On September 6, Brother Blackford and five other people (three for, three against) participated in a debate in Sydney, Australia on the question given in the tile. The whole debate—an hour and a half—is now online. You can see it at Richard Dawkins’s website or at the ABC site from Australia.
I haven’t yet watched it (though I’ve read Brother Blackford’s takes on it), so for the nonce I’m presenting this as a public service. But I will be watching it as soon as possible.
I did watch Russell’s bit, which extends from 54:21 to 1:02:51. He speaks forcefully and eloquently, emphasizing, as he often does, the fact that religion is most pernicious when it has power through the state. He also impugns the idea of a good and loving god. And his ending is powerful—a classic argument of New Atheism.
The audience questions begin right after Russell finishes.
If you’ve seen it, or watch it as a result of this post, weigh in below.
I can’t get the player at Richard’s place to display the video. I’m currently downloading it directly from ABC’s site, and then I’ll watch it.
ABC has a highlight reel for, what I suppose to be anyway, a fairly representative overview of how it went.
I don’t like highlight reels, but I understand others have less free time than I do . . .
Ok, I’ve made it through as much of the first speaker, Peter Jensen, as I can manage (and I’m live blogging about this as I go along).
Remember, the motion of the debate is that atheists are wrong.
After a long, tired list of the troubles with atheists, he finally delivers the crushing blow that converted me: you atheists ignore the demonstrably true demonstration of truth: revelation. Checkmate.
Moving onto the next speaker.
You mean that “It’s true because I says so in the Bible” part?
He’s right.
I always ignore that.
If only you could meet Jesus, he argues, you’d know . . .
Therefore, you’re wrong.
He is really a tedious man who never met a cliche he couldn’t shoehorn into a conversation and smugly think he’s said something of note.
At around 13 min 30 s Peter Jensen says, after describing evolution as an “idolatrous explanation of all things (10 in 23 s)” that “we can assess god through his own people the Jews…….How do you explain the Jews if the Jewish god is so awful?”
Is this a sort of equivalent of “if we are descended from monkeys why are there still monkeys?”
Anyway, the clincher seems to be the Jewish people exist, have history and writings, and are god’s own people. Therefore to deny God you have to deny the writings and history of the Jewish nation, which makes you antisemitic and ignorant (13 min, 59 s to 14 min 06 s).
An explanation, I feel, which can only be improved by adding “So there!” at the end.
Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think we should overlook the eminent improvement that would be achieved by not giving the explanation in the first place.
🙂
Well, how about, “Checkmate, atheists!”?
I listened to this nine hours ago so I’m hoping I’ve remembered it accurately
As a seasoned watcher of these sorts of debates on YouTube I found nothing new here except it took the Christians an unusually long time to get around to sex. The theists put forward all the usual non-arguments in a blizzard of rather smug stupidities such as:
Nothing comes from nothing
Genetic determinism makes life meaningless
Goodness comes from god
Christianity was/is historically positive & an intellectual force
Secularism is blamed for empty sex, consumerism & trivial celebrity at around the 31 minute mark.
Jane Caro & Russell Blackford are very effective at disputing the motion. They are both very confident, controlled & concise. Caro launches a witty, blistering attack on the treatment of women in the Abrahamic religions. Her approach is totally non-intellectual & all the more effective for that. I liked her closing remark about the Dalai Lama
The strongest argument here against the Abrahamic religions being true is that the Abrahamic religions are just the sort of institutions one would expect a bloke to invent
Good fun to listen to while painting or cutting the grass. I don’t remember the audience questions which tended towards commentary, but there’s a funny bit where the questioner has misheard something Blackford said ~ from memory the word that RB actually used was “chic” or similar
I agree. This is a good summation of the debate.
It was actually Scott Stephens who used the word “chic”; someone in the audience heard it as “shit” … so they thought he said something like, “atheism is fashionable and shit.”
Thanks for that Russell & for your fine website ~ I enjoy all your posts
Thanks, Michael.
Ok, I’m onto Jane Caro now, who I must say I am officially enamored of. Her opening salvo:
“The prima facie evidence that all gods are manmade is, of course (sung in a proper melancholy way), their treatment of WOMEN (also sung!)!” [applause, laughter, couple of whistles]
This is immediately followed on by her noting what awaits Islamic jihadists in heaven:
“Apparently as man is for Allah they will receive their reward in heaven by [virginal rewards]. As one would put it, imagine all of those obedient, god-fearing Muslim women who keep themselves pure behind all encompassing clothing out of their devout worship of their god only to find that when they die, their reward for all this virginal vigilance is to end up as whores for terrorists.”
I think Jane Caro just delivered what can only be mentioned as equivalent to a Hitchslap.
