Check out Sam Harris and Michael Shermer as they unfathomably put up with Deepak Chopra’s nonsense…
Here’s the Intelligence Squared debate on “Atheism is the new Fundamentalism” starring Richard Dawkins, Anthony Grayling, Richard Harries, and Charles Moore. Dawkins and Grayling do a fantastic job of handling the tired and ad hominem “arguments” from the theists.
Online results from the Intelligence Squared debate on “Is Atheism the new Fundamentalism?”. I didn’t catch the “in attendance” numbers, but the “disagree” vote captured nearly ALL of the undecided vote.
Frank Turek vs. Christopher Hitchens: What Best Explains Reality: Theism or Atheism? on Vimeo (via Vimeo)
I won’t have an opportunity to watch this until later this evening, but it seems as if it ought to be a decent round-two to their debate.
Before watching it, here’s what I expect: Turek making some fairly naive arguments that sound logical on the surface, but fall apart at a decent glance, and Hitchens applying Occam’s razor a bit too much and generally only making absolute sense to the people who have read his books.
Either way, probably worth the two hours if you’re a Hitchens fan.
The voting gives a good idea of how it went. Before the debate, for the motion: 678. Against: 1102. Don’t know: 346. This is how it changed after the debate. For: 268. Against: 1876. Don’t know: 34. In other words, after hearing the speakers, the number of people in the audience who opposed the motion increased by 774. My friend Simon, who’s a season ticket holder, said it was the most decisive swing against a motion that he could remember.
The problem (from the Catholic point of view) was that the speakers arguing for the Church as a force for good were hopelessly outclassed by two hugely popular, professional performers. The archbishop had obviously decided that it would work best if he stuck to facts and figures and presented the Church as a sort of vast charitable or “social welfare” organisation. He emphasised how many Catholics there were in the world, and that even included “heads of state”, he said, as if that was a clincher. But he said virtually nothing of a religious or spiritual nature as far as I could tell, and non-Catholics would have been none the wiser about what you might call the transcendent aspects of the Church. Then later when challenged he became painfully hesitant. In the end he mumbled and spluttered and retreated into embarrassing excuses and evasions. He repeatedly got Ann Widdecombe’s name wrong. The hostility of both the audience and his opponents seemed to have discomfited him.
I am eagerly awaiting the chance to watch this debate, if and when it gets released. Stephen Fry is one of my favorite people, and Hitchens is wonderfully well spoken and entertaining to both read and listen to.
Besides, it’s always good sport to watch the Catholic church get trounced.
