponents. they often like each other too. sports men and women often speak of the enormous pride they have in representing their country, a sense of belonging to a greater family. we see this vividly at the

commonwealth games, for example, which is known to many as the friendly games. and while i'm sure you have noticed it is always the competitors in the smallest countries who receive the largest cheers. people are capable of belonging to many communities, including the religious faith. king james may not have anticipated quite how important sport and games were to become in promoting harmony and common interests. but from scriptures in the bibles which bears his name, we know nothing is more satisfied than the fielding of belonging to a group who are dedicated to helping each other. therefore all things whatsoever you would that men should do to you do you even so to them. i wish you and all of those whom you love and care for a very happy christmas.

♪ >> on tomorrow's "washington journal" roger hickey of the campaign for america's future on the president's relationship with political progressives. orter lynn stanton on the fcc's net neutrality rules for higher heroes u.s.a. on job of prospects for returning veterans. "washington journal" begins live at 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span.

>> the c-span networks provide coverage of politics, public fairs, nonfiction books and american history. it's all available to you on television, online and social media networking sites and find our content any time through c-span video library and we take c-span on the road with our digital bus and local content vehicle bringing resources to your community. it's washington your way, c-span networks. now available in more than 100 million homes, created by cable, provided as a public service. >> this month the president and michelle obama welcome the 2010 conedy center honories to the white house. each year the kennedy center awards five performers and artists for their contributions to america's culture. this year honories or oprah winfrey, paul mccartney, singer and songwriter meryl haggard, composer and lear sift jerry herman and adancer,

choreographer and director earl t. jones. this is half an hour.

♪

[applause]

>> ladies and gentlemen, the president of the united states and mrs. michelle obama. [playing "hail to the chief"]

>> thank you! thank you! thank you, everybody. everybody, thank you so much. please have a seat. have a seat. well, what a good looking crowd. we do what we can. happy holidays, everybody, and on behalf of michelle and myself, i want to welcome all of you to the white house. and i want to start by giving special thanks to speaker nancy pelosi and all of the members of congress who are here. nobody has done more for our country overtime last couple of years. none of this would be possible

without some people who have put great effort into this evening. david rubinstein, michael kaiser, the kennedy center trust ies and all of the people who made the kennedy center such a wonderful place for americans of all ages to enjoy the arts. on that note, i also want to give special thanks to caroline kennedy. is caroline here tonight? hey, caroline. and all of the other members of the kennedy family who are here tonight. it's wonderful to see them. and finally i want to recognize the co-chairs of the president's committee on the arts and humanity. my good friend george stevens. [applause] george and his son michael are the brains behind the kennedy center honors and i want to thank them all for their great

creativity. this is a season of celebration and of giving. that's why it's my greatest privilege as president to honor the five men and women who have given our nation the extraordinary ghift of the arts. i arts have always had the power to challenge and the power to inspire. to help us celebrate in times of joy and find hope in times of trouble. and although the honorees on this stage each possess a staggering amount of talent, the truth is they're not being recognized tonight simply because of they're career as great lir assists or songwriters or dancers or entertainers, instead they're being honored for their unique ability to bring us closer together and to capture something larger about who we are, not just as americans but as human beings. that's what meryl haggard has been doing for more than 40 years. often called the poet of the

common man, meryl likes to say he's living proof thing s can go wrong in america but also thinks can go right. in a day and age when so many country singers claim to be rambling, gambling outlaws, meryl is actually one. [applause] he hopped his first freight train at the age of 10. was locked up some 17 times as a boy, pulling off almost as many escapes. later after becoming a bona fide country star, meryl met johnny cash and mentioned that he had seen cash perform years earlier at san quentin prison. that's funny, cash said, because i don't remember you being in the show. and meryl had to explain to the man in black he had not been in the show, he had been in the the show, he had been in the audience.