Justicar, Jane’s fabulous, isn’t she?
Ooops, hit post before I meant to.
Jane Caro’s capacity to communicate with an audience (the ad industry work helps!) is getting better and better. She is witty, forthright, and absolutely spot on. I wish she’d get more invites to overseas gigs.
She is a top-notch, grade A speaker. As I wrote at my place, which I was writing as I was watching, if she’s ever in a state near me, I will have a ticket to that event.
She is witty. She is funny. And she brooks no bullshit, cutting straight to the heart of the issue and then slapping it silly.
Now this is a woman in the skeptical community with a communications background who deserves every second of airtime she gets. And I hope she starts getting it more often, and not just locally.
Sadly, this is my first time hearing of her – which is my discredit to say the least.
If you can get abc iview (www.abc.net.au/iview) she has often appeared on The Gruen Transfer, a show about advertising.
Jensen is all about poetry, irritating but well spoken, Tracy Rowland is tedious and I didn’t listen to it all. If someone could give a cogent explanation of what Scott Stephens is on about I would be grateful. He complains about nihilism but seems to have given up himself, I thought despair was a sin!
It’s funny that Stephens came after Jane Caro’s mentioning the fact the religious are always able to identify an enemy, fearmonger and then offer a solution (after death of course).
And then Stephens announces himself as the proof in the pudding.
Rowland’s schtick boiled down to “We’re humans and we’re special! Don’t you atheists see that we’re so super special?! If there’s no god, we wouldn’t be so extra super duper special!!1!eleven!”
Stephens came across as totally unhinged. I don’t know what his basic point was, either. But he sure did seem to think he was the shit. What an ego on him. I think he also thought he was going to impress us with delivery skillz. I got the impression he was trying to “ORATE”; but it came across more like he was a crappy actor reading a crappy screenplay.
What’s interesting on the ABC page is this:
At each IQdebate the audience is polled on the topic, both before and after the debate takes place. Here are the results for this debate:
Pre-debate poll Post-debate poll
For: 28.5% 28%
Undecided:15.5% 6%
Against:56% 66%
The accommodationists are always saying the Gnu Atheists are merely preaching to the choir and making no converts. The figures above would suggest this is true insofar as the devout are concerned: their statistic remains essentially unchanged. But look at what’s happened to the figure for the Undecided.
/agreecompletely
Perhaps the audience gnus are wise to manipulating these stats 🙂
Even if that’s the case, it still shows the atheists outnumbering the theists by an overwhelming landslide of over 2:1.
While that might have more to say about the type of person attracted to this sort of debate, I can only hope that it’s an indication of the general level of rationalism down under as a whole….
Cheers,
b&
Here you are Justicar ~ your video extract: Jane Caro – Intelligence Squared Debate
Thanks
Anything I can do to help make it known that Jane Caro exists, and is, well, all that she is.
I am embarrassed to admit that I was completely ignorant of her existence.
Why she’s not being hounded to speak at our conferences is a mystery, unless no one knows she exists.
Well she’s very much in demand & her areas of interest are only “semi-atheist”. Her profile shows that she is qualified to speak from all sorts of angles on a wide range of topics ~ without needing to big herself up. The key word in the above is qualified if you catch my drift…
Indeed I do. You might find this hard to believe, but I’ve come to think that speaking in code has taken on a new art form in our community. A regular bank of knights Templar I daresay.
I am right now mulling over her writings and what not. So far, she does indeed impress.
Unlike the pro-religion speakers, who were amazingly stupid, uninteresting and absorbed with their own “wisdom”.
Scott Stephens is a smug little arsehole.
But of course, he wasn’t the only one.
When is a religionist debater actually going to stand up at the podium, be fricking honest and not just stand there moralising or avoiding the sodding topic for 9 minutes?
Does anyone have any examples of a god-botherer actually having a crack at winning one of these things instead of just turning up and relying on two millennia of privilege & a bit of hand-waving to get them across the line? This reminds me of the BBC debate featuring Stephen Fry on the notion that religion (or maybe it was specifically Catholicism) was a force for good in the world – nothing but evasions, equivocations, moralising and general holier-than-thou smugness from the goddists, all culminating in a similar walkover for the heathens.
Scott Stephens is a smug little arsehole.
I think that’s what they call an ad holinem argument.
nope.
that’s just an insult.
an ad-hom would be if he had implied that because he thinks Stephens is an asshole, we should be able to ignore any argument Stephens makes.
sorry, pet peeve, coming from hearing it used CONTINUOUSLY incorrectly by creationists.
no excuse for anyone to use it so.
ah, nevermind, I’m not seeing so good.
it was a joke.
I get it.
belatedly.
*facepalm*
I’m behind you 100% on that one!
I’ve just had the same problem with “JJB” in an earlier post.
I found this: “The Ad Hominem Fallacy Fallacy”. it might come in useful again when someone’s not joking.
/@
Ahhhh, I see what you did there 😀
I attended this debate with the Mrs. and friends. We were amazed at how poor a showing the religious side made. It is an interesting debate format where the speakers for the same side aren’t necessarily in agreement in all aspects. However they really could have done with some sort of organisation. Its was a couple of weeks ago, but from my memory the first speaker essentially waffled, the second had no grasp of reality and the third didn’t want to talk about the topic. They really didn’t try to show that atheists are wrong. They started with that assumption and went on from there.
Agreed.
Of course, as we know the atheist position is “no evidence of the existence of gods has been presented by those who claim said existence.” Accordingly, anyone arguing “atheists are wrong” would necessarily have to provide said evidence in order to prove the proposition. How else to prove atheism is wrong but to prove gods? Any theist with half a brain _knows_ that they can’t do any such thing, so the only thing they really can do is waffle and wave their hands about and make non-arguments.
Really, it’s no wonder the atheists cleaned up 10% of the undecideds in the final vote. Bollocks to accomodationism – all we need to do is appeal to the fencesitters with clear, reasoned arguments and let the theists drown in their own bullshit!
the atheists cleaned up 10% of the undecideds
~60% of them, in fact.
Dang it, I should’ve said they gained 10% of the total vote _from_ the undecideds. Because that’s what I meant!
Interesting, but I didn’t find anything new in the debate. It simply confirms for me that religion AND atheism have always been and will always be extremely contentious topics, and both are for debates! Thanks for sharing the link and the story.
Apparently all science is “Darwinian Idolatry” therefore god. “Science asks how, not who or why” … what utter nonsense. “Why” is one of the most popular questions in science, and science even answers the question of “who” as any forensic scientist can testify. One fact exposed by science is that “who” certainly wasn’t “Adam and Eve”. In fact historians even discard the Jesus stories and the claim of a historical Jesus due to the absence of any evidence to support the notion that there was such a historical person.
I like how the priest makes empty promises about how wonderful it will be if you’d only believe in god.
I can’t help listening to the pro-god people and thinking “is this guy some sort of retard?”
Like you, I watch the goddites preach and preen and promise am underwhelmed, but instead of thinking they’re idiots I’m just frustrated with what can only be their sheer laziness. You’d think when preparing to support the proposition “Atheists are wrong” that they’d do some kind of elementary research into what it is they’re attacking – read some atheist books, chapters, articles, blog posts for starters. If intending to score points against “Darwinism”, you’d think they’d look into exactly what evolutionary theory says and does not say – I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen goddites project their own authoritarian mindset onto scientists or non-believers and use hackneyed phrases like “Darwinian orthodoxy/dogma/idolatry”. Newsflash, goddite: we don’t worship Darwin and we don’t accept evolution because he told us to – we respect Darwin’s great insight (while also admitting it was incomplete & glaringly wrong in some parts) and we accept evolution because the evidence bears it out. Revelation, idolatry and authoritarian edicts on what to think are the business of religion, NOT science, and we’d thank you to stop tarring us with your own brush. By so accusing us, you make yourself look ignorant & lazy and you also implicitly admit that your method of arriving at belief is faulty and irrational.
Oh, and then, because Aussies have pretty decent bullshit detectors, you lose the frickin debate 😀
You have to love how one of the theists, with no sense of irony, accuses Blackford of sounding like a preacher. Are we really supposed to take that as a bad thing coming from a panel of Christians? Might as well have said, “You sound like us–like an idiot!”
And the crowd did the right thing this time by expressing loud disapproval of a theist cop out when it was asked of the male theist near the podium what God had been doing, then, for 12.99998% of the time in the universe and he tried to dismiss it by saying it wasn’t a serious question. No, I’m sorry, it is a serious question designed to show the intellectual poverty of theism.
Edit: not 12.99998% of the time, but 12.99998 billion years I think it was.
I wuz just about to pick you up on that 🙂
I get so used to hearing the repeated nines in percentages that I wrote it that way without thinking about it. :\
I was stunned when Tracy Rowland curtly commented that it was chic to be an atheist. I’d love for her to come to the American bible belt and experience the persecution of someone that expresses such an opinion, and the repercussions that can follow.
All in all, I enjoyed the debate. I also thought the outcome telling in that those that believe still did, those that did not, did not, but the majority of those that probably never thought to deeply about it were enlightened. I suppose there is hope, all be it at a snails pace.